Rosofsky and Burge at the Elmhurst Art Museum

The Unsentimental Journey of Seymour Rosofsky,
Denise Burge: Original Dirt through September 4,
Elmhurst Art Museum
(pieces shown: Rosofsky “Lady of the House – Venus” (below,
Denise Burge “Machination” (above))






Though presented as separate exhibits, the oil paintings of Seymour Rosofsky (1924-1981) and the quilts of Denise Burge (MFA, 1991) both overpower their walls with dynamic, centrifugal energies, while offering a fascinating contrast across generation, ethnicity, locality, gender, and media.

A second generation, blue-collar Jewish kid from Chicago, Seymour’s talent was recognized early and he ended up studying oil painting with Boris Anisfeld at the Art Institute. He picked up that Russian’s dreamy, decorative, modern classical style, and also became an art museum junkie, both in Chicago and Paris, drawing from a variety of primitive, post-impressionist, surrealist, and expressionist art. But when he put it all together, it was all about him. There’s a musty, cluttered, claustrophobic feeling about his work, with the viewer often placed in the role of the therapist puzzled by the highly emotional, confused world of a patient who feels trapped in a female dominated, family centered life.

Roughly 40 years younger, Denise Burge comes from the hills of North Carolina. Quilting is a traditional medium and her crude, overstated imagery and improvisational use of materials resembles the outlandish art of Howard Finster. But it would be a mistake to call her a folk artist. For the past 20 years, she’s been an art academic, and folk-themed quilting on environmental themes was just the strategy she employed 10 years ago. (more recently, she’s moved on to installations and then video). Unlike Rosofsky’s work, hers is extroverted and the narrative, rather than being ambiguous, is spelled out in text across the surface. The bold patterns and strong, clear fragments of color in the fabric are much more attractive than the blurry fog of Seymour’s rather pasty oil paints, and mark her as a very sharp designer. If the quilts don’t disintegrate (and some areas do appear fragile) they may well be recognized as exemplary in that medium.

In the catalog to Rosofsky’s 1985 posthumous retrospective, his friend, Chicago artist//historian/critic Franz Schulze defended his “rich color, carefully interwoven tonalities and assured drawing” against the 1972 attack by New York critic, Robert Hughes, in Time Magazine who railed against “Rosofsky’s clumsy paintings” and “wretched thesaurus of clichés.” . But Seymour’s special strength is honesty. His paintings are stocked with clichés from Giacometti, Bacon, Chagall, etc because he loved art history, and they are no more clumsy, cluttered and confused than his own happy/sad domestic life. He exemplifies the passion, resilience, and time honored futility of his favorite team, the Chicago Cubs, while Denise Burge might be considered just one more smart and talented academic working the politically correct mindscape.

Marion Kryczka at the Chicago Cultural Center

Marion Kryczka: Recent Paintings – Chicago Cultural Center, through July 3

(text in color was edited out of Newcity version)



Marion Kryczka’s well made, highly ordered, masculine vision of reality may fit the blue collar streets of Chicago, but he’s been peripheral to the contemporary artworld, unrepresented by galleries and remaining an adjunct associate professor at the School of the Art Institute for 30 years. Kryczka’s work also 1acks either the photo finish and sentimentality, or the anger and ugly distortions that other corners of the artworld might appreciate, and he’s not even goofy, damaged, or unsophisticated enough to qualify as an outsider.

As critic, G. Jurek Polanski, wrote about the 1999 exhibit in the Fine Arts Building, “The variety of pieces tell a story, one in which each work, while complete in itself, is placed to build a context with its companions and comprehensively reveal the artist's personality.” And the same is true today, although the story is changing, as the artist mellows into his sixties. The still-lifes include the same dead fish, sharp knives, and bottles of alcohol on low-rent kitchen counters that he’s been painting for decades. But the light feels less harsh, the whiskey has been replaced by wine, and fish seem almost happy to be offering their tender, pink, slaughtered flesh. The vanitas theme is still explored with various kinds of skull, but now the shelves are cluttered with more of the stuff that he’s been accumulating in his life.


There are also some genres that weren’t there 12 years ago. Two magnificent winter cityscapes of his north side neighborhood tout Chicago as an energetic, seasoned, comfortable metropolis. Most remarkable are three views of the Donald Judd sculpture park in rural Texas. Judd’s minimalist stainless steel cubes are the cold, hard face of the industrial world. But set into a bright, sunlit gallery, Kryczka has co-opted the reflective surfaces of sculpture to meditate on beautiful impermanence, just as Monet did with Rouen Cathedral.. As with every painting in this exhibit, every brush stroke and patch of color not only defines a recognizable piece of reality, it also participates in the dynamics of a very tight design. And there are no people. It’s just the man behind the paintbrush and the quiet world in which he lives.

Art theory has not respected regionalism for more than 60 years. But if our local encyclopedic museum ever devotes a gallery to Chicago, it’s my guess that Marion Krycyza’s work will be there. Not because it reflects the trends of Chicago art (it doesn’t), but because it reflects so many lives that have been built here..

East-West at Murphy-Hill

Yan Shi Zhong





East Meets West, Murphy Hill Gallery, through May 20


(text in color was edited out of the Newcity version)


In 1955, the Soviet Union sent Konstantin Maksimov (1913-1993) to Beijing to train a select group of Chinese students how to make social-realist art.



Konstantin Maksimov



And thus began another east-west cultural exchange, one that is still practiced by Chinese artists around the world. Like their commercial counterparts in capitalist countries, their message was restricted to what they were selling. But with Maksimov, as well as many others, the work often seems to have been made to impress other artists, not just the unwashed masses, and at its best can be enjoyed as subtle, expressive, post-Impressionist painting just as much as works by Cezanne or Van Gogh. And so, over 50 years later, we now have the 15 members of the “Oil Painting Society of Chinese American”, most of them art professors in Midwestern universities, and now free to express whatever they wish. All but one were sent to peasant villages during the Cultural revolution, triumphed against the odds to win the post-Mao national competition to get into college, studied art with the generation trained by the Russians, learned English, and finally realized the dream of coming to America.


Victor Wang




Zhi Wei Tu







Each one of them would be a success story even if they never lifted a brush again, but indeed these 15 are still painting, some of them quite well, and a few of them, like Zhi Wei Tu and Victor Wang gaining national reputations despite an art education that was incompatible with either the minimalism or conceptualism of contemporary art. They have much more in common with what is here disparaged as middle-brow, even if American portraits, landscapes, and still-lifes done in traditional European styles continue to have many talented practitioners. Several of these American born artists have also been included in this exhibit.,
David Leffel



including David Leffel, who channels Rembrandt,



Clayton Beck III







Clayton Beck III who reincarnates Nicolai Fechin,


Matthew Almy





and Matthew and Magdalena Almy whose Ravenswood Academy, here in Chicago, harkens back to the ateliers of Bouguereau and Gerome. Notable about the pieces chosen, is that so many of them are still-lifes of Asian sculpture or ceramics, reminding us that cultural exchange continues to go in both directions. Joining these two groups, is a selection of more traditional water media painters from the Chinese Artists’ Association of North America, founded by a legend of Chicago’s Chinatown, Andy Chan.



Andy Chan






Their techniques, materials, and subject matter may be ancient, but the brash effect of their work is as modern as an interstate billboard. All of this, plus more, takes place in 40,000 square feet on the third floor of the old Sears Roebuck corporate headquarters near Homan and the Eisenhower, in the last show this space will have before it is converted into commercial development. Special credit goes to Chinese born artist Mary Qian who dreamed up this enormous display as a kind of homage to the generations of Chinese artists who came to America before her,

Mary Qian




and to African-American Ralph Murphy, the entrepreneur who always finds a way to make interesting things happen.




Li Hu






Sherrie Mcgraw






Ruby Wang






Richard Lee





Li Lin Lee






Feng Xie

Charles White at N'Namdi Gallery

Charles White, Shaping of Black America
N’Namdi Gallery - March 5th


The first thing you notice about these iconic images of American black people is that none of them are angry. Contemplative, intelligent, determined: yes all of those qualities are magnificently expressed, but none of these characters, whether ordinary workers or famous liberators, seem angry about the world of injustice and humiliation into which they were born.

The next thing you notice is that the only thing about them that is African are the features of their faces. They could just as well be Mexican, or Chinese, or Turkish, rendered as they were in the international style of social realism, that leans so heavily on European painting from Giotto to Michelangelo.

Which is especially surprising since this work was done in 1974, at the height of the Black Power movement that inspired so many young African American artists of that era, especially the Africobra artists here in Chicago, to explore African themes, colors, and designs.

But the painter of these images was Charles Wilbert White (1918-1979) and they were done for the publisher of Ebony Magazine, John H. Johnson (1918-2005) who, like White, also grew up in poverty on Chicago’s south side and rose to prominence by virtue of hard work, imagination, and dedication to the destiny of his people.

Originally, this series of 12 paintings was intended to illustrate each chapter of “The Shaping of Black America” , written by Lerone Bennett, the long-time editor of Ebony Magazine. But the small images that appear in the book give no idea of the painstaking craftsmanship that is apparent in the 31”x 39” originals.

Done in monochrome oil on board, they have the feeling of watercolor on paper, with a carefulness that expresses the tenacity, dignity, self-reliance, and sensitivity of the cultural ideals being represented, as well as the mature character of the artist himself at the age of 56.


The social idealism found in his earlier work at the Art Institute (like “Harvest Talk”, 1953) has turned inward to become more personal.



There’s not a lot of joy in these severe monochrome images that seem to painfully emerge from discarded, crumpled brown wrapping paper. But this was intended to be a history lesson, not an aesthetic banquet, and aren’t most of the lessons from history grim ones?

John Marin at the Art Institute of Chicago

John Marin's Watercolors: A Medium for Modernism
Art Institute of Chicago
thru April 17






Sometime in the last century, the shameless huckster became the marketing professional, and the skills of building brand and market share were applied to fine arts as well as chewing gum. What’s so fascinating about Arthur Stieglitz is that he remains so admirable as an aesthete, as well as an artist and successful promoter. The permanent installation in Gallery 265 is the tribute that the Art Institute pays to his uncanny ability to help turn exceptional but obscure young artists into national icons: Georgia O’Keefe, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Edward Steichen, and John Marin.

Stieglitz began his career promoting photography, but what ultimately captured his enthusiasm was Modernism, the kind that was strong, bold, personal, and just as spontaneous as a shutter click. It was distinguished by its form rather than its perceived content, and none of the work he sold exemplified that any more than the watercolors of John Marin which he continued to collect and sell throughout his life. Happily, in 1949, Georgia O’Keeffe donated 40 of those pieces to the Art Institute, and they are now on display with 16 other paintings (plus some etchings) from the museum’s collection. All 56 are were made by Marin, but the ones that Stieglitz himself collected are the most exciting, as Marin acrobatically triumphed over the daring risks he took with his unforgiving medium.

And what a wonderful variety there are, from the slow and massive to the quick and crackling; from a room full of vibrant New York cityscapes to the rooms of ships, seacoasts, landscapes, and even nude bathers (whose puffy pink shapes are such a contrast with his usual angularities). But is all this expression specific to the Modernism that Stieglitz promoted and the Art Institute enshrines ? Are John Marin’s watercolors a medium for Modernism – or are they a medium for the kind of aesthetic enjoyment of the world that European landscapes have been expressing for centuries, and Asian brush paintings for a millennium? Gallery signage quotes Marin’s nonchalance about subject matter (any boat will do), though elsewhere he pronounced its importance and distanced himself from inner self expression. If Marin was a pioneer in abstract art, so was Rembrandt when he made his landscape drawings.

This exhibit is a triumph of aesthetic practice – in both the painting, the collecting, the curation (Martha Tedeschi), and even the framing, which uses either original gallery frames or ones made to their specifications. Under its current director, several shows have been mounted, using only objects from the museum’s own off-view collection. And this show is no less spectacular than the exhibits of the museum's own European tapestries and Japanese screens that preceeded it.

But it’s also a tragedy. Because when this show comes down, all these paintings may well spend another 60 years in storage, accessible only to those who make appointments with the Goldman Study Center (now open 8 hours/week). Why can’t they be rotated through a gallery of 20th C. works on paper, the way that Ukiyo-e prints have been in the Buckingham Gallery? Why can’t high resolution images of them be posted on the Internet? Why are visitors not allowed to take pictures of these items which are from the museum’s own collection?


Perhaps because the musem is far more committed to the ideologies rather than the aesthetics of modern art, and supporting evidence for an ideology only needs to be comprehended once. It’s only an aesthetic achievement, like a recording of Uchida playing Mozart, that needs to be experienced again and again and again.








Note: the above images,
taken from the AIC website,
are so small
I'm almost too embarassed
to show them.


Cape Split, 1935

But here's how his paintings look
in nice, big images
(thanks to Colby College, Maine)





Brooklyn Bridge, 1912

Art Institute of Chicago : Ancient Chinese Bronzes from the Shouyang Studio

Ancient Chinese Bronzes from the Shouyang Studio:
The Katherine and George Fan Collection
at the Art Institute of Chicago
through Jan. 2

Chinese art history begins with the Tang Dynasty (618-907) – or, at least that’s what you might conclude after seeing the plethora of colorful ceramics and monumental Buddhist sculpture in American art museums. Or perhaps a few charming tomb figures would take you back to the Han (206 BCE – 220 CE ). But it was in the previous millennium that the language, customs, and ideals of Chinese civilization really came together, and the surviving visual art of that period mostly consists of the kind of ceremonial bronze vessels that a Hong Kong engineer, George Fan, has collected and is now showing at the Art Institute.


Mr. Fan says that his interests have been primarily historical, focused on the inscriptions that determine so much of what can be known about the political history of Central China. The aesthetic qualities of these objects were tangential, and only a few pieces are as thrilling as the best work in the A.I.C.’s permanent collection that was assembled in the early 20th C., back when China was in turmoil and so many national treasures came onto the international market. But still, his collection is large enough to assign separate areas to several historical periods (early Shang, late Shang, early Zhou, Warring States, Jin, Qin, Spring and Autumn, etc). And many of the pieces reward close examination of their intensely designed surfaces, which all seem to express the powerful yang hexagrams of the I-Ching (which was also developed throughout this era). Especially engaging are the tall Shang goblets that might well have served as weapons after some partying warlords had quaffed the contents.



The historical significance of many of these objects has led to their designation as gifts to the State Administration of Cultural Heritage of China’s current dynasty, the Peoples’ Republic. But Mr. Fan has been a collector, not an archeologist, and with no indication of provenance, the origins of these pieces is problematic. Even if un-altered and authentic, they still have been excavated by treasure hunters not scientists, so their relationship to specific sites, and the other objects found there, has been lost forever. Archeological looting remains a huge industry and international problem, and art museums only exacerbate it by singling out individual collectors like Mr. and Mrs. Fan for high praise and status.

Smart Museum : The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan

"Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan
Smart Museum thru January 16, 2011

Back in August of 1909, distinguished orientalist, Victor Segalen, author of “La Grande Statuaire chinoise” (translated and published by the University of Chicago,1972) found himself and a colleague alone with a remarkable statue of Buddha in a remote shrine in China. Despite some damage to the torso, “its profile had retained its nobility, its eyes their gaze, the smile of its mouth its generous sweetness and a kind of irony.” And immediately they knew what to do. “This statue, we must have it! We will not leave without it!.” Removing an ax from their luggage, Segalen began chopping at the neck, and when the clamor attracted the attention of two peasants who were passing by, the locals obligingly showed them how to apply wedges and wooden blocks to make the work so much easier.



Imagine that process repeated tens of thousands of times in grottos and temple shrines throughout China in the early 20th Century, where unable carry off entire tableaux, plunderers, servicing the world art market, chopped off heads, hands, whatever -- many of which fragments would eventually enter the collections of American museums




But times have changed, and one of the greatest changes is the focus of modern scholarship. The pioneering scholar of Japanese Buddhist art, Ernest Fenellosa (1853-1908), may have believed that : "We are approaching the time when the art work of all the world of man may be looked upon as one, as infinite variations in a single kind of mental and social effort" But modern scholars are more likely to agree with Sir Edmund Leach(1910-1989): "works of art are not just things in themselves, they are objects carrying moral implications. What the moral implication is depends upon where they are"


So now, a century later, the University of Chicago has begun a project to restore one of the original sites, the Buddhist cave temples of Xiangtangshan. No, museums will not be sending the loot back to China, but 3-D scanning techniques allow for fragments to be scanned and then assembled into a virtual reality, which has been projected onto a wrap-around screen in this exhibit, and supplemented with touch-screens that offer iconographic information.





But as another pioneer in world art, Andre Malraux, once asserted : “Art is not learned, it is encountered”, and happily (perhaps has an afterthought) curators have complemented this digital display with 13 actual sculptural fragments (mostly heads and hands, but also a few complete figures) which have traveled here from museums in New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and San Francisco.




But when these 13 original fragments (some which are monumental in size) have been encountered, at least one viewer is convinced that the moral context involved is not specific to Buddhist doctrine, and the place where they belong is anywhere on planet earth, rather than just some shallow mountain caves in southern Hubei Province.




What’s especially delightful and unique about this display is that all of the pieces come from one place, Xiangtangshan, and one time, the short lived Qi Dynasty of northern China (550-577), and they all have a kind of simple sweetness that feels less severe/dogmatic than the Wei dynasty statuary that preceded it, and more natural than the Tang dynasty Buddhas that followed.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see so many examples of this (or possibly any) site specific genre of Buddhist sculpture, unless you travel to Washington for it’s next installation, which will be augmented by even more pieces from the Freer Gallery (which are forbidden to travel)

It’s also a chance to compare original fragments with the computer mapped versions derived from them. However accurate those mappings may be in terms of size and iconographic detail, aesthetically, they’re as ruined as original statuary when badly weathered by wind, ice, and water. And what is so remarkable about the 13 originals is how good each and every one of them looks. They’re in great condition, and just as in the great French cathedrals, the standard of workmanship, and quality control, was very, very high.

Perhaps, some future generation of scholars will re-discover the technique of rubber-mold making and use it to re-create some these shrines exactly as would now appear if they had never been butchered.

But for our generation, the fascination with digital technology is still too compelling, and interest in historic context still trumps aesthetic quality.