Focus on the Curators: The Modern Catalogue

With the opening of the Modern Wing less than three years away, Art Institute staff members are engaged in a number of projects related to the study, treatment, and presentation of the museum's preeminent collections.

Picasso scholar Marilyn McCully and Curator Stephanie D'Alessandro speak to a group in the conservation faculty about works being studied and preserved for the modern catalogue and the opening of the Modern Wing.

Chief among these projects is the release of several scholarly catalogues related to the museum's modern collection. In 2009, the second volume of American Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, which focuses on American modernism, will be released. Funded in part by the Henry Luce Foundation, the volume will contain entries for over 200 objects.

To celebrate the Modern Wing, the museum will also publish its first comprehensive volume of modern European paintings, sculptures, and drawings. Funded in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the projected three-volume publication will bring together the work of Art Institute curators and conservators as well as selected experts in the field of modern art, to provide a thorough understanding of the museum's important holdings of modern European art.

The first volume will focus on the work of French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese artists. Highlighting nearly 700 works from the permanent collection by such artists as Constantin Brancusi, Giorgio de Chirico, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, the publication will provide full provenance and exhibition and bibliographic histories for each work. In addition, nearly 350 key works?including Brancusi's Golden Bird, Matisse's Bathers by a River, and Picasso's Mother and Child?will be the subject of in-depth scholarly entries.

Pablo Picasso, Mother and Child, 1921. Restricted gift of Maymar Corporation, Mrs. Maurice L. Rothschild, Mr. and Mrs. Chauncey McCormick, Mary and Leigh Block Fund, Ada Turnbull Hertle Endowment, through prior gift of Mr. and Mrs. Edwin E. Hokin.

This much-anticipated publication is being compiled under the direction of Stephanie D'Alessandro, associate curator of modern painting and sculpture, in collaboration with Douglas Druick, Searle Chair of Medieval through Modern European Painting and Sculpture. Publication of the first volume is planned to coincide with the summer 2009 opening of the Modern Wing, where the modern collection will be reinstalled on the third floor.

"This catalogue will be an incredible and unparalleled resource. We are bringing together new historical information from archives, new facts about media and techniques from conservation, and new visualizations of compositional changes and technical data from conservation science. Our knowledge about the collection is radically changing," noted D'Alessandro. "The volume will be a way for us to celebrate the truly important collection we have here in Chicago at a critical moment in the museum's history."