American Modernists at the Art Institute of Chicago
There is a floor of 20th Century art in the American Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago - and gallery signage indicates that several kinds of Modernism are on display.
They’re not saying that every artist born after 1880 was Modern - but it’s starting to look that way.
Walter Ufer’s painting of Navajo has been carried up from the first floor to the second.
What’s next ? Will Andrew Wyeth be shown in the Modern Wing? Currently he’s not on display at all.
Eventually the museum will have to find a place for the non-confrontational art made after 1950.
Max Weber, (1881-1861) Construction,1915
Terra collection
Sure feels like the gritty kind of cityscape
This is the most doctrinaire European piece
in this room of American Modernists.
Life is a fierce, grim, desperate struggle.
“Be strong” it says.
Arthur Dove (1880-1946), Swing Music (Louis Armstrong), 1938
Stieglitz Collection
American born, Dove spent two years in Paris,
but I can’t imagine anything further from either cubism
or naturalism.
The painting says “My world is wonderful and full of surprises”
Marsden Hartley
American, 1877-1943 , Provincetown
1916
Oil on composition board , Stieglitz Collection
Sense of place?
More like a sense of quietly being in that place
Cheerful, rollicking, whimsical, ordinary
Balanced. Modest earth tones
At the beach
Rough hewn casual
Pulling inward
Figure - ground
Things coming together
Punctual (the clock face)
This is an episode in the painter’s life.
Escaping from war torn Europe,
he moved to an artsy resort town on the coast and loved it.
Marsden Hartley
American, 1877-1943
Movements
1913
Oil on canvas
Unlike many other American artists, Marsden Hartley was
more drawn to German Expressionism than to Frenchi modernism, and executed this painting in Berlin. Made on the eve of World War I, Movements possesses a turbulent energy that sparks associations with both the vibrancy of modern Berlin and movements of music. Like the Russian Expressionist painter Vasily Kandinsky, Hartley sought to make his work more like music, which he admired for its nonnarrative nature and its potential to be purely spiritual or separate from material reality.
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.544
In this work, Ben Shahn blended fact and fiction to offer a pointed commentary on the inclusions and exclusions of the art world. This enigmatic composition features eight known sculptures by leading artists of the day that were all displayed at a 1940 exhibition at the Whitney Museum. Three large, unframed painted images on the back walls of the gallery appear to be part of the show, but they were not actual paintings. Instead, they derive from Shahn’s photographs of working-class people around the United States, which he had taken while employed by the federal government as part of the New Deal, an economic program intended to revitalize the economy during the Great Depression. The invented works serve as portals to different worlds. The figures portrayed in them are positioned to see into the gallery but they are excluded from the “real” space of the museum and the modern art on view because of race, class, and geography.Another expression as personal as a journal - this time the excitement of a fast, sensual, urban life.
No grand ideas seem to be involved - just having a good time.
This is my favorite piece in this post - but there are several other Hartleys on display that are just as vibrant.
Google tells us that the Whitney has the best collection of American modernists - but Chicago is better for both Hartley and O’Keefe.
Ilya Bolotowsky (American, born Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, 1907–1981)
Study for 1939 New York World’s Fair Mural, Hall of Medical Science Date:
1938–39
A pleasant, orderly collection of shapes with a modernist flavor
is not necessarily a painting
Manierre Dawson
American, 1887–1969
Figure in Pink and Yellow Date:
1914
Casual, self satisfied, mildly whimsical
Like a portrait of Mr Greenjeans (Captain Kangaroo)
A sense of urgency may not be
good for healthy living
but who wants art without it?
Did not enter the artworld until the widow conducted an estate sale.
Patrick Henry Bruce. (1881-1936), Peinture, 1917-18
Terra Collection
Working hard to be cool and sophisticated.
This piece predates the Bauhaus but seems aligned with it.
Love the crispness
and slow, steady rhythm
Patrick Henry Bruce. Composition 3, 1916
(Found online - not at the museum)
I like this wilder one more.
It’s closer to my own life.
Charles Demuth. (1883-1935),Spring, 1921
The play of patterns is a contemporary concern
So is the reference to merchandising.
The arrangement of flat objects on a wall, however,
seems connected to American trompe-l’oeil
of the previous century.
Georgia O’Keefe (1887-1986), It was Yellow and Pink III, 1960
Stieglitz Collection
An early modernist forty years later
still exploring her own way of painting and observing.
An aerial view of a traditional subject for landscape painting
I haven’t done a complete survey - but it does seem that the museum has more pieces by Georgia O’Keefe on display than any artist other than Claude Monet.
Each of her pieces feels like an experiment.
We may also note that Uber-masculine Cubism
was replaced by the more personal and anarchic ABX,
while the soft, uber-feminine qualities of this painting
has lived on famously with Helen Frankenthaler and locally by Leslie Baum.
Preston Dickenson (1889-1930), 1922
Not quite a love of painted space (Cezanne)
Not quite a love of how things of the world appear (Vermeer)
Not quite a compelling personal vision (Van Gogh)
Call it a mishmash.
Almost makes me feel queezy (DeKooning)
Ben Shahn (1898-1969) Contemporary American Sculpture, 1940,
tempera on paper
Acquired in 2023, possibly in response to the Artworld’s recent turn toward social justice, this is more like a political cartoon than a painting - even if its subject would only relate to a miniscule cultural elite.
It takes aim at the New York heavy figure school of modern classical sculpture which is exactly the tradition into which I was born and wish to continue. So you might say it’s a slap in my face. Why doesn’t my kind of art pay more attention to the real world out there of tenements, struggling farmers and unemployed workers ?
To which I would reply “because imagining a positive, vibrant, beautiful human spirit makes one enthusiastic about humanity, not just our own little lives”
But then my response is based on experience with the best examples of actual sculpture - not the misshapen white lumps in his cartoon.
William Zorach, Mother and Child, 1930
Probably similar to what Shahn saw
Morris Kantor (1896 -1974) Haunted House, 1930
Non-Chicago Imagism?
As weird as Gertrude Abercrombie.
As threatening as a funhouse.
This is entertainment well done.
BTW . this piece won a purchase award
at the museum’s annual exhibition of living American artists.
Which may have been the only way it could have entered the collection.
**************
It’s hard to image this gallery without the Stieglitz or Terra contributions.
I was looking to compare this generation ( born at the end of the 19th century) with the ABX painters who followed.
Mostly less personal and more positive.
No one feels alienated and confused.
They seem to assume that viewers want pleasure and wonder and joy,
not a profound experience of the void.
Jackson Pollock, The Flame, 1934-38
posted by chris miller at 5:54 PM
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