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:
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.

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

STEPHANIE D’ALESSANDRO:
Wassily Kandinsky’s “Improvisation No. 30”, it’s a painting that is perhaps pleasurable by the colors and some of the forms, but it’s a hard one to decipher. Kandinsky was very interested in pushing painting to a new level. He was interested in the idea of art that has a deeper kind of meaning.

For Kandinsky, colors engaged many more of our senses. Yellow, for example, which you see a lot on the right side of this composition, was a color that related to the sound of bells, or the taste of lemons. And he meant to engage those memories and senses from people when they looked at the pictures. Meanwhile, blue, which you see in the sort of center of the picture, was one that was restful. It suggested the heavens to him, and he often used it to balance out more active colors. So he was thinking about colors not just for your eyes but how they engaged your ears, your taste buds, your skin … at least as a memory. And it was that whole experience that he wanted to bring into his paintings.

Now, as much as Kandinsky wanted to move to that non-objective place, he still retained elements of the real world in his pictures. And if you look carefully at this painting, you’ll see things that may suggest a cannon or two in the lower right corner, or some buildings just above; perhaps a kind of childlike rider on a horse on the upper left, or perhaps a crowd on the lower left. They’re suggestions. They’re not necessarily meant to tell a story.

NARRATOR:
In a letter to Arthur Jerome Eddy, the Chicago collector who bought this painting. Kandinsky wrote:

ACTOR (WASSILY KANDINSKY):
The title cannons is not to be conceived as indicating the picture’s contents…Rather…the true contents are what the spectator experiences under the effect of the forms and color combinations of the pictures.