HAA 200 Final

Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1885

"Bedlam," "scandal," and "hilarity" were among the epithets used to describe what is now considered Georges Seurat's greatest work, and one of the most remarkable paintings of the nineteenth century, when it was first exhibited in Paris. Seurat labored extensively over A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884, reworking the original as well as completing numerous preliminary drawings and oil sketches (the Art Institute has one such sketch and two drawings). With what resembles scientific precision, the artist tackled the issues of color, light, and form. Inspired by research in optical and color theory, he juxtaposed tiny dabs of colors that, through optical blending, form a single and, he believed, more brilliantly luminous hue. To make the experience of the painting even more intense, he surrounded the canvas with a frame of painted dashes and dots, which he, in turn, enclosed with a pure white wood frame, similar to the one with which the painting is exhibited today. The very immobility of the figures and the shadows they cast makes them forever silent and enigmatic. Like all great master-pieces, La Grande Jatte continues to fascinate and elude.

Renoir, Two Sisters, 1880

"He loves everything that is joyous, brilliant, and consoling in life," an anonymous interviewer once wrote about Pierre-Auguste Renoir. This may explain why Two Sisters (On the Terrace) is one of the most popular paintings in the Art Institute. Here Renoir depicted the radiance of lovely young women on a warm and beautiful day. The older girl, wearing the female boater's blue flannel, is posed in the center of the evocative landscape backdrop of Chatou, a suburban town where the artist spent much of the spring of 1881. She gazes absently beyond her younger companion, who seems, in a charming visual conceit, to have just dashed into the picture. Technically, the painting is a tour de force: Renoir juxtaposed solid, almost life-size figures against a landscape that—like a stage set—seems a realm of pure vision and fantasy. The sewing basket in the left foreground evokes a palette, holding the bright, pure pigments that the artist mixed, diluted, and altered to create the rest of the painting. Although the girls were not actually sisters, Renoir's dealer showed the work with this title, along with Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando and others, at the seventh Impressionist exhibition, in 1882.

O'Keefe, Black Cross, New Mexico, 1930

"I saw the crosses so often—and often in unexpected places—like a thin dark veil of the Catholic Church spread over the New Mexico landscape," said Georgia O'Keeffe about her first visit to Taos, New Mexico, in the summer of 1929. A member of the circle of avant-garde artists who exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz's gallery 291 in New York, O'Keeffe had married the progressive photographer and dealer in 1924. What she encountered during late-night walks in the desert and then transformed into Black Cross, New Mexico were probably crosses erected near remote moradas, or chapels, by the secret Roman Catholic lay brotherhoods the Penitentes. As this pioneer of American modernism approached all of her subjects, whether buildings or flowers, landscapes or bones, here O'Keeffe magnified shapes and simplified details to underscore their essential beauty. She painted the cross just as she saw it: "big and strong, put together with wooden pegs," and behind it, "those hills . . . [that] go on and on—it was like looking at two miles of gray elephants." For O'Keeffe, "painting the crosses was a way of painting the country," a beloved region where, in 1949, she settled permanently and worked almost until her death at the age of ninety-eight.

O'Keefe, The Shelton with Sunspots, 1925

"I went out one morning to look at [the Shelton Hotel] and there was the optical illusion of a bite out of one side of the tower made by the sun, with sunspots against the building and against the sky," said Georgia O'Keeffe, recalling the precise moment that inspired her to paint The Shelton with Sunspots. Although her depictions of flowers and the southwestern landscape are powerful and evocative, O'Keeffe painted a group of cityscapes in the 1920s that are no less intriguing. She married the photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz in 1924, and the following year they moved into the Shelton, a recently completed skyscraper. O'Keeffe was fascinated by the soaring height of the building and emphasized its majesty in this painting by rendering it from the street below. In the glaring light of the emerging sun, the building becomes an abstracted series of rectangles arranged in the center of the composition. Yet the hard edges of the Shelton are softened by the numerous circular sunspots and wavy, flowing lines of smoke and steam, suggesting that despite her urban subject matter, O'Keeffe nevertheless sought to unify man-made and organic forms, just as she would in her southwestern paintings such as Black Cross, New Mexico .

Mitchell, City Landscape, 1955

Although influenced by Abstract Expressionist artists in New York in the early 1950s, Joan Mitchell did not prioritize self-expression: her often exuberant abstractions were "about landscape, not about me," she once explained. Mitchell painted large, light-filled canvases animated by loosely applied skeins of bright color—here infused with the energy of a large metropolis. The title suggests a relationship between the painting's network of pigments and the nerves or arteries of an urban space. The sense of spontaneity conveyed in City Landscape, however, belies Mitchell's methods. Unlike many of her contemporaries, who were dubbed "action painters," Mitchell worked slowly and deliberately. "I paint a little," she said. "Then I sit and look at the painting, sometimes for hours. Eventually, the painting tells me what to do."

Chagall, White Crucifixion, 1938

The 1938 painting White Crucifixion represents a critical turning point for the artist Marc Chagall: it was the first of an important series of compositions that feature the image of Christ as a Jewish martyr and dramatically call attention to the persecution and suffering of European Jews in the 1930s. In White Crucifixion, his first and largest work on the subject, Chagall stressed the Jewish identity of Jesus in several ways: he replaced the loincloth with a prayer shawl, his crown of thorns with a headcloth, and the mourning angels that customarily surround him with three biblical patriarchs and a matriarch, clad in traditional Jewish garb. At either side of the cross, Chagall illustrated the devastation of pogroms. On the left, a village is pillaged and burned, forcing refugees to flee by boat and the three bearded figures at bottom left—one of whom clutches a Torah—to escape on foot. On the right, a synagogue and its Torah ark go up in flames, while below a mother comforts her child. By linking the martyred Jesus with the persecuted Jews and the Crucifixion with contemporary events, Chagall's painting passionately identifies the Nazis with Christ's tormentors and warns of the moral implications of their actions.

Monet, Stacks of Wheat, End of Summer, 1890

The monumental stacks that Claude Monet depicted in his series Stacks of Wheat rose fifteen to twenty feet and stood just outside the artist's farmhouse at Giverny. Through 1890 and 1891, he worked on this series both in the field, painting simultaneously at several easels, and in the studio, refining pictorial harmonies. In May 1891, Monet hung fifteen of these canvases next to each other in one small room in the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris. An unprecedented critical and financial success, the exhibition marked a breakthrough in Monet's career, as well as in the history of French art. In this view, and in nearly all of the autumn views in the series, the conical tops of the stacks break the horizon and push into the sky. But in most of the winter views, which constitute the core of the series, the stacks seem wrapped by bands of hill and field, as if bedded down for the season. For Monet, the stack was a resonant symbol of sustenance and survival. He followed this group with further series depicting poplars, the facade of Rouen Cathedral, and, later, his own garden at Giverny. The Art Institute has the largest group of Monet's Stacks of Wheat in the world.

Archibald Motley Jr., Nightlife, 1940

Chicago painter Archibald Motley represented the vibrancy of African American culture, frequently portraying young, sophisticated city dwellers out on the town. Nightlife depicts a crowded cabaret in the South Side neighborhood of Bronzeville, with people seated around tables and at the bar. The clock reads one o'clock, and the place is still hopping with drinkers and dancers. Two bartenders serve customers and restock the well-lit display of liquor, and couples dance furiously in the background to music provided by the jukebox at the right. The strange head atop the jukebox may be a peanut-vending machine known as "Smilin' Sam from Alabam'"; when a coin was inserted into the head and the tongue was pulled, the machine would dispense peanuts. Motley unified the composition through his use of repeated forms and a pervasive burgundy tone that bathes the entire scene in intense, unnatural light. (The artist had seen Edward Hopper's Nighthawks at the Art Institute the year before and was intrigued by his use of artificial light.) The stylized figures are tightly interconnected; they are arranged along a sharp diagonal that compresses the space into a stagelike setting. The dynamic composition and heightened colors vividly express the liveliness of the scene, making Nightlife one of Motley's most celebrated paintings.

Sherman, Untitled #92, 1981

Cindy Sherman is a major figure in the contemporary revival of directed, or staged, photography. Her work explores the pervasive effects that mass-media images have upon the construction, assumption, and projection of individual identities. Since the late 1970s, the artist has served as both photographer and model for a large cast of fictional personalities created through changes in costume, hair (usually a wig), makeup, and lighting. Sherman first gained recognition for a series of black-and-white works that imitate the look and feel of stills from popular films of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1981 she began a series of large color photographs that mimic the horizontal format of a magazine centerfold. Though formally reminiscent of such glossy spreads, Sherman's representations are fraught with anxiety, vulnerability, and longing. In Untitled #92, she depicted herself in a moment of cinematic distress, crouched on the floor with wet hair. Her costume—white blouse and plaid skirt—evokes a school uniform, and her well-manicured hands offer evidence of some unknown struggle. An imposing darkness surrounds her but a bright light, suggestive of a flashlight or the headlights of a car, illuminates her blank expression.

Fang, Reliquary Head, Central Africa, ca. 1850

Communion with the ancestral dead is an important focus of art and ritual for the Fang people of southern Cameroon and northern Gabon. This large, beautiful head was made to sit with its neck inserted into the lid of a bark reliquary box that held the selected remains, most often skull fragments, of an honored ancestor. Kept in a dark corner of a man's sleeping room, the head and box protected the remains and embodied the deceased, keeping his or her force available to the living. This reliquary head's almond-shaped eyes were embellished with copper-alloy inserts, one now missing, that would have reflected light in a startling manner, adding to the work's mysterious aura. The wide-eyed stare also lends a childlike quality to the ancestral likeness that would have been appreciated by the Fang. Within their worldview, the balance of opposing elements—infant and ancestor, birth and death—is considered a fundamental aspect of human existence. The sleek and refined features of this sculpture, including a high domed forehead, a jutting chin, and an elongated nose that is visually balanced by a plaited coiffure, highlight classic qualities of Fang abstraction that likewise embody opposition. These stylistic elements had a strong influence on the work of early twentieth-century artists such as Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

Morisot, Woman at Her Toilette, 1875

Consistent with the Impressionist aesthetic that Berthe Morisot fervently espoused, Woman at Her Toilette attempts to capture the essence of modern life in summary, understated terms. The painting also moves discreetly into the realm of female eroticism explored by Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir but seldom broached at this time by women artists. Rendered with soft, feathery brushstrokes in nuanced shades of lavender, pink, blue, white, and gray, the composition resembles a visual tone poem, orchestrated with such perfumed and rarified motifs as brushed blonde hair, satins, powder puffs, and flower petals. The artist even signed her name along the bottom of the mirror, as if to suggest that the image in her painting is as ephemeral as a silvery reflection. Morisot exhibited in seven of the eight Impressionist group shows; this painting was included in the fifth exhibition, in 1880, where her work received great acclaim. She was a particularly close friend of and frequent model for Manet, and she married his younger brother Eugène the year before she completed this painting. In addition to domestic interiors such as this one, Morisot's pictorial realm included studies of women and children, gardens, fields, and seaside vacation homes.

Hopper, Nighthawks, 1940

Edward Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by "a restaurant on New York's Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet," but the image—with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative—has a timeless, universal quality that transcends its particular locale. One of the best-known images of twentieth-century art, the painting depicts an all-night diner in which three customers, all lost in their own thoughts, have congregated. Hopper's understanding of the expressive possibilities of light playing on simplified shapes gives the painting its beauty. Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner emits an eerie glow, like a beacon on the dark street corner. Hopper eliminated any reference to an entrance, and the viewer, drawn to the light, is shut out from the scene by a seamless wedge of glass. The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another. (The red-haired woman was actually modeled by the artist's wife, Jo.) Hopper denied that he purposefully infused this or any other of his paintings with symbols of human isolation and urban emptiness, but he acknowledged that in Nighthawks "unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city."

Hesse, Hang Up, 1965

Eva Hesse produced an extraordinarily original, influential body of work in her short career, pioneering the use of eccentric materials and idiosyncratic sculptural forms. Hesse considered Hang Up among her most important works because it was the first to achieve the level of "absurdity or extreme feeling" she intended. Produced at the height of Minimalism and the Pop Art movement but belonging to neither, the piece was fabricated by her friend the artist Sol LeWitt, and her husband, Tom Doyle, who wrapped the wood stretcher with bed sheets and attached the cord-covered steel tubing. Sealed with acrylic, the object is subtly shaded from pale to dark ash gray. It is an ironic sculpture about painting, privileging the medium's marginal features: the frame and its hanging device, represented by the cord that protrudes awkwardly into the gallery. The title might be understood as a humorous instruction for the sculpture's display but also acts on a more psychological level. Collapsing the space between the viewer and the artwork, Hang Up creates a sense of disorientation and toys with our ability to discern a clear demarcation between painting and sculpture.

Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled, 1989

Felix Gonzalez-Torres's work is consistently characterized by a sense of quiet elegy. One of the defining moments in his widely influential career, "Untitled" can be considered a self-portrait in the form of words and dates. First realized in 1989, the work expanded with subsequent installations until the artist's premature death in 1996, and can continue to shift in ongoing manifestations. The portrait joins historical events and enigmatic personal milestones into a running text placed close to the ceiling. Such an installation is reminiscent of traditional friezes carved on the faces of public architecture, including the facade of the Art Institute's 1893 Allerton Building, which includes artists' names chiseled into a horizontal band. By offering clues to a personal history in a commemorative form normally dedicated to institutional use, Gonzalez-Torres undercuts the public and official in favor of the private and subjective, reminding us that an individual's identity is not always reducible to an image captured on canvas or etched in marble. "Untitled" can change each time it is installed and may be presented in an infinite variety of ways. Its owner is obliged to consider adding (or subtracting) events, including ones subsequent to the artist's death, ensuring that it remains relevant and dynamic.

Leger, Reclining Woman, 1920

Fernand Léger first saw the work of the Cubists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso at the Paris gallery of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Around 1909 Léger began to experiment with geometric shapes, complementary colors, and strong outlines, although his paintings remained largely nonrepresentational until after World War I. His involvement in the war had a profound impact on his work. In the years following, he introduced volumetric forms that resembled pistons and pipes into his compositions, joining others in the Parisian vanguard in charting a more sober, conservative course that placed renewed emphasis on objective observation. Substituting hard metallic tubes for pliant flesh and flat patterned disks for soft and dense pillows, the artist updated the classical figure of the odalisque (a female slave or concubine often pictured in the history of art as a reclining nude) with his particular blend of Cubism and machine aesthetics. Reclining Woman demonstrates Léger's interest in producing "everyday poetic images": paintings in which the manufactured object is the "principal personage," shown as precisely as possible to reveal an absolute sculptural value rather than sentimental associations. This work exemplifies the Purist style, a kind of industrial classicism that focused on utilitarian objects. Léger hoped that through such paintings, art would become accessible to the whole of modern society rather than to just a privileged few.

Kuba, Helmet Mask, Central Africa, ca. 1900

Formed in the seventeenth century, the Kuba Kingdom unites an ethnically diverse population across the Western Kasai region of today's Democratic Republic of the Congo. This mask, mukenga, is a regional variant of a Kuba royal mask that is made only in the northern part of the kingdom. The mask's form and lavish embellishment are associated with wealth and status. Cowrie shells and glass beads, once highly valued imports, cover much of its surface. A stylized elephant trunk and tusks rise from the top, evoking the powerful animal and the wealth accrued by the Kuba in the nineteenth century through control of the ivory trade. The tuft of red parrot feathers that is suspended from the tip of the trunk and the fur of a spotted feline on the mask's face are insignias of rank. During the funerals of titled aristocrats, a member of the men's initiation society may dance wearing the mukenga mask and an elaborate costume that includes many layers of woven raffia skirts and cowrie- and bead-laden belts, gloves, bracelets, and anklets. The deceased is laid out in identical attire, underscoring the association between the spirit, which is manifested through the performance of the mask, and the realm of the ancestors.

Matisse, Bathers by A River, 1915

Henri Matisse considered Bathers by a River to be one of the five most "pivotal" works of his career, and with good reason: it facilitated the evolution of the artist's style over the course of nearly a decade. Originally, the work was related to a 1909 commission by the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, who wanted two large canvases to decorate the staircase of his Moscow home. Matisse proposed three pastoral images, though Shchukin decided to purchase only two works, Dance II and Music (both State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg). Four years later, Matisse returned to this canvas, the rejected third image, altering the idyllic scene and changing the pastel palette to reflect his new interest in Cubism. He reordered the composition, making the figures more columnar, with faceless, ovoid heads. Over the next years, Matisse transformed the background into four vertical bands and turned the formerly blue river into a thick black vertical band. With its restricted palette and severely abstracted forms, Bathers by a River is far removed from Dance II and Music, which convey a graceful lyricism. The sobriety and hint of danger in Bathers by a River may in part reflect the artist's concerns during the terrible, war-torn period during which he completed it.

Picasso, Mother and Child, 1920

In 1917 Picasso traveled to Rome to design sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev's famed Ballets Russes. Deeply impressed by the ancient and Renaissance art of that city, he began painting monumental figures inspired by antiquity. His new classical style was influenced by the finely modeled odalisques of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and the late, oddly proportioned female nudes of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Mother and Child was also inspired by Picasso's own life. Just three years earlier he had married Russian dancer Olga Khokhlova, and in 1921 their son Paolo was born. Between 1921 and 1923 he produced at least twelve works on the subject of mothers and children, returning to a theme that he had explored during his Blue Period. But whereas those figures are frail and anguished, his classical-period figures, with their sculptural modeling and solidity, are majestic in proportion and feeling. Here an infant sits on the mother's lap and reaches up to touch her. The woman, dressed in a Grecian gown, gazes intently at her child. Behind them stretches a simplified background of sand, water, and sky. Picasso's treatment of the pair is not sentimental, but the relationship expresses a serenity and stability that characterized his own life at this time.

Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge, 1895

In At the Moulin Rouge Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec memorialized Parisian nightlife at the end of the nineteenth century. The painting is noted for its daring composition, dramatic cropping, and flat planes of strident color. A regular patron of the Moulin Rouge, one of the most famous cabarets of the Montmartre district, Toulouse-Lautrec here turned his acute powers of observation on the club's other habitués. The flaming red-orange hair of the entertainer Jane Avril is the focal point of the central seated group. Preening in the greenish mirror in the background is the dancer La Goulue. The stunted figure of the aristocratic artist appears, as it often did in life, next to his devoted, much taller cousin, Dr. Gabriel Tapié de Céleyran. But it is the frozen, acid-green face of the dancer May Milton that dominates the canvas and haunts the action. The painting comprises two joined parts: a small main canvas and an L-shaped panel to the lower and right edges. The canvas was severed after the artist's death, perhaps by his dealer (to make the composition less radical and more saleable), and restored sometime before 1914.

Cezanne, The Bay of Marseilles, 1885

In a letter to his friend and teacher Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne compared the view of the sea from L'Estaque to a playing card, with its simple shapes and colors. The landscape's configuration and color fascinated him. This painting is one of more than a dozen such vistas created by the artist during the 1880s. Cézanne divided the canvas into four zones—architecture, water, mountain, and sky. Although these four elements are seen repeatedly in Impressionist paintings, Cézanne's work is very different from that of his fellow artists. Whereas their primary purpose was to record the transient effects of light, Cézanne was interested in the underlying structure and composition of the views he painted. Filling the canvas with shapes defined by strong, contrasting colors and a complex grid of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines, he created a highly compact, dynamic pattern of water, sky, land, and village that at once refers back to traditionally structured landscape paintings and looks forward to the innovations of Cubism. Using blocklike brushstrokes to build the space, Cézanne created a composition that seems both two- and three-dimensional. Not locked tightly in place, his forms appear to touch and shift continually, creating a sense of volume and space that strengthens the composition and brings it to life.

Kandinsky, Improvisation No. 30 (Canons), 1915

In his seminal 1912 text Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Vasily Kandinsky advocated an art that could move beyond imitation of the physical world, inspiring, as he put it, "vibrations in the soul." Pioneering abstraction as the richest, most musical form of artistic expression, Kandinsky believed that the physical properties of artworks could stir emotions, and he produced a revolutionary group of increasingly abstract canvases—with titles such as Fugue, Impression, and Improvisation—hoping to bring painting closer to music making. Kandinsky's paintings are, in his words, "largely unconscious, spontaneous expressions of inner character, nonmaterial in nature." Although Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons) at first appears to be an almost random assortment of brilliant colors, shapes, and lines, the artist also included leaning buildings, a crowd of people, and a wheeled, smoking cannon. In a letter to the Chicago lawyer Arthur Jerome Eddy, who purchased the painting in 1913 and later bequeathed it to the Art Institute, Kandinsky explained that "the presence of the cannons in the picture could probably be explained by the constant war talk that has been going on throughout the year." Eventually, Kandinsky ceased making these references to the material world in his work and wholly devoted himself to pure abstraction.

Pollock, Greyed Rainbow, 1950

In the late 1940s Jackson Pollock developed a revolutionary form of Abstract Expressionism by dripping, pouring, and splashing paint onto large-scale canvases. Pollock emphasized the expressive power of the artist's gestures, materials, and tools, often applying paint with sticks, trowels, and palette knives instead of brushes. He also challenged the concept of easel painting by working on canvases placed either on the floor or fixed to a wall. With no apparent beginning or end, top or bottom, his paintings imply an extension of his art beyond the edges of the canvas, engulfing the viewer. Among the last great purely abstract paintings Pollock made before his untimely death in 1956, Greyed Rainbow is a quintessential example of action painting. The paint application ranges from thick chunks squeezed directly from a tube to thin, meandering lines poured from a container with a small hole or squirted from a baster. The work is predominantly black, white, gray, and silver; in the bottom third of the canvas, however, Pollock thinly concealed orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. The title of the work presumably refers to these grayed sections of hidden color.

Matisse, The Geranium, 1905

Like his artistic hero, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse merged the traditional and the avant-garde. In Still Life with Geranium, he transformed a simple still life into a populated Arcadian landscape painting, rendered in the brilliant color, thick paint, and rapid brushwork characteristic of the group of painters known as the Fauves (French for "wild beasts"). Matisse was recognized by critics as the leader of this group. This composition is one of contrasts—the pale palette and light brushwork in the upper half of the picture are juxtaposed with the darker colored, heavily painted lower half; the firmly planted pose of the female figure is contraposed with the almost-fleeing figure of the male; and the red vegetables grown near Paris are set near ceramic objects from exotic, faraway places. One of many still-life paintings in which Matisse incorporated his own figurative sculptures, here the artist challenged his viewers' expectations by rendering his modeled figures with minimal color and simple lines. Probably represented as plaster casts, these figures would later be made in bronze editions by the artist; versions of Woman Leaning on Her Hands (on the right of the geranium) and Thorn Extractor (on the left) are also in the collection of the Art Institute.

Hockney, American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), 1968

One of England's most versatile and inventive artists of the postwar era, the painter, printmaker, set designer, and photographer David Hockney settled in Los Angeles in 1964. His work since then has often reflected, with wit and incision, the sun-washed flatness of the Southern California environment. Perhaps the most iconic example from a group of double portraits of friends and associates from the 1960s, this large painting depicts contemporary-art collectors Fred and Marcia Weisman in the sculpture garden of their Los Angeles home. As Hockney said, "The portrait wasn't just in the faces, it was in the whole setting." As relentlessly stiff and still as the objects surrounding them, the couple stands apart, his stance echoed in the totem pole to the right, hers in the figurative sculpture behind her. Mrs. Weisman's distorted mouth also mirrors that of the totem pole. Mr. Weisman's shadow falls possessively over the abstract sculpture at his feet. His hand is clenched so tightly it seems as if he were squeezing paint out of his fist (Hockney deliberately left the drips). Brilliant, raking light flattens and abstracts the scene. This pervasive aridity is reinforced by the segregation of living, green foliage, including the lonely potted tree, to the edges of the painting. Unsurprisingly, the Weismans did not favor Hockney's harsh portrayal and did not keep the painting.

Picasso, The Old Guitarist, 1905

Pablo Picasso produced The Old Guitarist, one of his most haunting images, while working in Barcelona. In the paintings of his Blue Period (1901-4), of which this is a prime example, Picasso restricted himself to a cold, monochromatic blue palette; flattened forms; and the emotional, psychological themes of human misery and alienation, which are related to the Symbolist movement and the work of such artists as Edvard Munch. Picasso presented The Old Guitarist as a timeless expression of human suffering. The bent and sightless man holds his large, round guitar close to him; its brown body is the painting's only shift in color. The elongated, angular figure of the blind musician relates to the artist's interest in the history of Spanish art and, in particular, the great sixteenth-century artist El Greco. Most personally, however, the image reflects the struggling twenty-two-year-old Picasso's sympathy for the plight of the downtrodden; he knew what it was like to be poor, having been nearly penniless during all of 1902. His works from this time depict the miseries of the destitute, the ill, and the outcasts of society.

Dali, Inventions of the Monsters, 1940

Salvador Dalí, Surrealism's most publicized practitioner, created monstrous visions of a world turned inside out, which he made even more compelling through his extraordinary technical skills. When the Art Institute acquired Inventions of the Monsters in 1943, the artist wrote his congratulations and explained: "According to Nostradamus the apparition of monsters presages the outbreak of war. The canvas was painted in the Semmering mountains near Vienna a few months before the Anschluss [the 1938 political union of Austria and Germany] and has a prophetic character. Horse women equal maternal river monsters. Flaming giraffe equals masculine apocalyptic monster. Cat angel equals divine heterosexual monster. Hourglass equals metaphysical monster. Gala and Dalí equal sentimental monster. The little blue dog is not a true monster." Inventions of the Monsters has an ominous mood. It is rife with threats of danger, from the menacing fire in the distance to the sibylline figure in the foreground with an hourglass and a butterfly, both symbols of the inevitability of death. Next to this figure sit Dalí and his wife and muse, Gala. With his native Catalonia embroiled in the Spanish Civil War, the artist surely felt great anxiety over a world without a safe haven, a world that indeed had allowed for the invention of monsters.

Cassatt, The Child's Bath, 1895

The only American artist to exhibit her work with the French Impressionists, Mary Cassatt was first invited to show with the group by Edgar Degas in 1877. By that time, she had become disenchanted with traditional academic painting. Like her friend Degas, Cassatt concentrated on the human figure in her Impressionist works, particularly on sensitive yet unsentimental portrayals of women and children. The Child's Bath, with its striking and unorthodox composition, is one of Cassatt's masterworks. Here she employed unconventional devices such as cropped forms, bold patterns and outlines, and a flattened perspective, all of which derived from her study of Japanese woodblock prints. The lively patterns play off one another and serve to accentuate the nakedness of the child, whose vulnerable white legs are as straight as the lines of the woman's striped dress. The elevated vantage point permits the viewer to observe, but not participate in, this most intimate scene. Cassatt's composition thereby reinforces her subject: the tender absorption of a woman with a child.

De Chirico, The Philosopher's Conquest, 1915

The work of Giorgio de Chirico represents an unexpected form of classicism in early avant-garde painting. This canvas, one of six in a series, combines a Mediterranean cityscape with still-life objects. Familiar elements appear in many of de Chirico's paintings like pieces of a mysterious puzzle: a classical arcade, oddly oversize artichokes, a cannon and cannonballs, a clock, an industrial brick chimney, a monumental tower, a running train, and a square-rigged sailing ship. Here the stage set for this extraordinary juxtaposition of objects is an Italian piazza, virtually deserted except for the menacing shadowy figures outside the edge of the scene. De Chirico represented objects with a matter-of-fact, though intentionally crude, precision. He painted his scenes flatly, in bright colors, and illuminated them with a cold white light. Rendered in this clear style, works like The Philosopher's Conquest seem rife with meaning, though they remain resolutely enigmatic. Indeed, by juxtaposing incongruous objects, the artist sought to produce a metaphysical quality, what he called "art that in certain aspects resembles . . . the restlessness of myth." De Chirico's works would profoundly affect the Surrealists, who in the 1920s and 1930s attempted to portray dreams and images of the subconscious in their work.

Bamana, Pair of Headdresses, Mali, ca. 1900

These headdresses were all worn by men in male-female pairs during performances celebrating the mythical farming beast named Chiwara, which introduced the Bamana people to agriculture. The rituals motivated young men to work hard. Each headdress combines the graceful horns of an antelope with the body of an aardvark. A young male calf sits upon the female's back, symbolizing the fertile union of men and women and of the earth and the sun.

Caillebotte, Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1875

This complex intersection, just minutes away from the Saint-Lazare train station, represents in microcosm the changing urban milieu of late nineteenth-century Paris. Gustave Caillebotte grew up near this district when it was a relatively unsettled hill with narrow, crooked streets. As part of a new city plan designed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, these streets were relaid and their buildings razed during the artist's lifetime. In this monumental urban view, which measures almost seven by ten feet and is considered the artist's masterpiece, Caillebotte strikingly captured a vast, stark modernity, complete with life-size figures strolling in the foreground and wearing the latest fashions. The painting's highly crafted surface, rigorous perspective, and grand scale pleased Parisian audiences accustomed to the academic aesthetic of the official Salon. On the other hand, its asymmetrical composition, unusually cropped forms, rain-washed mood, and candidly contemporary subject stimulated a more radical sensibility. For these reasons, the painting dominated the celebrated Impressionist exhibition of 1877, largely organized by the artist himself. In many ways, Caillebotte's frozen poetry of the Parisian bourgeoisie prefigures Georges Seurat's luminous Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884, painted less than a decade later.

Wood, American Gothic, 1930

This familiar image was exhibited publicly for the first time at the Art Institute of Chicago, winning a three-hundred-dollar prize and instant fame for Grant Wood. The impetus for the painting came while Wood was visiting the small town of Eldon in his native Iowa. There he spotted a little wood farmhouse, with a single oversized window, made in a style called Carpenter Gothic. "I imagined American Gothic people with their faces stretched out long to go with this American Gothic house," he said. He used his sister and his dentist as models for a farmer and his daughter, dressing them as if they were "tintypes from my old family album." The highly detailed, polished style and the rigid frontality of the two figures were inspired by Flemish Renaissance art, which Wood studied during his travels to Europe between 1920 and 1928. After returning to settle in Iowa, he became increasingly appreciative of midwestern traditions and culture, which he celebrated in works such as this. American Gothic, often understood as a satirical comment on the midwestern character, quickly became one of America's most famous paintings and is now firmly entrenched in the nation's popular culture. Yet Wood intended it to be a positive statement about rural American values, an image of reassurance at a time of great dislocation and disillusionment. The man and woman, in their solid and well-crafted world, with all their strengths and weaknesses, represent survivors.

Bouguereau, Nymphs and Satyrs, 1873

Three nymphs playfully drag a Satyr into a woodland pond, while a fourth calls to her companions in the distance. Satyrs—half-man, half-goat—were reputedly unable to swim. Bouguereau exhibited this painting, accompanied by a verse from the Latin poem that inspired it, at the 1873 Paris Salon. Its vaguely classical subject provided an ideal opportunity to demonstrate his skill painting the female nude from multiple viewpoints. An American collector immediately bought the work, which eventually ended up on display in the bar of New York City's Hoffman House, where Sterling Clark first encountered it.

Vincent Van Gogh, The Bedroom, 1889

Vincent van Gogh so highly esteemed his bedroom painting that he made three distinct versions: the first, now in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; the second, belonging to the Art Institute of Chicago, painted a year later on the same scale and almost identical; and a third, smaller canvas in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, which he made as a gift for his mother and sister. Van Gogh conceived the first Bedroom in October 1888, a month after he moved into his "Yellow House" in Arles, France. This moment marked the first time the artist had a home of his own, and he had immediately and enthusiastically set about decorating, painting a suite of canvases to fill the walls. Completely exhausted from the effort, he spent two-and-a-half days in bed and was then inspired to create a painting of his bedroom. As he wrote to his brother Theo, "It amused me enormously doing this bare interior. With a simplicity à la Seurat. In flat tints, but coarsely brushed in full impasto, the walls pale lilac, the floor in a broken and faded red, the chairs and the bed chrome yellow, the pillows and the sheet very pale lemon green, the bedspread blood-red, the dressing-table orange, the washbasin blue, the window green. I had wished to express utter repose with all these very different tones." Although the picture symbolized relaxation and peace to the artist, to our eyes the canvas seems to teem with nervous energy, instability, and turmoil, and effect heightened by the sharply receding perspective.