What to See in an Hour

NARRATOR:
Artist Grant Wood discovered the house in this painting by accident. Judith Barter, Field-McCormick Chair and Curator, American Arts, tells the story.

JUDITH BARTER:
Well, he was riding around in the country one day, and he found this wonderful Gothic Revival house. And it is a wonderful house—I’d buy it in a heartbeat. And he said he wanted to paint the perfect couple that would live in a house like that. And so he engaged his dentist and his sister to pose for this picture.

NARRATOR:
As the artist said:

ACTOR (GRANT WOOD):
I imagined American Gothic people with their faces stretched out long to go with this American Gothic house.

JUDITH BARTER:
Grant Wood never said whether this was a husband and wife or a father and daughter. She’s wearing her apron, and on the left side of the painting are her flowerpots and the domestic chores. He is on the right, with his pitchfork, probably headed to the barn, which is also on the right side of the picture. Over his bib overalls, which mark him as a farmer, he wears a dress shirt and probably his only suit jacket, dressing up for this picture. And she wears her best apron and the family cameo.

Ironically, in 1930, this neat, tidy little farm couple was already a dying breed. In 1920, this country was predominantly urban, and no longer rural. And particularly in the early 1930s, at the depth of the Depression, young people were leaving the farms. This couple would have been sort of left behind in the dust.

NARRATOR:
This work reads both like a satire of the American dream…and a celebration of a way of life that was quickly disappearing.

JUDITH BARTER:
People in Chicago loved this picture because it was something so foreign to them. It was certainly an American scene, but it wasn’t something that people lived in big cities could relate to very well. And they found it rather exotic and fun, and so it was quite popular.

NARRATOR:
This may be the most iconic work of art in the Art Institute. Gloria Groom, David and Mary Winton Green Curator and Chair of European Painting and Sculpture.

GLORIA GROOM:
What you see are a lot of different figures. And these figures represent different walks of life. They’ve gathered here on the banks of the Seine on a Sunday afternoon, and they’re in their Sunday best, most of them.

It seems very alive, because of the color. But no one is really moving. There is really a stillness. Seurat wanted to extract from modern life, to distill it. And to make it, as he said, like the Parthenon frieze, but using modern people in all their traits.

NARRATOR:
There are mysteries here: on the left, the boater with the cap seems disproportionately large in relation to the couple seated next to him. Why is the little girl in orange the only one captured in movement? What are those two orange shapes at the far right?

GLORIA GROOM:
For us,it’s an enigmatic painting. It’s one that we return to again and again. You never get tired of it. Because you’re always finding something else that is unusual, that makes you think differently about what you thought you knew. And that, I think, is the sign of a great painting.

NARRATOR:
Seurat used a technique called ‘pointillism,’ and it’s what he’s famous for. He painted in tiny little dots, often in complementary colors.

GLORIA GROOM:
If you were an avant-garde artist in late 19th century, you would be thinking about complementaries on the color wheel. So purple and yellow, and blue and orange, and red and green.And when you lay them down next to each other, and you don’t blend them,they have a flickering quality.

And so he breaks up the surface with these little dots of pigment. And that is what is his completely different approach to painting. And every artist after ‘the Grande Jatte’ had to reckon with what a painting should be, and how can we now accept this new technique.

NARRATOR:
Judith Barter, Field ¬McCormick Chair & Curator, American Arts.

JUDITH BARTER:
‘Nighthawks’ is a really fascinating painting. It’s such an American painting. The Americanness is in many of the details: The ‘Phillies Cigar’ ad above the diner. The salt shakers, the heavy-duty porcelain mugs. The napkin holders. The big coffee urns in the back. The soda jerk, with his cap on. It’s what America was like and what America liked in the ’30s and ’40s.

NARRATOR:
But look closer. There’s something unrealistic—and off-putting—about Edward Hopper’s scene.

JUDITH BARTER:
It looks real, but it’s not. There’s no sense of real depth. When you try to go deep into this picture, it pushes you back to the surface. He uses acid greens against bright yellows and oranges—the red dress of the woman with her orange hair. These set your teeth on edge, but they do work together; he was a brilliant colorist.] And if you look at the diner, there’s no way in or out except through that orange door that ostensibly goes to the kitchen. So it’s sort of a hermetically-sealed environment with these four people in this diner at night.

NARRATOR:
And…no one is talking. To many, ‘Nighthawks’ evokes a sense of loneliness. But Hopper himself disagreed with this interpretation. In an interview, he said.

[EDWARD HOPPER ARCHIVAL AUDIO]:
I think those are the words of critics. It may be true, it may not be true. It’s how the viewer looks on the pictures. What he sees in them.

JUDITH BARTER:
What I see in Hopper is a sense of everyman. That any of us could be sitting in this diner. it’s really the idea of we are individuals, but we have a collective consciousness as well. I think people just relate to the everydayness of it. They can put themselves in these pictures.

Narrator: This is Art Institute of Chicago Presents. And today, we’re featuring Jordan Casteel.

Jordan Casteel: To make a portrait is to think in nuanced ways about the layers of the human existence.

[Music cue]

Narrator: That’s Jordan Casteel, a painter based in New York City known for intimate portraits of the everyday life of people in and around her community. Casteel often does nearly life-size paintings, showing her subjects in their homes, out at a public park, or riding the subway—spaces that characterize our day to day lives. As a result, Casteel’s subjects seem inviting, like they’re welcoming you into their home or allowing you to witness a personal moment. And this makes sense, because Casteel’s choice to focus on portraiture stems from a lifelong investment in people.

Jordan Casteel: I’ve always been interested in people, I’ve always been curious about the relationships between people, what made them tick, what made them happy, what it is that makes a human being a human being and makes us our deepest versions of ourselves.

Narrator: Though there’s not one specific moment that Casteel points to that made her want to do portraits, the artwork she grew up with in her home definitely influenced her.

Jordan Casteel: So for example there’s a Charles White etching that my parents have, Mother and Child, that I very distinctly recall looking at it and feeling familiarity. My own affinity for my own mother, I understood it even at a young age. So that was the kind of portraiture and the thing that ignited my sense of belonging within certain spaces was just seeing sheer representation of something that seemed familiar to my own experiences or my own ways of being.

Narrator: Familiarity in representation is an important point for Casteel. Take a tour around the Art Institute, or most art museums, and you’ll see lots of portraits, but usually of wealthy, fairly well to do white folks. That’s the history that Casteel is confronting in her work.

Jordan Casteel: There are stories that are never told and frequently kind of ignored. And I’m always interested in the stories that haven’t been told, so looking at the vastness of the history that I learned, art historically speaking, very rarely did I encounter histories that felt similar to my own. And now I get to rewrite tha tjust by being who I am and painting what I want to paint.

Narrator: Now, the power of portraiture and its history is really on our minds right now at the Art Institute. At the time of making this episode, the museum is exhibiting the presidential portraits, from the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, of President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald. And we also have one of Casteel’s portraits of President Obama on view at the same time. So we wanted to get Casteel’s insights into how she looks at and thinks about portraits when she visits a museum. The first thing she pointed out is that a portrait is never just a portrait.

Jordan Casteel: I think of every painting as being a collaborative product between the artist and the person they’re representing. So as much as we’re seeing the person in the frame, if it’s a portrait we’re talking about, there’s an image maker and the image maker has labored over many decisions, the process of making that painting.

Narrator: But where as I might start with, say, the subject’s expression or their eyes, Casteel starts with something far more concrete than that.

Jordan Casteel: When I first approach a painting, I think the thing that draws me in is usually the paint itself. The material, the colors, the shapes, the relationships between the shapes. It’s a compositional draw initially that I’m sucked into. Is it a solid background, is it a textured background, what do the differences between those gestures make me feel? And what does that feeling say about who this person that they’re representing is? And where do I want to rest my eyes the longest within the canvas frame? That’s why I love painting, it’s just a question mark.

Narrator: The emphasis on composition and color can actually help us when looking at Casteel’s portrait of Barack Obama that she made last year. Though Casteel usually works from photographs, with this painting she had the daunting task of choosing one image among thousands from the White House.

Jordan Casteel: It is dense with images of Barack Obama. And I got an opportunity to really sit and look through them, whittled it down to maybe four or five, and then from those four or five there was one.

Narrator: The photo she landed on was by photographer Peter Souza, and unlike the portrait by Wiley where the gaze is direct and you experience the full figure of the president, Casteel’s portrait is cropped extremely close and President Obama is contemplative, his eyes downturned or possibly closed.These are intentional choices that echo her other portraits, particularly those of the New York City subway riders.

Jordan Casteel: There is a layer of distance and an acknowledgement of distance, and yet there’s an intimacy. It draws you in to only be able to be exposed to a very particular view point. And that viewpoint is that of my own, of the viewer, why I want you to see the side of his face so explicitly and his ear and the gaze is very distant, and yet there is a sense of knowing. That focus of the frame and the compressed-ness and the tightening of the frame allows for you to really remove distractions that might otherwise be there.

Jordan Casteel: This painting was an opportunity to expose and experience a closeness that I don’t necessarily have and I haven’t had access to in a literal sense. If I can’t literally stand in front of Barack Obama what would it look and feel like if I could?

Narrator: For Casteel, a portrait is an opportunity to explore the singular perspective of an artist, as well as be invited into the world of the person depicted. And by reveling in that world we can discover something new and profound about that person and about ourselves.

Jordan Casteel: I think to occupy a portrait as a viewer is to occupy an environment you haven’t seen before. Although you are maybe seeing something for the first time, there might be something that feels familiar within it. Identify that, find it, and try to name it, and then recognize it in relationship to that which you didn’t understand. I think every portrait is an opportunity for inquiry and a sense of knowing and entering the home or the mind or the environment of someone else.

CREDITS

This episode was produced and edited by me, Andrew Meriwether, with coordinating help from Bronwyn Kheuler. We want to give special thanks to Jordan Casteel and the Casey Kaplan Gallery, along with Joe Iverson. This has been a production of Art Institute Presents, you can find all our podcast episodes on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

NARRATOR:
Stephanie D’Alessandro, Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator, International Modern Art.

STEPHANIE D’ALESSANDRO:
You’re looking at Pablo Picasso’s ‘Old Guitarist’, from late 1903-’04. It’s a painting of a man, who, by his sunken eyes and closed eyelids, seems to be a blind man playing a guitar. Maybe his mouth is a little open singing, or maybe he’s breathing. Maybe because of the blue color, maybe because of the emaciated quality of his body and its angular position, sort of smushed into this composition—but there’s an emotional level to the painting as well.

The color blue was an important color for many artists, artists interested in this kind of evocative feeling or kind of personal subjectivity, or psychology. Picasso was very much a part of that as much as anything else.

NARRATOR:
Take a look at how Picasso uses white highlights to emphasize the gauntness of the figure’s body. In both the composition and the sensitive rendering of the figure, Picasso references the great 16th-century Spanish painter, El Greco.

STEPHANIE D’ALESSANDRO:
Picasso was someone very sensitive to the plight of the downtrodden. He himself was a struggling artist at this time, and certainly would’ve been sympathetic to people like this old guitarist, who would’ve been an outcast in society.

This is not only is an amazing painting by Picasso but it happens to be the very first acquired by an American museum. And it was the beginning of Chicago becoming known as a place for modern art.

NARRATOR:
Gloria Groom, David and Mary Winton Green Curator and Chair of European Painting and Sculpture.

GLORIA GROOM:
I think one of the reasons that people are so drawn to this is because of the subject matter. I mean, Van Gogh is painting his bedroom with his paintings in it, and the furniture that he purchased.

NARRATOR:
This was Vincent Van Gogh’s bedroom in his house in Arles, where he lived in the late 1880s. There he’d dreamt of establishing an artists’ collective—a “Studio of the South.” Initially he’d filled with great optimism about the endeavor and the idea of finally finding a place to call home.

The room itself is simple, almost austere. In a letter to his brother Theo, he wrote:

ACTOR (VINCENT VAN GOGH):
You’ll probably find the interior the ugliest, an empty bedroom with a wooden bed and two chairs—yet I’ve painted it twice on a large scale.

NARRATOR:
Van Gogh, in fact, considered this painting one of his very best. Curator Gloria Groom.

GLORIA GROOM:
He makes it look so interesting and inviting, and at the same time, [rather discomforting. The way the paint is laid on, the brokenness of it. The extreme radicalness of splayed-out floorboards. There’s a kind of…I wouldn’t say creepiness, but definitely unease, unsettledness about it.

NARRATOR:
That unease likely relates to Van Gogh’s state of mind at the time. He painted this work after he’d had a mental breakdown, left the house, and had been hospitalized for mental illness.

GLORIA GROOM:
He’s in the asylum. [His] dreams have been shattered. He knows he will never, ever have that kind of home of his own …it’s a bedroom that has furnishings as you might imagine in any bedroom, but the way it is painted makes it alive. Gives it another sense of excitement that we just don’t think about in art of that period. It is very unusual.

MADHUVANTI GHOSH: As you walk into the Alsdorf Galleries, the sculpture that takes one’s eye is this very large Buddha who is seated in meditation.

NARRATOR: Alsdorf Associate Curator of Indian, Southeast Asian, Himalayan and Islamic Art, Madhuvanti Ghosh.

MADHUVANTI GHOSH: This is the first sculpture that I decided to install in these galleries because it’s location determined how everything else fitted around. {musical pause} So the Buddha faces sculptures from South East Asia, which you see on either side of him. I’ve placed a pair of Thai monks in front of him honouring him. {pause} What is really beautiful about him is the fact that he has these markings on his body — these 32 markings that special beings were supposed to have.

NARRATOR: If you look between the Buddha’s eyes, you’ll see one of those markings. A small dot, called the urna, is a sign of divine vision. On the palms of his hands you can see the the symbol of the chakra, or wheel of law.

NARRATOR: Now, start to make your way around the sculpture. From the side you’ll notice his unusually large ears, the shell-like curls of his hair, and the flaming knot atop his head, representing spiritual knowledge. As you circle toward the rear of the Buddha, you’ll see an inscription across his back. The writing is likely a dedication from or about the person who donated this sculpture to its original location, a monastery at the port city of Nagapattinam, near the southwestern tip of India.

MADHUVANTI GHOSH: Unfortunately, it’s quite illegible so it so we haven’t been able to decipher it yet. But it also helps us realise that this sculpture would’ve been seated somewhere in the round. It would’ve been possible for pilgrims to circumambulate the Buddha and that is the way in which you honour a sacred being.

MADHUVANTI GHOSH: I hope that seeing this beautiful, big Buddha gives you a moment to just be silent and appreciate what the Buddha stood for… his ideals.