Lecture: Dreams and Nightmares at the Fin de Siècle
Art Institute of Chicago 159 East Monroe Street, Chicago, ILArt Institute of Chicago
The last decade of the 19th century in Europe saw an explosion of evocative and disturbing works of art, reflecting a cultural cynicism felt around rapid industrialization, a perceived moral decline, and the rural flight to urban centers. These anxieties inspired Symbolist artists to draw on a dark and mysterious vocabulary of demons, skeletons, femmes […]
Strange Realities: The Symbolist Imagination
Art Institute of Chicago 159 East Monroe Street, Chicago, ILArt Institute of Chicago
Symbolism is among the most complex art movements to define. Although it followed on the heels of Impressionism, whose imagery was accessible and bright, Symbolism’s dark and mysterious vocabulary is far less known. While Symbolist artists were aligned in their embrace of the creative imagination, they used diverse styles and drew inspiration from the past, […]
Contemporary Drawings from the Stenn Family Collection
Art Institute of Chicago 159 East Monroe Street, Chicago, ILArt Institute of Chicago
Voraciously curious and contagiously enthusiastic about art, Chicagoan Irving Stenn Jr. has across five decades assembled a spectacular collection of 20th-century art from various movements and across the world. Stenn began collecting art with his wife, Marcia, in 1971, largely as a way of enhancing their newly renovated Lincoln Park home. Although neither had formal […]
AIC Lecture: Neoclassical Drawings—What’s Old Is New Again
Art Institute of Chicago 159 East Monroe Street, Chicago, ILArt Institute of Chicago
Discover the defining features of neoclassicism in this exploration of the origins and characteristics of the “new classical” style that dominated Europe, especially France, in the late-18th century. With an eye towards the drawings featured in Revolution to Restoration: French Drawings from the Horvitz Collection, Margaret Morgan Grasselli, a leading expert in the field of French drawings, […]
Revolution to Restoration: French Drawings from The Horvitz Collection
Art Institute of Chicago 159 East Monroe Street, Chicago, ILArt Institute of Chicago
Revolution to Restoration: French Drawings from The Horvitz Collection features approximately 90 drawings made from the 1770s through the 1850s, one of the most turbulent periods in French history. During this time, France abolished the monarchy, established a republic, terrorized perceived political enemies, waged war across the continent, imposed an empire, and eventually reinstated the monarchy—and […]
Ellsworth Kelly: Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance
Art Institute of Chicago 159 East Monroe Street, Chicago, ILArt Institute of Chicago
In October and November of 1951, Ellsworth Kelly produced a series of eight large-scale collages. Each of the works consisted of papier gommette, sticky colored paper used by French schoolchildren, cut into squares and arranged by chance in a 40-inch-wide grid formation. These collages are key early works in Kelly’s career, showing his experiments with chance, […]
Ellsworth Kelly: Portrait Drawings
Art Institute of Chicago 159 East Monroe Street, Chicago, ILArt Institute of Chicago
While Ellsworth Kelly is remembered today as one of the most important post-war American abstract painters, sculptors, and printmakers, he was also a dedicated and prolific portraitist who drew likenesses of himself and his friends throughout his long life. Though these drawings are little known and have seldom been exhibited, Kelly produced them in such […]