Lecture: Beyond Form—Abstraction at Midcentury

Hello, and good afternoon, everyone.

Hello. Oh. Thank you so much. It's such a polite audience. I love this already.

I'm Mel Becker Solomon, associate research curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings and the curator for "Beyond Form: Abstraction at Midcentury." I am delighted to welcome you to this afternoon's program held in conjunction with the exhibition. Support for this program is provided by the Allan McNab Endowed Fund. As we begin, a brief reminder to please silence your mobile devices.

It is my pleasure to introduce the speaker for this afternoon's program and my incredible curatorial assistant for "Beyond Form: Abstraction at Midcentury," Chloe Glass. Chloe Glass, yes, clap. (audience applauds) Chloe Glass is a research associate in Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago.

She previously received her MA with distinction from the Courtauld Institute of Art and her BA with distinction from Yale. She has worked in cultural heritage institutions across both France and America in bilingual collections research and exhibition planning. "Beyond Form" was first conceived as an exhibition highlighting the Art Institute's extraordinary holdings of Abstract Expressionism and a companion to the "Willem de Kooning: Drawing" exhibition, also on view.

As the idea developed, I realized there was an opportunity to broaden the story of abstraction by presenting it through a more global and inclusive lens, primarily the postwar years from 1940 to 1970. When Chloe and I began systematically exploring the museum's collection of prints and drawings, we were continually amazed by the remarkable works we discovered, many of them rarely seen and too often overlooked. Chloe supported this vision from the very beginning and brought invaluable insights that helped shape the exhibition in meaningful ways.

As a result, more than half of the works are on view for the very first time, nearly half are by women artists, and artists from 23 countries are represented in the exhibition. Thank you, Chloe, for all of your hard work, dedication, and wisdom. I couldn't have done it without you.

And now, without further delay, please join me in welcoming Chloe to the stage. (audience applauds)

Good afternoon, and thank you, Mel, for the very kind introduction. It's been a real pleasure to work with you on this show for the past year and a half, I think. I'd also like to thank our colleagues across the museum who have really supported our vision and who have worked tirelessly to bring this exhibition to you all.

"Beyond Form: Abstraction at Midcentury" brings together, as Mel said, 65 artists from more than 23 countries to tell a more global story of abstraction between 1940 and 1970. Moving away from artistic traditions such as realism and figuration, artists experimented with form, color, shape, and gestural mark making to pursue new aesthetic and conceptual possibilities. The works show the many techniques of abstraction, including burning, ripping, expressive mark making, and collage, some of which we'll explore today.

And all but two of the works are drawn from the Prints and Drawings permanent collection. As artists moved around the globe at mid-century, both voluntarily for travel or education, or forcibly by displacement, they encountered opportunities for collaboration and reinvention of the self. And through abstraction, artists really found the creative freedom to express their identities and experiences.

Today, I'm going to anchor my presentation in these three artists. And along the way, I'll make connections to other artists also exhibited in "Beyond Form." I've chosen to focus on Tetsuo Ochikubo, Richard Hunt, and Lenore Tawney as they were all students at the School of the Art Institute in the 1940s and 1950s and thus had ties to our city. Although many artists responded to the events of World War II, Tetsuo Ochikubo had a more immediate perspective, having actually served in World War II.

He was born in Hawaii in 1923 to Japanese immigrant parents and later voluntarily enlisted in March 1943 in the American Army in a segregated unit composed of Japanese soldiers or soldiers of Japanese descent known as nisei. These segregated units were a direct response to President Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, which unjustly incarcerated over 120,000 Japanese Americans solely based on heritage. The Japanese American soldiers in the 442nd unit and 100th battalion aimed to prove their loyalty in combat, and Ochikubo actually helped successfully liberate French cities from Nazi occupation and drive German forces out of Northern Italy.

The 442nd remains the most decorated unit in the history of the US military for its size and length of service. Ochikubo was then honorably discharged from the military in 1946, and then with support from the GI Bill, which aimed to allow veterans to pursue educational opportunities, he began his artistic training in the late 1940s. He first attended the School of the Art Institute from 1947 to 1948 as demonstrated by the student record, which also notes that he served in the infantry in France, Italy, and Germany.

While at SAIC, he studied still life painting, in which he got an A, and figure painting, in which he got a B, which maybe explains why he switched to abstraction. Ochikubo also traveled to Japan where he studied traditional ink brush painting in 1953, learning how to apply ink with brush on thin paper and sweeping strokes. The final stage of his artistic training was his time as a fellow at Tamarind Lithography Workshop in 1961, where he produced these 10 prints in which we have in our collection.

Lithography was a printmaking technique invented in Germany in 1798, and we'll look more at the technique on the next slide, but essentially, it lent itself very well to mass production and was thus widely used for advertisements or general commercial ventures. Simultaneously, artists in France especially began experimenting with a technique. And in the 1890s and early 20th century, many well-known impressionists and symbolists produced lithographs.

There were many lithographic ateliers, or studio, established across Europe, and these really created spaces where the artist and artisan worked closely together to design the image and then print it. In comparison, a continuous tradition of lithography did not exist in America. An artist often traveled to Europe instead.

In fact, until 1957, there was only one atelier in all of the United States dedicated to fine art lithography. This changed in 1960 when June Wayne founded Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, specifically as a non-commercial space that trained both artists and printers to create fine art lithography. Wayne aimed to create a space of experimentation where artists unfamiliar with the medium could push its boundaries and develop their own visual language.

Ochikubo was one of the first artists to participate in Tamarind and to be invited to Tamarind. He arrived for his two month fellowship in the summer of 1961. Tamarind also trained printers because lithography was a complex chemical process.

And Ochikubo worked very closely with printer Joe Funk, pictured here, who himself was actually also a World War II veteran and had earned his fine art degree with the help of the GI Bill as well. At Tamarind, Ochikubo drew the design on the stone, and then Funk applied the necessary chemicals and used the proper tools to print the image on paper. Collaboration was a key component to lithography, as both individuals brought their specialized knowledge together to successfully create one work.

In fact, one book on lithography joked that a printer must be a bit of a psychologist because the artists with whom they work can be highly sensitive and temperamental individuals. Regardless of their relationship, it was a productive one, and they resulted in these 10 lithographs. Tamarind was less crucial to the survival of lithography as a fine art.

And I'm really emphasizing this because many of the artists in the show, seven, and to be exact, trained at Tamarind and were fellows there. And so this ethos of collaboration really does run through our exhibition. So now that we've learned a little bit about the history of the technique, I'd like us to take a look at how it was done.

Lithography is based on the simple principle that grease and water resist each other. As we see here, the artist is drawing directly on the stone with a special kind of waxy, greasy ink in solid form or diluted into liquid form. And when it's diluted, it can be applied with a brush and create painterly effects similar to watercolor.

Lithography also allows the artist, captures the exact mark of their hand so they can darken the stone by adding marks on top of it or also lighten it by scraping away with a precise tool, as seen. So here they're darkening, and here they're scraping away. There is no carving in this process.

It's a flat, planographic process. And you see the fluidity with which an artist is moving their hand across the stone. It means that artists who are unfamiliar with the technique are really able to access it quite easily.

So now that we understand a bit better about the process, we can turn to Ochikubo's work. Although at first glance, it appears to be a simple contrast between yellow and black, the details reveal that there are four colors: yellow, dark yellow, gray-brown, and dark gray. Each color requires a separate stone, which means that Ochikubo drew his design on four separate stones, which Funk then printed separately and carefully lined up or registered on the same piece of paper.

We can especially see this in how the rich black sits on top of the vibrant yellow. And these different colors really allowed Ochikubo to achieve greater texture and depth to his work. The overlapping shades of darker and lighter yellow seem to vibrate, perhaps evoking the strong Hawaiian sun.

The frantic brushstrokes at the top contrast sharply against the contained form, the black sphere below, creating a tension between stability and dynamic, uncontained movement. Given Ochikubo's history as a veteran, the black circle really seems to evoke a bullet or a cannon that has been fired and then exploded above. He achieved these feathery lines by applying the greasy liquid of the brush, evocative again of his earlier artistic training and ink painting in Japan.

A former New York Times critic commented on Ochikubo's earlier work, saying there is, quote, a quiet effort to reduce experience to its essentials, using only space and a few variations in surface. Ochikubo maintained this aesthetic in his Tamarind lithographs, creating a deeply personal and layered work through a seemingly simple contrast of black and yellow that speaks to both his training as his multifaceted artistic training and his experience as a veteran. He himself said, "My ultimate purpose in painting is to understand and be understood, to be able to understand life and its thousands of facets, to eliminate arbitrary and contrary truth, to have the function and command of beauty at the tip of my brush." Ochikubo was also one of the founding members of the Metcalf Chateau, a group of Asian American artists in Hawaii, pictured here, who reinvigorated modern art in the archipelago.

As first generation Japanese, Korean, or Chinese Americans in Hawaii, they combined patterns or motifs from both the topography of the islands and their own cultural heritage backgrounds. And many of them were also veterans and had traveled both in the continental US and abroad in Europe. And they called upon these experiences in their work upon their return to Hawaii.

Hawaiian modern art, however, has historically been excluded from mainstream narratives of modernism. In the exhibition, we purposely placed Ochikubo at the end of a long gallery so that its vibrant bright color hopefully draws you down. And across from a drawing by Jackson Pollock here at center and a print by Claire Falkenstein, which seems invisible, but I promise it's not.

We're going to look closely at it in a minute. All three of these works have rich, dynamic movement, and we chose to place them together in an effort to rebalance these histories of abstraction from Japanese American artists active in Hawaii to one of the most well known names of abstract expressionism to woman sculpture active in Paris. Claire Falkenstein initially trained as a sculptor and printer, and painter, excuse me, in San Francisco in the '20s and '30s, but turned to printmaking after taking a class with Stanley William Hayter in California.

She then studied at Hayter's workshop at 2017 in New York and Paris in the '40s and '50s. Atelier 17 was characterized by Hayter's encouragement that artists experiment not just with the subject matter or the image of what they were creating in their prints, but the materials themselves, using plaster casts, plexiglass, or dental tools to create more sculptural works. Hayter also encouraged his students to not use preparatory drawings.

So instead of carefully planned designs, improvisation and chance were really paramount to the resulting work. Falkenstein embraced this approach wholeheartedly. She began welding scraps of metal to thin sheets of copper and passing them through an old printing press with a thick sheet of handmade paper on top.

The intense pressure of the press embossed the metal parts into the paper, creating, as she called them, objets gravures, or graphic objects, which blurred the boundary between sculptural and graphic work. In the exhibition, they're under protective acrylic. But when Mel and I were going through our vaults, we were actually able to touch the paper and feel the deep grooves that these metal parts have embossed into the paper.

And Falkenstein specifically had handmade linen paper created so that they wouldn't be pierced or perforated by the pressure. So it's a real treat to be able to touch the objects. Falkenstein explained that these experimentations were rooted in her interest in movement and, quote, exploding the volume of a form, which she also captured in her three-dimensional wire sculptures.

As I said, it's quite difficult to see. So I do invite you to spend some time with it in the exhibition. Another Japanese American artist who trained at Tamarind was Ruth Asawa.

Asawa arrived at Tamarind in 1965, where she quickly embraced lithography and created 54 prints over the course of her two-month fellowship, nearly a print a day. In the same way that Ochikubo collaborated with Joe Funk, Asawa worked closely with the printer Clifford Smith. In this print, Smith created a reversed image in which Asawa's marks appear as negative space on an inked ground.

So essentially, the parts that were drawn on stone, the ink splatters, the border, the trunk at center, all appear lighter because the white of the paper is visible while the negative space is printed with black ink, which creates a ghostly image. It's an extremely complicated process, but what's important to take away is Asawa is deeply interested in this relationship between positive and negative space. And of the lithographs that she produced at Tamarind, "Plane Tree Reversal" best encapsulates her exploration of the interdependence between these visual opposites, reversing figure and ground.

This sudden switch of perspective also finds resonance in her own personal history. In 1942, she and her family were incarcerated at different Japanese internment camps across the US. Asawa was sent to Arkansas and was released in August 1943, but she would not see her parents for another two years.

The incarceration suddenly and forcibly separated and isolated Asawa from her family and community, reversing her world. She later settled in San Francisco in 1949 and lived there for more than 60 years. This print is based on the trunks of the plane trees in her neighborhood and is really a testament to the home and community that she rooted herself in later in life.

Three years after Tamarind also, Asawa founded the Alvarado School Arts Workshop, a volunteer program for arts education in the city. The ethos of collaboration had really been nurtured during her time at Tamarind. And she later summarized her artistic philosophy as saying, "Each material has a nature of its own.

And by combining it and putting it next to another material, you change or give personality to it without destroying either one." Shinoda Toko also collaboratively experimented with lithography. She was born in Japan in 1913 and initially trained as a calligrapher in the 1930s and '40s, but was excluded from the male-dominated field. She was also frustrated by the hierarchical nature of calligraphic associations and the often conservative approach that encouraged creating legible work.

After World War II, Shinoda encountered more opportunities for international artistic exchange that really allowed her to move beyond ink painting. She recalled, "The air of freedom after the war suddenly nurtured the seeds of a desire within me to express the shape of my heart visually. I was suddenly emancipated from the oppressions of my 20s and my brush moved like an outpour.

Like a spur, this new feeling pushed me outside the constraints of characters, and it became my exciting job with limitless scope." Shinoda found such freedom in lithography after having been introduced to it by Arthur Flory, an American artist who had established a lithographic workshop in Japan in the early 1960s. She was particularly drawn towards the medium, as it used the same application method as ink painting, namely drawing with a brush, but this time directly on stone. Lithography this faithfully reflected the tonal variations of ink painting and this nuanced, textured brush work.

Here, the vertical brush strokes are testament to the decisiveness of her hand as she moved across the stone. And she was so entranced that over the next five decades, she created more than 1,000 lithographs. As Shinoda expanded her career internationally, she further transitioned from painting legible characters towards abstraction.

She recalled, "I wanted to see how my works would be received in a foreign country where letters are not read as letters." Here, the vertical lines instead become streaks of light, piercing the velvety dark, or blades of grass emerging from the ground. For Shinoda, abstraction and lithography offered a means of uniting both her early artistic training as a calligrapher and her interest in moving beyond legibility. For Tetsuo Ochikubo, Claire Falkenstein, Ruth Asawa, and Shinoda Toko, experimental printmaking workshops played a key role in allowing them the freedom to play with these unfamiliar techniques and incorporate motifs drawn from their own lived experiences.

The proliferation of lithographic and printmaking work studios at mid-century in the United States, France, and Japan, among others, facilitated these international and cross-cultural connections that artists carried forward with them. Next, I'd like to turn our attention towards artists who commented upon social injustices and inequalities through their abstract works that were often grounded in motifs drawn from the body or natural world. I'd like to begin with the work of Richard Hunt, who I'm sure many of you are familiar with, as he was born in 1935 on Chicago's South Side and trained and practiced in the city for the majority of his life.

He enrolled at the School of the Art Institute in 1953 and graduated in 1957 with his undergraduate degree in arts. And as we can see from this transcript Hunt enrolled in many art history, drawing, and sculpture classes, but the sculpture classes were really plaster casts or ceramics. There was no welding available at SAIC at the time.

So instead, Hunt taught himself how to weld in the basement of his father's house. And by the way, his student record and photos and the Ochikubo student record both come from the wonderful Ryerson and Burnham Archives team here at the museum. Hunt made his first metal sculpture in 1956.

Titled "Hero's Head," the work was a response to the racially motivated murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy who was lynched by white men in Mississippi. Hunt lived a few blocks from Till in Chicago, and both of their families had arrived in the city as part of the great migration of Black Americans escaping racial segregation and violence in the American South. Both boys also frequently traveled back to the South to visit their relatives.

After Till's murder, Hunt was one of the thousands who attended his open casket funeral in Chicago in September 1955. And as the photograph of Till's mutilated face was circulated through primarily Black media outlets, Hunt welded the sculpture in remembrance of Till and the violence of American racial terror. The drawing in the exhibition is an early example of what would become Hunt's signature visual vocabulary.

Here, tall forms extend upwards and terminate in fingers or bones. They resemble plants and body parts, a type of abstraction known as biomorphic in which the artist draws upon the motifs from the natural world. The shapes resemble bones, enhanced by white gouache, which is selectively applied.

Much more easy to see in the exhibition around here. And they rise out of the ground as they are stacked on top of each other, standing tall, reminiscent of how Hunt's sculptures were also pieces of metal welded together. The horizon line in the drawing along the midsection here helps anchor the forms in the landscape and is further evocative of Hunt's large-scale sculptures, which were often placed in parks or plazas.

In fact, he ended up creating over 160 public sculptures, which were more than any other artist in the US and the majority of which are in Illinois. In his sculptures and related drawings, he consistently returns to abstract forms rooted in natural motifs that champion ideas of freedom, flight, or growth. In fact, we're lucky enough to have an early example of his sculptures on view in gallery 291 of the Modern and Contemporary wing, which I encourage you to see after the exhibition.

The sculptures composed of found objects that Hunt discovered in junkyards and on the street. In fact, his upbringing in Chicago was foundational to his work, as Chicago was one of the centers of steel production in the early 20th century. Hunt frequently salvaged parts from old junkyards and cars, turning them into these forms that stride forward or take flight.

The rebirth exemplified Hunt's attitude towards his practice. He said, quote, "I have always been interested in the concept of freedom on the personal and universal levels." Another artist in the exhibition who created unified works from disparate elements was Romare Bearden. Here, Bearden layered pieces torn from magazines to create a collage that presents a mostly monochromatic gray room.

There's a chair at center here next to a green dresser with a lamp on top, which really situates us in a domestic space. To the left of the dresser are two men sitting. Their four hands are cut from different pages of the magazine.

You can see an eye here, what appears to be hats, but is really, you know, pages for magazine cut in the shape of a hat. And on the right, we have another man standing, perhaps with his hands on his hips looking towards his two companions. The writer Ralph Ellison commented upon the faces in this collage, saying they draw upon African sculpture and are, quote, made to focus our attention upon the far from abstract reality of people.

He continued saying, quote, "Here abstract interiors are presented in which concrete life is acted out under repressive conditions." Of course, Ellison had written the 1952 best-selling novel "Invisible Man," which presented the Black experience and searched for identity from a narrator first in the South and then New York City. Bearden had had a similar trajectory, having been born in North Carolina and then moving to Harlem in 1914 where he was quickly absorbed into the intellectual, musical, artistic life of the Harlem Renaissance. Ellison and Bearden also shared a close personal friendship, and Ellison actually owned this work.

Both men understood the multifaceted experience of being Black in America and of being Black artists. They were both members of the 306 Group, which is a collective of artists and writers based in Harlem. Although this work is composed mostly of tones of gray, a bright rectangle of blue here at center bisects the plane, and it evokes a summer sky through an open window, but also the blues genre of music.

And in fact, for over 16 years, Bearden's studio was above the Apollo Theater, which was an iconic music landmark in Harlem that welcomed Black jazz and blues performers who were not allowed to perform at other venues. There's just an auditory quality to this work, an idea which we'll return to. Furthermore, the vibrant blue was also inspired by the use of color in 17th century Dutch paintings by artists such as Vermeer and Rembrandt.

Bearden connected himself and his subject matter to this well-respected and established tradition of painting through collage. And collage served as the apt metaphor for the reconstruction necessary after World War II. Just as people around the globe sought to rebuild their shattered realities, so too did artists generate these fresh abstractions by cutting and pasting scraps of existing material.

These complex layered works demonstrate how artists are recycling remnants of their histories, both personal and found, to reflect on the past and present and imagine new futures. Ellison also noted the poetry of blues present in Bearden's collage. So in the exhibition, we have paired it with a collage by Grace Hartigan and a print by Fayga Ostrower that share these similar vibrant blue elements.

Hannah Wilke, by contrast, gravitated towards rich pinks and oranges in this biomorphic drawing from the 1960s. Arranged horizontally, the circles and semicircles overlap as they couple and decouple and are rendered in pink and orange pastel that she blended and smudged. The circular shapes, particularly the three at the bottom of the arc on the right-hand side, evoke breasts or testicles.

The large empty circles, however, are evocative of her folded sculptures made of gum or latex, difficult to see, but on her forehead here, she would chew gum and then fold it and unfold it. Try it next time you're chewing gum. And she called these sculptures "boxes" in reference to the patriarchal slang for vagina.

And so this idea of emptiness is present in the drawing and the voids here as well. And she herself insisted that her art really made visible the taboo subject of female sexuality. She remembered, quote, "The drawings are erotic, but they do not obviously represent genitals, yet you know damn well that there is something very sexual about them.

I still get into a lot of trouble for the sexual meaning of my work, no matter how beautiful I wanted to make it." She aimed to really create art that reclaimed female sexuality from patriarchal norms and censorship that demanded obedience and modesty. She explained that she used pastel tones of red, pinks, and oranges because they were historically associated with femininity. And this was another way to resist cultural expectations.

Wilke's drawings and sculptures were part of a wave of abstract erotic art during the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and '70s that embraced sexual imagery as a means of empowerment. The activist and scholar, Audre Lorde, said the erotic was a source of power, especially for women whose lives are lived out in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society. By presenting the erotic through such androgynous or re-imagined forms, artists reclaimed it as a liberatory, political force.

In fact, she herself, Wilke herself said in 1975, "I tried to elevate the status of women by making art with a very sexual, sensitive, open, free feeling." She later co-founded the advocacy group Fight Censorship in an effort to call attention to sexism in the art world and defend women artists who made sexually explicit and political art. Wilke, along with Richard Hunt and Romare Bearden and many other artists featured in the exhibition, used biomorphic abstraction to call attention to and push against societal inequities. They found that abstraction offered them a way to evoke these complex, conceptual ideas while also subverting censorship.

The focus of this final section will look at the work of Lenore Tawney and others to show how mid-century abstract artists were inspired by sound and music. Born in Ohio in 1907, Tawney moved to Chicago at age 20 where she took night classes for over 15 years at the School of the Art Institute between 1927 and 1942. She also enrolled in classes in 1946 at the Chicago Institute of Design where she studied sculpture, painting, and weaving.

In 1964, Tawney visited the First World Congress of Craftsmen in New York where she saw a Jacquard loom for the first time. The Jacquard loom is a type of mechanical weaving machine invented in 1804 by the Frenchman, Joseph Marie Jacquard, who pictured here, this is actually a weaving of Jacquard made on a Jacquard loom. So a nice little meta moment.

Both these works are in the collection of the Art Institute. And the Jacquard loom created these really complex designs based on a series of punch cards, so it was a predecessor to computer programming. But Tawney was more interested in how the thread was suspended from a harness at center.

Seen here, they're really gathered. These threads gathered from the harness, so floating in air. She was trained as a weaver on a traditional loom in which the threads were arranged on horizontal and vertical axes.

And so the mechanics of the Jacquard loom really opened up the boundaries of weaving for Tawney. And speaking of the loom, she said, quote, "I was so impressed and thrilled by this. The loom was as wide as this room and had all these threads that went up, up, and they were all trembling.

It was terrific, like music going. Well, I couldn't get over that, so I began to make drawings." The work featured in the exhibition, "Red Circle," belongs to that series of drawings from 1964. And here, lines of ink converge from the four corners into this red circle at center, really drawing the energy towards the center of the paper.

Tawney often envisioned her works as expanding and contracting, really breathing and living. The luminescent red dot seems to also bend and disrupt the grid, pulling towards it. And the hand-drawn lines superimposed atop the rigidity of mechanical grid of the graph paper further generate this optical effect of tension and depth.

The four corners of the square, however, anchor the circle on the page and is reminiscent of stability and cosmic unity, which was a significant symbol that often recurred in Tawney's work. In fact, she returned to the graph paper drawings over 30 years later when in the 1990s, she translated them into three-dimensional weavings. Titled "Drawings in Air," she attached linen twine along the four edges of a plexiglass case and then wound them together at center to create a central point of tension and connection.

Tawney understood her drawings and weavings as being all one thing. She fluidly moved back and forth between these media to explore the carving-out of space. Both the drawing and the re-imagined sculpture are as much line and thread as they are negative empty space.

And in fact. Oops, nope. The photograph from the side shows this multi-layered approach in her "Drawings in Air." In contrast to traditional weavings in which they're placed on a wall and you view them from the front, Tawney created sculptural weavings meant to be viewed in the round or from different angles. Sometimes you could walk under her sculptures as well and look up.

So just as her drawing lines really disrupt the grid of the graph paper, so too do her sculptures subvert and resist the grid imposed by the traditional loom and instead embrace an improvisational approach. She often described her process as feeling or listening to each thread in a kind of meditative process. Her graph paper drawings also led her to create a series of postcards in the 1960s.

Here we see that she returns to the symbolism of the circle within the square, although this time with an eye staring out and in the rectangular constraints of the piece of paper. It's a little folded at the top, so I like to imagine that it was forced to, like, a mail slot or something because this was sent in fact to Katharine Kuh. Kuh was a pioneer of Chicago's modern art scene, having founded Chicago's first commercial gallery of modern art in 1936.

And she was the Art Institute's first curator of Modern Painting and Sculpture in 1954. Tawney and Kuh maintained a long friendship, and we are lucky to have 18 of Tawney's postcards to Kuh in the Ryerson and Burnham Library. Ku was also an early supporter of Tawney's work, saying, quote, "Lenore led so-called fiber art out of the range of anything like weaving.

They are great transparent bas-reliefs." Kuh thus also recognized the groundbreaking sculptural approach of Tawney's work. And as a curator of modern art, Kuh's responsibilities included developing relationships with artists whose work she admired and aimed to collect. Two of the works displayed in "Beyond Form" were privately collected by Kuh, and upon her death in 1994, were included in her bequest to the Art Institute.

Claire Falkenstein inscribed the phrase, "To a friend Katharine Kuh a bientot," on her print, which we discussed earlier. "A bientot" signals that she was hoping to or planning to see Kuh again soon, as the two were lifelong friends and corresponded quite frequently. As with Tawney, Kuh had also been an early and vigorous defender of Falkenstein's innovative sculptures.

The drawing on the left, however, bears the inscriptions, "For Katharine 1950? Hedda Sterne." I like that even the artist herself is unsure what year this was created, question mark? So Hedda Sterne had immigrated to the United States in 1941 after narrowly surviving a Nazi raid on her Jewish neighborhood in Bucharest. She settled in New York and began exploring the motion and light of her new urban environment, as in this drawing in which the rapid and spontaneous application of watercolor onto wet areas of the paper create these diffuse, fuzzy edges, particularly visible in this blue tendril at right. Kuh prominently included one of Sterne's abstract paintings of New York in her exhibition, "American Artists Paint the City" at the 1956 Venice Biennale.

Kuh considered that Sterne's work captured some of New York's staccato excitement. And although New York was upheld as a symbol of urban progress, its art world often remained frustratingly segregated and hierarchical. Here, Stern is pictured alongside other famous abstract artists of the 1950s, a group famously known as the Irascibles for their opposition to the art establishment whom they considered anti-modern.

Sterne was the only female member in the photo, and she's standing in the back, still dressed in her coat because she was not invited by the group, but she showed up and was only included because of her persistent presence. The photo shows the men who became the most well known and celebrated figureheads of abstract expressionism, while others like Sterne were often left on the margins or fighting for their place in the narrative. And in fact, similar to Sterne, Norman Lewis was an early pioneer of abstract art in New York in the 1940s, but was often overlooked because of his status as a politically-engaged Black American artist.

In response, he co-founded artists groups with Romare Bearden and Beauford Delaney, whose works are also on view in the show. Lewis explained, "My main concern is with the condition of man, the things that happen to people, how they react, and the impact of their spirits. This is what I tried to capture." Lewis was also particularly engaged in the musical scene of New York.

He drew this while listening to Charlie Parker, an improvisational jazz saxophonist. The compact vertical lines really mimic Parker's quick tempos while the looping swirls down here refer to his complex harmonies. It's quite a beautiful work.

And similar to Lenore Tawney's drawing, which evokes the repetitive sounds of the Jacquard loom, Lewis's work presents an innovative approach to drawing that translates an auditory experience to a visual one through spontaneous gestures. Lewis, Sterne, and Tawney's drawings all showcase artists' interest in translating the sound, whether from machine, city, or music. And their abstractions, particularly Tawney's re-imaginings of her drawing into sculpture, challenged the boundaries of fine art.

Tawney's drawing also weaves in, pun intended, the history of modern art in Chicago, highlighting a curator's role in developing narratives of modern art for public audiences. The works of Tetsuo Ochikubo, Richard Hunt, and Lenore Tawney showcased the many ways that artists engage with abstraction post World War II. The goal of "Beyond Form" is to not only demonstrate how artists were moving, as the title suggests, beyond form or beyond figurative realism, but also for us to move beyond singular, static narrative of abstraction.

And the exhibition shows that between 1940 and 1970, artists around the world are experimenting often in collaboration with each other and creating dynamic works that help them make sense of their new realities and challenge established world views. This is the first time that many of the works in the show will be on view at the Art Institute of Chicago. And we hope that you'll discover new connections and stories as you walk through the exhibition, thank you.

(audience applauds) We have some time for questions. So if you have a question, please raise your hand and wait, and a staff member will bring a microphone to you.

[Staff Member] Chloe, we have a question over here. Hi, okay.

[Attendee] Hello. Thank you. I'm going to ask a question about abstraction and form, recognizing that some of it's reflected in the exhibition. But I'm curious what you learned in this process about the nature of abstraction relative to form.

What do these terms mean to you? What did you learn about them?

Yeah, thank you for that question. Could everyone hear it? Yeah. What what did I learn about abstraction? And it's really complicated, and there's not one way that a work can be abstract.

And I think that's what our exhibition highlights so beautifully is that there are many, many, many ways that artists are engaging with this language. So some of them are ripping and collaging. Some of them are, literally, there's an artist who pours solvent onto board and burns it on fire.

And this creates kind of a soot residue that... There's many, many ways for works to be abstract. And in fact, when we were trying to figure out the layout of the exhibition, we came up time and time again against how to categorize or how to organize these works into the galleries.

And we hope that when you walk through, you'll see that a work that has biomorphic motifs might not be in the biomorphic, the drawn-from-life section, but now that you have that vocabulary, you can better understand it. In relationship to form, we really also envisioned the first two spaces of the exhibition as introducing people to what abstraction is. I think sometimes there's a hesitancy or kind of an anxiety around abstraction.

And we found that many artists are actually looking to their natural and built environments and to their own body and incorporating motifs from houses, from the sea, from body parts. And we hope that this will, even if abstract, will allow people to kind of move into the exhibition. So it's very complicated, but we hope that we've opened up some new connections for you all.

Yeah, I think we have one in the back.

There you go. Thank you. Are there any works that you decided not to include in the exhibition? And could you tell us a little bit about why?

For sure. I mean, Mel and I went through the vaults for months pulling out, we have 80,000 works in prints and drawings. You know, the full 80,000 are not abstract art from the 1940, 1970, but we have many, many, many, many.

And we often would find an artist, find their work in our database, go to the vault, pull it out, and either it just didn't resonate with us aesthetically, or it also had been on view too recently. Works on paper are very delicate. And so the works that you see here will not be shown for another 5 or 10 years because of conservation requirements.

And so sometimes we had a work that we really were drawn to, but just could not include because it had been shown a couple of years ago, unfortunately. Or we had works that, sometimes we talk, when designing an exhibition and choosing works, we think about what can hold a wall. And so a work might be great when you're viewing it and holding it like this, but on a wall, it might not always have the power to draw visitors in or to connect with others.

So we went through probably 20 or so iterations of our checklist, choosing works, yeah. Yeah, I think we have one. Thank you for waiting. It's...

[Attendee] Hi, I had one question about who the initial patrons for these experiments with form were and kind of the initial not just market for these artists, but also, kind of, who was kind of financing and providing support for these experiments with abstraction.

Yeah, thank you. A lot of these artists were creating these abstract works in collaboration with each other in workshops. And they were not always, you know, well received by contemporary galleries or museums, but really by working closely with each other and creating this kind of, creating these artist-run collectives and groups, they found they had the space to experiment.

The artist I talked about earlier who poured and then burned the work had founded a group that created happenings in Germany. So instead of exhibitions taking place in galleries, these happenings happened in the street or in fields, often at night with lots of light. So artists are really kind of pushing against, are finding their own means.

In terms of the works in the exhibition from a curatorial perspective, more than about half of them were acquired in the last decade. So our curators have been really insistent on expanding these narratives of abstraction and of collecting artists who were not represented in our collection beforehand. So we have dedicated funds to collect certain works of art.

And Katharine Kuh, of course, was one of those early pioneers in Chicago.

[Staff Member] Do we have another? Yeah. Could you pass this please?

[Attendee] Hi there. Congratulations again. This question is still coming to my brain right now. With such a heavy focus on artists who didn't necessarily always get the appreciation or the respect that they deserved when they're in their most heaviest creative period, what is your, kind of, long-term goal for people who are coming through and seeing these works? And how can they, like, in the future, continue to, like, appreciate and be expanded upon by these kinds of artists?

That's a great question. I hope that you all take away a few artists, names of artists who you had no knowledge of beforehand. Now, there are some names in here that you'll be familiar with from maybe history textbooks, and their works are beautiful.

And I hope that you, for example, I had no clue who Tetsuo Ochikubo was before I pulled his work out of the vault. I knew Jackson Pollock, of course, but not Ochikubo. And I think Ochikubo's litho really is quite a powerful work.

So I hope that you all please read our object labels. We spent a lot of time and rounds of editing with our lovely interpretation and editorial teams, but please read those. And we've really tried to give object labels chats that explain what a work is to artists that we felt were not present in the canon.

So I hope that when you talk about this exhibition or you talk about abstraction with your friends or your colleagues, you share names that are not as well known and that you maybe, yeah, look for them in other museums and keep that curiosity, thank you.

[Staff Member] I think that's a great note to end on. Thank you so much, Chloe.

[Chloe] Thank you so much, everyone. (audience applauds)