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Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando is one of the most beloved paintings in the Art Institute’s already beloved Impressionist collection, and it’s easy to guess why. The painting features two innocent-looking, fashionably-costumed young circus performers who are taking their bows before a seemingly adoring crowd. But as you look closer—and as you learn more about the painting—the innocence and beauty is cleverly manufactured.

The two sisters, Francisca and Angelina, were actually part of a roving German acrobatic troupe. And this painting supposedly does capture the performers’ nuances. Renoir’s own brother Edmond wrote of the painting:

There really is no sense of arrangement. [Renoir] has captured the two children’s movement with unbelievable subtlety and immediacy. This is exactly how they walked, bowed, and smiled in the ring.

But despite these truths, the work also has some fictional elements. For one, the girls are not nearly as young as they look. At the time this was painted, the two sisters would have been 14 and 17. Here, Renoir has enhanced their youthfulness and they appear to be closer to 10 and 12. Renoir also refused to paint them as they would have appeared under the circus’s gas lights, deeming them too harsh. Instead, he painted them as if en plein air, building up layers of diaphonous paint to give the girls an almost luminous quality. They also—purposefully—match their environment, with their outfits complementing the gold tones of the floor and the oranges that Angelina holds. Renoir also avoided the more unsavory parts of the circus, giving us just a hint of the probably mostly male crowd who comprised the 19th century nocturnal demimonde.

One person who was definitely able to overlook the painting’s inaccuracies was the original owner, Mrs. Potter Palmer. She loved the painting so much that she kept it with her at all times, even when she traveled abroad!

Finally, one of the things I discovered in my research is that this is not the only painting is the Impressionist galleries of the Cirque Fernando. Do any Art Institute aficionados know of other paintings that feature this popular 19th-century destination?

Image Credit: Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando (Francisca and Angelina Wartenburg), 1879. Potter Palmer Collection.

Picasso and Chicago, opening February 20 (Members’ Preview starting on the 16th) in Regenstein Hall, will celebrate the rich history Pablo Picasso shared with our fair city. Although Picasso never visited Chicago (or any U.S. city for that matter) his impact on Chicago is clear—the most obvious (and tallest) evidence being Richard J. Daley Center Sculpture, the centerpiece of Daley Plaza since 1967.

A mutually-beneficial relationship began much earlier than that, though, not long after the dawn of Picasso’s career. In 1913, the Art Institute hosted the International Exhibition of Modern Art (aka the Armory Show). It included seven works by 31-year-old “Paul Picasso.” Though the Armory Show made stops in New York and Boston, the Art Institute was the first legit museum in the United States to ever exhibit Picasso’s work. Critics writing about the show regarded the young artist’s work suspiciously. Just ten years later, though, the first Picasso entered the Art Institute’s collection; in 1923 trustee Robert Allerton donated Sketches of a Woman and a Man (1904) and, a year later, Study of a Seated Man (1905).

The rest is literally history, and it’s all summed up quite handily in the forthcoming catalogue accompanying the exhibition. Curator Stephanie D’Alessandro charts the life and times of Picasso and his relationship to Chicago in an illustrated chronology starting with the Armory Show (see image above) and leading right up to the opening of the exhibition. Picasso and Chicago: 100 Years, 100 Works contains 100 of the 250+ works slated to be on view in the exhibition. The catalogue takes a few cues from the Art Institute’s 1968 publication Picasso in Chicago: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints from Chicago Collections, released in conjunction with an exhibition celebrating Picasso’s 85th birthday.

Like the 1968 exhibition, Picasso and Chicago has at its core, and indeed couldn’t exist without, a collecting community in Chicago that embraced Picasso soon after his work arrived in America—a community that has generously donated much of that work to the Art Institute over the past 100 years.

Image Credit: The Cubist gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago’s presentation of the 1913 Armory Show.

Japanese artist Tomoko Konoike brings the picture book to life with mimio-Odyssey, a video-projected artist’s book that tells the story of a faceless quasi-human’s journey through a surrealistic forest. Along the way, she encounters six-legged wolves, bees with girls’ legs, and flying daggers as she seeks to make sense of the world around her.

Several traditions are evoked through the imagery in mimio-Odyssey. Shinto animism often associates wolves with kami, the spirits of the unseen world. The words “wolf” and “kami” are even pronounced the same. Imagery taken from Buddhism can been seen in the “third eye” of enlightenment and the prevalence of daggers, often symbolizing the exorcising of evil spirits. And Noh theatre plays its role in the Konoike’s animated masks of young and old, good and evil. Konoike’s use of mythology gives the story of mimio-Odyssey a timeless quality, despite its strange and imaginative creatures. It felt almost like having a storybook read aloud to me as I watched the images flicker silently across the pages. See mimio-Odyssey on view in Gallery 108, next to the Ando Gallery.

Tomoko Konoike. mimio-Odyssey, 2005. Gift of Roger L. Weston.

The halls of the museum and the School of the Art Institute are constantly refreshed with an influx of new work as special exhibitions open and close and the permanent collection rotates into the galleries. What most museum-goers and school-attendees don’t often get to see though is the driving force behind the institution itself: the creativity of the staff and faculty.

Interested in a peek behind the scenes—and into the minds of the Art Institute community? Then ArtWork 6 is your chance. This exhibition features new works in all media created by school and museum employees, from Security and Museum Education to Painting and Drawing and the Dean’s Office.

As I entered the packed opening reception last Friday evening, it struck me that while there were 160 of my colleagues participating in the show, I had only known that a few were artists. To come across a spoken word piece, a film projection, and a large-scale wooden sculpture created by people I see in weekly meetings was thrilling; art runs deep at this place in ways I hadn’t expected.

Patti Mocco—who’s just finishing her 15th year in the accounting department—confirmed the sentiment. She has exhibited work in the 2003 and 2008 shows, this time submitting an examination of a lotus pod, a drawing she made while looking at the abstract in nature.

“I’m in accounting, but I love using the other half of my brain. It’s so nice to speak to my fellow colleagues about my work, sharing my experience. It introduces the commonality that we have working here.”

Assistant Director of Academic Administration Jaclyn Jacunski agrees. “Though we all do so much here at the school and the museum and play so many different roles, the exhibition is an insight that I am working with artists everyday. That beyond what we do at work, we leave this place making the choice to work more in the studio and to show those expressions and thoughts.

It is nice that in some formal way we recognize each other as artists and acknowledge our contributions.”

ArtWork6 is truly a product of common interest and effort. A do-it-yourself grassroots production from the first show in 1998, this rendition was organized by an all-volunteer committee from both sides of Michigan Avenue: the museum and the school.

To check out the exhibition (which is open to the public), visit the Sullivan Galleries located on the 7th floor of 33 S. State Street, Tuesday through Saturday from 11:ooam to 6:00pm. Artwork6 is on view until February.

ArtWork6 is truly a product of common interest and effort, a do-it-yourself grassroots production from the first show in 1998, it was organized by an all-volunteer committee from both sides of Michigan Avenue: the museum and the school.

To check out the work, visit the Sullivan Galleries located on the 7th floor of 33 S. State Street, Tuesday–Saturday, 11am–6pm. Artwork6 is on view until February 1, 2013.

Jets have complicated lives, too.

From first flight to plane graveyard, commercial jetliners have long careers with more than just figurative ups and downs. I’m a confessed airliner enthusiast, so Hito Steyerl’s In Free Fall (2010) piqued my interest because it lays out the life, death, and reuse of a Boeing 707. The moving-image work is separated into three chapters: Before the Crash, After the Crash, and Crash. When we join the main character, Boeing 707 4X-JYI, it’s in pieces in Mojave—the place where planes go to die. We’re told that 4X-JYI started its life at the glamorous airline TWA ferrying the trendy jet-set. The plane descended to serving utilitarian functions for the Israeli military in the 1970s, made an explosive cameo in the 1994 film Speed, and then was sent to China as scrap—its fuselage chewed up and, presumably, turned into products like pirated DVDs of American action films.

The story of the classic jetliner is told through appearances by Hito Steyerl, actor Imri Kahn, and even the cameraman. The production of In Free Fall also plays a role. So essentially, it’s telling the story of the airplane, but it’s also telling the story of telling the story of the airplane. Follow me?

Regardless, the plane’s many lives, shown in the immersive environment of the Donna and Howard Stone Gallery for Film, Video, and New Media, offer a visually compelling look at the processes of production, consumption, destruction, and reuse. This exhibition is on view through January 27.

Image Credit: Hito Steyerl. Still from In Free Fall, 2010. © Hito Steyerl. Courtesy of Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam.

Irving Penn is most famous for his fashion photography, still lifes, and portraiture, but Irving Penn: Underfoot (which opens today in the Modern Wing’s Bucksbaum Gallery) explores an often overlooked topic right outside the artist’s door. Instead of looking at the world around him, Penn pointed his camera to the ground to capture what former Art Institute director James Wood referred to as the “cosmos underfoot.”

I have to admit, the first time I saw an image of one of these photographs on my computer screen, I began making galactic associations. To me, the white spots across the pavement do resembled clusters of stars across the night sky. But as I looked more closely at images, I began to pick out objects: matches, twigs, cigarettes. Suddenly, my comet-like objects came into focus. They were chewed gum! Never before have I examined a dirty piece of sidewalk so intently. A sort of odd beauty is created in the subtleties of the photographs.

Besides 36 gelatin silver prints—presented complete for the first time—the exhibition also includes the tools Penn used to create the photographs. For most of them, he used a medium-format Hasselblad camera specially fitted with tubes to extend the lens nearly to the ground.

Irving Penn: Underfoot is open through May 12.

Image Credit: Irving Penn. Underfoot XXIV, 2000. The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of The Irving Penn Foundation in memory of James Wood. © by The Irving Penn Foundation.

If you looked at just the bottom of this garment, you might guess it was from 19th-century France, whereas the top wouldn’t look out of place on any contemporary sidewalk. And the contrasts don’t end there; this trench-dress hybrid’s exterior is made of a heavy, stiff cotton, while the interior is lined with a fragile organdy. These seemingly incongruous juxtapositions makes sense, however, when you consider the designer’s intent. Yohji Yamamoto’s “dream is to paint time” and his work often alludes to the history of dress. His collections also often have an androgynous bent, increasingly blurring the lines between male and female.

This garment is part of Material Translations: Japanese Fashion from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the first collaboration between the museum and the School of the Art Institute’s Fashion Resource Center. Last night, the organizers of the exhibition—Janice Katz, the Roger L. Weston Associate Curator of Japanese Art at the museum, and Gillion Carrara and Caroline Bellios of the Fashion Resource Center—spoke in-depth about Japanese art and avant-garde fashion. Thy also shared some construction secrets with the audience. For example, imagine the weight of this dress. The heavy cotton combined with the wire shaping at the bottom make it extraordinarily heavy. Taking into account that the wearer wouldn’t be able to lift her arms without ripping the garment, Yamamoto placed a vent where an underarm seam would normally be, allowing for freedom of movement. This design feature also indicates that this is a garment made to be worn—I love to imagine it strolling down the streets of Chicago.

Image Credit: Yohji Yamamoto. Dress and Safety Pins, 1999. Purchased with Fashion Resource Center Funds.