Art Institute of Chicago

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Dualities have defined the history of the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), a museum and school (The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, or SAIC) in ambivalent relationship with one another and their host community. AIC's iconic Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge building on Michigan Avenue, erected on debris from the great fire of 1871, first served the Columbian Exposition, whose congresses it housed in 1893 before AIC occupied it at year's end. This nearly windowless structure on the edge of the frenetic central Loop served as a refuge from urban disorder. Yet like the surrounding noise, filth, and labor conflict, AIC was a by product of railroad development, meat processing, and other forms of commerce that fueled Chicago's growth.

In 1866 sculptor Leonard W. Volk and other artists formed the Chicago Academy of Design. Partly as a result of losses caused by the fire, the academy encountered financial difficulties and solicited help from business leaders. Employing some sleight of hand, these businessmen created in 1879 a new organization, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, renamed The Art Institute of Chicago in 1882. Its charter provided that it be "privately administered for the public benefit by a Board of Trustees." Under the leadership of the grain merchant and banker Charles L. Hutchinson, president of that board from 1882 to 1924, AIC's art school became the nation's best enrolled and its museum, with a half-million visitors by 1899, developed the largest membership. In addition to moving AIC to its permanent home in 1893, Hutchinson attracted distinguished faculty, including sculptor Lorado Taft, and enlarged the museum's collections. Major donors included Martin A. Ryerson and Bertha Honoré Palmer, who with painter Mary Cassatt's advice acquired a superb collection of nineteenth-century French paintings.

Along with others who followed Hutchinson, museum directors Daniel Catton Rich (1938–1958) and, in the decades after 1980, James Wood, strengthened curatorial areas such as Prints and Drawings, Architecture, and African and Amerindian Art and museum education, and brought square footage to more than ten times its 1893 total. Expansion occurred in every decade except the 1930s and 1940s. Examples of growth include the Ryerson Library (1901); the Ferguson Building (1958), whose funding with monies designated for commissioning "statuary and monuments" drew legal challenges; new facilities for the SAIC (1977); and several wings and buildings over the following quarter century. The museum developed outstanding collections in numerous areas, such as Impressionism, Flemish and Italian painting, and—with the help of the Buckingham family—prints and drawings and Asian art.

Although conservative aesthetic and social impulses guided many of the trustees, the institution helped expand definitions of what constituted significant art, as in its 1895 exhibition of works by Claude Monet and Édouard Manet, and in the 1906 purchase of Assumption of the Virgin (1577) by El Greco, then a largely neglected master. Amid great controversy, AIC in 1913 presented a distillation of New York City's Armory Show, which gave tens of thousands of Chicagoans their first encounter with Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and other avant-garde artists. Only a few modernist works entered the collection in the next fifteen years. However, with gifts such as those from Frederic Clay Bartlett, which included Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand-Jatte (1884) in 1926, Arthur Jerome Eddy's 1931 bequest of Expressionist works by Wassily Kandinsky, and others, AIC developed a major modern collection, which also included important American paintings, some by former SAIC students such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Archibald J. Motley, and Grant Wood. Appointment in the 1940s of the innovative gallery owner Katherine Kuh as a curator indicated increased commitment to exhibiting challenging contemporary work.

In 2001 the museum's ten curatorial departments included some with continuity to the founding era, and others such as Photography that reflected the broadened definition of museum-worthy art. Changes in cultural perceptions led in 1956 to formation of a Department of Primitive Art, later renamed the Department of African and Amerindian Art. Some areas diminished in importance. Plaster reproductions of classical works, considered an important aspect of the collections in the 1880s, had been removed from display by the 1950s. The museum achieved a higher level of professionalism when a comprehensive exhibition held in conjunction with the 1933–1934 Century of Progress Exposition suggested the wisdom of arranging AIC's collections in a systematic, integrated manner rather than displaying together all works given by one donor.

Although trustees assumed a less direct role in curatorial and curricular decisions as the museum became more professional, a seat on AIC's board continued to be one of the highest distinctions available to Chicago's social and economic elite. Support from large corporations such as Kraft General Foods and Ameritech became increasingly important. In 2001 the largest sources of support were gifts and endowment income and school revenues, mostly from tuition. Other sources were museum admissions and memberships; and public funds, which became available when AIC's building was erected on Chicago Park District Land in 1893 and were later supplemented by state and federal programs.

The provocations of contemporary art, in conjunction with identity politics, sparked controversies in the 1980s and 1990s that threatened but did not end this public support. As always, balancing the goals of building an international art collection and serving the needs of a local arts community presented challenges and some resentments, as when in the 1980s AIC abandoned its Chicago and Vicinity show, once a regular event. Increased emphasis in the contemporary art world on work that responded to the concerns of particular communities, some outside the traditional arts audience, created new possibilities for collaboration and conflict.

Bibliography

Chicago History 8, no. 1 (spring 1979). Special issue on The Art Institute of Chicago.

Gilmore, Roger, ed. Over a Century: A History of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1866–1981. Chicago: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1982.

Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Prince, Sue Ann. The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

—George H. Roeder Jr.

Art Institute of Chicago
Established	1879; in present location since 1893
Location	111 South Michigan Avenue Chicago, USA
Visitor figures	1,441,000 (2006)
Director	Eloise W. Martin
Website	www.artic.edu/aic

The Art Institute of Chicago is a fine art museum located near the Loop community in Chicago, Illinois. The Museum is overseen by President James Cuno. The Museum is known for its extensive collection of Impressionist and American art. It is located on the western edge of Grant Park, at 111 South Michigan Avenue in the Chicago Landmark Historic Michigan Boulevard District, in a building designed by the Boston firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge (1892). It is the third most popular cultural attraction in Chicago.^[1]

The Art Institute of Chicago Building was originally constructed for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition as the World's Congress Auxiliary Building, with the intent that the Art Institute occupy the space after the fair closed.

The Museum’s Collection

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges-Pierre Seurat

American Gothic by Grant Wood

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper

Today, the museum is most famous for its collections of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and American paintings. Included in the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection are more than 30 paintings by Claude Monet, including six of his Haystacks and a number of Water Lilies. Important works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, such as Two Sisters (On the Terrace), as well as Paul Cézanne’s The Bathers, The Basket of Apples, and Madame Cézanne in a Yellow Chair, are in the collection. At the Moulin Rouge, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is another highlight, as is Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day. Non-French paintings completing the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection include Vincent Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles and Self-portrait, 1887. Among the most important works of the American collection are Grant Wood’s American Gothic and Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.

The museum has much more than paintings, however. Fine sculptures from all over the world can be seen. In the basement are the Thorne Rooms. There are exact miniatures demonstrating American and European architectural and furniture styles. Also in the basement are galleries displaying its world-class photography collection. On the main floor is the George F. Harding collection of arms and armor reflecting armaments and armor throughout the Medieval period and Renaissance. A fine collection of Pre-Columbian Meso-American ceramic figures is another outstanding display. A special feature of the museum is a “touchable” statue for the blind, and for children. It is an expressive facial portrait of young St. Joan d’Arc.

Modern Art Wing

The Museum is in the midst of a major expansion to create a new Modern Art Wing to house its modern art collection. The structure, designed by Renzo Piano and scheduled to open to the public in 2009, will include a bridge connecting the top floor of the new wing with the popular Chicago Millenium Park to the north. The addition will also include a courtyard designed by Gustafson Guthrie Nichol.

The Art Institute hopes that the new addition will draw added attention to its 20th Century collections, which include such important paintings as Pablo Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, Henri Matisse’s Bathers by a River, and René Magritte’s Time Transfixed. The curators of the museum believe that its modern collections are on par with the best in the world, "comparable only to those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou Centre in Paris."^[2] They also note that "No other encyclopedic museum in the United States or any other country has collections of modern and contemporary art to rival those of the Art Institute." The modern collection, they concede, has been overshadowed in the past by the Art Institute’s extraordinary 19th century collection.

The Terra Collection

Since April 2005, approximately fifty paintings originally from the Terra Museum’s (now the Terra Foundation) collection have been on loan to the Department of American Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC). The collections of the Terra and the Art Institute are located in a new suite of galleries, and together provide one of the nation’s most comprehensive presentations of American art. The foundation’s collection of American works on paper are housed in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute.

The Art Institute Building

Main article: Art Institute of Chicago Building

The current building at 111 South Michigan Avenue is third address for the Art Institute. It was designed in the Beaux-Arts style by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge of Boston, Massachusetts.^[3]

The Art Institute's famous western entrance on Michigan Avenue is guarded by two bronze lion statues created by Edward L. Kemeys. When a Chicago sports team makes the playoffs, the lions are frequently dressed in that team’s uniform. Just inside the eastern doors is a reconstruction of the trading room of the old Chicago Stock Exchange. Designed by Louis Sullivan in 1894, the Exchange was torn down in 1972. Salvaged portions of the original room were brought to the Art Institute and reconstructed. Leaving the Art Institute through the east doors at the end of the driveway is the Stock Exchange entrance.

The Art Institute building has the unusual property of straddling open-air railroad tracks. The east and west buildings of the museum are separated by the tracks used by the Metra Electric Line and South Shore Line. While a windowless gallery connects the two buildings, a glass atrium on the south side of the west building allows museumgoers to look down at the passing commuter trains.

Swami Vivekananda

The famous Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda addressed the Parliament of the World’s Religions at the Art Institute in 1893. On 11 September1995, the Art Institute put up a bronze plaque to commemorate Swami Vivekananda’s historic address. The plaque reads:

“

On this site between September 11 and 27, 1893, Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), the first Hindu monk from India to teach Vedanta in America, addressed the World’s Parliament of Religions, held in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition. His unprecedented success opened the way for the dialogue between eastern and western religions.

”

On 11 November1995, the stretch of Michigan Avenue that passes in front of the Art Institute was formally conferred the honorary name “Swami Vivekananda Way.”

Coordinates: 41°52′46″N, 87°37′26″W

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Art Institute of Chicago

• The Art Institute of Chicago
• The Art Institute of Chicago : collections
• The Terra Foundation For American Art
• A Visitor's Experience: The Art Institute of Chicago (myArmoury.com article)

Gallery

Self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh	Bedroom in Arles by Vincent Van Gogh	Paris Street; Rainy Day by Gustave Caillebotte	Wheatstacks (End of Summer) by Claude Monet
Water Lilies by Claude Monet	The Basket of Apples by Paul Cézanne	St. Joan, a tactile statue for the blind and children "GuruWnd"> "3D red_cyan glasses recommended for your viewing pleasure" />	Armor "GuruWnd"> "3D red_cyan glasses recommended for your viewing pleasure" />

See also

• School of the Art Institute of Chicago
• Logan Medal of the arts
• Looptopia

Notes

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