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Chapter 3

Chicago, Illinois

Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago is a spectacular gallery, enhanced by the Renzo Piano Modern Wing, constructed in 2009.

It is huge in space and full of great art. The second floor on the west side is the sculpture room. Huge, all white walls. When I visited it (three times in 2015 alone), it had Charles Ray’s sculpture — only eight pieces in this immense white cavern.

The rub is this: the view over Millennium Park, the Gehry Bandshell, all of Chicago’s architecture, an explosion of a city panorama. Nowhere else.

15. Earthly Paradise (1916–20)

Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947)

Pierre Bonnard, Earthly Paradise, 1916–20

Oil on canvas, 130 x 160 cm

Estate of Joanne Toor Cummings; Bette and Neison Harris and Searle Family Trust endowments; through prior gifts of Mrs. Henry C. Woods (1996.47)

The Art Institute of Chicago

Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images

I was at Drouot auction house in Paris one day when a Bonnard lithograph of a yellow cat came up for sale. A charming image, it went for a steal at around € 900 and I have passing regret for not buying it. (I was under the weather at the time.)

What a sweet painter, Pierre Bonnard, one of the most instinctive and sensitive artists of all time. Still-lifes to nudes, modern landscapes to bygone communities, small scales to large, he showed it all while incorporating some of the best colour techniques ever mastered.

Fortunately, for any number of reasons, he eschewed a career in law and government for our viewing enjoyment. After a year of military service, Bonnard moved into a studio in Montmartre with Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, and Aurelien Lugne-Poe to begin his career. Like many of his contemporaries, he was inspired by Japanese prints.

After a time as part of the Nabis, a group of painters determined to rejuvenate painting after the post-Impressionists, Bonnard found new interest in landscape. In 1910 he discovered the south of France, source of much of our modern French art and the land of twentieth-century wish-fulfillment. Connecting his art with the landscape of Provence became his obsession. He used calming hues to achieve the effect of light and feel of warmth in his canvases.

Bonnard later returned to painting nudes, but this time he focused on emphasizing structure instead of just purely colour. He painted Earthly Paradise somewhere between 1916 and 1920. It shows Adam, the intellect, and Eve, the sensuous, part of our Western mythology.

Of prodigious output, you can find other Bonnards at the Fogg Museum of the Harvard Museums of Art.

Now, then, about that yellow cat….

16. Still Life with Fruits and Stringed Instrument (1938)

Georges Braque (1882–1963)

Georges Braque, Still Life with Fruits and Stringed Instrument, 1938

A deconstructionist still-life, a mind-altering experience without herbal stimulant, just the neurons brought alive. Along with Picasso, presaging Jacques Derrida and his ilk, Georges Braque makes us see a different reality.

An early-twentieth-century, French, multi-faceted artist and not-so-distant artistic cousin to, say, Duchamp, Braque traversed several periods of gorgeous painting with elegance and grace. As a young man, he painted houses by day and attended the École des Beaux-Arts by night, changing his style from Impressionistic to Fauvist. He took inspiration from Matisse and Derain, who used colour and free form to mine deep emotion, something Braque wanted to realize on canvas.

In 1907, Braque encountered Pablo Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , and this turned into a close friendship between them, founding a revolutionary art movement known as Cubism. While Picasso moved away from Cubism, Braque continued to create within the Cubist realm, now making collages with only pasted paper instead of painting. Braque covered his collages in geometric shapes with hidden dispersion of musical instruments, fruit, and furniture, bringing to them a three-dimensional element never seen before.

After a time, Braque reverted to painting, now doing still-lifes, trying to depict space in an unconventional way. Braque captured on canvas how different things transform over time in their different temporal dimensions. Still Life with Fruits and Stringed Instrument is one of many pieces Braque painted during this period, one that reflects his style perfectly. At first glance, the visual data Braque displays is almost overwhelming, but a second, closer look reveals Braque’s unconventional sense of beauty. The round, clothed table is full of fruit, sheet music, and a stringed instrument of some sort. To the back of the table, on either side, are two figures: one possibly a metronome; the other, the red one, is anyone’s guess. These are shapes informed by colour. Think of a traditional still-life superimposed by Cubist elements.

During the Second World War, solitude and sweetness took over his canvases. His subjects became little birds, the ocean, landscapes, and more, shown in lithograph, sculpture, and stained glass form until his death in 1963. While the form may have changed, he never really strayed far from his Cubist roots.

Other Braques may be found at Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

17. Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877)

Gustave Caillebotte (1848–94)

Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877

Oil on canvas, 212.2 x 276.2 cm

Charles H. and Mary F.S. Worcester Collection, 1964.336

The Art Institute of Chicago

Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images

This vista is still there, sadly marred by the commercial trappings of twenty-first-century Paris. Motorcycles abound. Traffic lights, too, and a neon green pharmacie nearby. What is missing, of course, is this handsome Parisian couple out for a stroll in the inclement weather.

Gustave Caillebotte was consumed by his surroundings — the people, landscapes, and other artworks. Born into a wealthy family, he had the leisure to eschew careers in law and engineering. He studied art at the École des Beaux-Arts but didn’t stay for long. He befriended fellow Impressionists like Degas, Monet, and Renoir, and, along with many of theirs, purchased works by Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Alfred Sisley, and Berthe Morisot, amassing at one time the most prestigious collection of Impressionist art in France.

Caillebotte’s most famous painting, Paris Street, Rainy Day , captures a fleeting, impermanent moment in the Saint Lazare streets of Paris. A fashionably dressed couple, glancing away, walks along the rain-dappled street toward the viewer. Caillebotte’s cropping of the scene sweeps us into the very real image, evoking a momentary truth. Cleverly using the street lamp to divide the foreground from the background, offering a pleasing geometric aesthetic, the painting reflects the radical urbanization of Paris by Napoleon III and his architect, Baron Haussmann. For Caillebotte, this meant fresh inspiration, along with the chance to explore the modernity of his own city.

Indifferent to fame, Caillebotte created his art for himself, showing rarely. His renown came years after his death, demonstrating the timeless beauty of his work.

While Paris Street, Rainy Day was his masterpiece — it never fails to evoke a poignant wish to be there at that moment in time — and the piece for which he is best known, you can see other Caillebottes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

18. White Crucifixion (1938)

Marc Chagall (1885–1985)

Marc Chagall, White Crucifixion, 1938

Oil on canvas, 154.6 x 140 cm

Gift of Alfred S. Alschuler (1946.925)

The Art Institute of Chicago

Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images

Normally a painter, a sweet and gentle colourist, depicting scenes from his shtetl life in Lithuania, Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion is the first in his series created to call global attention to the persecution of European Jews in the 1930s. Like many of Chagall’s works, the canvas features multiple images on which, individually, a viewer feels drawn to focus. The dominant figure of Christ on a white cross stabilizes the piece. The smaller images depict untoward action and random violence. The overall grey shading creates a cohesiveness while the passivity of the figure provides a pervading calmness, allowing the viewer to return to that point for respite.

Typical of Chagall’s style, White Crucifixion makes heavy use of symbolism. Chagall shows Christ as a Jewish martyr by substituting his usual adornments with classic Jewish motifs. His traditional loincloth is replaced with a tallit (a Jewish prayer shawl), his crown of thorns with a head cloth, and the mourning angels as three biblical Jewish patriarchs and a matriarch.

In this sobering and intense work, Chagall borrows the moral condemnation of Christ’s tormentors to evoke the same condemnation toward the Nazis. Safe in Paris (as it would be two more years until the Nazis invaded France), Chagall painted White Crucifixion to draw attention to all the anti-Semitic violence sweeping Europe and, more specifically, Kristallnacht — the horrifying anti-Jewish pogrom officially decreed by Nazi Germany.

This painting succeeds both as an artistic and moral creation. Its message, urgent at its birth, and at full strength today, pushes us to engage with Chagall’s sense of horror engulfing Europe in 1938. Here, Chagall leaves no room for apathy and indifference. Only the hard heart fails to respond to this tragic scene.

Other pieces by Chagall, such as I and The Village (1911), may be seen at the MoMA while La Fontaine Fables is found at the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Laurel, Mississippi.

19. The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (1455–60)

Giovanni di Paolo (1403–82)

Giovanni di Paolo,

The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, 1455–60

Tempera on panel, 69.6 x 39.1 cm, surface: 66.3 x 36.6 cm

Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection (1933.1014)

The Art Institute of Chicago

Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images

Florence was the driving force of the Renaissance. Lorenzo Ghiberti, the Italian sculptor, spent his life on the Florence Baptistry doors, called by Michelangelo the Gates of Paradise.

From 1403 to 1452, three years before his death, he laboured on this huge, huge project. The result represented the Renaissance’s aspirations, and artists who followed used it as their model. Architecture and sculpture was more important than painting in Florence during this time.

Here we have an artist, Giovanni di Paolo, painting twelve panels, six of which are here in Chicago. A few years after Ghiberti’s thunderbolt bronze sculpture Gates of Paradise , stylized and primitive with rough landscape, grand architecture, raised bronze, and extreme emotions: its influence is clear.

Why do I love this? Well, it is a magnificent picture of the Renaissance, its colour and its glorious architecture. Buildings were important to the citizens. They were a matter of pride.

The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist — the ugly deed of beheading juxtaposed with the lovely architecture. Was blood ever more graphically splattered?

Saint John the Baptist Entering the Wilderness — so much a mirror of Ghiberti’s ragged mountains of bronze, but look at the crenulated exits overlooking an elysian church in the valley. The flicker of mountains against the straight pattern of the fields.

Christ and John — the patterns of land off to a misty church. The figures all posing but intense, yes, intense, on a patterned zigzag parquet floor.

Saint John the Baptist in Prison Visited by Two Disciples — grey flat squares, arches, fluted columns with an archway to geometric fields. All the angles that architecture can provide and, oh yes, the dog. Maybe one of the first dogs in painting.

Salome Asking Herod for the Head of Saint John the Baptist — look at the cantilevered angles of the architecture. Ballustrades, stairs, arches, a backdrop to a beseeching for death.

The Head of Saint John the Baptist Brought Before Herod — this is the one! I love it for two reasons. First, the whacky architecture — the feeling of multiple rooms, busy, connected yet discombobulated architecture. Second, either one or two attendants bring the platter with John’s head. The lady at the back right with John’s head may be the same as the server before Herod. There are two women in Salome Asking Herod for the Head of Saint John the Baptist.

Salome’s simple green gown is bewitching.

Welcome to the early Renaissance!

The Feast in the House of Simon (1608–14)

El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) (1541–1614)

El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), The Feast in the House of Simon, 1608–14

The Art Institute of Chicago

People attributed his elongated figures to astigmatism. Not so. Born in Crete, he was a product of a Byzantine background using elongated proportions seen in Byzantine figures. He was constantly pre-occupied with ideas of mystical religion, the ecstatic union with the Divine Spirit. He was very successful in life, but treated with contempt after death, finally resurrected to his immense current stature after the First World War, when artists began to ignore establishment stuffiness and standards of correctness.

El Greco left Crete with its ancient Byzantine rigidity and arrived in Venice to see Tintoretto’s unconventional symphonies of sweep, slash, long javelins of lines, and colour, colour, colour. He developed a bold disregard for natural forms and colours. He made mannerism more aggressive and made it meld with the religious fervour of Spain.

He was overconfident. He proclaimed Michelangelo couldn’t paint. He worked under Titian in Venice for a time but was disturbed by the sensuous (hence anti-religious) nature of Venetian work. After a stint in Rome he settled in Toledo, Spain, with his wife and son. His success in Toledo was huge. His villa on the verge of a canyon had twenty-four rooms, many completely unfurnished. At night, he paid an orchestra to play while food was served.

He was a well-read mystic of a sort. One of his friends called on him to take a walk. El Greco’s room had curtains drawn, so all was dark. He was in a chair, neither working nor sleeping, and refused the walk, as “the light of the day disturbed his inward light.”

For a time critics viewed him as mad.

Sir William Stirling Maxwell, in 1864, said:

El Greco has been justly described as an artist who alternated between reason and delirium and displayed his great genius only at lucid intervals.

Manet and Delacroix proclaimed El Greco a genius.

Here, Feast in the House of Simon has a sparkle, electric shiver, colour so bright as if splashed on yesterday. And the electricity of the conversation! A sweep and curve of interaction. Look across at the Tintoretto, yes, yes, you can see Tintoretto’s influence!

20. Nighthawks (1942)

Edward Hopper (1882–1967)

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942

The Art Institute of Chicago

Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images

Life happens while you’re making plans, the saying goes. The folks in Nighthawks might heed this advice before it’s too late.

Ruminative, brooding, probably no one captured the lack of spirit of his times better than Edward Hopper. If ever there was an existentiality to painting, Hopper exemplified it. Ivo Kranzfelder, in Hopper , put it this way: His paintings “reveal a world that is no longer in a state of innocence, but has not reached the point of self-destruction.”

A life-long New Yorker, Hopper showcased what was pure and simple about America post–First World War. Gas stations, railways, forlorn houses, sun-shrouded but empty apartments, these were the constructs of everyday life. Using a more defined form of Impressionist palette, Hopper employed light and shadow strategically, emphasizing, indeed, heralding, emptiness as motif.

Here, the fluorescent lighting draws us into the café in contrast to the desolate street, the slumbering neighbourhood. A calmness pervades, no hurry even though the country was engaged in a foreign war, far from its domestic shores. We don’t see any entrance to the café. Either we aren’t welcome or the characters themselves are trapped?

With little emotion showing, there seems to be bare interaction. Each is lost in his or her thoughts, pensive, maybe worried. What are they thinking? The canvas affords us the chance to imagine their feelings. What a profound experience, almost like no other of its time and place. Like bees in amber. Caught. Forever. Anywhere, USA.

Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers (1865)

Édouard Manet (1832–83)

Édouard Manet, Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers, 1865

Oil on canvas, 190.8 x 148.3 cm

Gift of James Deering (1925.703)

The Art Institute of Chicago

Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images

The great Impressionist, with his “flat” canvases, almost oriental patterns, use of black and stage figures, and sense of theatre. Here so-o-ooo immediate, with a Goya ink background. Christ naked — the mockers indifferent.

A palpable sense of taunting and indifferent scorn.

The flat black deadens all. On the left the yellow ice cream jerkin runs against Christ’s spindly legs and big bunion on his right big toe, his scrawny, pale shoulders, weak arms all create defeat. The pupils of his eyes as black and empty as the background. The lance tentatively poking him is a slumbering animal.

I have followed closely the art writings of Julian Barnes, an English novelist, and have come to trust his judgment about artists. He brings new insights that delight me. Imagine my horror when I read in his 2015 book, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art, his contemptuous put-down of this painting in a chapter of praise for Manet. This painting was one of three religious paintings by Manet (1864–65). The catalogue description for a 2011 show in Paris said they “… revolted his enemies as much as they embarrassed his admirers.”

Barnes says of this (and the other two paintings):

… they are sort of derivative, academic monsters you nowadays find hung high up in provincial Musées des Beaux-Arts long exiled there by a relieved Paris art bureaucracy. (“Look we are sending you a Manet!”)1

I still believe it is a picture of profound religious insight.

21. Untitled #12 (1977)

Agnes Martin (1912–2004)

Agnes Martin, Untitled #12, 1977

India ink, graphite, and gesso on canvas, 182.9 x 182.9 cm

Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize Fund (1979.356)

The Art Institute of Chicago

Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images

Do you see the flower? It’s there in the grid, luminous against the grainy background. You just need to look carefully!

Canadian-born Agnes Martin moved to New York City in 1932 and began creating her iconic abstractions. When she arrived, she met a small, but ultimately influential, cadre of like-minded artists. Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, and Robert Rauschenberg were among them, spending their time creating postwar American art and experimenting with Abstract Impressionism.

Her grids caught the public attention around 1958 at her first one-woman show. She combined her free-hand, graphite lines with coloured bands on a square six-foot canvas. She used delicacy and precision to complete these organic masterpieces. The structural, white pencil markings never touch the edge of the canvas, creating a fluidity between materials and ideas, a shimmering unification of sorts.

Battling schizophrenia, Martin ultimately moved to New Mexico, where she built her own home single-handedly but did no painting. She began painting again in 1974 but her grid style was no more. Horizontal and vertical stripes of warm colour replaced the simple style she had perfected.

Untitled #12 (1977) was painted in a fifteen-part series on canvas. The series abandoned her original technique in exchange for a hand-drawn painting, exhibiting a subtle gradation of light. Titles that had been focused solely on nature had changed to express love and life. She worked into her nineties, she died in 2004, and her work endures.

22. City Landscape (1955)

Joan Mitchell (1925–92)

Joan Mitchell, City Landscape, 1955

Oil on linen, 203.2 x 203.2 cm

Gift of Society for Contemporary American Art (1958.193)

The Art Institute of Chicago

Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images

Does this look like a city landscape to you? Would it without the title? It does to me. The painting evokes the nervous energy a large metropolis radiates, neon and all.

Chicago-born, Joan Mitchell took inspiration for her foray into Abstract Expressionism from heavyweights like de Kooning and, earlier, from Kandinsky, Matisse, and Cézanne. She had intended to study with Hans Hofmann but found his teaching technique too intimidating and ventured elsewhere.

After a European stint, she found her artistic voice and called her new works “Expressionist Landscapes.” A tough woman, she refused to be ignored in the male-dominated art scene of 1950s New York. With great irony, she referred to herself as a “Lady Painter,” mocking her contemporaries who failed to take her seriously as an artist.

Refusing the hew to the conventional wisdom of flatness on the canvass, Mitchell continually returned to the tradition of figure and ground, almost always alluding to landscape, however unrecognizable. The oil-on-linen City Landscape hues of soft pink, mustard yellow, warm orange, and black in their short brush strokes create a sense of chaos as they intensify toward the middle of the canvas. Ambient light surrounds the metropolis. You can feel the frisson , the pulsating excitement, as you are swirled into the epicentre.

Mitchell said of her work, “I paint a little, then I sit and look at the painting, sometimes for hours. Eventually, the painting tells me what to do.” She lived the last part of her rich life with Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, but their works never seem a reflection of the other’s, each always hewing to her and his artistic vision.

A timeless artist, Mitchell’s Untitled (1960) sold at auction in 2014 for $11.9 million, a record for a “Lady Painter.”

Mitchell is also exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, and at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City, but City Landscape is not to be missed.

23. Woman at Her Toilette (1875–80)

Berthe Morisot (1841–95)

Berthe Morisot, Woman at Her Toilette, 1875–80

Oil on canvas, 60.3 x 80.4 cm

Stickney Fund (1924.127)

The Art Institute of Chicago

Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images

Some pictures pop up out of nowhere.

In March 2016, Waldemar Januszcak, a British art commentator, picked the one hundred greatest works of art in THE WORLD. Well, I look. Berthe Morisot, Young Woman at Her Toilette, “The most talented of the female Impressionist painters worked with brush strokes so dashing and inventive and brave, they set your pulse racing.”

Look at it. If ever a painting deserves the praise, “a salad of feathery strokes,” this is it. Shades of lavender, pink, blue, white, and grey. The black choker takes your eye away from the yellow rose on the table. All a flutter of femininity yet a discipline in the brushing. Magic.

Berthe Morisot, a member of the Impressionists, had a picture selected by the establishment Salon as early as 1867, the year she posed for Manet in the famous Balcony. In Manet’s hallmark picture (Musée D’Orsay), she is a riveting beauty with a black choker, ringlets of raven black hair, and sizzling dark eyes. She was the legendary Fragonard’s great niece and became Manet’s sister-in-law. She survived the 1870–71 Commune in Paris when the Germans slaughtered many French civilians. Paris was stripped of trees and lights, people were starving, and rat paté or cat stew was survival. Cholera lurked.

In 1874 Pissarro put on the first group exhibition of what became known as the Impressionists. She entered nine works, Degas ten, Monet nine, Cézanne but three. She was a regular exhibitor until its last show in 1886.

She was a great friend of Manet and a subject of many of his portraits. She was close to Degas. In one of her letters to her sister, she reveals a Jane Austen–like quality:

Monsieur Degas seemed happy but guess for whom he forsook me — for Mademoiselle Lille and Madame Loubens. I must admit I was a little annoyed when a man whom I consider to be very intelligent deserted me to pay compliments to two silly women.

… For about an hour Manet was leading his wife and me all over the place … what is more I had completely lost sight of Manet and his wife, which further increased my embarrassment. I did not think it proper to walk around all alone. When I finally found Manet again I reproached him for his behaviour.2

A young poet said, “When I am near Madame Manet I feel like an uncouth lout.”3

After Morisot’s death Renoir, Monet, and Degas organized a retrospective exhibition of her works.

Ascending and Descending Hero (1965)

Bridget Riley (1931–)

Bridget Riley,

Ascending and Descending Hero, 1965

Acrylic emulsion on canvas, 72 x 108 in.

Gift of Society for Contemporary Art (1968.102)

The Art Institute of Chicago

courtesy Karsten Schubert, London

Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago

Doesn’t look like much, does it? Is it even art? Well, is it something that attracts the eye? Does it speak to the senses, even causing aggravation? Is it arranged in an arresting way? Does it make you think? Does it make you feel? If so, surely it’s art.

Bridget Riley was one of the youngest, most driven, and most influential women in the modern art world. In 1931, in Cornwall, England, during the Second World War, she fell in love with the outdoors. She was intrigued by the constant changes in light and colour and cloud formation and admired the world around her from a young age.

After her father was seriously injured in a car accident, she spun into a complete mental and physical breakdown. She was out of touch, and out of mind, something she had never experienced. Failing in painting, she eventually found her way back to London where, at the Tate Gallery, she saw an Abstract Expressionist exhibition that sparked some inspiration.

Riley began her first Op Art pieces, sticking to shades of black and white and the simplest of geometric shapes. She based these paintings on the illusion she felt in her own eye. She wasn’t painting from theory, she was experimenting, until she found an image she wanted to share. Ascending and Descending Hero is among her important early works, culminating in bold, hypnotic canvases. These works were purely instinctive and, consequently, enticing to us.

Op Art made its way into pop culture because of Bridget Riley. Designers, even in the fashion industry, fell in love with it, as did advertisers. She became one of the art darlings of the sixties. She is today a hip eighty-four-year-old woman, still perfecting her unique artistic vision.

Is it art? Yes, it is.

24. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884 (1884–86)

Georges Seurat (1859–91)

Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884, 1884–86

Oil on canvas, 207.5 x 308.1 cm

Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection (1926.224)

The Art Institute of Chicago

Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images

Admit it! You want to share this idyllic moment, go back in time and reality and check out the scene, even to greet the woman with child stately walking toward us.

Georges Seurat painted La Grande Jatte, arguably the most influential and famous piece of his oeuvre , when he was just twenty-seven. During that time, amid the late eighties, the Impressionist movement needed a pick me up, someone with a fresh eye, new ideals, and inspiration. Georges Seurat was just that spark to steer the Impressionists in a new direction.

La Grande Jatte takes on the form Seurat envisioned and created, formally known as Pointillism, informally known as Divisionism. He wisped small brush strokes and dappled tiny dots of complementary colours onto his canvas, creating a bright, incandescent glow of colour and light. By placing small dabs next to each other, the colours blend in different ways and create an almost 3D effect.

The sophistication of modern affluence basking in the sun on this Parisian island inspired Seurat to begin his largest work. Modern life was his muse for many projects and influenced him in the creation of this piece, but while painting it, Seurat captured the natural beauty and qualities of light within nature and their interaction. Different hues cast shadows from the women’s skirts onto the ground. The mixing of greens creates a blue shadow next to them. The light greens create a yellow ring around the leaves on the trees and, most prominently, around the characters in the shaded foreground. This seamless colour creates a very realistic depiction of light and its changes, something the viewer would actually experience if they had gone to this park, or any park for that matter.

Seurat had many preconceived ideas about this painting, but fretted endlessly about its layout. As preparatory work, he completed twenty-eight drawings, twenty-eight panels, and three canvases full of sketches. After much deliberation, he depicted forty-eight people, three dogs, and eight boats in his gorgeous park setting. From a distance, the activity of people on land and off leads the viewer’s eye in all directions within the frame but doesn’t overwhelm. Yet Seurat was very mechanical when constructing this piece. “Some say they see poetry in my paintings,” Seurat said. “I see only science.”

When it debuted in 1884, critics and observers sneered at the so called pretentious characters in the scene and compared them to robots and tin soldiers. His techniques were widely rejected by the art world establishment until thirty years after his death in 1891, when he died of an undetermined disease at age thirty-one. In 1924, Frederic Clay, an avid art collector and lover, bought La Grande Jatte and loaned it indefinitely to the Art Institute of Chicago, where it still hangs. Sadly, but in a way sweetly, La Grande Jatte is among the most parodied of all time. Seen in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off , Family Guy , Sesame Street , The Simpsons , The Office , Looney Tunes , and even the subject of a Broadway musical, Sunday in the Park with George , Seurat brought his vision to life and it continues to enchant us.

25. Tarquin and Lucretia (1578–80)

Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) (1518–94)

Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti), Tarquin and Lucretia, 1578–80

Oil on canvas, 175 x 151.5 cm

Art Institute Purchase Fund (1949.203)

The Art Institute of Chicago

Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images

How do you capture the crackle of Tintoretto? Painter of perhaps the greatest Last Judgment of all. Here a rape, the scattering bouncing pearls, white skin, flashing colour — a quick brutality.

Shimmers of lightning bathing the silks and satins. This elegance, cheek by jowl with ugly rape, her hand reaching out to you, for you to rescue her. The peasant-like face of Tarquin clashes with a sprawling statue emblematic of culture all before a bejewelled wall.

Peter Schjeldahl in the February 12, 2007, edition of the New Yorker said:

He drew with his brush, light over dark — so that shadings came first, imparting a sumptuous density to forms that are lit with highlights like spatters of sun.

Baroque which took hold two decades later with Caravaggio, can seem an edited ratification of tendencies already developed by Tintoretto.

A Venetian master best seen in Venice, Tintoretto grows on you, his slashing style symphonic.

Titian, king of Venetian painting, just hated Tintoretto. Competition!

26. Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando) (1887–88)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando), 1887–88

Oil on canvas, 100.3 x 161.3 cm

Joseph Winterbotham Collection (1925.523)

The Art Institute of Chicago

Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images

Jean Sutherland Boggs in the Expo 67 catalogue captures the message of Lautrec aptly:

The whole work of Lautrec could be interpreted as a record of man at play — in cafés, cabarets, brothels, the opera house, at the races or, as here, in the circus. It is however, a play which tends to be vicarious, passed on to spectators as apathetic as these. It is also a play which demands hard work of the performers even of the solid horse in the painting. Lautrec inevitably cut through the illusion of such a performance to reveal something as sordid and cruel as the circus master’s sadistic pleasure in his whip. Yet always surmounting this caustic vision of man wearyingly at play for the second hand enjoyment of others is a respect for man’s vitality and will.

The circus master may be wicked (look at his caricatured profile) but he is also dynamic and self-assertive. The bareback rider may be tawdry but she and the horse move with considerable conviction through space. They may have vices but among them are not maudlin self-pity nor the vacant apathy of the meagre crowd. Lautrec’s poster-like forms have this same aggressive force. It was this combination of irresistible will and energy that Lautrec found most admirable in performers giving their audience an illusion of man at play.4

After years of contemplating Lautrec, for me, Boggs has captured his special message. Critics can really guide you.

Lautrec, a dwarf, brilliant, astute, always fighting pain and illness, led a peripatetic life among Parisian music halls and brothels. Some of the early purchasers of his art were brothels. Brothels bought and sold. Here Gimpel tells of a sale:

May 18, 1918

George Bernheim told me: “In a little while, at six, I’m going to the brothel on rue Favart to see sixteen Toulouse-Lautrecs for which they’re asking 100,000 francs. They’d have turned down 120,000 before the war.”

“Quite possibly,” countered Alforsen, a Swedish artist, “as business is bad in the houses….”5

Lautrec painted the underside of Paris, its brothels and dancehalls. There is sometimes frenetic energy, other times a fatigued despondency. But never boring, nor do you react with pity. It is a tough life, but true.

Fishing Boats with Hucksters Bargaining for Fish (1837–38)

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Fishing Boats with Hucksters Bargaining for Fish, 1837–38

Oil on canvas, 174.5 x 224.9 cm

Mr. and Mrs. W.W. Kimball Collection (1922.4472)

The Art Institute of Chicago

Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images

Turner existed only to paint. He started at age eleven and didn’t stop until his death in 1851. He was cockney and a prodigious worker. Landscape was his friend. Everywhere he went, he took his notebooks. He mastered watercolour.

This 1837 painting is a grand sweeping stage. He had a passion for the sea. He has caught the fury and the wet of the sea. Here the boat may be out of control, in the frothing, giddy power of the waves. There is a vibrant novelty to these waves with their ginger-ale fizz and drag current. Was ever the roil of the sea caught better? The spinnaker pushed by a hell-bent gust, driving the boat to a surge. How can the hucksters get close? A desperate painting with, off in the distance, a new-fangled steamer. The future? The waves, a pattern of spun gold, the sky over brutish black and an ochre lump, all airy blue, buttery yellow atmosphere and light, the colour becoming the story — painting set free, reflecting the vicissitudes of nature. He applied his watercolours wet on wet, allowing paint to diffuse and outlines to soften, influencing his oil painting. This is at first a traditional painting but, at a closer look, changes are afoot.

Turner and Constable were opposites. The promiscuous Turner railed against marriage; Constable pious, devoted in marriage, conventional.

Constable said of Turner when they met in 1813, “I was a good deal entertained with Turner. I always expected to find him what I did — he is uncouth but has a wonderful range of mind.”

This painting was done only seven years before his more abstract later works such as Rain, Steam and Speed.

27. The Bedroom (1889)

Vincent van Gogh (1853–90)

Vincent van Gogh, The Bedroom, 1889

Oil on canvas, 73.6 x 92.3 cm

Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection (1926.417)

The Art Institute of Chicago

Photo Credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images

Van Gogh, meteoric in his late-blooming passion as an artist, disturbed, driven, his prodigious talent is measured in mere months. He produced his masterworks in only thirty months.

In October 1888 he painted a picture of his bedroom, a novel subject for a painting.

He produced two more paintings of his bedroom in Arles. The first, damaged by water, is in Amsterdam. This, his second, was meant as a sort of reproduction. The description that follows has a slight variance from the painting here. It modifies the first painting. But except for the floor colour, which has changed, it mirrors this canvas.

His letter to his brother, Theo, sets out his vision:

I had a new idea in my head and here is the sketch to it … this time it’s just simply my bedroom, only here colour is to do everything, and, giving by its simplification a grander style to things, is to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, to look at the picture ought to rest the brain or rather the imagination.

The walls are pale violet. The ground is of red tiles. The wood of the bed and chairs is the yellow of fresh butter, the sheets and pillows very light greenish lemon. The coverlet scarlet. The window green. The toilet-table orange, the basin blue. The doors lilac. And that is all — there is nothing in this room with closed shutters. The broad lines of the furniture, again, must express absolute rest. Portraits on the walls, and a mirror and a towel and some clothes.

The frame — as there is no white in the picture — will be white. This by way of revenge for the enforced rest I was obliged to take.

I shall work at it again all day, but you see how simple the conception is. The shading and the cast shadows are suppressed, it is painted in free flat washes like the Japanese prints …6

Van Gogh stresses rest. Up close this is clearly wrong. This is a disturbed painting and anyone sleeping in this seething bedroom under tilted walls would either be careening from LSD or the world’s most roiling hangover.

The bed’s frame, which Van Gogh describes as “the yellow of fresh butter,” is in fact an uneasy, ribbed, heavy impasto, dabbed colour, the pillows “very light greenish lemon” are a study of turmoil. The matting on the chair is alive, an infested blob. “The walls are pale violet,” no, they’re psychedelic, pinching the viewer as they tilt in fighting the fury of the bed. Van Gogh said, “Looking at the picture ought to rest the brain, or rather the imagination.” No, it’s a psychiatric Ping Pong game.

Pissarro, a companion artist, said, “Many times I’ve said that this man will either go mad or outpace us all. That he would do both, I did not foresee.”

When furnishing the yellow house in Arles, he bought twelve chairs. He never entertained and had no disciples. He had intended to establish a community of artists in the south of France, but only Gauguin visited, a disaster ending with Vincent’s razored ear.

Julian Barnes, the novelist and art critic, says of Van Gogh:

He isn’t one of these painters like, say Degas or Monet, who over the years refine and deepen our vision. I am not sure Van Gogh’s paintings change for us very much over the years, that we see him differently, find more in him at 60 or 70 than we did at 20. Rather, it is the case that the painter’s desperate sincerity, his audacious resplendent colour and his intense desire to make paintings a “consolatory art for distressed hearts” take us back to being 20 again. And that is no bad place to be.7

I think this is both valid and profound.

He was a voracious reader: Dickens, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Longfellow, Whitman, Charlotte Bronte, and Aeschylus.

28. American Gothic (1930)

Grant Wood (1891–1942)

Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930

Oil on beaver board, 78 x 65.3 cm

Friends of American Art Collection (1930.934)

The Art Institute of Chicago

VAGA, New York (2017)

Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images

As in a dream, the beholder is taken to another place as we try to unravel the ambiguity of Grant Wood’s most famous painting, American Gothic .

Who are these people? Parodied, mocked, damned with familiarity.

Wood’s subjects, farmer and daughter, were modelled after Wood’s sister, Nan, and his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby. The daughter seems anxious, as if reflecting on a past love or trouble sitting uneasily on her mind. Her sophisticated clothing suggests something of a different time, but the tiny, loose curl hanging from her right ear hints at hidden sensuality, in contrast to the Midwestern propriety. The father is defiant and stolid but seems refined also — as shown by the gold button beyond his class and time. Wood chose these models because they could easily be the inhabitants of the “American Gothic–style” house of the title. They are also the perfect couple to represent his depiction of rural America and the Great Depression, survivors in a time of chaos.

An advocate for the Regionalist movement, Wood refused to paint any large urban spaces. He spent his time reimagining and interpreting rural America on canvas. As part of his quest for regionalism, he returned to Iowa in the summer of 1930, where he stumbled onto this home, still standing today in Eldon. Gothic-styled homes mimicked the timelessness of the great European cathedrals, beautiful in their architecture and detail. This specific home Wood chose to paint has the pointed church window. It looks pasted onto the structure but, aesthetically, cements the painting.

Pop culture has embraced American Gothic for years by adapting it, over and over, for its intended audience. Simple changes to the characters, clothes, props, and background make for an easy, successful manipulation. On a doormat, a caption says: “One nice person and one old grouch live here.” It has been on magazine covers and TV show title pages, in newspaper articles, posted on the street. The media has been successfully using it to express all kinds of cultural, environmental, and social issues in a fresh, humorous way. Many of this generation recognize the work from its countless iterations, offering immortality in its own, if ironic, way.

Museum of Contemporary Art

29. Study for a Portrait (1949)

Francis Bacon (1909–92)

Francis Bacon, Study for a Portrait, 1949

Oil on canvas, 149.4 x 130.6 cm

Gift of Joseph and Jory Shapiro (1976.44)

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Francis Bacon’s existential angst is so palpable, so raw, so transfixing it is irresistible. His early exposure to war and alienation from his family (because of his homosexuality) clearly presaged the demonic paintings he would later create. They remain transformative on many levels, not the least aesthetically.

Already influenced by Surrealism and Cubism, by the mid-forties Bacon had come to a very pivotal point in his work, creating Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) at the Tate Britain. These paintings integrated movement, a constant and driving theme throughout the rest of his works. In Study for a Portrait (1952), also at the Tate Britain, he cries in pain or horror, howling in outrage at the human condition. Throughout his later work, Bacon often depicted a single person, typically isolated in a room. The viewer is rendered helpless, uncomfortable, unable to help as the subject is boxed in, but maybe there is no help warranted, no escape to be arranged. Many of these works use heavy paint, rigid surfaces, and a second interior in the frame.

In his Heads series, of which VI is one, Bacon slathered blacks and greys along the unprimed side of the canvas. Bacon preferred to paint on the opposite side of the canvas as he found the ridged grooves of the canvas held and displayed the paint in a more powerful form than the primed side. Head VI is the painting in the series that uses colour, displaying an open-mouthed man, in a purple cape, likely reflecting the hopelessness of the post–Second World War, apocalyptic nuclear age.

If there is a primal scream, one common to us all, that we can almost hear, like the famous Munch(s) or Ginsberg’s Howl , Head VI is it.

Not to be missed is Bacon’s Figure with Meat series of works, based on Velasquez’s Pope Innocent X (found in Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome), a sensational version of which is in the nearby Art Institute of Chicago.

149 Paintings You Really Need to See in North America

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