Leon and Sadie Garland at Koehnline Museum

Sadie Garland, 1933

Leon and Sadie at Koehnline Museum, through Sept 20

Social idealism has not been the theme of Chicago pictorial art for several generations, but it came quite naturally in the 1930’s to Leon and Sadie Garland, the children of  Jewish immigrants who met in the art classes at Hull House. 

 Leon Garland, "Jewish Wedding" (detail), 1930's

 Their wedding reception was hosted by  Jane Adams herself,  who would have reaffirmed that transcendent  sense of community that  Eastern European Jews brought with them from the shtetl.  Regretfully,  social idealism also took some  catastrophic turns in that era, so understandably the cult of  individualism has dominated the  “Free World” ever since.  But the idealism of Leon and Sadie was quite benign – indeed they led their lives as remarkably free individuals, moving throughout Europe to study art, and then returning to teach and practice it. 

 Leon Garland, "Hull House", 1930

 Leon’s visions of society are gentle  and a bit folksy, though not too saccharine or mythic.

 Leon Garland, "Chicago near Hull House", 1930's

 

Leon Garland, "Morgan Street", 1941

 His visions of  some Chicago neighborhoods feel exactly how they still feel to me today – not so much charming as gritty and practical. 

 Sadie Garland, "Boats", 1940

While  Sadie’s urban visions feel  like excuses to make geo-form abstractions that express how much she enjoyed her life.  Both of them show the strong influence of  Andre Lhote in whose Paris atelier they studied.  Lhote practiced a kind of  breezy, decorative  Cubism that celebrated  the light-hearted side of modern life that must have appealed to the Romantic newly weds from Chicago. 

 Leon Garland, "Four Frenchmen", 1930

 Helpfully, David Sokol, the curator, has placed  postcard size reproductions of Lhote’s work right next to similar paintings done by the Garlands. 

 Leon Garland, "Blacksmith", 1940

 Sadie Garland, Jesus Torres and Wife, 1930

 Initially, the Garlands captured his lightheartedness, but like so many artists who depicted the American scene at that time,  there’s a looming darkness and heaviness in their images. Unfortunately, as time passed,  health problems restricted Leon’s activity and Sadie took jobs in social work to support the couple – so there’s a feeling that they did not achieve what they could have.

 The show has  examples of Leon’s talent at commercial graphic design,

 and he did a large,  rambling  painting of ominous children’s toys that prefigures the surrealism of Seymour Rosofsky.  But he failed to develop a  strong, consistent vision, and after his untimely death, Sadie stopped painting altogether.  What they left behind was a window into the lives of two idealistic, talented, brave young Chicagoans in the 1930’s.

John Valadez at the National Museum of Mexican Art

John Valadez,  through August 11, National Museum of Mexican Art


The figurative paintings of John Valadez are overwhelming.  The people feel too close, the colors too intense, the energy too exhausting, crackling  with the inescapable reality of a newspaper’s front page or a busy corner outside a convenience store.  It’s what you might call popular art, with more of a journalistic than a  theoretical agenda for depicting  community life on the  streets and nearby beaches  of his Hispanic neighborhood.    In that way it fits the title given to this exhibition, “Santa Ana Condition”, a mostly Hispanic city near Los Angeles,  where, in 1998, Valadez  painted  the walls of the Federal Courthouse with a cycle of murals depicting summer festivals.   The drama on his streets is strictly personal.  If there’s a fight, he reports on the emotional aftermath.  Mostly he shows the inner struggle of people with their own desires as stimulated by the modern, urban world around them. 

 Sometimes, especially at the beach, turbulent appetites may come alive as fantastic sea monsters or whales, in response, perhaps to the voluptuous curves of a woman’s body or an automobile’s fender.   This is the American dream of Surfer music from the 1960’s:  buxom girls and classic cars, especially convertibles,  on the warm, sunlit sand.

With work spanning four decades, the exhibit reveals the incremental development of the artist’s vision.  In the 1970’s he was assembling collages of newspaper clippings at the same time he was making  black and white photographs of Mexican Americans  posing for him on the street  Then he switched to color film -  and then he made large, sometimes life size,   drawings from the photographs.  By the mid 80’s he was painting complex narratives that feel like photographic records of things both real and fantastic. The highlight of this period is a monumental pastel entitled “Pool Party” (1986), depicting two young Latin women behind the house grooming the family dog and hosing down the edge of the pool, apparently unconcerned with the nearby hills that are ferociously burning behind them. Hey girls! Wake up and smell the smoke!  There’s that gentle sense of humor in the later narrative work as well, some of it more fantastic, others less so.

Dulces, 1999

 He depicts a world that’s awkward, funny, and brimming with hope and excitement, but not especially elegant or profound.  And unlike  the leading American figure painters of that period, like Eric Fischl, the characters in his paintings feel as innocent as the noble peasants depicted by an earlier generation of Mexican artists.

Tomoaki Suzuki at the Art Institute

Tomoaki Suzuki – Roehm Terrace, Art Institute, through Oct. 27 

It doesn’t look like Japanese artists are ever going to shake their aesthetic inclinations however alien they might be to the provocative anti-aesthetics of contemporary art. Tomoaki Suzuki can’t stop himself from making his 20-inch statues look really good, even if he places them on the floor where it’s difficult to discern their quality.

He makes expressionless polychrome figures that in many ways resemble the carefully detailed dolls one might find in Japanese gift shops. It’s just that instead of pretty Geishas in kimonos, he represents the handsome young people of his London neighborhood in the kind of clothing that expresses their individuality. By placing them directly on the floor, he offers the thrill of the incongruous, but he’s not just a skilled model maker, or a conceptual artist who hires one.

 Katsura Funikoshi

 He’s in a tradition of figure sculpture, as received from his teacher, Katsura Funikoshi, whose father was also a sculptor. Though enhanced by the fluid naturalism of Rodin and late 19th C. France, this tradition remains essentially Japanese in its straightforward inner strength as achieved by the execution of crisp planes carved across the surface. He has created a specific posture, character, and costume for each person, but though great attention has been paid to every eyelash and belt buckle of his British models, they have a distinctly Japanese elegance and attitude. And the paint has been applied with a sensitivity to color and pattern more than to specify details of costume. Like many Japanese sculptors over the past thousand years, Suzuki is a wood carver, though in this display, the carvings have been cast in bronze, allowing them to be displayed in an outdoor setting like the Roehm Terrace high atop the Modern Wing at the Art Institute. And what a magnificent setting it is! – offering the magnificent steel and glass skyline that rises just north of Grant Park.

 Even the largest sculpture can feel dinky on that heroic, sunlit platform – but surprisingly Suzuki’s figures feel large and important, even if you have to crawl around on your hands and knees to properly see them. It’s a good bet that eventually his work will be displayed up on pedestals, allowing viewers to properly see it without scuffing their knees. That may defy the artist’s original intention, but perhaps that intention was only to display it in the way most suitable to attract the contemporary art world.

Michael Van Zeyl at Gallery 180

Michael Van Zeyl at Gallery 180, through May 2



Morbidity is stalking the Classical Realism of our time with figures as perfectly life-like as they are lifeless. But Michael Van Zeyl has a much lighter touch His settings resemble hotel banquet rooms – well appointed with fruit, flowers, crockery, and furniture but far removed from palatial elegance. And the attractive young women he portrays seem healthy and lively, though not especially remarkable or profound. Something seems to be happening, but it’s their own private secret, and whether happy or sad, it will probably pass as quickly as a summer shower. The stage has been set for a comedy of manners.



This kind of painting is far removed from the Surrealism of the Chicago school, which is why it so badly needs to be shown here. The people and scenes depicted are just as contemporary. It’s just that the angst or quirkiness of the artist is not in your face. Instead, you feel skill, intelligence, balance, and wit behind the stage, making careful arrangements. Compared with the great masters, his painterliness comes up short, and is not strong enough in his still lifes to provoke a sense of wonder. But wherever figures are added, his painting becomes intriguing.

Picasso in Chicago

“Picasso in Chicago”, through May 12, Art Institute of Chicago







In 1926, the Art Institute of Chicago was the first American museum to place a painting by Pablo Picasso (‘the Old Guitarist”) on permanent display, so it’s a bit surprising that 40 years after his death we are still waiting for a major retrospective for what its director calls “the most transformative artist of the 20th Century”. The current show is limited to items from its own collection enhanced by works on paper from local collectors. But with over 400 pieces to draw from, it still offers a memorable stroll through that exceptional artist’s 70 year career. And an encyclopedic museum like the Art Institute is the perfect place for it because Picasso was an encyclopedic artist. Picasso-relevant displays have been scattered throughout the museum to remind us of his wide ranging eye. He borrowed from his older contemporaries like Rodin and Cezanne, as well as historic European painters from El Greco to Corot and world art from Africa and Polynesia (though he had little use for either south or east Asian) . The artist seems most comfortable with historic art of his own Mediterranean homeland, i.e. Greco-Roman classicism, and his greatest achievement, at least for me, are his line drawings illustrating Ovid’s Metamorphosis, sumptuously laid out in a gallery-long vitrine.



That man could draw! You can see from his very earliest marks on paper why this was one young artist who never had to drive a delivery truck or wait on tables. He doesn’t go for depth of volume, but his line manages to capture both character and tension, and when he chooses, fits seamlessly into overall design.



Of course, he could also paint, and that’s the shortcoming of this exhibit, limited as it is to local collections. The two major paintings from Philadelphia that traveled to Chicago for this show are now hanging over in the Modern Wing, perhaps because they would only remind us of what is missing. The only other exciting painting that came to Chicago recently was the 1965 “Les Dormeurs” that hung on Navy Pier last year for Art Expo.



There's no way that this much Picasso can be anything less than fascinating. It's a trip through art history, especially the early 20th C. avant garde. And the artist's vigorous, satyr-like personality is as endlessly appealing as it is repellent. But this exhibit has prioritized the history of Picasso in Chicago collections. This history teaches us nothing about the artist because it’s not likely he knew any Chicago collectors. And since the pieces have not been grouped by collector or date of collection, we can learn very little about those collectors. So "the story of this unique 100 year relationship" is just an exercise in civic self grooming that only shows how badly we need it.

Quest for the West at the Eiteljorn Museum

P.A. Nisbet


‘Quest for the West’ at the Eiteljorn Museum, through Oct. 7


Like the visual arts of the totalitarian regimes of the last century, ‘Western art’ is like the pre-modern artworlds – i.e. it works to establish social values and meaning rather than to critique or undermine them. It’s also an artworld unto itself, with it’s own collectors and a dozen museums, several of which, like the Eiteljorn in Indianpolis, cultivate the genre with annual exhibitions of new work. Every year, 50 artists are chosen by the Eiteljorn, and about 150 paintings and sculptures put up for show and sale.


The Eiteljorn’s annual show is distinguished by narrative and scenery meant to be uplifting with the simple and direct wholesomeness of an elementary school text book. It offers fantasies of hearty pioneers/cowboys and cute Indians that is too shopworn and politically incorrect for mainstream galleries. But it does reflect a living ideology of freedom, opportunity, and individuality that competes quite successfully against the nominalism, alienation, and self absorption of the contemporary artworld for the domination of American life. Occasionally, there is some sense of the artists’ personalities or how each one feels about specific people and places.. But that kind of work can best be found across the hallway, in the Eiteljorn’s excellent collection of Georgia O’Keefe and the early 20th C. Taos school.


Most of the paintings in the Quest show seem to be follow the study of photographs, since there’s a cold, dry, flatness and the feeling that the artists were manipulating pixels rather than paint. While the sculptors, in the tradition of Frederick Remington, mostly focus on a broken, highly descriptive surface rather than the qualities of mass and space found in both modern and ancient traditions. And yet, there’s no doubting the extraordinary skill as these artists maneuver like Olympic gymnasts through the complexities required by their subject matter. The cinematic American West is certainly there in all its bronco busting detail, but unlike the pioneers they depict, the artists don’t seem to be breaking new ground or taking big risks. The pieces reflect the pleasant ambience of an upscale shopping mall or corporate office rather than a hard-scrabble frontier.


Turning his back on both contemporary fantasy as well as reality, P.A. Nisbet was my favorite artist in the show, as he recreated the effects of 19th C. landscape, including the infinite, spacious vistas introduced by English Romantics like John Martin. The eerie, obsessive perfection of Mikel Donahue’s photo based cowboy genre scenes cannot be ignored, either. Every year there’s at least a few pieces that deserve to be moved across the hall into the permanent collection, but most of them lack aesthetic intensity. It’s too bad that ‘Western Art’ seems to be the only art game in town that tries to reach beyond the personal to present positive and convincing American ideals.

Roy Lichtenstein at the Art Institute

Roy Lichtenstein’s introduction of commercial graphics and popular cartoon imagery into the black-tie artworld was such a spectacular and immediate success in 1961, one might wonder just how long his 15 minutes of fame was going to last. Which was probably a question he asked himself as he devoted the following decades to riffing on canonical art as well as comic books. It was a successful strategy, and without it, I doubt we would now have such an extensive career retrospective in a major museum. The exhibition’s program notes tell us that “he explored just about every art historical style out there”, but mostly he stayed within canonical modernism: Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, Mondrian, etc, with a final venture into Chinese landscape. All of it chopped up and processed in something of a graphic art meatgrinder, transforming everything to a clean, sleek, decorative style that suits a white cube, modern living space as smoothly as a Breuer chair. But does this work challenge or celebrate that process? Or does it just accept it – as one might accept the other consequences of modern life like air pollution, global warming, periodic financial crashes, and mindless chatter on radio and television? Despite those concerns, many of these productions do look pretty good, often with a hint of whimsy that can’t help but turn a frown upside down. And so he joins Jasper Johns and Gerhard Richter as the only post-war painters to have had something like a career retrospective at the Art Institute since 1980, which seems to recognize photography as the major vehicle for contemporary expression. In the 31 years following 1980,. the museum has given solo exhibits to 111 photographers but only 33 painters from the entire 20th Century. . The sensitive touch of a brush to a surface just doesn’t seem to be so important any more, and all it provided for Lichtenstein’s work was an occasional decorative flourish, as he seemed intent on making his pieces appear to have been mechanically produced. This is the kind of antiseptic nihilism that prominent Chicago artists have been reacting against for 50 years. We like our juvenile nihilism to appear more gritty and soulful.