POSTED BY Katie R., ON January 27, 2012, 0 COMMENTS

It was June 1890, and Charles L. Hutchinson, then-president of the Art Institute of Chicago, together with Martin Ryerson and two other museum trustees, were making a purchase of no little significance. The art dealer? The renowned Parisian gallery of Durand-Ruel and Company. The source? None other than Princess Demidoff (formerly Princesss Lise Troubetzkoi), widow of the late Prince Paul Demidoff of the Florentine branch of the Russian noble family founded by Count Nikolai Demidoff. The paintings? Let’s look at the bill of sale: Hobbema, Rembrandt, Steen, and Van Dyck, and that’s just for starters. These Demidoff paintings, however, were just a small part of a larger purchase from Durand-Ruel, primarily of Dutch and Flemish paintings, that was intended to jump-start the Art Institute’s brand new collection.

And to show what good taste these gentlemen had, a quick search revealed that at least two of these paintings—Jan Steen’s The Family Concert and Gerard Terborch’s The Music Lesson—are still in the museum’s collection!

POSTED BY Katie R., ON January 26, 2012, 0 COMMENTS

Becoming a docent at the Art Institute is no small task. After a competitive admission process, docents accepted into the program train for three semesters to gain general knowledge of the museum’s collection as well as learn and practice interactive gallery teaching. And to become an “all” docent (one who is prepared to give any of the 22 tours offered for student groups), it generally takes around five years. However, the rewards can be enormous. As our own museum director Douglas Druick stated on the occasion of the docent program’s 50th anniversary last year, “to walk through the galleries and see children, led by docents, jumping up and raising their hands to talk is to see the work of the museum at its best.”

Currently, about 150 docents give tours to the over 100,000 students who visit the Art Institute each year. But we’re looking for more…docents, that is. Right this very second, we’re recruiting a new training class to begin in September 2012. If you love art and enjoy working with students, we invite you to one of the following information sessions (in the Modern Wing’s Ryan Education Center) to hear more about the museum’s docent program. Or contact aicdocent@artic.edu with any questions.

Thursday, January 26 at 5:30
Thursday, February 23 at 5:30
Friday, February 24 at 1:00

POSTED BY Guest Blogger, ON January 24, 2012, 0 COMMENTS

Preparations for the exhibition Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity—an exhibition that explores the way the Impressionists drew from modern fashion in their quest to forge a new visual language for painting—are in full swing. The exhibition opens in fall 2012 at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, moves to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in February of 2013, and closes with a summer 2013 showing at the Art Institute of Chicago. So far we’ve been fortunate to find not only the exact corseted and crinolined silhouettes that we need in order to showcase garments in proximity to the paintings they inspired, but we’ve even found the type of fabrics suggested for some of the more outstanding painted dresses. One example is a blue silk robe de promenade, or walking dress, from 1874, with the same apron skirt and bustle seen in Renoir’s La Parisienne (National Museum Wales, Cardiff), which he showed at the first exhibition of the artists who would be labeled the Impressionists.

Weirdly, though, the exhibition teams here, in New York, and in Paris have been struggling to locate that which would seem to be the easiest of all to uncover—the ballgown. Isn’t this the kind of dress one keeps for their progeny but is never actually worn again? And isn’t a ball dress the kind of garment that gets taken out only on very special occasions so suffers less from modifications? John Singer Sargent, the American artist in Paris, only wanted to paint portraits of women wearing ball dresses, which he felt had an enduring style. So why is it then, that from many public and private collections we’ve approached, we have not been able to find for Chicago an example of those elegant, décolleté off-the shoulder, satin or tulle evening gowns that are the star of many Impressionist paintings, in particular those of Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot?

So I extend my quest to the internet. Since everyone has a great great great grandmother and perhaps some of you have attics or basements filled with old relics, any chance you know the whereabouts of the perfect French-made ballgown for our exhibition? ggroom@artic.edu

—Gloria Groom, David and Mary Winton Green Curator, 19th Century European Painting and Sculpture

Image Credits:

Pierre-Auguste Renoir. La Parisienne, 1874. National Museum Wales, Cardiff.

Berthe Morisot. Jeune femme en toilette de bal, 1879. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

POSTED BY Troy K., ON January 19, 2012, 20 COMMENTS

Several years ago, Hilary Thayer Hamann published a wonderful book called Categories On the Beauty of Physics. The book, which I highly recommend, beautifully blended accessible explanations of various physics topics with illuminating selections from literature and fine art. (Paintings from the Art Institute’s collection were used for the topics “momentum,” “orbit,” and “particle.”) Subsequent volumes covering other scientific disciplines were planned, but alas, there is still only one book in the series.

This great book came to mind one day as I was walking through Contemporary Drawings from the Irving Stenn Jr. Collection, an exhibition on view in galleries 124-127 until February 26. It is plain to see that many of the drawings in the exhibition relate to mathematics, including arithmetic, geometry, patterns, and codes. It struck me, though, just how many of the drawings might be used to literally describe or illustrate traditional math problems like we’ve all seen in school. Imagine the wonderful textbooks that might result from collaborations between educators, artists, and museum curators…

Just for fun, I wrote a few math problems for some of the drawings in the exhibition. These problems probably miss the point of the drawings and definitely fall short as a useful educational tool. But, for the one or two of you who relish getting extra math homework from art museum blogs: enjoy!

Just to make things interesting, the first person who submits a comment below with the correct answers to all three problems will receive a complimentary copy of the exhibition catalogue. So sharpen your pencils and get to work! You may begin.

#1: Based on Mel Bochner, Study for Double Solid Based on Cantor’s Paradox, 1966

A solid form is constructed out of small blocks. Each small block is a cube having dimensions 1 ism x 1 ism x 1 ism. (An “ism” is a made-up unit of measure).  There are no hollow cavities inside the form. The entire solid form, which is 15 ism tall, is cut along a plane of symmetry into two pieces, as shown above. What is the volume of each half of the solid form?

#2 Based on Robert Moskowitz, Red Cross, 1986

A cross-shaped tank holding 600 gallons of red paint sits in the middle of a large white room. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the tank suddenly begins to leak from all twelve of its vertical faces. If half of the faces each leak at a constant rate of 1 gallon every 3 minutes, and the other half of the faces each leak at a constant rate of 1 gallon every 6 minutes, how long will it take until the tank is half empty?

#3 Based on Robert Mangold, Circle In and Out of a Polygon 2, 1973

A regular hexagon is inscribed inside a circle, which is itself inscribed inside a square. An irregular hexagon is formed by half of the square and half of the inscribed hexagon, as shown above. If the radius of the circle is 1 unit, what is the area of this irregular hexagon?

EXTRA CREDIT: Write your own math problem based on a work in the Art Institute’s collection and submit it to blog@artic.edu. If we get enough problems, we will post a few of our favorites. Problems can be easy, hard, serious, funny, or whatever. Be creative. Have fun.

POSTED BY Robby S., ON January 12, 2012, 1 COMMENTS

The years following World War II were ones of great upheaval and social unrest, and few countries underwent such drastic change as Japan. With many of its major cities destroyed during the war, Japan’s rebuilding process coincided with expansive economic growth, prosperity, and an increasingly Western cultural influence. In response to Japan’s rapid modernization, postwar youth rebelled against many of the country’s traditional ways of thinking and sought new forms of expression. Rough, Blurred, and Out of Focus: Provoke Magazine and Postwar Japanese Photography offers an introduction to this tumultuous time from the perspective of the disaffected youth who lived through it.

While an older generation of photographers returned to the popular objective style of photojournalism (as seen in the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson), young photographers sought a new aesthetic philosophy to document their changing world. This new generation used photography as a means of expression, not documentation, and considered the individual behind the camera as important as that which was being photographed.

Beginning in 1959 with the formation of the VIVO cooperative, photographers like Shōmei Tōmatsu, Ikkō Narahara, and Eikoh Hosoe forged a new style characterized by wild experimentation, ambiguity, and unsettling, often confrontational subject matter. The movement continued in the late 60s and 1970s with the short-lived Provoke Magazine and such photographers as Takuma Nakahira, Yutaka Takanashi, and Daidō Moriyama. Provoke’s distinctive style was described as are, bure, boke (“rough, blurry, and out of focus”). The rough graininess of the images came from deliberate printing techniques, while the blurry, out-of-focus qualities were a facet of the photographers’ expressionistic approach.

Rough, Blurred, and Out of Focus: Provoke Magazine and Postwar Japanese Photography is on display until February 27 in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries*. The photographs that impressed me most include:

Ikkō Narahara’s depiction of a Trappist monk running through a monastery

Yutaka Takanashi’s otherworldly behind-the-scenes photo of fashion models who, as the wall text aptly puts its, look “like an invasion of Mod spacemen”

Eikoh Hosoe‘s strange picture of a man’s arm wrapped around a seemingly disembodied woman’s head

A bride’s ecstatic expression, captured by Fukase Mishima

* Please note that this exhibition is closed on Saturdays and Sundays.

Image: Detail from image 4 in Volume 1, Provoke, 1968.