While vacationing in Paris in 1889, Chicagoans Bertha Honore Palmer and her hotelier husband, Potter, met another rich American, the expatriate avant-garde artist Mary Cassatt.
Cassatt was an unabashed proselytizer for what was then a new and unconventional style of painting and group of artists creating what was called “impressionism.”
The meeting of the two women, one the doyenne of Chicago’s high society and the other an artist fast on her way to becoming an undisputed master, was prophetic for Chicago.
Cassatt found in Palmer an admiring acolyte who, often with Cassatt’s assistance, eagerly began collecting the works of Cassatt’s Parisian contemporaries. They were artists who were not yet well-known in Europe and nearly unheard of in America. Degas. Monet. Renoir. Pissarro. Sisley.
On Monday, the Art Institute of Chicago opened an exhibition that recaptures some of the excitement of the social, intellectual and artistic ferment of that age.
The exhibition celebrates the 100th anniversary of the museum’s move into its elegant building at 111 S. Michigan Ave. In doing so, it takes 350 pieces from its 260,000 works of art and fashions a story of how they all came to be there.
“Most of our pieces were gifts from benefactors, not purchases made by the museum,” said Teri Edelstein, the museum’s deputy director who organized the exhibition, “Chicago’s Dream, a World’s Treasure: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1893-1993.”
“While many people may be familiar with our collections,” Edelstein said, “they may not be familiar with how those collections came to be here. That’s a story we hope this exhibition will tell.”
The legendary Bertha Palmer was in many ways the prototypical amateur collector who shaped the museum’s growth and reputation.
In 1891 she was one of the city’s wealthy movers and shakers laying plans for the city’s first world’s fair, the 1893 Columbian Exposition.
Although the exposition itself was on the South Side, the exposition committee decided to help underwrite a new, 50,000-square-foot building downtown at 111 S. Michigan Ave.
The understanding was that the building, done in the style of the Italian Renaissance, would house “learned and professional meetings” during the fair. When the fair ended in October 1893, it was turned over to the Art Institute to house its collection.
Bertha Palmer was put in charge of the Woman’s Building at the world’s fair, an exhibition hall she wanted to devote to showing the status of women around the world.
In 1891, returning to Paris, she commissioned her friend Cassatt to do one of the building’s giant murals. In subsequent years they returned to Paris to snap up works of art to adorn the walls of their gilded mansion on Lake Shore Drive.
In an 1892 visit alone they came back with 15 Monets, 11 Renoirs, seven Pissarros, two Sisleys and one each by Cassatt and Degas. Bertha Palmer was buying pieces from Monet’s now immortal series on haystacks almost as soon as they left his easel.
They purchased many of the works from Paul Durand-Ruel, a Parisian art dealer. Bertha Palmer evidently admired the dark pink walls of Durand-Ruel’s gallery where he displayed his artists’ works, as she had one of the rooms in her home painted the same color to show off the works after she bought them.
“When we created a room for the Palmer collection for this exhibit, we wanted to re-create some of the feeling for that time,” said Edelstein. Exhibit curators managed to recover a small swatch of the dark pink from the Paris gallery and reproduced it for a wall where, among other works, they’ve hung three of the haystack paintings Palmer collected.
In other parts of the exhibit, curators have re-created 100-year-old display techniques, showing rooms as they appeared in the museum’s first 20 years. One room displays plaster reproductions of classic European sculptures, which made up the bulk of the museum’s early displays, with a wall crammed with some of its first acquisitions of original paintings.
Among them are pieces that are still among the most popular at the museum, including Rembrandt’s “Young Woman at the Open Half-Door,” Jules Breton’s “Song of the Lark,” and Cassatt’s “The Bath.”
Another wall re-creates a portion of what may have been the most controversial art exhibition ever mounted, The Armory Show of 1913. Opened in New York City in February of that year, two months later it moved to the Art Institute for a 24-day showing here.
It was the first, serious international exposition of modern art, introducing Americans to artists such as Picasso, Brancusi and Duchamp. It scandalized many but ignited the imaginations of young artists and collectors everywhere.
The present exhibit, designed by architect Stanley Tigerman, builds on these bewildering arrays of differing schools of art, tracing changing tastes of donors and museum curators.
It culminates with an almost surreal display of the painting the museum considers its masterwork, Georges Seurat’s painting, “Sunday on La Grande Jatte-1884.” The enormous, mural-sized piece hangs alone against a black wall in the middle of a long, darkened gallery, brightly lit so it appears to hover.
The painting is an object lesson of how one generation can ridicule an artist while subsequent generations will hail him as a genius.
In the 1920s, Chicago artist and collector Frederic Clay Bartlett and his wife, Helen, were following in the footsteps of earlier Art Institute benefactors such as the Palmers, Martin Ryerson and Kate Buckingham.
In 1924, they purchased “Sunday on La Grande Jatte.” Over the next two years, they assembled a small collection of other modern masters to accompany the work, including Picasso’s “Old Guitarist” and Van Gogh’s “Bedroom at Arles.” In 1926 they shipped the paintings directly to the Art Institute as a gift.
Wary of such “radical” artwork, the museum’s trustees balked at accepting the gift. According to the museum’s archival records, the trustees were especially troubled by Seurat, an artist who had yet to have had any of his work hung in any European museum.
Robert Harshe, then the museum’s director, had to beg the trustees to accept the Bartletts’ gift. As soon as it was displayed, it created a sensation and became the Art Institute’s most famous painting, the one by which it is most easily identified throughout the world.
