POSTED BY Guest Blogger, ON May 15, 2012, 0 COMMENTS

Whenever we open an exhibition as large and robust as Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, we offer our Members exclusive access to the exhibition before it opens to the public.  Our members are our supporters, our family, and our best ambassadors—we count on them to spread the word when they love an exhibition as much as we do!  We were originally planning on offering just three days of previews for Lichtenstein, but due to an overwhelming member response, we added extra days, for a total of six days of exclusive member previews and four member-only lectures.

This week, members have entered the Lichtenstein galleries with stars (or in this case, dots) in their eyes as they were greeted by room after room of Roy Lichtenstein’s most iconic works.  Many of them also joined us for a member lecture given by exhibition curator, James Rondeau.  As one excited member said, “This is the best preview I have been to. The lecture by the curator gave me insight into the show and helped me understand the context of Lichtenstein’s work within the sphere of art history.”  Another member exclaimed, “This is one of those exhibitions that you want to come back to again and again—and I will!”

Our Member previews continue through Friday, May 18.  Busy this week?  Not a problem!  We will be repeating the lecture halfway through the exhibition on Wednesday, July 11 at 2:00 PM, and at the end of the exhibition on Thursday, August 23 at 6:00 PM.  Click the links above to make your reservations now!  Not a member?  Click here to join today!

—Annie S., Assistant Director of Member Experience

POSTED BY Guest Blogger, ON May 10, 2012, 1 COMMENTS

The Art Institute’s amazing collection of Medieval to Impressionist paintings doesn’t move around very often. But in the intimate hallway around the main staircase off of Michigan Avenue, it’s a different story! There, rotations of prints intermingled with smaller paintings and sculpture change every 6 months to minimize light damage to these fragile artworks, and show off our holdings of over 50,000 prints. Like the paintings in the adjoining main galleries, the prints begin in fifteenth-century Germany in Gallery 202a (on the right of the room with Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day), and wrap all the way around the building, ending in Paris again with Degas pastels in the 1890s in Gallery 226a, to the left of the Caillebotte.

Gallery 223a is home to all things Victorian of the 1850s.  The current installation may appear to include only paintings, but look closer! Two works, a portrait of Queen Victoria and a shipwreck scene (both above), are actually “printed paintings” made with a complicated printing process by George Baxter. This prolific British entrepreneur printed works to decorate everything, including needle boxes, snuff boxes, medals, Great Exposition souvenirs, and other memorabilia. Baxter invented an innovative color printing technique so that he could mass-produce commercial images that resembled oil paintings. This effort earned him the epithet “The Picture Printer.” His “Baxter Process” integrated several traditional printing techniques, combining an intaglio “key” plate that printed the main features of the design with numerous relief color woodblocks. Baxter’s subjects varied from still-life imagery and genre scenes to images depicting important contemporary events. In the portrait, Queen Victoria is seated in state with the Crown of India on a cushion beside her. This print was released just after India was added to the British Empire. Similarly, Baxter based his dramatic shipwreck tableau on the description given by the only English survivor of a shipwrecked tea-merchant ship, the Reliance. Of the 116 passengers, only seven survived. Baxter used about 8 color blocks for this print, and 12 for his portrait of Queen Victoria, in addition to the intaglio key, exemplifying the intricacy of his complicated procedure. Both works attest to his ability to fashion vibrant, captivating prints, as well as his interest in Great Britain’s triumphs and tragedies.

For a whirlwind tour of the rest of art history through prints, start in 202a for luminous engravings and woodcuts of saints and secular subjects from early Northern Europe. Continuing to your right, 204a always includes two or more of our set of fifteenth-century Italian memory cards with eerie allegorical images, which noble youths used to learn about the hierarchical world around them. 205a introduces the visual excess of the Italian and French Renaissance, and 207a highlights the broad wit of the Germans across the border, with their equal emphasis on eclectic humanism and bodily humor. 208a houses a lush group of landscapes by Rembrandt van Rijn and after Peter Paul Rubens, which will only be up through September. 209a and 212a include 17th-century Italian prints and paintings, and 213a includes more Northern Baroque and British into the 18th century, often studded with satires by William Hogarth. 216a mingles French Baroque and Rococo with an exuberance of ornament prints and ornate portrait pastels. 217a is a dark and somber corner displaying through Halloween our fantastic Irish grisaille of a little girl seemingly lost in the wood, a skeletal Piranesi and a very repentant Mary Magdalene mezzotint. 219a is always devoted to Francisco de Goya’s feverish imagination, with 225a replete with Honoré Daumier’s more lighthearted Parisian caricatures. That gallery will showcase a hilarious selection on misguided fashion to coincide with the upcoming Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity exhibition in July 2013. 220a includes early 19th century French and British prints, and 221a early German ones, now including a set of unusual pastoral scenes that suggest all is not always copacetic in arcadia.

Not all of the galleries change at once, so check back on every visit to see what’s new!

—Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Curatorial Fellow, Department of Prints and Drawings

Image Credits:

George Baxter. The Wreck of the ”Reliance”(November 12, 1842), 1843. Gift of Henry M. Huxley.

George Baxter. Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, India, etc., c. 1859. Gift of Henry M. Huxley.

Schelte Adams Bolswert. Landscape with the Great Ruins, c. 1614. Print Sales Miscellaneous Fund.

POSTED BY Guest Blogger, ON April 25, 2012, 2 COMMENTS

Have you ever seen a book on display in an Art Institute exhibition and wondered what the next page looked like? Now you can turn through the pages yourself!

Thanks to a generous Community Associates pilot-project grant, over a dozen of the museum’s most important artist sketchbooks, albums, and unique printed items are now online for full viewing. They will also make increasingly regular appearances in exhibition kiosks. The most recent addition to the digital lineup is the newly-acquired sketchbook by Gustave Caillebotte from the Department of Prints and Drawings. This is the only known sketchbook by the beloved artist of the Art Institute’s own Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877). The 29 drawings—in a commercial-style artist book with a pencil holder flap at the top—give an unprecedented look at what the artist was up to from 1883–1886, as he scrupulously labeled each landscape location throughout his travels.

The books have all been culled from Prints and Drawings and from the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, with pieces from more departments coming soon. They cover a wide range of dates, media, and artists, with a particular emphasis on our great wealth of 19th-century French sketchbooks, including versions by Géricault, Cézanne, and Redon, as well as Caillebotte. At the moment, the website boasts a total of 16 books and three anatomical flap prints, including 10 artist’s and architect’s sketchbooks, two albums of prints and drawings, two hand-drawn medieval manuscripts, and two rare printed books/photobooks. You can browse them all in chronological order, or look at specific media (sketchbooks, manuscripts, and printed books).

One of the most colorful digitized volumes to date, from the Libraries’ Special Collections, is an amazing Devotional Scrapbook assembled by an eighteenth-century Bavarian monastery librarian. In creating this love letter to printmaking (finished and dated on Valentine’s Day, 1798) the librarian assembled and saved nearly 1000 ephemeral prints and drawings from oblivion with this simple explanation: ‘because some day, someone might care.’ With the innovative Turning the Pages software, which was developed by the British Library, we can see the toll time has taken on these prints—several digital wormholes show the transparent tracks where hungry critters nibbled through the first few sheets. On page 9, you can even peek under a print that was added later, coyly hiding the original image.

All of these digitized books have great surprises to offer, and more will be added on a regular basis, so look closely and check back frequently!

—Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Curatorial Fellow, Department of Prints and Drawings

POSTED BY Guest Blogger, ON April 17, 2012, 1 COMMENTS

Ed. Note: The writers of this post, Kayla and Naomi, are two of the teens who participate in Teen Lab, the museum’s after school program run in partnership with After School Matters. During Teen Lab, 20 teens from all over the city meet at the Art Institute to learn about the museum, its collection, and museum careers, and to make artwork inspired by their experiences. Click here for more information about Teen Lab.

If you like The Nightmare Before Christmas or Disney or supporting young artists (or maybe all three?), then we have an event for you. During this semester’s Teen Lab, a group of students (including yours truly) focused on stop-motion animation, which is animating objects and drawing using a series of photos. We learned about a variety of techniques like making flipbooks, moving objects around, and using cut paper. We would take pictures during the process and then animate them later on a computer.

For inspiration, we used artworks from the galleries in the Art Institute. In one mini project, we used photos of artworks that we then cut into pieces and rearranged while taking pictures of each little movement.

To animate, we also worked with MacBooks and used the application iMovie to set the timing right. It took a lot of time just to complete just one mini project. In total, we spent three days a week for ten weeks here in the Art Institute for the program. Not to mention the seemingly countless hours spent taking pictures for these animation projects!

To show off our work, Teen Lab will be having a public screening on Thursday, April 19th from 4:30 to 6:30pm. It will be held in the Ryan Education Center in our home at Studio B. There will be snacks served and you’ll get your own chance to learn how to animate like we did. So don’t be shy and come check us out on Thursday…we know you want to!

—Kayla Henderson and Naomi Gonzalez, Teen Lab participants

POSTED BY Guest Blogger, ON April 16, 2012, 5 COMMENTS

In deference to the safety of the museum’s collection, painting in the Art Institute has traditionally been restricted to a limited number of students and professionals. But thanks to creative uses of mobile devices, the museum has been able to extend that artistic experience to a wider audience without spilling a drop of paint. In a recent Teen Studio Workshop on Experimental Painting, museum education staff—using an iPad app that simulates painting techniques—provided teens with a digital canvas and virtual brushes and paints.  Inspired by artworks like Gerhard Richter’s Ice (1-4) shown below, participants “squeezed” virtual paint onto their simulated canvases, blended and smudged colors with a palette knife, and built up layers and textures, all through touching or dragging their fingers over iPad screens.

Museum lecturers also use iPads as virtual portfolios to show images that supplement understanding of artworks discussed on public gallery talks. Digital images on the iPads permit the audience to view sculpture from different angles, and to explore related works from the collection not on display, or comparative artworks from other museums or collections. The speaker below, for instance, shows the image of an ancient coffin to help convey the original purpose of the Egyptian funerary objects in the cases behind him. Lecturers use them to zoom in on minute details, some not detectable to the naked eye, and the highly visible backlit screen gives iPads an advantage over their paper analogues.

Lecturers have even begun to incorporate audio and video into their tours. During a gallery talk, for example, visitors might listen to the atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg and compare it to the abstract compositions of Vasily Kandinsky; or they might compare movement, rhythm, mood, or repetition in an artwork to that found in an example of jazz or classical music. A lecturer might invite visitors to explore Richmond Barthé’s bronze sculpture The Boxer and watch an archival video showing the artists process and sculptural techniques in his studio. Most recently, children were introduced to the illustration exhibition Animals around the World: Picture Books by Steve Jenkins in the Ryan Education Center both literally and virtually. First, students looked closely at the dynamic paper collages combined with amazing facts about inhabitants of the animal kingdom. Then an educator showed videos on an iPad of the animals in their habitats, enabling some of our youngest audiences to see examples of where an artist drew inspiration for his work.

Mobile technology is increasingly demonstrating its potential to connect museum audiences of all ages with the artists and their works and to provide opportunities for creative experiences through dynamic interaction with the collection. Stay tuned for more ways in which the Art Institute of Chicago will engage 21st century visitors with mobile and touch-screen technology, bringing them closer to the collection in new and exciting ways.

—Carolina K., Education Technology Manager, Digital Information and Access