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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:
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.

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.