The 20th Century can be said to have begun for many Chicagoans with the arrival of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. By 1980, when my tenure as director began, the Art Institute had amassed one of the most notable collections of 20th-Century art of any museum of its type. The highly original plans for the reinstallation of in 1991 by Charles F. Stuckey, then head of the Department of Twentieth-Century Painting and Sculpture, erased the sometimes arbitrary and artificial lines of nationality that had kept related works in separate rooms.
Works by American artists are now integrated with those by Europeans, just as they are presented here, to reflect more accurately the influences that have flowed so freely between the artists in different countries.
Our new book, “Twentieth-Century Painting and Sculpture,” which includes more than 140 works, celebrates the finest and most challenging art of our time. Accompanying each painting is a brief description, taken from the book, that explains the artistic and social history of each work. Through our collection, we are able to tell a cohesive story about the art of the 20th Century. A portion of that lesson follows.
-James N. Wood
Painting the Puritan ethic
Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” caused a stir in 1930, when it was exhibited for the first time at The Art Institute of Chicago and awarded a prize of $300. Newspapers across the country carried the story, and the picture of a farm couple posed with a pitchfork before a white house brought instant fame to the artist.
The Iowa native, then in his late 30s, had been enchanted by a simple Gothic Revival cottage he had seen in the small southern Iowa town of Eldon. Wood envisioned a painting in which, as he put it, “American Gothic people . . . stand in front of a house of this type.”
He asked his dentist and his sister to pose as a farmer and his spinster daughter. The highly detailed, polished style and rigid, frontal arrangement of the two figures were inspired by Flemish Renaissance art, which Wood had studied during three trips to Europe between 1920 and 1926.
One of the most famous American paintings, “American Gothic” has become part of our popular culture, with the pair having been the subject of endless parodies.
Wood was accused of intending to satirize the intolerance and rigidity that the insular nature of rural life can engender, an accusation he denied.
Instead, he created here an image that epitomizes the Puritan ethic and virtues that he believed dignified the Midwestern character.
Opulent, ambitious and Surrealist
Despite the unique nature of his art, Jackson Pollock drew inspiration from a number of disparate artistic styles. He was as interested in the American Indian art of his native Southwest as he was in heroic Renaissance and Baroque painting. Pollock also responded profoundly to Surrealist art. . . . He shared the Surrealists’ desire to address primal and mythic subjects and to explore the unconscious.
The canvas presents what appears to be a ritual confrontation between two large, gesturing figures flanking a sacrificial beast under a dark sky. Displaying an extensive variety of paint application, “The Key” seems to be a demonstration piece. A jumble of triangles and arcs has been brushed onto the canvas, scraped with a putty knife and dabbed and squeezed from tubes, leaving many areas of canvas exposed.
The swirls of roughly applied paint that compose the “head” of the right-hand figure would lead to the completely non-figurative “drip” paintings that the artist began to make later that year. The painting’s technical virtuosity and many intense colors make it one of Pollock’s most opulent and ambitious Surrealist works.
Transporting viewers to a spiritual realm
Following years of extended visits to the Southwest, Georgia O’Keeffe left New York in 1949, settling outside of Santa Fe. In her 1976 autobiography, she wrote: “One evening . . . we walked back of the morada (chapel) toward a cross in the hills. I was told that it was a Penitent cross. . . . (L)arge enough to crucify a man. . . . the cross stood out-dark against the evening sky.” Penitentes, or secret lay brotherhoods, may erect crosses for Passion week rites near remote moradas.
In “Black Cross, New Mexico,” O’Keeffe captured the otherworldly aura of the scenery she encountered on her walk. The unnatural lighting-dark on the hilltops, aglow in the valleys-and stark contrast between the undulating contours of the hills and sharp angles of the cross transport the viewer into a spiritual realm. Since O’Keeffe often combined elements from different locales in her works, the original title of the painting-“Black Cross, Arizona”-suggests that she drew inspiration from Arizona hill country as well as the New Mexico sanctuary. The present title was used in her first retrospective exhibition, organized in 1943 by the Art Institute’s noted director at the time, Daniel Catton Rich.
A sensitive marriage portrait
Despite Amedeo Modigliani’s exceptional talent, his work, which consisted mainly of portraits and frankly sensual nudes, found a market only after his death in 1920, which was hastened by the artist’s legendary bohemian conduct and a constitution weakened by tuberculosis.
In comparison, Lithuanian-born Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973) was a model of industriousness and rectitude. He commissioned Modigliani to paint a portrait celebrating his marriage to the Russian poet Berthe Kitrosser. As Lipchitz recalled in his memoirs, Modigliani declared the work finished after only two days. However, at the modest price of “ten francs per sitting and a little alcohol,” Lipchitz persuaded Modigliani to work on it for another two weeks.
In this nuptial portrait, Modigliani struck a careful balance between wry caricature and a deeply sensitive portrayal of the couple. Nothing in the picture is plumb, from the features of Lipchitz’s face to the painting in the background and the inscription written in block letters. Despite the striking distance between the heads of the sitters, the way in which the figure of Lipchitz anchors himself to the back of his wife’s chair and his upper torso protectively envelops her captures the sense of strong connection between the new husband and wife.
An ominous reaction to war
One of Matisse’s most ambitious and moving paintings, “Bathers by a River,” began in 1909 as a commission for Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, who wanted an ensemble of mural-sized works for his Moscow residence. Shchukin purchased two. Like them, the first version of “Bathers by a River” was a stylized rendering of a pastoral scene, showing five nude females near a waterfall.
When Matisse returned to the composition in 1913, he eliminated one figure and transformed the remaining ones into starkly hieratic forms, employing faceless ovals to define their heads and thick, black lines to indicate their limbs and torsos.
In 1916 Matisse again revised “Bathers by a River.” He transformed the blue stream into a black band, to which he added a white snake; and he isolated the columnar figures against vertical zones of green, black, white and grayish blue, thereby creating the illusion of shifting space comparable to that made by a folding screen. The stiffly posed, predominantly gray figures resemble plaster sculptures more than they do real flesh. Scholars have conjectured that the panel’s ominous mood reflects Matisse’s reaction to World War I, and the threat it posed to the values of art and life that the artist had set out to celebrate in 1909.
A merciless look at life in California
Perhaps because of his outsider status, English painter David Hockney has been able to cast a cool, objective eye on the life and mores of Southern California since first visiting there in 1964. This portrayal of Fred and Marcia Weisman has come to epitomize the prototypical American art collectors. The artist expressed his amazement at the lifestyle of such a couple in 1976:
“I went to visit some collectors. I’d never seen houses like that. And the way they liked to show them off! They would show you the pictures, the garden, the house. . . . All had large comfortable chairs, fluffy carpets, striped paintings, and pre-Colombian or primitive sculptures and recent three-dimensional work.”
Here the husband and wife pose on opposite sides of a terrazzo patio deck on which some of their holdings are displayed. Fred Weisman seems as intense and stony as the William Turnbull sculpture before him. Marcia Weisman faces the viewer frontally like the Henry Moore sculpture to her left. Tellingly, it is the sharp, brilliant light of Southern California that binds the composition’s many elements together, rather than any affinity between the two collectors, who seem oblivious of both each other and the art they have chosen to possess.
Images from a dehumanized world
While based on a photograph of the English actor Sir Laurence Olivier (1907-1989), this colossal face hardly seems a portrait of a specific individual. Indeed, the title of the work refers not to Olivier but to the painting’s color scheme-caliente means “hot” in Spanish. . . . By simulating the appearance of a big-screen television image, Ed Paschke seems to have been suggesting that technology and the mass media have the power to dehumanize and to eradicate individuality.
A graduate of the School of the Art Institute, Paschke worked as a commercial artist in the 1960s. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he participated in a number of group exhibitions with other Chicago-based artists who evolved a style that came to be known as “Imagism.”
In realizing his monumental portraits, Paschke projected an enlarged photograph onto a canvas and then applied several thin layers of paint to create glowing, lustrous color effects.
While continuing to be informed by Imagism, “Caliente” and other of Paschke’s subjects from the 1980s, such as his images of Elvis Presley, Mona Lisa and Abraham Lincoln, convey a more reflective, introspective mood than his earlier, more raucous compositions of circus freaks, hustlers, showgirls and transvestites.
A symbol of Chicago’s support of modern art
Throughout his career, Constantin Brancusi focused on a small number of themes, such as the “Sleeping Muse” and the “Bird.” Around 1910, Brancusi embarked on a series of close to 30 “Bird” sculptures. He first used the highly polished bronze in “Golden Bird.” By mirroring the surrounding space, this reflective surface enabled the artist to integrate object and setting with unprecedented intensity.
Compared with preceding “Bird” sculptures, the Chicago version is more elongated and simplified. The sculptor suggests details such as feet, tail and upturned crowing beak through elegant inflections of a single silhouette; and his streamlining of the “Bird’s” form may have been prompted by his admiration for machine design.
“Golden Bird” was purchased in 1920 by New York lawyer John Quinn. Brancusi himself placed “Golden Bird” on this base, which he designed, in 1926, when he went to New York to oversee an exhibition of his works.
This show subsequently traveled to the Arts Club of Chicago, which acquired “Golden Bird” in a farsighted gesture that has made this sculpture a symbol of the city’s support for modern art.
