What to See in an Hour

Elizabeth McGoey: One of the things that I think visitors wouldn’t know about the window when you’re standing in front of it is how deep those glass layers can go. It’s not flat at all.

[MUSIC]

Narrator: Associate curator, Liz McGoey.

Elizabeth McGoey: We see this dazzling landscape, these naturalistic details—the back of the window, in fact, looks like a topographical model, it sort of undulates and changes in size.

Narrator: Curator, Sarah Kelly Oehler

Sarah Kelly Oehler: This is actually comprised of 48 panels of glass, but what you don’t see is that each individual panel might be up to five layers thick of glass, sort of pancaked together.

Narrator: This intricate arrangement of glass comes together in a soaring view of Mount Chocorua in New Hampshire, long the homeland of Algonquin peoples as well as many other Indigenous communities. It is also a landscape that meant a great deal to the family that commissioned this work from Tiffany Studios as a memorial.

Elizabeth McGoey: This window was a commission made by Mary Hartwell in honor of her husband Fredrick Harwell who was a deacon of the Central Baptist Church in Providence, Rhode Island. Frederick Hartwell was born in New Hampshire and his family had a home there. Even now it still has deep resonance with the family.

Sarah Kelly Oehler: Mary Hartwell would have chosen Tiffany Studios because, at that time, they were the preeminent maker of glass products.

Elizabeth McGoey: Louis Comfort Tiffany had started a glass company in 1885, which would then become Tiffany studios. And the firm had become synonymous with technical innovation and radiant brilliance.

Sarah Kelly Oehler: And the woman who designed this was named Agnes Northrop and she was, in fact, Tiffany Studio’s leading landscape designer

Elizabeth McGoey: She really had an eye for natural compositions, for how to create well-developed, interesting, intricate passages of foliage and water.

Narrator: Northrop, Tiffany, and the many talented specialists across the firm were celebrated for their innovations in stained glass. One distinctive example is the leaves of the trees, made of what is appropriately called “foliage glass.”

Elizabeth McGoey: Which is where shards of glass are thrown onto another molten color and went through the rollers, where you get this dazzling confetti-like effect that conveys dappled light coming through trees.

Sarah Kelly Oehler: What they ended up doing was really thinking about how to use the glass itself to achieve different aesthetic effects.

Narrator: To take in the full complexity and intricacy of the landscape, from the mountain peak to the lush foliage at the waters edge, we encourage you to do some up-close observation as well as from across the room.

Elizabeth McGoey: It’s a work of deeply resonant beauty. I absolutely can see people coming here and reflecting on time they’ve spent in nature, on remembering a loved one. I think this is a work that will allow that kind of respite, that kind of joy, but also bring a sense of wonder that is unparalleled.

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.

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:
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:
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 bizarre, playful marble sculpture depicts a satyr, a part human part horse or goat creature who often represents the wild untamed parts of human nature. Research Associate, Jeff Nigro.

Jeff Nigro: And we know it’s a satyr because there’s a very little, tiny tail sticking out of his lower back. The satyr is wearing a theater mask in the form of a Silenus figure. One of these older, bearded, mature figures who form part of the entourage of Dionysus.

Narrator: Though Dionysus is best known for being the god of wine, to the Greeks he was also the god of theater because they saw each as possessing a similar power.

Jeff Nigro: As with wine so with theater, Dionysus takes you out of yourself. In theater the performers become other people in a sense, they take on the characteristics or the characters of other people.

Narrator: This particular image of the satyr sticking his arm through the mask is actually seen in a number of sculptures from Antiquity.

Jeff Nigro: We actually see this motif quite a bit in relief sculpture, and usually this figure of a satyr sticking his hand through the mask is paired with another satyr who is frightened by this. So it’s sort of…boo.

Narrator: If you look carefully you’ll notice that some parts of the sculpture looks more weathered than others. Italian collectors in the 17th century didn’t want to look at a broken sculpture, so additions were made.

Jeff Nigro: And these additions were put on by a very famous 17th century italian sculptor named Alessandro Algardi, who was one of the leading sculptors working in Rome in the 1600s.

I don’t know what else to say about it except it’s… it’s just fun.

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:
Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago and attended the School of the Art Institute in the late 1940s, just as the Abstract Expressionist movement gained popularity.

Kate Nesin, Associate Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art.

KATE NESIN:
At the center, we have this tangle of pigmentation, of pinks and reds and oranges and yellows. Buried a little deeper, you see a number of blue tones, different kinds of slash marks and dripping paints. And above and below this central tangle, we have these pearlescent patches of gray and beiges and purples and pinks that seem to kind of wrap around the tangle.

One of the things I love about this painting is its ambiguity. You can approach it from a number of views.

The first time I encountered this painting, I was inclined to see that tangle of pigments as a distant horizon line. Like you’re seeing a bright, vivid, electrified city kind of hovering in the distance. But you could also imagine this as an aerial view on an island like Manhattan, and that gray is the watery environment in which that island sits. Or you could imagine it as a much more zoomed-in, close-up, fragmented view of a city at evening, through a window that’s wet with rain. So that tangle becomes the dripping of lights of cars driving and buildings that are lit at night.

It looks like these drips and slashes of brushstrokes were made quickly. And the representation of speed and energy here is really important, but Mitchell herself tended to work deliberately.

NARRATOR:
Mitchell said:

ACTOR (JOAN MITCHELL)
Sometimes I don’t know exactly what I want [with a painting]. I check it out, recheck it for days or weeks. Sometimes there is more to do on it. Sometimes I am afraid of ruining what I have. Sometimes I am lazy, I don’t finish it or I don’t push it far enough. Sometimes I think it’s a painting.