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NARRATOR: Art Institute director Douglas Druick.

DOUGLAS DRUICK: This picture of a mother and her child at the beach was painted by Pablo Picasso in 1921, the same year that his first son was born by his wife, Olga Khokhlova, who had been a dancer with the Ballet Russe.

NARRATOR: After the cataclysmic events of World War I many artists including Picasso looked back to classical sources in their search and integrity.

DOUGLAS DRUICK: We know that Picasso goes to Rome in 1917 and is very deeply affected by the Roman sculpture that he sees while he’s in the city. This classical vocabulary enters his work and it’s fully expressed in this picture of 1921 in which you have this great solid monumental figure of the woman with the child in her lap. One thinks in terms of the volumes of important antique sculpture which have this sense of weight and monumentality and, indeed, serenity. The fascinating thing about Picasso is that he could explore different styles simultaneously.

NARRATOR: Turn around to look at the figure in a red armchair across the gallery. This painting made ten years after the mother and child depicts Marie Thérèse Walter, with whom Picasso had recently become involved.

DOUGLAS DRUICK: This is the first picture in which Picasso used what will become a signature iconography and that is painting a figure face-on and in profile and melding the two together as he does in this portrait of Marie Thérèse. The picture is not only inventive, formally, pictorially, it’s also very inventive in terms of the materials that Picasso used.

NARRATOR: Curator Stephanie D’Alessandro.

STEPHANIE D’ALESSANDRO: Marc Chagall’s an artist who we normally think of with these very beautiful, lyrical, dream-like pictures often with men and women and animals floating in space, very joyful images. However, in the 1930s he began to focus more directly on the political and social situations that were happening in Europe and most particularly on the persecution of the Jews.

NARRATOR: In this painting made in 1938 Chagall focuses on one of the most resonant persecutions in Western culture, the crucifixion of Christ. Radically, he emphasizes Christ’s Jewish identity, linking his suffering with that of contemporary Jewish people. Christ’s loincloth is a Jewish prayer shawl and Biblical patriarchs and a matriarch float above him in place of angels.

STEPHANIE D’ALESSANDRO: There are a number of smaller scenes in the picture that relate some of the recent events that happened in Europe at about this time including Kristallnacht, which was on the ninth of November in 1938 when in Germany the Jewish synagogues were ransacked and burned. Even though this picture isn’t as colorful as Chagall’s typical images, there’s actually a very beautiful quality of light in this painting. There’s a black and white contrast that Chagall used to evoke a sense of ethereality and spiritualism even in a picture that has such sad imagery.

NARRATOR: In 1937 Chagall wrote an autobiographical poem that reflects many of the images seen in this painting.

NARRATOR:
In 1890, Claude Monet began to paint this series of wheat stacks, in all seasons, at different times of day.

In 1890, he wrote to a friend:

ACTOR (CLAUDE MONET):
I’m working away at a series of different effects (of stacks), but at this time of the year, the sun sets so quickly that I can’t keep up with it. …but the further I go, the better I see that it takes a great deal of work to succeed in…what I want to render: ‘instantaneity,’ above all…the same light diffused over everything…

NARRATOR:
By this time, Monet lived in the small village of Giverny, northwest of Paris. He could see these fields outside his back door. Gone were the scenes of daily urban life that had once captivated him and his Impressionist peers. Gloria Groom, David and Mary Winton Green Curator and Chair of European Painting and Sculpture.

GLORIA GROOM:
You see him moving not only away from Paris in subject matter, but in the way he’s painting and in the colors he’s using, that are in some ways, very much not natural. They’re moving into a different key that is based on what he feels, rather than what he is seeing.

I think when you’re looking at these paintings you’re seeing something beyond Impressionism in many ways, because it’s no longer about modern life. So there’s no longer a sense of place in the same way. It’s a sense of place recreated in the artist’s mind. He’s taking on a subject that is so banal and so anti-picturesque, especially for the time it was painted.

But it’s rather a very different approach to picture-making. And doing something that no other artist had done. So that instead of painting a one-off and then painting a second one, he’s painting a group that he sees as an ensemble. And one critic talks about them and he says: You don’t understand them except in comparison with one another.

NARRATOR:
At this point, you can continue the Highlights tour by walking back toward the Grand Staircase to find Gallery 211. Or, you could proceed downstairs to America Windows.