THINKING MODERN: PAINTING IN CHICAGO, 1910-1940
As early as 1910–the opening year for a historical exhibit at the Harold Washington Library Center, “Thinking Modern: Painting in Chicago, 1910-1940”–a young Chicago draftsman named Manierre Dawson was producing small abstract paintings. At that time very little advanced modern art had been seen here: it was in 1913 that the Art Institute brought to Chicago a smaller version of the famous Armory show, which had given New Yorkers their first real look at Duchamp, Matisse, and others. Dawson bought a small Duchamp sketch there, but students at Chicago’s premiere art school, the School of the Art Institute, protested the Armory show’s Henri Matisses by conducting a mock trial of “Henry Hairmatress,” mutilating him in effigy and burning effigies of his paintings after “convicting” him.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Modernists, by contrast, stressed the uniqueness of each person’s vision. The purpose of art was not to rearticulate timeless values but to discover the new. George Bellows–an Ashcan school painter who also taught briefly at the School of the Art Institute, in 1919–encouraged his students to “Try everything . . . in every possible way. Be deliberate and spontaneous . . . thoughtful and painstaking. . . . Learn your own possibilities.” In part due to the influence of Bellows and others, by the 1920s Chicago had a genuine modern art movement. Artists knew each other, and they connected with people in other fields–Harriet Monroe, the founder of Poetry magazine, was an important early supporter. They began to found their own societies. The group Cor Ardens (“Ardent Hearts”) was followed by the Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists, which offered an alternative to more conservative juried shows: any artist could exhibit in a State Street department store for a small fee.
Based on Macena Barton’s two paintings on display here, she was not a great painter, but the work is so odd as to be worth noting. Salome (1936) shows a nude Salome with the head of Saint John on a plate at her feet. In her hand, at about the level of her crotch, is a curved sword, its end covered with blood, which she holds curving upward like an erection. Loaves (1938) seems at first glance a conventional still life of bread on a table, until one notices that the background is a distant landscape of fields and a river; the table’s legs would have to be about 100 feet long to touch the ground. The vaguely cosmic significance given to this still life places this picture in the small but fascinating category of the truly weird.
Thecla’s Self-Portrait (1936) again combines watercolor and charcoal, creating an image of profound visual contradictions. Some areas are so dark they seem like light-absorbing voids; others, light or tinged with white, shimmer almost radiantly. We see Thecla’s head and shoulders: she wears a black hat with a flowing white veil, depicted in white lines with a repeating star pattern; through the veil a background of water and sky is visible. Thecla stares ambiguously, a bit unhappily; the surface of her face is curiously luminous in some areas, dark in others. The space around her head is filled with dark leaves, unattached to any tree; in contrast to the precisely rendered veil they’re painted in smudges. The effect is of several different representational systems employed at once, each held in a paradoxical balance with the others. The picture poses its contradictions as questions while simultaneously asserting that there are no answers. If an artist’s self-portrait can be taken as an accurate record of her self-image, it seems Thecla is profoundly ambivalent about her physical self and her relation to the world. While some of this ambivalence may be particularly Thecla’s, the position of women–and women artists–in 1930s Chicago might well have discouraged a more positive self-conception.
