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DePaul Art Museum

There’s a new museum in town. Yet I’m not sure how many Chicagoans know the good news. The DePaul Art Museum opened last September in a new, three-story structure adjoining the Fullerton CTA stop.

The museum is only new in a technical sense. Since 1998, it has been housed in two large rooms within Richardson Library, unknown to outside passersby. Louise Lincoln, its highly capable director since 1997, has mounted numerous noteworthy exhibitions under serious limitations.

Though art has been present on campus from 1985, it was hidden in the literal sense. What the striking red brick building achieves is a freestanding space for the museum’s art collection (2,000 objects with extensive holdings of Chicago art) with the size (15,000 sq. ft.) and facilities (a new collection study room) befitting a true museum. It also signifies the university’s growing commitment to the arts.

A tip of the hat is warranted for the contextually-rich design by Antunovich Associates, their first museum project.

My earlier post focused on Chicago’s formerly feisty publication, The New Art Examiner, and its dedicated focus on Chicago and the greater Midwest art community. Lincoln and assistant director, Laura Fatemi, opted for an equally strong local focus and provocative theme for their opening show

Re: Chicago opens with a wall text that states, “Chicago rivals—and surpasses—other cities in music, architecture and theater; yet in the visual arts, it has too frequently been seen as a ‘second city’.”  Though many prominent artists, past and present, sport Chicago connections, many left and made their reputations elsewhere.

The exhibit seeks to reframe Chicago as a true artistic center vis-a-vis other centers such as Paris, New York and even Los Angeles. Alongside the Chicago theme, Lincoln chose a novel way to showcase the chosen works: a group-curated show. She polled 43 curators, collectors, critics and scholars to name a favorite Chicago artist. The result is an alternate canon of the famous, the no longer famous and the ought to be famous.

Ivan Albright

The show is both a delight to walk through and an entertaining guessing game. New discoveries loom at each hang while one wonders what did James Elkins, Neil Harris, Lew Manilow and James Rondeau choose? For every known artist like Ivan Albright, Karl Wirsum, Dawoud Bey and Richard Hunt, there was the thrill of discovering Manierre Dawson, Art Shay, Macena Barton, Irving Petlin and many more. Most surprising was Franz Schulze’s backward reach into the mid-19^th Century for now-forgotten portraitist, George Healy, along with the absence of Ed Paschke, Roger Brown or Jim Nutt.

Manierre Dawson

You’ll want to take home the show’s colorful, attractively-designed catalog to reread not only each curator’s supporting statement but for the scholarly essays buttressing Chicago’s claim for its rightful place in the art world.

Wendy Greenhouse skillfully argues that Chicago’s art tradition has run counter to the prevailing canon throughout history. Its artists have long favored representational or surreal (“cartoonish”) work over an East Coast canon dominated by abstract, expressionistic art.

Karl Wirsum

Lynne Warren champions Chicago’s “extraordinary photographic legacy” and bemoans the near-criminal neglect of such masters as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind and other renowned figures.

If you are an art lover, you owe it to yourself to get to the DePaul Art Museum by March 4 to catch this appealing yet ultimately serious show. The museum’s next exhibition will feature African photographer, Malick Sidibe. It opens March 29.

DePaul Art Museum is located at 935 West Fullerton Avenue. For information on public events and hours, call 773/325-7506 or visit www.depaul.edu/museum.

L. T. Selman, Ltd. Gallery

Editor’s Note: The blogs posted this month feature lesser-known personal discoveries that can provide enjoyable holiday outings.

One evening in late October, I entered Studio 207 in the Fine Arts Building and discovered a whole new world. For several long moments, I stood transfixed by the sight of approximately 700 paperweights on display in long glass cases.

In my mind, paperweights are associated with Chicago real estate developer and fanatical collector, Arthur Rubloff, who donated his collection of 1472 rare and beautiful objects to the Art Institute in 1978.

Paperweights, however, suffer a reputation as being an art world lightweight. The latest slap came in today’s Chicago Tribune (Dec. 21) where the writer says Rubloff’s collection has little place in the museum. The Art Institute seems to share a similar view of this decorative art since it displays them in the lower level near the famous Thorne Rooms in a scenario reminiscent of “Upstairs/Downstairs”.

I imagined that paperweight production had ceased in recent years. Not so. In speaking with Alexis Magaro, the gallery manager, I learned that a large number of highly-skilled artisans are producing new, imaginative designs with many on display at the studio.

The studio is the new home of L.H. Selman Ltd. It is named for Lawrence Selman, one of the world’s leading paperweight collectors (he assembled Rubloff’s collection). In 2009, two brothers, Ben and Mitch Clark, who come from a family of paperweight collectors, bought Selman’s collection and shipped it from California to Chicago.

In fact, Chicago houses the largest collection of antique and modern paperweights in America. (The Bergstrom-Mahler Museum in Neenah, Wisconsin houses the largest museum collection in the world dedicated to paperweights). About 700 objects are on display, but Magaro says about 4,000 are on the premises.

While paper dates from the Egyptian era over 4,000 years ago and glassmaking artistry is 3,500 years old, paperweights date only from 1845 with Venetian glassmakers in Murano, Italy. The most spectacular examples of this art, though, came from France during paperweights’ brief heyday from the 1850s to the 1890s.

The Victorian era was a sentimental time when letter-writing became a fad. Paperweights were sold in stationery stores as an attractive accessory to desk sets. The finest such objects came from the French factories of Saint Louis, then Clichy and Baccarat. But, by 1860, their production fell off sharply.

American paperweight manufacturing was centered around Boston and New England. Since most glassmakers were European immigrants, American designs were imitative of European models. Art Elder, an authority on paperweights, says that what American designs lacked in originality, they made up for in ingenuity which collectors find more charming and desirable.

Once French production ceased, collecting, primarily by aristocracy and royalty, began. Queen Victoria and Queen Mary were collectors as was Napoleon III. You should ask Alexis about the connection between pansy paperweights and the Bonapartist movement.

Magaro led me on a historical tour of the main paperweight designs. The earliest examples contained a profile in bas-relief of a person to be commemorated. Then came the millefiori (meaning thousand flowers in Italian). Lampwork designs include sculpted flowers, animals or insects.

What I found fascinating is that the flowers, animals or insects are made of glass, so minutely crafted and at miniature scale that you’d swear they were the real thing trapped within the glass casingl.

Paperweights can range widely in price. Magaro said that, while the vast majority range from $500 to $5,000, prices can hit the $10,000 to $25,000 range for rare examples. However, one can find holiday designs on Selman’s website for $175 and some petite millefiori designs are a steal at only $26.

Value is determined by a number of factors: the maker (French are generally the most valuable), symmetry and centering of the design, no internal flaws such as bubbles or cracks, size (the larger the better) and visual impact or the “wow” factor.

L.H. Selman is a full-service gallery. It buys and sells paperweights, handles sales on consignments for collectors and conducts sales auctions twice a year. It enjoys an international reputation.

Mere words can’t do justice to the visual delight and pleasure of holding one of these creations in your hand. You still have more than a week to sample this holiday treat. And maybe even get that last-minute holiday gift. You owe it to yourself to discover what Elder calls “one of the world’s best-kept secrets”.

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L.H. Selman Ltd. is in Room 207 at 410 South Michigan Avenue. Phone is 312.583.1177. Hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays and by appointment on weekends. Its website, www.selman.com features a lot of interesting information and photos, of course.

April’s arrival not only means breaking out of winter’s frosty grip but the approaching end of the 2011-12 cultural season. Yet, rather than winding down, the arts are kicking into high gear. This month and next feature such newsworthy events as Riccardo Muti’s return to the CSO, the Miles Davis Festival at the Auditorium, Steppenwolf’s newest, “Hot L Baltimore”, and that cornucopia of visual art, Artropolis (formerly Art Chicago).  In this post, I search slightly farther afield and preview worthwhile discoveries. Like Spring’s blossoms, Chicago is blooming with arts programs outside the Loop that can prove as, or more, enjoyable than more heavily-promoted, marquee offerings.

After sorting through my pile of invitation and news releases, here are 5 local April events plus 1 attraction worth a special weekend getaway.

1. Chicago Chorale

You need to hurry to catch this superbly-trained 60-member choir perform what many listeners consider one of the supreme achievements of classical music, Bach’s Mass in B-Minor. They perform this Sunday, April 3, at        3 p.m. in the acoustically-rich surroundings of Rockefeller Chapel on the University of Chicago campus. The chorale is celebrating its 10^th Anniversary season. If you are a fan of classical music or choral singing, I guarantee you a special treat. For tickets, go to www.chicagochorale.org.

2. Next Theatre

This Evanston-based theater company, celebrating its 30^th anniversary season, is known for staging socially and politically provocative drama. I saw a production of “Killer Joe” there years before Steppenwolf discovered Tracy Letts’ Osage County. On April 8, Next offers the Chicago premiere of “The Metal Children” by Adam Rapp, fresh from a sold-out run on Off-Broadway in New York. The play dramatizes a NY writer’s struggle to keep his young adult novel from being banned by a small-town school board. It parallels Rapp’s own fight with middle-America family values in Muhlenberg, PA over his novel, The Buffalo Tree. For more information and tickets, go to www.nexttheatre.org.

3. Chicago International Movies & Music Festival (CIMM)

If the last rock feature you saw was the Rolling Stones’ IMAX, “Shine a Light”, Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” or the classic “The Last Waltz”, you can get your rock, reggae, hip-hop fix from April 14-17 as CIMM presents its 3^rd annual festival and screens 70 films from more than 20 countries ranging from features, animation, documentaries, concert films and music videos. The world premiere of Fix: The Ministry Movie about the British band opens the festival on Thursday, April 14 with a guest appearance by Ministry bassist, Paul Barker. One that I plan to see is Sizzle about a businessman with operatic pretensions who hires a professional team of musicians to stage Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte at his private country estate with him as the lead. The festival takes place at various venues around town. For comprehensive film and event listings and to purchase tickets, go to www.CIMMFEST.org.

4. “Illuminating The Shadows: Film Criticism in Focus”

Cineastes, Arise! The air will be thick with clashing opinions and dueling thumbs at an ambitious conference probing the state of film criticism to be held from April 21-23 at Northwestern’s Block Museum. The conference  features four panels and four screenings plus appearances by renowned critics from across America like former Reader critics Jonathan Rosenbaum and Dave Kehr (The New York Times), Karina Longworth (LA Weekly), Wesley Morris (Boston Globe) and Scott Foundas (Film Society of Lincoln Center). Chicago is fully represented by Michael Phillips, J.R. Jones, Hank Sartin, Ray Pride, Fred Camper, Bill Stamets and Ignatiy Vishnevetshy to cite just 8. The conference kicks off on Thursday, the 21^st, with a screening of noted director, Errol Morris’ 2010 feature, “Tabloid”.  All events are free and open to the public on a first-come basis. For a full schedule and more information, go to www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/blockcinema.

5. Vivian Maier Photographs

Vivan Maier Self Portrait

Is there any Chicagoan left who, in the past three months, has not heard the amazing story of this Austrian-born, Chicago photographer who toiled for many years as a nanny to North Shore families? Her recently-closed show at the Chicago Cultural Center was a huge success. Like so many figures throughout art history, Maier received no recognition of her work during her lifetime but is now being hailed as one of the 20^th Century’s greatest street photographers. It was only as the result of an estate sale shortly before her death in 2009 that a trove of 100,000 negatives and 3,000 of her prints revealed her secret, second identity.  Art consultant Russell Bowman will mount a new show of her work at his River North gallery, 311 West Superior on April 15^th. An opening reception is scheduled from 5:30 to 8 p.m. By all means go and be spellbound by Maier’s astute eye which, like Weegee or Helen Leavitt in New York, captured the life and people on Chicago’s streets of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. To see a selection of Vivian Maier’s vintage photos, go to www.bowmanart.com.

5+1. Frank Lloyd Wright in Milwaukee

Milwaukee Art Museum

Frank Lloyd Wright was an iconic architect of the 20^th Century whose fame endures in such stunning designs as Robie House, Fallingwater, Unity Temple, Johnson Wax HQ, Taliesin and the Guggenheim Museum. Yet the idea that his ideas hold lessons for contemporary times is the premise of a fascinating exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Six weeks remain to catch “Frank Lloyd Wright: Organic Architecture for the 21^st Century” until it ends on May 15^th. The show surveys more than 150 works, from scale models, furniture to newly-discovered home movies and 33 never-before-exhibited Wright drawings. You will also see Wright’s plans for Broadacre City, his 1932 futuristic design for a model suburbia, years before the age of the automobile. This year marks the centennial of Taliesin, Wright’s summer home, studio and school in Spring Green, Wisconsin and the 10^th Anniversary of the museum’s stunning building designed by Santiago Calatrava.  For more information, go to www.mam.org.

Country Clare Inn

While the museum itself is worth the 90-mile trip from Chicago, you should also consider combining the visit with a sleepover. You might try County Clare, an Irish inn and pub that I can recommend based on a stay. Have a fine dinner at the delightfully atmospheric French bistro, Coquette Café, as I have several times. Milwaukee is an overlooked gem and nearly right in Chicago’s backyard. So, instead of heading east to New Buffalo some weekend in April, head north and discover Wisconsin hospitality.

For reservations, go to www.countyclare-inn.com and www.coquettecafe.com

Editor’s Note: Watch for a preview of highlights of events for May.

Bathers by the River

In the last six months, the Art Institute of Chicago has mounted three extraordinary exhibitions—“Matisse: Radical Invention 1913-1917”, “Henri-Cartier Bresson—The Modern Century” and the recently-opened “Gray Collection: Seven Centuries of Art.”

When writing on exhibitions, the focus, properly, is what’s on the walls.  Yet, in this instance, I found the catalogues to the Matisse and Gray shows as impressive. Both are richly informative additions to our knowledge of two persons at the top of their game: one a major artist of the 20^th Century (as protean as Picasso and productive of more personally satisfying creations) and the other a premier mid to late 20^th Century art dealer and his wife whose private collection is on public view for the first time.

The Matisse and Gray shows have resulted in two visually striking catalogues published by Yale University Press. The Matisse exhibition was a five-year curatorial collaboration between the museum’s Stephanie D’Alessandro and the Museum of Modern Art’s John Elderfield, the reigning authority on Matisse’s work.

Matisse has become the new Monet, an artist whose name brings out the masses. Yet a mere 87 years ago, Matisse was burned in effigy by students at the School of the Art Institute when his work appeared in the infamous 1913 Armory Show. And, as late as mid-century, he was viewed as an accomplished colorist and decorative artist but not one worthy of admission to the pantheon of 20^th century giants.

I found the show (which closes at MoMA next weekend) when it was shown in Chicago earlier this year to be a grand sweep of masterworks prior to 1913 followed by the more austere and radically reworked portraits and drawings from the World War I period.

The curators probably reasoned that just showing the severe black and white drawings of the transformative period would have been deadly. Thus, they chose to accent the contrast with pre-1913 works. They opened with paintings bursting with color and sculptures such as the busts of Jeannette and the initial “Back” studies in bronze.

I learned a great deal about Matisse’s methods and psychological frame of mind during this time but found the show’s heavy emphasis on new x-ray evidence to be more of a curators’ obsession and too didactic in pressing how radical a shift Matisse’s art underwent.

The dancers

Just seeing “The Dance” and “The Moroccans” can often be enough to make us to marvel at the creative act that produced it.  The one exception was “Bathers by the River” (fourth state) in which the curators opened my eyes and helped unravel its mystery for me.

Sometimes the catalogue can be more successful in making one’s case than a museum exhibition where the act of seeing and our more

instinctual appreciation usually takes precedence.  If you are a fan of Matisse, as I am, and want to go inside his painstaking step-by-step artistic process, I urge you to buy the book and read its expert investigations.

Gray collection

Mary & Richard Gray

Just last week, I viewed Richard Gray’s collection in the museum’s Richard and Mary Gray Galleries for prints and drawings (quite a stroke of symmetry). I can only describe my wanderings through the galleries as a sensual viewing delight as well as one of admiration for the keen eye that assembled this rich assemblage.

I cannot recommend seeing this superb collection too highly (on display through January 3, 2011). I think you will be enchanted and possibly transported by the virtuosity on display. And to marvel that such drawings were not collected as avidly until several decades ago.

I have known Richard Gray in passing over three decades and admired his strong taste in artists and, more recently, his and his wife’s philanthropic generosity to many Chicago institutions from the Smart Museum of Art, the Chicago Symphony, Chicago Humanities Festival and WFMT.  It is testimony to his solid integrity as an art dealer (not generally the most ethical profession) that he was invited to the board of the Art Institute.

The catalogue to the show offers a greater appreciation of the over 100 works on display and gave me a glimpse into how the collection was formed.  A great addition to the catalogue, besides analyses of the exhibit’s 115 drawings by over 50 international experts, is the interview with the Grays conducted by Lawrence Wechsler.

I was delighted to get to know Richard’s life story and to read that, as a dealer and collector, Gray has always trusted his eye and his gut, not as I assumed, some superior knowledge of art and artists.

Gray Collection Seven Centuries

Gray began collecting modern and contemporary artists, many of whom his gallery represented. Over time, with his wife’s art history expertise, he took his collecting addiction back in time so that the collection now spans seven centuries.

The book has been lovingly produced from the range and expertise of the contributors, the book’s renowned designer and its paper and reproductive quality. You will learn a lot about one man’s passion and how it led to the assembling of this museum-quality collection.

Since Gray started his collecting journey and moved backwards, it might be fun to start with two of his earliest acquisitions on pages 103 and 129. Then savor it, starting at page 170 all the way back to the arresting late 15^th Century “Portrait of an Old Man” drawing that graces the front cover. It might be enough to start your own collecting juices racing.

The Cubs opened their 2010 season at Wrigley Field yesterday afternoon. But more than a half-century ago, 5 unknown Chicago artists, who would go on to international notoriety as members of the “Hairy Who” and the Chicago Imagist school, were, unbeknownst to one another at the time, all in the friendly confines on Opening Day, 1954.

Karl Wirsum was a grandstand vendor. Art Green was seated in a box seat on the third base line. It was Suellen Rocca’s first baseball game and Gladys Nilsson (Jim Nutt’s wife) was standing on the nearby El platform at Addison.

The score is lost to history but the one fact recorded for journalistic posterity involved Jim Nutt. Nutt was seated in the bleachers and caught a Hank Sauer home run ball. Twelve years later, these artists had their magic moment, bursting onto the local and later international art scene with the inaugural “Hairy Who” show (curated by Don Baum) at the Hyde Park Art Center, then at 5236 South Blackstone Avenue.  As for the Cubs, they are still waiting for their magic,World Series moment 56 years later.

The year is only six weeks old but, last week, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., opened an exhibition that promises to be a high point of 2010.   From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection. Chicago’s serious collectors, connoisseurs and simply fans of mesmerizing paintings need to make a pilgrimage to Washington before next July 31. But don’t wait until next year to go. You will want to return for a second viewing. Dale’s bequest stipulates that the works can only be seen at the National Gallery.

Chester Dale was a dashing, hard-driving Wall Street financier.  He started on “The Street” as a lowly runner but, through shrewd instincts, amassed a fortune.  He began buying art as a hobby. However, once his wife, Maud, who was trained as an artist, saw that his passion for art was genuine, she took charge and guided the building of their superb collection. Dale purchased the bulk of his collection during a whirlwind period from 1926 to 1932. The Great Depression curtailed his feverish pace.  He made fewer purchases over the next twenty-five years with his final acquisition being Salvador Dali’s “The Last Supper” in 1956.

Dale was courted by dealers and museums.  At various times, he was a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute and the Philadelphia Museum of Art besides the National Gallery. Both Chicago and Philadelphia wooed him in hopes of acquiring his collection. However, at his death in 1962, the entire collection went to the National Gallery.  He chose that institution because his collection would rest in the nation’s museum and add immeasurably to the new museum’s holdings. John Walker, a former director of the National Gallery, assessed its importance saying, “It’s not just the backbone but the whole rib structure of the modern French school.”

The collection consists of 306 works—223 paintings, sculptures and works on paper —of which 81 are on display.  Visitors can take an art history tour of stunning breadth including late 19^th to early 20^th Century masterworks by Degas, Manet,  Monet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Mary Cassatt,  Redon, Cezanne, Picasso, Braque, Matisse,  Modigliani, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rousseau and Dali.

Kimberly Jones, who curated the show and authored its accompanying catalogue, admits to a few favorites in the show.  They are Manet’s “The Old Musician”, Henri Fantin- Latour’s “Portrait of Sonia” (his niece) and Braque’s still life, “Le Jour”. She says,”It’s been really wonderful for me to learn about what Chester Dale meant for the National Gallery, the nation and the history of collecting in general.”