AIC: Modern Art (Bot)

Among his many recollections of childhood, Max Ernst often recounted his fear and fascination with the forest that surrounded his home. He wrote of feeling “delight and oppression and what the Romantics called ‘emotion in the face of Nature.’” By expressing his thoughts in these terms, Ernst linked himself with the spiritual landscape tradition of Romanticism, which conceived of an invisible realm at work in the natural world. This dark and mysterious forest scene dates to one of the most creative periods of Ernst’s career. Spurred by the Surrealist leader André Breton’s proclamation of “pure psychic automatism” as an artistic ideal, he developed the innovative technique of frottage, his term for the method of reproducing a relief design (like the surface of a piece of wood) by laying paper or canvas over it and rubbing it with a pencil, charcoal, or another medium. In Forest and Sun Ernst used this technique to create a petrified forest, which he imbued with a sense of primordial otherworldliness. By scraping away almost-dry paint on the canvas (a process he called grattage), the artist produced the encircled sun at the center of the composition. Ernst painted six variations of the forest and sun theme. As in the other five canvases, the tree trunks suggest a letter in the artist’s name: in this case, a capital M. Bequest of Richard S. Zeisler

Forest and Sun https://www.artic.edu/artworks/185760/

Paul Delvaux painted The Awakening of the Forest in the late 1930s, after having adopted Surrealism as a visual language to give form to his inner world—one populated with childhood memories and fantasy. For this monumental painting, the artist transformed an episode from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), in which Professor Otto Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel discover a prehistoric forest deep inside the earth. Delvaux showed the professor at left, examining a rock or fossil; behind him stands Axel, who bears a striking resemblance to the artist himself. Under a full moon, a group of women in the background appear like automatons. In the foreground, several figures combine human and vegetal elements; these ambiguous figures seem to embody a primordial, as yet undifferentiated, state. A woman in the right foreground and another in the left middle ground, both in Victorian dress, hold lamps and try in a vain to shed light on the unyielding mystery of the scene. Despite the multitude of naked figures and their detailed description, The Awakening of the Forest retains a detachment that adds to its strange and mysterious effect. Joseph Winterbotham Collection

The Awakening of the Forest https://www.artic.edu/artworks/111642/

Gift of Mrs. Frank R. Lillie

The Last Supper https://www.artic.edu/artworks/55498/

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Carter H. Harrison

Hermine David https://www.artic.edu/artworks/22194/

Through prior acquisition of the George F. Harding Collection

Woman Leaning on Her Hands https://www.artic.edu/artworks/118601/

Gino Severini was a member of the Futurists, a group of Italian artists that announced its existence with a manifesto published in 1909 on the front page of Le Figaro. The Futurists urged others to ignore the past and focus on the aesthetic power of modern life. Their paintings celebrate modernity—the speed, thrill, and especially the danger of factories, airplanes, automobiles, locomotives, and steamships. Their style blended Divisionism and Cubism to render “dynamic sensation” and the interpenetration of objects and their environment by superimposing different chromatic planes and lines of force. Severini’s work focused on Parisian entertainments, nightlife, and street activities. In Festival in Montmartre, he depicted the centrifugal motion of a carousel and the liberating, yet destabilizing, effects of color, speed, and sound. The artist presented this work in his first solo exhibition in 1913, writing in the catalogue, “My object has been to convey the sensation of a body, lighted by electric lamps and gyrating in the darkness of the boulevard. The shapes of the pink pigs and of the women seated on them are subordinate the whole, the rotary movement of which they follow while undergoing displacement from head to foot and vice versa.” Bequest of Richard S. Zeisler

Festival in Montmartre https://www.artic.edu/artworks/185766/

Mary and Earle Ludgin Collection

Clio https://www.artic.edu/artworks/63773/

By the early 1920s Berlin had become a crossroads for the international avant-garde, especially for artists from Eastern Europe, who were eager to absorb the radical art of their time and find opportunities to exhibit and sell their work. Max Herman Maxy arrived in 1922, already well established in the modern art scene of Romania but eager for more direct exposure to the dynamism of Berlin’s artistic life. Maxy was soon associated with the Expressionist Novembergruppe (November Group) as well as the art dealer Herwarth Walden, who featured the artist’s work in his publication Der Sturm and at his Sturm Galerie. This composition reflects the Expressionist influences on Maxy’s work: the vibrant, prismatic facets describe the shallow surfaces of buildings as well as the darkened space of narrow alleys, which together produce a lively, kaleidoscopic effect. Through prior bequest of Mima de Manziarly Porter

Untitled https://www.artic.edu/artworks/217570/

The artists of Brücke (Bridge) regularly worked together, both in their studios as well as out of doors; this communal approach contributed to the early consistency of their style and reflected an important aspect of their utopian program. Echoing larger social concerns about health at the time, Max Pechstein and his colleagues often escaped the constraints of city life to find a more authentic existence in nature, documenting their experiences in their work. Later, after his relocation to Berlin in 1908, he also made solitary trips to Nidden, a remote fishing village on the Baltic Sea. Pechstein painted The Red House during the second of these trips, attracted to the expansive dunes and forests of the region as well as the local people and architecture. Bequest of Kenneth and Bernice Newberger

The Red House https://www.artic.edu/artworks/205573/

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Saidenberg

Still Life: Barbera https://www.artic.edu/artworks/84235/

Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection

Little Sneerer https://www.artic.edu/artworks/118675/

Gift of Florene May Schoenborn and Samuel A. Marx

Apples https://www.artic.edu/artworks/64001/

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Francis Steegmuller

Musical Instruments https://www.artic.edu/artworks/44880/

Anonymous gift

La Morocha https://www.artic.edu/artworks/238721/

At the end of World War II, Marc Chagall sought new avenues for artistic experimentation and turned to the medium of stained glass, which allowed him to explore intense color on a monumental scale. Working with master stained-glass maker Charles Marq, he executed 86 windows across Europe, Israel, and the United States. America Windows presents an unusual secular theme in his oeuvre, merging symbols of American history, the Chicago skyline, and the arts; reading from left to right, the panels represent music, painting, literature, architecture, theater, and dance. Chagall dedicated his work to Mayor Richard J. Daley, a great supporter of public art projects in the city, with whom he had worked on The Four Seasons mosaic at Chase Tower Plaza. A gift of Marc Chagall, the City of Chicago, and the Auxiliary Board of The Art Institute of Chicago, commemorating the American Bicentennial in memory of Mayor Richard J. Daley

America Windows https://www.artic.edu/artworks/109439/

Bequest of Maxine Kunstadter

Composition https://www.artic.edu/artworks/52998/

A Millennium Gift of Sara Lee Corporation

Antwerp https://www.artic.edu/artworks/153698/

Worcester Sketch Fund

Cagnes https://www.artic.edu/artworks/12402/

Bequest of Kate L. Brewster

Shepherdess https://www.artic.edu/artworks/68452/

Promised Gift of Robert J. Buford

God of War https://www.artic.edu/artworks/241048/

Through prior gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman

From the Ermine to a Chimera in the Abyss (D’hermines à une chimere en abîme) https://www.artic.edu/artworks/206759/

This painting exemplifies Yves Tanguy's late style, especially as he practiced it after his move to the United States in 1939, where he married the American painter Kay Sage. The forms have become harder and more sculptural, resembling strangely shaped stones, rather than the amorphous creatures of his earlier paintings, and echoing more clearly the prehistoric stones—the dolmens and menhirs—of Tanguy's native Brittany. Color is also intensified, as the artist makes more generous use of the orange-red and blue found only spottily in earlier works, such as his 1928 screen. The arrangement, size, and shape of these forms has become more varied, from the regimented clustering of forms on the right to the horizontal scattering of forms on the left and in the background. The viewer is also brought visually closer to the scene through the cropping of forms in the foreground.The title of the painting (inscribed on the back as La Rapidite des sommeils) works in conjunction with the image to heighten its enigma and mystery, as in the works of Giorgio de Chirico and Rene Magritte. Perhaps the title refers to the onset of sleep, or to the different stages of sleep, as the French use of the plural "sommeils" seems to suggest. This interpretation seems to find a visual equivalent in the progression from congested, active foreground to sparse, quiet back-ground, from the thicket of vertical forms on the right to the more relaxed rhythm of horizontal forms extending into the distance. In the middle ground, at left, is an unusual configuration that seems particularly evocative in relation to the title. A horizontal form reminiscent of a sleeping figure lies, as in a bed or coffin, within the rectangular space defined by a rocklike border. Is Tanguy referring to the sleep that ushers in the dream-world of his landscapes or to the ultimate sleep, the sleep of death? The mood of the picture hovers uncertainly between the ominous and the contemplative, between lower and upper halves, engendering a desire to traverse the inhospitable foreground to reach the soothing, misty reaches of the background. Given the date of the work, at the end of World War II, one also wonders whether there is embedded in this work something of the emotional tenor of the times, a yearning for a peace that would transcend recent history.—Entry, Margherita Andreotti, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2, The Joseph Winterbotham Collection at The Art Institute of Chicago (1994), p. 176-177. Joseph Winterbotham Collection

The Rapidity of Sleep https://www.artic.edu/artworks/54745/

Bequest of Florence S. McCormick

Head of a Woman https://www.artic.edu/artworks/59443/

Lindy and Edwin Bergman Joseph Cornell Collection

Untitled (Hôtel de la Duchesse-Anne) https://www.artic.edu/artworks/99789/

Bequest of Mima de Manziarly Porter

Composition https://www.artic.edu/artworks/90439/

Gift of Mary and Leigh Block

Nuclear I, CH https://www.artic.edu/artworks/59822/

Gift of William E. Hartmann

Maquette for "Miró's Chicago" https://www.artic.edu/artworks/100666/

Gift of Richard Feigen

Figure and Flowers https://www.artic.edu/artworks/28548/

Gift of Society for Contemporary American Art

Part of a Garden https://www.artic.edu/artworks/79387/

Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection

Painting with Green Center https://www.artic.edu/artworks/8987/