Chicago History | Spring 1979

·THE· ART· INSTITUTE· OF· CHICAGO .

A Centennial Perspective

that appeals to many interests must resist the temptation to devote an entire issue to a single theme. The centennial of The Art Institute of Chicago, however, presents an occasion and a richness of subject that warrants such an effort.

Rather than attempt full chronological coverage-a vain effort in the 64 pages at our command-we have focused on selected aspects, moments, activities, and issues, to give some sense of the scope of the institution and of the manifold events and undertakings that have made up its history.

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz's "The Art Institute of Chicago: The First Forty Years," lays the foundation, discussing the ideals and purposes of the men who founded the Art Institute and shaped the direction of its activities during the crucial beginning years. Erne R. and Florence Frueh's "Frederic Clay Bartlett: Chicago Painter and Patron of the Arts," looks at an artist who exhib ited at the Art Ins ti lute, a trustee who helped direct it, and a donor of one of its important collections.

Peter C. l\Jarzio's analytical "A Museum and a School: An Uneasy but Creative Union," examines the relationship between the museum and the school (which predated it), raising challenging questions about the tensions that are bound to arise between the two. Our "Look ing Back"'ard" section for this issue introduces Archibald J. Motley, an 87-year-old alumnus of the school and an important black artist, who shared with art historian Elaine D. 'Woodall his memories of studying and exhibiting at the Art Institute. \Ve often publish accounts of our own collections, but an unusual feature of this issue is USUALLY, A MAGAZINE

a center sect ion of color photographs presenting works from the Art Institute's collections, accompanied by a genealogy of the nine curatorial departments that have evolved over the years . \,Ve conclude with essays by two of our staff members: Frank Jewell's brief history of the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries and their collections; and Robert L. Brubaker's "Toward a History of the Art Institute," a survey of the sources available to lay readers and professional historians who wish to explore the history of the institution further.

In one way or another, many of our colleagues at the Chicago Historical Society were drawn into helping produce this issue. Director Harold K. Skramstad, Jr., as always, gave us encouragement, support, and what any publications staff values most of all--editorial freedom. \ ,Ve are deeply grateful to various members of the Art Institute staff, especially Celia Marriott of Museum Education, Daphne Roloff and her staff at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, and Linda Cohn of Museum Photography, for their amiable and ready responses to all our questions. However, responsibility for the choice of authors, articles, and illustrations is entirely ours.

The importance of the subject--one of the central cultural institutions of Chicago and of the country as a whole-presented us with an awesome responsibility. Putting together this issue, however, offered not only a challenge, but much delight. We hope that we have managed to convey some of that to our readers.

EDITOR

Chicago History The M aga;:,ine of the Chicago Historical Society

SPRING 1979 VOLUME VIII, NUMBER 1

Fannia Weingartner Editor

CONTENTS

Gail Farr Casterline Assistant Editor

THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO: THE FIRST FORTY YEARS/2

by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz

Marcia Beales Editorial Assistant

Karen Kohn Designer Walter W . Krutz Paul W. Petraitis Photography

FREDERIC CLAY BARTLETT: CHICAGO PAINTER AND PATRON OF THE ARTS/16

by Erne R. and Florence Frueh A MUSEUM AND A SCHOOL: AN UNEASY BUT CREATIVE UNION/20

by Peter C. Marzio THE COLLECTIONS/24 LOOKING BACKWARD: Archibald J. Motley and The Art Institute of Chicago: 1914-1930/53

by Elaine D. Woodall THE RYERSON AND BURNHAM LIBRARIES/58

by Frank Jewell TOWARD A HISTORY OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO: A SURVEY OF SOURCES/61

by Robert L. Brubaker

Cover: Southern elevation of the Art Institute building, reproduced from a mylar copy of the original drawings on water-damaged linen. The architects were Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge.

Art Institute.

Inside Cover: One of the two lions which flank the Michigan Avenue entrance to the Art Institute. Designed

by Edward Kemeys , they were installed in 1894. Chicago Daily News photo, gift of Field Enterprises, CHS.

Typeset by Publication Composition Corporation.

Printed by Fine Arts Printing Company.

Copyright 1979 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago , Illinois 60614 Articles appearing In this Journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America : History and Life

The Art Institute of Chicago: The First Forty Years

BY HELEN LEFKOWITZ HOROWITZ « J think you should have sympathetic admiration) nay) even affection)

for the ideal Chicago which exists not only in the brain) but in the heart of some of her citizens.')

Charles Eliot Norton to H enry Blake Fuller

CHICAGO, like several other major cultural institutions established in the city during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, did indeed draw its existence from the brains and hearts of a group of Chicago's cit izens, and a rather select group at that.

The bare outlines of the circumstances surroundi ng the founding of the Art Institute are quickly told.

On May 24, 1879, a group of business leaders who had been asked to save the foundering Ch icago Academy of Design organized by artists in l 866, resigned from the board of that organ ization and incorporated a new one, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. In December 1882 the latter's name was changed to The Art Institute of Chicago. The Academy of Fine Arts had been located in rented rooms at State and lVIonroe. In J887 the Art Institute moved into its own bu ilding, designed by the firm of Burnham and R oot and constructed at the southern corner of Michigan Avenue and Van Buren Street. The present core structure, designed by the firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge was completed in 1893 for temporary use by the THE ART INSTITUTE OF

H elen Lefkowitz Horowitz teaches at Scripps College, Claremont, California. She is the author of Culture & the City : Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917, published in 1976, from which this was in part adapted. She is curremly do ing research on places des igned specifica ll y for use by women.

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Chicago History

World's Congres es, meeting as part of the ·w orld's Columbian Exposition, and for permanent use by the Art Institute. From the outset its founders intended the Art Institute to both exhibit and teach art.* The leadership of the Art Institute during its first forty years was primarily in the hands of Charles L. Hutchinson, president o( the trustees from 1882 to 1924. His predecessors, George Armour and Levi Z. Leiter, had served for one and two years respectively. l\Iore than anyone, Hutchinson provided a continuing ethos for the institution. His aims were high. Addressing a gathering at the Art Institute in the spring of 1888, he noted with regret, "\rVe live in a materialistic age under one of its most characteristic governments, and-I fear we must admit here in Chicagoin one of the most barren cities." l\Iaterialism, corrupt government, barren city: to Hutchinson the three were linked. The businessman, chained to his work, "a mere machine devotee! to business," had withdrawn from the public life of the city, leaving the society Lo drift or to be led by incompetents. ·w hat was needed was art. "In the midst of this busy material life of our day," Hutchinson conLinued, art "may call upon us to halt, and turn our thoughts away from so much that is of the earth earthy, and lead us to contemplate those eternal truths which after all most concern the children of God."

*See Peter C. l\Iarzio's "A l\fuseum and a School," page 20.

Charles L. Hutchinson (1854-1924) was one of the founders of the Art Institute and its president for 43 years. He came to the museum daily, involving himself in every aspect of its general management and acquisition program. This portrait from the Chicago Historical Society 's collection was painted by Gari Melchers. CHS.

Chicago History

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The First Forty Years

There was certainly much business to preoccupy the citizens of Chicago. Built by commerce and industry, the city had become the center of the national railroad network, the transfer point for grain, lumber, and meat going eastward and for manufactures going westward. Spread over 170 square miles its population would, by the next census, exceed a mil1ion. Downtown, massive buildings were reaching for Lhe sky. But Hutchinson was not impressed.

Continuing in his address, he compared Chicago unfavorably to Florence and Rome, where "art treasures of many generations have been gathered together to delight, instruct and inspire." ,vhat Chicago needed were "more beautiful surroundings, monuments of art, buildings, stored with books and paintings and sculpture." Such a Chicago would act as a moral force on its citizens, pointing the way to more sp iritu al lives. "On every hand something should suggest high and noble thoughts .... I would that al every turn were a statue or monument or building, rich in artistic design, which would set forth ideas of beauty, grace or power."

Why would one of the city's leading bankers come to see art as a way of leading the citizens of Chicago into civic righteousness? He certainly did not inherit his tastes from his father, Benjamin. The elder Hutchinson, one of the nation's most notorious grain speculators, was said to have reacted to his son's purchase of a French painting of a sheep meadow by complaining, "Think about him! A son of mine!

He paid S500 apiece for five painted sheep and he could get the real article for $2 a head!"

Charles Hutchinson, born in 1854 in Lynn , l\ [assachusetts, had moved with his parents to Chicago in 1858. When he wanted to go to college, his father insisted that he remain in Chicago and enter business. Charles Hutchinson became the junior partner of B. P. Hutchinson and Son, Commission l\Ierchants, and an officer and ultimately president of his father's Corn Exchange Bank. He also became a member and, later, president of the Board of Trade.

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Chicago History

From 1882 to 1893, the Art Institute occupied this building at Michigan Avenue and Van Buren Street, designed by the firm of Burnham and Root. One critic suggested that the structure was more suitable for "a produce exchange" than a museum. Art Institute .

But unlike his father, Charles L. Hutchinson turned away from speculation after one unfortunate venture and for the rest of his life remained a cautious, conservative investor.

Charles Hutchinson came to model himself after the many East Coast patricians who had distinguished themselves from the newly rich by the mark of culture. Hutchinson's life became an exercise in the acquisition of taste. Together with his wife, the former Frances Kinsley (daughter of a famous Chicago restaurateur), Hutchinson traveled extensively, seeking culture in museums, galleries, concert halls, and churches. The Hutchinsons were frequently accompanied by another couple of means, l\Ianin A. Ryerson and his wife. Educated at Ha1Tard Law School and the heir to a lumber fonune, Ryerson ,1¡as a man of discriminating taste and judgment, an inspired collector and a fonunale teacher for his close friend.

But Hutchinson's contributions to the Art Institute went way beyond the purchase of items for its collection. His vision and energy helped create at the Art Institute a sizable enterprise that sought ever wider support from and ever greater involvement in the community.

The First Forty Years

During the shaping decades of the Art Institute when Hutchinson was president, trustees enjoyed authority unquestioned by professional curators or even the director. Hutchinson came to the Art Institute each morning at nine, spoke with the director, then walked through the galleries ancl the school. He frequently returned in the afternoon or evening for committee meetings, lecLUres, or social events. His power at the Art Institute ranged from authorizing a check, to making decisions with the other trustees regarding acquisitions, Lo actually hanging picLUres on the walls for an exhibition. Obviously he was moved by more than aesthetic yearnings or the desire to create a life different from that of his father.

At an earlier point in Chicago's history, commercial leaders had dominated every aspect of the city's life. But by the 1890s they had withdrawn from the political arena, which was now largely in the hands of party politicians. During these years of municipal corruption and labor unrest, upright businessmen were faced with a dilemma: how could they bring order to Chicago when they lacked direct political power and, above all, wanted to protect the economic institutions that had served them well? ·while some turned Lo civic reform, others sought through philanthropy to mediate the worst wrongs of the system by protecting its victims, ofiering opportunity to the next generation through education, or-in the case of the Art Institute-helping uplift the population by refining its soul.

The vision that Charles Hutchinson expressed in J 888 was shared by a number of business and professional men in Chicago who• became trustees of the Art Institute: i\fanin A. Ryerson, Edward E. Ayer, Adolphus C. Bartlett, George E. ,\clams, Bryan Lathrop, John J. Glessner, Nathaniel K. Fairbank, and Albert ,\.Sprague.Like Hutchinson, they were Protestants o[ British, or Huguenot, descent and largely Republicans whose position and ,vealth were identified with Chicago's distinctive industries.

With roots in the East, to a significant degree in New England, they knew from Boston's example what a city ought to become. Loyal to the city where their fortunes were made, these business leaders believed that if it continued in its rapid expans ion of population and wealth, Chicago might even overtake ew York.

Pride contributed to the creation of Chicago's cultural institutions. The Art Institute was not just to purify the city: it was to validate it as well.

These men were members of a new generation of civic leaders who had emerged in the years after the 1871 fire with a new energy, significant wealth, and a vision of the city and its needs. The founders ancl early trustees of the Art Institute had worked together in the Art Department of the Interstate Industrial Exposition, the annual trade fair originally held to celebrate Chicago's recovery from the fire. Some were also active in the Chicago Biennial Musical Festival Association and the Chicago Grand Opera Festival, and in the promotion of the Aud itorium and ultimately the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It was to this group of men that the Baptist founders of the University of Chicago would turn as they stretched their denominational institution into a secular university. The vVorld's Columbian Exposition in 1893 would give to the outside the first real glimpse of the effects of this ferment (wh ile the Field Columbian Museum, created to hold the £air's heritage, would complete the network of cultural instiLUtions designed for the whole city in the nineteenth century). After seeing the fair, Charles Eliot Norton, the nation's arbiter of taste, would admonish the critical Chicago novelist Henry Blake Fuller, "I think you should have sympathetic admiration, nay, even affection, for the ideal Chicago which exists not only in the bra_in, but in the heart of some of her citizens." orton could see this clearly because he had helped shape the notion of the ideal that linked art to social uplift. In his disillusionment after Chicago History

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The First Forty Years

the Civil \Var, he turned to Europe's past and, guided by his English friend John Ruskin, found solace in the medieval world that created the cathedral. From his secular pulpit at Harvard, where he lectured on the history of art, orton would preach to generations of young men about the glories of the European heritage and the deficiencies of his own America. His influence had guided the civic-minded across the continent to shape cultural institutions that would inject into American life the values that inhered in the great masterpieces of art. A city like Chicago could grow out of its material adolescence to an awareness of the best that had been thought and said in the world. Creativity based on the traditions of the past would generate the conditions for a civic renaissance and Chicago would emerge as a cultural center which, like Florence, would inspire and elevate its citizenry. The Chicago of 1893 offered, for a brief moment at least, the hope of a city committed to idealistic dreams.

Idealism shaped the choice of cultural institutions. Even before the fire the city abounded in musical societies, commercial gallerie , and theaters; but to the men who felt responsible for culture, these hardly seemed to offer possibilities for spiritual growth. They hou ed entertainment, not art, and reflected the materialism of the society to which they were so closely linked. Culture required endowment. ¡when men such as Charles Hutchinson surveyed the city's needs, the lacks were obvious. Along with libraries, a symphony orchestra, a university, and a museum of science, there was need for a museum of art which, with its school and its spaces for public gatherings, would act as a focus for the city's activities.

To l\fartin Ryerson and Charles Hutchinson, art represented the eternal ideal. Yet works of art were also products of human history, expressions of the values of a society in a historical moment. Embodiment of this dual quality--of being both timeless and w ithin time-became one of the criteria of the Art Institute's collect6

Chicago History

ing policy. Its collection was to consist of the great works which successfully represented the ideal. And because each society and each period expressed itself in its own way, the collection should consist of examples of art drawn from every period of history.

In the nineteenth century, the Art Institute lacked the money for extensive acquisitions and thus was dependent on loans from private collectors and on their gifts. There was never any thought of limiting the collection to one art form or period, however. Rather than restrict its scope, the museum filled out its holdings with reproductions. But the latter was only a holding action until funds could be acquired to allow for a more systematic development of a permanent collection. Hutchinson and his associates kept watch over movements in the art markets and demonstrated a willingness to purchase within a generous range of periods and styles. Their acquisition in 1894 o( the Demidoff Collection of Dutch masters set a high standard. Their more daring selection of El Greco's The Asrnm ption of the Virgin, demonstrated their independent judgment.

The Elbridge G. Hall collection of casts of sculpwre, arranged chronologically, was designed to give "comprehensive illustration of the whole history of sculpture." The museum collection as a whole was first broken down into the various media: oils, pastels and watercolors, prints, and sculpwre. V11 ithin each division, the works were separated by country and period and placed in separate rooms, apparently in chronological sequence. The Art Institute was a musemn o( the history of art, much like a visual representation of a written text intended to be both comprehensive and systematic.

Idealism not only defined what a collection should have, it also laid down what it should not have. The Art Institute was willing to let the Field l\Iuseum purchase certain objects in the collection which it regarded as artifacts rather than fine art. Despite the fact that many trustees were on both boards, the two museums

The First Forty Years

The Martin A. Ryersons and Charles L. Hutchinsons in Jaipur, India, ca. 1892. The two couples frequently traveled together, and both were longtim e benefactors of the Art Institute. The Ryerson bequest of 1933 has been called " the finest single body of works ever to come to the museum." Art Institute.

were seen as compleLely separaLe. The Art Instilule could aicl the Field Museum: for example, when its own lecture hall was judged a fire haLard, Lhe Fi eld Mu eum was able Lo use space al the An Instilute. BuL when Lhe University of Chi cago aucmptcd Lo bring the Art Institute under iLs aegis as a department in Lhe univer-

siLy, the museum unequivocally resisted, even Lhough Martin Ryerson was presiden t of the university's board of trustees and Ch arles HuLchinson iLs treasurer.

Because the Art Institute housed art rather Lhan entertainment, it excluded by design those areas popular with the public. It could ski rt the Ch icago History

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The First Forty Years

Security guards of The Art Institute of Chicago, ca . 1902. Art Institute.

risk of unpopularity in several ways: it might compromise standards, but that would go against the fundamental belief on which it was founded, that art was the representation of the ideal. Or it might ignore the public. However that was equally untenable, because the Art Institute had been built to lift the whole city out of the throes of materialism, not merely to satisfy Chicago's elite. In the years after the museum's founding, this commitment did not fade, and it is said that Charles Hutchinson reviewed 8

Ch icago H istory

the attendance figures of the Art Institute daily.

Hence only one choice was open: LO make an earnest attempt LO get the public to experience the art gathered in the museum's collection.

But in the late nineteenth century the Art Institute intended that its public be members of the relatively privileged middle class, and so the means chosen to attract visitors tended to appeal to the literate, the relatively leisured, and those who traveled freely between their residential neighborhoods and downtown.

The First Forty Years

The Art Institute quickly made itself the center of artistic life in Chicago. It maintained a regular lecture series on painting, sculpture, and architecture, staffed by Chicago's best-known artists. In addition, the museum building served as headquarters for a variety of Chicago associations of artists and those interested in fine arts. These groups held annual exhibitions in the museum. Thus the Art Institute directly encouraged local artists by providing them with a prominent place for displaying their works of art and offering them for sale. On its own the Art Institute arranged temporary shows as well.

Without compromising the standards of its permanent collection, the museum allowed more popular attractions to build up clientele.

Whatever the causes, the results were success in the terms that the businessmen on the board of trustees knew best. By 1899, the Art Institute was attracting more than half a million people a year, almost three thousand on an average Sunday afternoon.

The decision which dramatizes best the nature of the Art Institute's idealism and concern for the public is its building. This was an opportunity for the trustees to serve as direct patrons of the arts. It was meant to provide a setting that established the proper relation between the public and the collection. The building designed by the Boston firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge exemplified the Art Institute's identification not only with the architecture but also with the humanistic spirit of the Renaissance. While proponents of a functional aesthetic might commission a building which visually , exposed its structure and technical functioning, the trustees of the Art Institute wanted a building which expressed a relationship to human lives.

Consistent with their idealistic approach to art, the building was to express one of the great moments of art. Solid and balanced, it would invoke the names of great artists on its exterior: Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, and Holbein. Later, a pair of

stone lions, recalling those which guarded the British l\luseum, would take up a similar stance in front of the main entrance to The Art Institute of Chicago.

The Art Institute prided itself on its care in planning "for the exhibition of pictures and fine art objects, as regards lighting, accessibility, simplicity of arrangement and convenience of classification." But the vast enclosed space of the interior offered as well more than a suggestion of European grandeur. The Art Institute was finished as parts of the collection grew in size and as funds for building were donated.

The monumental staircase, planned for many years, was completed in the twentieth century.

"Nothing since the original erection of the museum has clone so much as the construction of this grand staircase to dignify and ennoble the building. Immediately upon entering the visitor is aware that he is in a great public building devoted to art." Such an interior space expressed culture, creating a world within which one might breathe a refining atmosphere.

An edifice of beauty, the Art Institute was not to be located in a wealthy neighborhood as in other cities where "art has . . . set itself apart." Rather, in keeping with the prevail ing sense of art's function in a materialistic society, "proximity to the heart of the city is an overwhelming recommendation in the eyes of the Trustees." Moreover, the central location served a symbolic function important to Chicago philanthropists. Downtown was the heart of the city, the place where decisions were made, where businessmen endangered by their absorption in materialism had their offices. To set the buildings there would underscore their importance and give them opportunity to act as spiritual forces.

While the Art Institute was designed to countera~t the materialism of downtown, in some ways it also clearly reflected it. The museum's structure was built on speculation and the hope of growth. "The Trustees call attention to the fact that it is the necessary growth Ch icago Hist ory

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The First Forty Years

This gallery, photographed ca. 1910, displayed plaster casts of important pieces of classical sculpture which were often used as models by students of the School of the Art Institute. Art Institute.

of the institution which constantly taxes our resources ... the work constantly expands, and no friend of the Institute would have it otherwise." Essential for the building was a master plan which called for laying foundations for additions still to come and to be executed in stages. This allowed the trustees to retain control over development at the same time that they stimulated and guided gifts. Thus, while technically staying within its means, the Art Institute could take the risk of beginning on the next stage of building before obtaining the resources to complete it. The trustees not only believed in growth-at times they bet on it.

Acquisitions were planned in the same man10

Chicago History

ner. The , Demi doff Collection was bought as one lot with money borrowed from several trustees. The Art Institute then asked the public to buy individual paintings from the collection as gifts to the museum. By I 901 the system reached a kind of maturity. The museum listed its greatest needs and their approximate costs, ranging from books for the museum library to a $100,000 hall for architectural casts. Like the other cultural institutions of the city, the Art Institute developed categories of membership designed to tap various levels of wealth and interest. A governing membership in the Art Institute cost $100 upon election by the board, followed by $25 each year, or $400 for life. From

The First Forty Years

there one might move down the scale to a regular membership purchasable for $10.

The business sense of the trustees affected the nature of the Art Institute to some extent. Success, which in reality had to do with the quality of the cultural experience, was translated into numbers. From the standpoint of the collection and the building, the relevant statistics were endowments and additions. As far as the Institute's relationsh ip to the public was concerned, they were the number of visitors. In the twentieth century, as interest began to shift from the middle class to the urban ma ses, this business sense contributed to the Art Ins ti tute's willingness to change its approaches . But it took certain pressures for this to happen.

William M. R. French was instrumental.

Trained as a landscape arch itect, and the brother of a noted sculptor, French had been the secretary of the Chicago Academy of Design and became the first director of the Art Institute. It is clear from his correspondence with Charles Hutchinson that French exerted pressure on the board to increase the public's exposure to the resources of the museum. His reaction to the proposition that the photographs of all children in the Chicago public schools be deposited at the Art Institute seems characteristic: "At first it struck me as a ridiculous idea; then it occurred to me that it might advertise the institution among the whole population ."

Outside the Art Institute, the offerings and activities of settlement houses such as HullHouse implied that the museum was not serving the immigrant peoples of the city. WhateYer significance the downtown location of the Art Inslitute might have for the trustees, it was clear to Jane Addams that the residents of Halsted Street did not travel so far. If cu lture was to affect the lives of Addams' neighbors, it was imperative that it be brought to where they lived. William Rainey Harper of the U niversity of Chicago had established extension courses to serve this purpose. There was no reason why the Art Institute shou ld not try to

reach out into the neighborhoods.

Th is questioning of culture did not just concern its availability to the public. Reformers such as Addams challenged the notion which equated culture with the fine arts and sought a definition that brought it closer to the lives and labor of working people. Administrators like French seemed more drawn to truth and efficiency than to beauty and uplift. And novelists like Henry Blake Fuller, who found a new power in realism, raised the fundamental question of the relation of art to morality. What if art did not make better men, but more selfindulgent ones?

Even if the trustees did not choose to enter into a debate with such critics of their institution and its purposes, they could, and apparently did respond to some degree by expanding the Art Institute's role and paying heed to new artistic currents.

The most visible change in the twentieth century was a willingness to rethink the nature of the collection. From the beginning the Art Institute had supplemented its permanent collection with temporary exhibitions. Later these increased in number and in scale, offering to the Chicago public not only contemporary European paintings and art objects from the Far East, but the works of local and regional artists as well. Moreover, individual patrons provided the means to establish awards for works exhibited at the Art Institute shows.* The museum's willingness to take risks was made manifest by its decision to host the infamous 19 I 3 show of post-impressionist and cubist art-the Armory Show-which had been turned down by the Metropolitan Museum in ew York and had ended up being shown in an armory.

•The importance of this form of recogmt10n becomes clear in Elaine D. Woodall's article on Archibald J. Motley, page 53.

Chicago History

11

In defending its willingness to exhibit the radical Armory Show of 1913, the Art lnstitute 's Bulletin for April 1914, noted: "Question has been raised in some quarters whether the Art Institute does right in exhibiting the strange works of the cubists and post-impressionists; whether the great museum ought not to adhere to standards and refuse to exhibit what it cannot be supposed to approve. The policy of the Art Institute, however, has always been liberal , and it has been willing to give a hearing to strange and even heretical doctrines, relying upon the inherent ability of the truth ultimately to prevail." Art Institute.

Openness to the new should not be confused, however, with official endorsement. French left Chicago during the 1913 show, commenting privately that it had in it "a large element of hoax and humbug, and another large element of laziness and incompetence." French's coolness to modernism was counterposed by the interest of future director N. H. Carpenter and by the enthusiasm of Arthur Aldis and Arthur Jerome Eddy, who lectured on post-impressionism to the interested, if bewildered, viewers who jammed the Art Institute galleries.

As important as temporary exhibitions or events might be, they differed from the permanent collection, which far more definitely established the standards by which the museum defined a work of art. A critical turning point was the organization in 1910 of The Friends of American Art, an association of 125 Chicagoans, each of whom pledged $1,000 for the purchase of works by living American artists for the Art Institute's collection.

As the nature of the collection was redefined, so too was the whole relation of the museum to the public. By the twentieth century, Hutchinson's concern had shifted to the value of art for 12

Chicago History

the masses. While it remained the duty of the philanthropic elite to support aesthetic endeavor, the few acted for the many: "Art is not destined for a small and privileged class. Art is democratic. It is of the people and for the people .. . . It exists for the common heart and for ordinary culture." Florence remained the model for the "ideal Chicago," but the meaning of the Renaissance city had changed. There, artists gave form to the ideals of the common people. They were the ones "who could best express the life and the hope of the time in painting, sculpture, and architecture, in terms understood by all." The result was harmony and coopera tion. Artists were responsible workmen ancl citizens who tried to communicate with their publi c. In return, they received recognition and a respected place in the community.

"They did not set their Art upon a pedestal where few could see it. ... They placed their art upon the ground where the children could look and gaze at it, and by it be inspired."

In this look at the past Hutchinson selected those elements of social integration of which art was the most important expression. Chicago citizens would be brought together in a new

This undated view of one of the galleries shows, among other works, El Greco's The Assumption of the Virgin (1557). purchased in 1906 and considered one of the museum's most important acquisitions. Art Institute.

unity. Not only would they be disciplined, but, in partaking of art, they would join in a common experience and fill the void caused by the lack of shared values. The city that was searching for its soul would find it and would strive to reach the ideal. As George Adams, another trustee of the Art Institute, declared at the dedication of Orchestra Hall across the street, "We look through the dust and smoke of Chicago as she is, to see the fair and noble form of our city as she will be, a center of influence, intellectual as well as industrial, a school of the nation, as Pericles declared that Athens was the school of Greece." "\!\Tith this sense of the value of culture and with a n'ew commitment to the broader public, the Art Institute established innovative programs. To extend the resources of the museum outside its walls, the Art Institute developed loan collections and a lecture service offered to clubs, schools and colleges, and chambers of commerce. Beginning in I 909, selections from the museum's permanent collection were exhi bi tee! in field houses in the city's parks.

The relation of the Art Institute to local art societies extended and deepened in the twentieth century. By I 914, nearly eighty associations met at the Art Institute each week. A good many of these were affiliated with the Municipal Art League. Through its exhibition committee, the league helped manage an annual exhibition of the work of Chicago artists at the Art Institute. At this February exhibition, the individual clubs gave receptions for their members and took them on gallery tours. Many of the clubs made regular purchases at these exhibitions, as did the Chicago Municipal Art Gallery. The exhibition committee of the league met at the Art Institute; there delegates received news of events at the museum which they reported back to their clubs.

These groups were not only those designed to provide fellowship for art lovers and amateur artists bu_t also included organizations such as the Public School Art Society, founded by Ellen Gates Starr of Hull-House, which purchased paintings to decorate the public schools, organized collections, sponsored lectures, and sought Chicago History

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The First Forty Years

to bring the Art Institute into closer relation with the people. The Society led children through the museum on guided tours and organized neighborhood art centers which coordinated activities with the Art Institute.

In addition, the Art Institute became a place where other groups seeking to expand the cultural offerings of the city could gather. The Chicago \Voman's Club, for example, sponsored Sunday afternoon musical concerts at the Art Institute for many years.

No single example can convey the newer approaches that the Art Institute made to the public during th is period. Rather, it is the very multiplicity of offerings-a veritable explosion of activity on many different levels-that is revealing. Beyond its rigorous schedule of exhib itions, for instance, the Art Institute in 1916 provided instruction for adults, including special Sunday evening classes for working people, and gallery tours, a Children's Hour, and special high school classes for the young. The museum sold reproductions and offered loan collections of paintings, slides, and books for use by schools and associations. It also offered extension programs of traveling exhibits with accompanying lectures, classes in an outlying part of the city, and noon talks to factory workers. On the night of December 31, 1912, the Art Institute remained open free and provided a lecture on Rembrandt, a musical program, and refreshments as an alternative means of welcoming the New Year. The enthusiasm with which growth in attendance was greeted is indicated by the statement of pleasure following an impromptu address by William Jennings Bryan to some 20,000: "It is suggestive of the Art Instit u te's relation to the city to note that the front steps of its building become the rallying place for spontaneous public gatherings [such] as this."

But it was not just the level of activity that rose between I 890 and I 917, it was the concern behind it. There was a new sense of seeking and ques tioning. A weakness, once discovered, became a problem to be solved by involving the 14

Chicago History

whole community. In 1914 the Art Institute became concerned that no systematic effort had been made "to introduce all Chicago school chi ldren to the Art Institute." Representatives of the Board of Education, the Municipal Art League, the Public School Art Society, and the General Federation of \,Vomen's Clubs, among others, were invited to discuss the problem. A committee of representatives from all interested organizations was then constituted to devise a plan to remedy the situation.

This reflected a very different relationship between the Art Institute and the community than had existed earlier. In 1890 the museum was set apart from the city as a sphere in which the philanthropic elite on its board could act to restructure the quality of life in the city. By 1910 the Art Institute was working with other kinds of citizens' organizations in a cooperative effort to meet the needs of the city as they were then felt.

The critical moment of change came in 1903.

After years of effort the state passed an act that transferred formal ownership of the Art Institute-as well as the Field Museum-from the city to the South Park Commission. It also authorized a city referendum on the imposition of a tax to be used for the maintenance of the two museums. The successful outcome of the vote brought $50,000 to the Art Institute annually. But equally important, this new development meant that the museum and the city could now expect to work together. Charles Hutchinson became one of the South Park Commissioners, his first municipal office.

The Art Institute's move in making art available to a broader public had a national impact.

In 1909 the American Federation of Arts, designed to link together local art societies throughout the country, was organized at a convention in Washington. Charles Hutchinson was its president and its board of directors included two other prominent Chicagoans, Art Institute trustee Bryan Lathrop and future director . H. Carpenter. Its periodical Art and Progress, launched the same year, cataloged the

Taken in 1919, this photograph looks north along Michigan Avenue, past the fa9ade of the Art Institute building to the right. Art Institute.

effons of museums, associations, and city governments to promote culture. The federation's lasting contribution was the organization of traveling art exhibitions supplemented by illustrated lectures. In its early dynamic years, the American Federation of Arts projected Chicago's approach to culture onto the national scene.

Yet the Art Institute did not simply embrace the twentieth century. Rather, nineteenth century approaches to culture remained alongside the new. The place of the Art Institute in Daniel Burnham's Plan of Chicago is a testament to the hold of the past. Inspired by Paris, Burnham hoped to create a Sorbonne on Lake 'Michigan, for which the Art Institute already stood in place. Swathed in trappings of classical and Renaissance magnificence, the institutions of culture and of the city would form an axis at its center to symbolize its communal and spiritual life. The idealistic vision of Chicago that Charles Hutchinson conveyed in his 1888 speech still had its hold in 1909.

The Burnham plan dramatized the tension between the Art Institute's heritage and twentieth century forces. In the years that followed,

this tension would manifest itselÂŁ in the Art Institute's acquisitions, its annual shows, and in the relation between the museum and the art school. There would be significant changes prompted by the growth of the Ins ti tute's staff of professional curators with specialized training in the areas of their curatorial responsibility.

Yet the Art Institute's most distinctive feature would remain-its special relation to the public.

At this time membership exceeds 65,000, the largest by far of any art museum in the country.

Its collections, exhibits, and programs draw not only millions of Chicagoans but countless visitors from abroad. Their presence acknowledges the Art Institute's status as one of the leading art museums in the world. The Art Institute remains solidly anchored in the heart of downtown, where its founders wished to see it exert its uplifting influence.

Selected Sources A detailed bibliography can be found in the author's Culture and I.he City: Cultural Phi/anthro/>y in Chicago from the 1880s to 19j7_ Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976.

See also, " Toward a History of the Art Institute of Chicago: A Survey of Sources," page 61; and Charles L. Hutchinson's speeches: "Art: Its Influence and Excellence in ifodern Time," reported in Saturday Evening Herald 31, March 1888; " The Democracy of Art," American Magazine of Art 7, 1916.

Chicago History

15

Frederic Clay Bartlett: Chicago Painter and Patron of the Arts

BY ERNE R. and FLORENCE FRUEH

The gallery ofpaintings given to the Art Institute by Bartlett ÂŤ became the first room of modern art in any American museum. It remains a monument to its generous collector, the rare example of a group ofpaintings gathered with deep knowledge, taste, and warm understanding.')

Daniel Catton Rich, Chicago Tribune, June 25, 1953

FREDERIC CLAY BARTLETT (1873-1953) was a gifted and prolific painter whose works were frequently exhibited at the Art Institute and other major American museums. Many of his murals, impressive contributions to Chicago's public art, may still be seen. But his most enduring gift to the city was the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection of the Art Institute, one of the finest collections of post-impressionist paintings in the world.

Bartlett was the son of Adolphus Clay Bartlett, president of Hibbard, Spencer, Bartlett & Company, one of the country's foremost hardware firms. Young Frederic grew up in Prairie Avenue's select circle of wealthy and closely knit Chicagoans who shared common social and cultural bonds. It was a restricted society, but also one which gave the city many of its civic and cultural leaders.

Such financiers, industrialists, and merchants as l'viartin A. Ryerson , Charles L. Hutchinson, Marshall Field, Edson Keith, Charles D. Hamill, Cyrus H. McCormick, John J. Glessner, and Adolphus Clay Bartlett, dedicated to the city in which they prospered, gave liberally of ~heir time and money to the Art Institute, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the University of Chicago, serving on the boards of trustees of one or more of these and other cultural enterprises.

Like his father, Bartlett served for many years as a trustee of the Art Institute, and believed with him that "if one devoted one's time to

finance then a goodly portion should be given back to ... public benefits." The young Bartlett, however, did not enter his father's business, but early committed himself to the life of an artist.

At nineteen, overwhelmed by the splendor of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the "miles and miles of pictures" he saw there, he "determined to leave the security and luxury of home ... and forge out into the world to learn the technique, secrets, and methods of artists." Visits to Rome, Florence, Siena, Padua, and Pisa later that year strengthened his resolve, and in 1894 he embarked on what was to be five years of intensive study of painting in Munich and Paris.

After a year of preliminary work with a private professor in Munich, Bartlett became one of the few foreigners ever to be admitted to that city's prestigious Royal Academy. Following his graduation, he went on to Paris where he enrolled at the Ecole Collin for drawing in the morning; Aman-Jean's School of Painting in the afternoon; and classes for figure drawing at the Academie Calorossi in the evening. When James Abbott Mc eill Whistler opened his short-lived Paris studio, Bartlett was one of the first to enroll.

Bartlett's early interest in mural painting was stimulated when he met the eminent muralist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Many years later he fondly wrote of their first encounter:

Erne R . and Florence Frueh are the authors of The Serond Presbyterian Church of Chicago: Art and Architecture (1978), and numerous articles on the Arts and Crafts movement in Chicago.

How generously and kindly he received me. He looked with keen interest at the portfolio of sketches I had tremblingly brought and asked me to enlarge certain ones on cartoon paper, indicating a little color, and bring them back to him at my convenience. I walked home on Olympian

16

Chicago History

Mural by Frederic Clay Bartlett in the vestibule of the Frank Dickinson Bartlett Memorial Gymnasium of the University of Chicago. Photo courtesy of the University of Chicago .

clouds ... [and] was ever grateful for his sympathy and his helpful and inspiring criticism.

In 1899 Bartlett returned to Chicago with his bride, the former Dora Tripp of White Plains, New York, whom he had met in Paris. The young couple settled temporarily in his parents' Prairie Avenue mansion, and Bartlett promptly found himself "a good studio in the Fine Arts Building," Chicago's mecca of artistic activities.

Most Chicago artists found it hard to make a living, complaining that the "simple fact of local residence worked against them with local purchasers." Brush and Pencil chided: Chicago educates more artists than any other city in America; but it does not encourage them to stay here. As a consequence there is a constant migration o[ artists, and generally the best, to other localities, where they are better appreciated.

And Finley Peter Dunne, creator of the philosophic barkeep Mr. Dooley, urged: Buy pictures. Buy them of the local artists. You cannot expect arti ts to remain in the city when they are dependent upon Eastern exhibitions for their sales; and you cannot create an art center without artists.

But for Frederic Clay Bartlett the time and place were right. The city was in the midst of an unprecedented building boom accompanied by a gre:n demand for decorative art in public buildings. This offered an ideal opportunity for Bartlett's talent which, coupled with his social connections, soon brought him commissions for murals.

His first major commission (1900), in collaboration with his close friend, architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, was the decoration of the newly reconstructed nave of the Second

Presbyterian Church. This extensive project, still existing, included twenty-five Bartlett frescoes-the magnificent Tree of Life in the chancel and twenty-four large panels, predominantly of angels singing and playing medieval instruments, in the Gothic arches of the nave.

Other major Bartlett works (generally in the Pre-Raphaelite mode) which can still be seen, are: a richly gessoed frieze depicting medieval athletic games in the lobby of the Frank Dickinson Bartlett Memorial Gymnasium at the University of Chicago (1904); fifty-six small panels covering the entire ceiling of the Gothic lounge of the University Club of Chicago picturing a medieval chase and feast (1909); a charming mural symbolizing the flowering of the arts in the vestibule of the tenth floor of the Fine Arts Building (1910); and Gothic decorations in the Fourth Presbyterian Church (1914).

Additional Bartlett murals, no longer existing, were: five lunettes representing Music, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and Science at McKinley High School (1904), painted over; thirty-four murals showing the rise of commerce and industry in Chicago, for the Council Chamber of City Hall (1911), destroyed by fire; and two large lunettes, entitled Great Walls, for the Burnham Architectural Library of the Art Institute (1920), masked during its redecoration .

Bartlett exhibited his easel paintings regularly at the Art Institute between 1900 and 1933.

Among the first of these was Autumn, a Whistlerian landscape described in Brush and Pencil as follows: l\fr. Bartlett's Autumn is confessedly not an effort to interpret or faithfully depict nature, but to produce a striking decorative effect in the guise of a landscape. The colors are rich and subdued, and are Chicago History

17

Rendered in the impressionist style, Blue Rafters (ca. 1919) is a study of Helen Louise Birch at the Bartlett summer house in Lake Geneva. The painting is Frederic Clay Bartlett's best-known work . Art Institute.

so disposed that the whole composition is a harmonious bit of unreality ... withal a picture so pleasing in its decorative effect as to command attention and elicit admiration.

Numerous other landscapes followed over the years. Before 1918 most of these were painted during trips to Munich, southern France, Switzerland, Italy, and the Orient, and show the influence of \Vhistler and Puvis de Chavannes.

Much of Bartlett's work after 1918 was done in the United States. Increasingly his paintings began to show the influence of the post-impressionists, particularly Matisse and Van Gogh, whose works he had already begun to collect.

Bartlett was honored with several one-man shows at the Art Institute in which twelve to twenty-four paintings were exhibited. His work was awarded prizes at the St. Louis Exposition of 1904 and the San Francisco Exhibition of 1915; and representative works are now in the collections of the Art Institute, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.

Blue Rafters, the best known of Bartlett's paintings, is a vibrant study of his second wife, H elen Birch Bartlett. It was exhibited in a one-man show at the Cincinnati Museum in 18

Chicago History

1918 and a year later purchased for the Art Institute by The Friends of American Art. The Bassin de Diane, Fontainebleau was given to the Art Institute by the Ryerson family; and a still-life, Fruit, was a gift of the third Mrs. Bartlett.

Bartlett's most active period of collecting began in 1919, after his marriage to Helen Birch.

Together they assembled a small collection of post-impressionist paintings for their own edification and enjoyment, but as it grew they planned to give it to the Art Institute at some future date. That time came all too soon. In l 925 Helen Birch Bartlett died. The following year Bartlett gave their sizable collection of twenty-three masterpieces to the Art Institute in her memory. The terms of the gift specified that the collection was to be kept intact, although other works could be shown with it "should the practice serve to illustrate better the sequence and relation of painters and tendencies."

In addition to Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, considered by many one of the most important paintings of the nineteenth century, the collection included Picasso's The Old Guitarist; Toulouse Lautrec's At the Moulin Rouge; Cezanne's Basket of

Georges Seurat's pointillist masterpiece, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-86), was the crowning piece of the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection presented to the Art Institute by Frederic Clay Bartlett in 1926. Art Institute.

Apples; Van Gogh's Room at Arles; Henri Rousseau's The Waterfall; Matisse's Woman on a Rose Divan; and Gauguin's The Day of the God. Bartlett apparently die\ little painting after a cataract operation in 1932. He married again and thereafter diviclecl his time between Beverly, Massachusetts, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

He never completely severed his ties with Chicago, however, maintammg a residence in Evanston and an office on East Wacker Drive, just across the river from the gigantic Hibbard, Spencer, Bartlett & Company warehouse. He died in his Beverly home in the spring of 1953, at the age of eighty.

In his journal, Bartlett fervently expressed his conviction that every human being owes a payment for being born in the world. In other words one must pay for their birthright before one is free to follow their own selfish desires. A talented person must pay back with their talents perchance in science, engineering, architecture, painting, sculpture, in whatever branch he was endowed.

By contributing to the artistic life of the city,

both as a professional artist and as an unusually discerning benefactor of the Art Institute, Bartlett die\ indeed make his payment to the world.

Selected Sources Chicago Daily News, Chicago Tribune, various dates.

Prn1001c.,Ls: Apollo, September, 1966; Art Institute of Chicago Aunual Re/1ort, B ulletin, exhibition catalogs. scrapbooks, vari• ous issues; Art News, Architectural Record, Brush and Pencil, Fine Arts Journal, The Sketch Book, various issues; [University or Chicago] The l'niversily Record, I 904-05.

Bartlett , Frederic Clay. Sorto/a Kindofa Journal of My Own. Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1965.

Chicago Blue Book. Chicago: Chicago Directory Co., 1902-16.

Chicago. Chicago ~lunicipal Library. " Brief Review of the Im• portant Sculpture and Painting in the City Hall" by Frederick Rex. Typescript. February 9, 1933.

Chicago. Chicago Municipal Library. "City Hall, A Pictorial History" by Arthur G . Lindell. Unpaged scrapbook .

Frueh, Erne R. and Florence. Chicago's Second Presbyterian Church: Art and Archilecture . Chicago : The Second Presbyterian Church, 1978.

Goodspeed , Thomas \V. The University of Chicago Biographical Sketches. Vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925.

H orowit, , H elen Lefkowitz. Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s lo 19Ii. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1976. ~!axon , John. The Art lllstilute of Chicago. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. , 1970.

NEWS PAPERS:

Chicago History

19

A Museum and a School: An Uneasy but Creative Union

BY PETER C. MARZIO

Physically connected by a bridge of buildings across the tracks) the museum and school have not gone separate ways.

The challenge of today is to affirm the symbiotic relationship between apparently divergent parts . ... To see [ the Art InstituteJ simply as a trade school or an art school or a museum would be to miss its brilliance.

THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO is both a museum and a school. 'While this structure has flourished for a century, its unique and fragile nature has, for too many years, been taken for granted.

Indeed, the precedent for establishing a single organization like the Art Institute, devoted to exhibiting works of art for public viewing and to training artists according to sound pedagogical principles, was virtually non-existent abroad until the twentieth century. For example, even though the leading popularizer of art in Europe, the Louvre, made its collections available to artists on an exclusive basis for 5 days of every 10 that it was open in the early nineteenth century, no formal attempt was made to offer instruction in art. In Europe, only industrial design museums were connected with schools, particularly those in the German cities of Dresden, Stuttgart, Leipzig, and Hanover. Art museums and art schools were seldom organized as single institutions.

In America, on the other hand, art museums founded after the Civil War were often associated with an art school. Art appreciation and

Peter C. Marzio is director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He is the author of numerous articles and books including, most recently, The Art Crusade (1976) and The Democratic Art: An Introduction to the History of Chromolithography in America, to be published in 1979.

20

Ch icago History

art instruction were considered complementary.

The Art Institute deserves study because it has retained this museum-school makeup for a century. The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Minneapolis art complex have maintained a similar close association between their museums and schools. Moreover, the Art Institute has from time to time claimed the largest student body of any art school in America and even the world. In a recent publication entitled The Art Institute of Chicago: 100 Masterpieces (1978) a booster wrote unblushingly: The School of the Art Institute is the leading institution for the training of the artist in the United States and the only ma jar degree granting art school that has remained connected with a major museum-an affiliation that provides a superb laboratory of models in every media.

A few of us in Washington, Boston, and Minneapolis may disagree, but the point is well taken. The Art Institute of Chicago has been a significant aesthetic force in America, and its students, among them Georgia O'Keefe, Claes Oldenburg, and Red Grooms, are candidates for a small hall of fame.

Although the museum and school of the Art Institute have enjoyed obvious success, why today does the museum-school union so often seem to be an anomaly? Is the nature of the pairing so odd that it can scarcely exist? The history of the Art Institute shows that there are no simple answers to these questions.

A Museum and a School

For many years the school and museum shared the same spaces. Classes were held in rooms adjoining the galleries and students were frequently to be found copying the works of the great masters as part of their training. This group, however, taken before 1918, is shown working with live models. CHS.

The Art Institute was first an art school.

After numerous false starts in the 1860s and 1870s, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts was founded i~ 1879 and changed its name in 1882 to The Art Institute of Chicago. Its charter was clear. It called for: The founding and maintenance of schools of art and design, the preservation and exhibition of collections of objects o[ art and the cultivation and extension of the arts of design by any appropriate means.

Chronologically, and in the language of the

charter, the school came first, but in practice the school and museum seemed equal in importance. During the pioneering decades of the Art Institute, the major concerns were funding; establishing an adequate endowment fund; and finding sufficient space for both museum and school. The early annual reports are remarkably balanced in their discussion of the two parts of the Institute and, initially, expenditures were fairly equal. In l 895 it cost $39,075 to operate the museum and $22,855 to operate the school. The museum and school were housed Chicago History

21

of 200." By 1909 the figure stood at 3,222, and in 1922, 4,521 students took courses. In 1957-58 the figure stood at 5,589. But as the school grew, so too did the museum. Exhibitions that were originally intended to provide students with models for study became popular with the general public. As early as 1895 the Annual Report testified to the popular appeal of "successful" exhibitions: It is a mark of the activity of the institution that of the nineteen sky-lighted galleries only three ... have remained unchanged through the year. Most of them have been rearranged from three to ten times, with an expenditure of labor and attention to which the older museums are strangers.

Women tended to predominate in the classes of the Art lnstitute's school during the early years. This sculpture class, photographed ca. 1890, worked from a live model. Art Institute.

in the same building, and though space was tight, each seemed able to manage without a major encroachment on the other's territory.

During the first decades of the school's existence, most students were women. Not until the rise of an industrial arts department in the 1920s did men appear in appreciable numbers. As an interview with a school student in the Chicago Times Herald of 1897 suggests, training in the fine arts was primarily associated with females: "Not every girl with a taste for drawing can go to Paris to study, and we think ourselves very lucky to have such a splendid school, and jolly one, too, right in our own city." Only after World War II did the number of men enrolled begin to equal the number of women.

The school has been enormously popular with students throughout its existence. By 1880, the year after the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts opened its doors, it had an enrollment "upwards 22

Chicago History

As museum attendance increased from 558,552 in 1909 to 919,620 in 1935, and 1,669,119 in 1971-72, the gulf between the museum's budget and the school's widened. From the modest difference between $83,558 for the museum and $74, 136 for the school in l 908, the figures rose to $154,873 vs $81,301 in 1914; $208,205 vs $92,579 in 1918; 500,568 vs. $217,053 in 1938.

In June 1978 the overall operating expenses of the Art Institute were $16 million, of which $4.5 million were allocated to the school.

The cost of the increasing number of temporary exhibits and a growing disparity in budgets were early harbingers of the strain that would eventually develop between the museum and the school. Space allocation for the school and security for the museum appeared repeatedly as vexing issues. From 1900 to 1940, Chicago's wealthy citizens seemed more interested in the museum than the school: their support went to the permanent collections, and to building and endowment funds, while the school was left to pay its own way.

The school and museum differed in other significant ways as well. A museum like the Art Institute was a public showcase, with set hours and regular routines. Its priorities were connoisseurship, security, cleanliness, and order.

The school's priorities were, in contrast, student

In the post-World War II era an art career for men seemed to become more acceptable than in the past.

Possibly spurred by the availability of G.I. benefits, the number of men enrolled in classes at the Art Institute increased considerably, as can be seen in this photo taken in the late 1940s. Art Institute.

self-awareness and freedom, for the school was a laboratory and a training facility, and, even within the framework of scheduled classes, thrived on informality and serendipity: the chance event was the keynote of its daily rhythm. While the museum aimed to preserve and protect the art of the past, the school pursued the new and the untried. These different goals, which to this day distinguish the museum and the school, created innumerable problems and eventually culminated in open conflict.

But this outbreak of hostilities was long in coming. For until the 1950s, the museum and the sd1ool of the Art Institute ran along parallel tracks. A basic harmony existed because certain aesthetic principles were accepted by both parties. The museum exhibited masterpieces and

the school (particularly from 1879 to the 1920s) believed that copying the art of the past was a crucial step in artistic training. While it was normal to see students working in museum spaces in the 1879-1925 era, today it is the exception. The physical design of the Art Institute structure, dedicated in 1893, encouraged the integration of museum and school activities.

Classrooms were literally located alongside of, above, and below the exhibition galleries, and students were a regular element in the museum's traffic. Today, if an art student is seen in the musemp, it is likely that he or she is performing some kind of grant-in-aid work-study job or is simply lost. Integrated spaces did not guarantee a smoothly run institution, and, in (continued on page 44) Chicago History

23

The Collections

What the Art Institute of Chicago has in its collections is a group of nineteenth-century French pictures of the greatest distinction as well as a major group of old Flemish pictures and old Italian paintings. Put another way, the collection does not cover the whole history of Western painting with equal emphasis. But what it covers in depth, it covers gloriously. The same may be said of the print room's holdings as well as the Oriental collections. In the case of the collections of ceramics and furniture, the original emphasis was on acquiring the typical rather than the exceptional . ... [but] as modern taste no longer seeks to copy, the emphasis necessarily has had to change--and at a moment when many categories have skyrocketed in price.

John Maxon in The Art Institute of Chicago draw attention to the fact that in the course of time the collectionsthe heart of any art museum--are bound to reflect changes in taste, interest, and financial resources. In the case of the Art Institute, some of these changes can be traced in the evolution of the nine departments which currently share curatorial responsibility for the collections.

In the early years, when the collection as a whole was small, the director of the Art Institute also served as curator. As the collection grew and became increasingly diverse more curators were drawn into its conservation and exhibition. At the present time the museum's curatorial and professional staff includes more than l 00 people.

It was l 9 I 6 before a formal distinction was established between painting and sculpture on the one hand and decorative arts on the other JOHN MAXON's COMMENTS

*The research for this section was done by Victoria Irons Walch of the Society's staff. The illustrations were supplied by the Art Institute.

24

Chicago H istory

by the creation of a separate Department of Decorative Arts. ,i\Testern painting and sculpture, meanwhile, remained as one collection, though with increasingly specialized curators.

During tbe past decade or so, the size and importance of the different segments of this collection have led to the formation of three functionally distinct departments: Earlier Painting and Classical Art; American Arts; and 20th Century Painting and Sculpture.

The Department of Decorative Arts itself spawned an even larger number of separate departments as the quantity and quality of its diversified holdings increased. Thus, a series of substantial gifts spurred the formation of a separate Department of Oriental Art in 1921.

Similarly, in 1957, two substantial acquisitions in the field Jed to tbe establishment of the Department of Primitive Art. The Department of Textiles, designated as a separate entity in l 961, became yet a third offshoot. More recently still, the Department of Decorative Arts split into two more specialized departments: European Decorative Arts and American Decorative Arts. Soon after, the latter was absorbed into the newly created Department of American Arts, thus reuniting-in this instance at leastpainting, sculpture, and the decorative arts.

The Department of Prints and Drawings, established in 1911, expanded its collection substantially from the late 1930s on, eventually including photography within its scope.

A separate Department of Photography was established in 1974.

The collections in the care of the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries are discussed elsewhere (see page 59). As the following pages show, all of the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago have developed, to quote John Maxon again, "because of the affectionate interest of the people of Chicago," who have given the Art Institute generous and continuing support from the beginning.

The Collections

Earlier Painting and Classical Art no formal departmental divisions in the Art Institute's earliest years, the works which now form the core of the collections of the Department of Earlier Painting and Classical Art were among the first and most important of the museum's acquisitions.

The first accession into the permanent collections was made in the late 1870s. Acquisitions continu ed without much direction throughout the 1880s, but in 1890 the first truly important WHILE THERE WERE

The Chicago Vase [Attic red-figure stamnos], ca. 450 B.C. found at Capua. The unknown artist is referred to as the " Chicago Painter," Greek. Terra cotta. Gift of Philip D. Armour and Charles L. Hutchinson, 1889.

St. John on Patmos, ca. 1650. Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665) , French.

Oil on canvas. A. A. Munger Collection, 1930.

Chicago History

25

The Collections

The Golden Wedding, 1674. Adriaen van Ostade (1610-1685), Dutch. Oil on panel.

George B. and Mary R. Harris Fund, 1894.

group of paintings to become part of the collections-IS Dutch masters-was purchased by Charles L. Hutchinson at the Paris sale of the Demidoff Collection. In the course of the next few years a number of people contributed the purchase price of particular paintings and thus became their actual donors.

The paintings were first displayed in Chicago on November 8, 1890, at a gala opening.

Five thousand invitations have been issued to the art-loving people in the city, and the edifice will be adorned in all its halls, stairways, and chambers with flowers and palms and orchids. There will be an orchestra which will discourse music of the most absolute variety, ranging from the classic scores of Mendelsshon (sic) to the popular music that has tunes in it. [The Evening News, November 7, 1890] 26

Ch icago Hist ory

The paintings displayed that night included some that remain among the most highly regarded pieces in the Art Institute's collections: Rembrandt's Young Girl at an Open Hal/Door, Frans Hals's Portrait of an Artist, and Meindert Hobbema's Watermill with the Great Red Roof. The painting most prized at the time, both artistically and monetarily-it cost twice as much as the Rembrandt-was Adriaen van Ostade's genre painting, The Golden Wedding (shown here).

The next major addition to the collections came in 1906, with the acquisition of El Greco's The Assumption of the Virgin (see page 13). The Art Institute purchased the painting on the recommendation of American

The Resurrection , ca. 1600. " Cecco del Caravaggio " (active first quarter of the 17th century), Italian. Oil on canvas. Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection , 1934.

Chicago History

27

The Gulf of Marseilles, seen from L'Estaque , ca . 1891. Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). French.

Oil on canvas. Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1933.

artist Mary Cassatt, who had come upon it while touring Spain. Several trustees contributed money to make the purchase possible, but in 1915 Nancy Atwood Sprague donated a sum sufficient to reimburse them all.

Although the Art Institute received its first impressionist painting just after the turn of the century, it was the acquisition of the Potter Palmer Collection in 1922 which put it on the path toward preeminence in this area. Mrs. Palmer had begun her collection of nineteenth century French paintings long before the Impressionists were widely accepted, and the fifty works she donated in her husband's name include some of the finest examples of the period.

Four years later, in 1926, the Art Institute received the magnificent Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection of French post-impressionist pa intings. With these two rich collections in its possession, the Art Institute quickly became a world center for the study of nineteenth century French painting. Additional gifts of works in this area from a number of other generous donors have reinforced the Art Institute's leading position.

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Ch icago History

The quantity and quality of the acquisitions since then have been on such a scale that it would be impossible to list even the most important donors and their gifts here. Suffice it to say that a large number of loyal and devoted Chicagoans have given consistent and enthusiastic support to this department.

One gift that must be mentioned, however, is Martin A. Ryerson's bequest in 1933 of what remains the greatest single collection to come to the Art Institute, comprising a total of 227 paintings of outstanding quality and range.

Among them are many fine early Flemish works as well as some splendid nineteenth century French ones.

Principally because the tastes of its many benefactors have tended to focus on certain periods in the history of art, the Department of Earlier Painting and Classical Art is very strong in some areas, such as the Dutch masters and French impressionists and post-impressionists, and less strong in others. As is generally the case, the quality of its collection has depended on the combined boldness and imagination of its curators and donors.

The Cliff Walk (Etretat) , 1882. Claude Monet (1840-1926), French. Oil on canvas. Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection, 1933.

Paris , A Rainy Day, 1877. Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) , French . Oil on canvas. Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Fund Income, 1964.

Chicago History

29

The Collections

Eu ro pean Decorative Arts Decorative Arts is a direct descendant of the broader Department of Decorative Arts, one of the oldest in the museum. The collection of decorative art objects began in the late 1870s and has continued ever since with extraordinary support from donors. Many of the department's most important gifts have come from the Antiquarian Society.

The Antiquarian Society was actually organized in 1877, two years before the Art Institute, to help raise the standard of arts and crafts produced by women and to create a market for them. After a decade devoted primarily to sponsoring classes in painting, drawing, and embroidery, the Antiquarian Society in 1888 decided to direct its efforts toward other goals.

With the proceeds from the sale of classroom property, members established a fund for the purchase of objects representative of the industrial arts for the collections of the Art Institute.

Thus began a long and fruitful association.

The organization of the decorative arts collection into a formal curatorial department came in 1916. Collecting emphases varied over the years as objects in a particular medium or from a particular region attracted special interest. As noted earlier, when the holdings in several of these areas achieved a certain volume and level of importance they were organized into the separate departments of Oriental Art, Primitive Art, and Textiles. The most recent change removed American decorative art objects, leaving a department devoted exclusively to the acquisition, care, and study of the European decorative arts.

From the outset some of the finest objects in the collections of the Art Institute were European. The holdings of pieces made in England had always been strong, and in the 1920s and 1930s the department began to collect pieces from the Continent-especially France-with equal vigor.

The decorative arts as collected by the Art THE DEPARTMENT OF EUROPEAN

30

Chicago Hist ory

Institute cover a wide range of objects including furniture, sculpture, metalwork, ceramics, glass, and architectural ornament. Frequently, entire furnished rooms were purchased or donated. However, the chief permanent presentation of period settings, wrought in the finest detail, is to be found in the mini ature Thorne Rooms, donated to the Art Institute in 1942

by Mrs. James Ward Thorne.

Fall-Front Desk, 1812. Charles Percier (1764-1838) and Pierre-Fran9ois-Leonard Fontaine (1762-1853) designers; unknown cabinetmaker, French.

Calamander veneer over pine, assorted other woods, brass, steel, copper, gold and silver leaf, bronze, leather. Centennial Fund and the Mrs. Burton W. Hales, Mrs. William 0. Hunt, Jessie Spalding Landon, Mrs. Harold T. Martin, Adelaide Ryerson , Mrs. E. Hall Taylor, Mrs. Chester D. Tripp , and Mrs. Philip K. Wrigley Funds, 1976.

The Collections

Textiles ORIGINALLY IN THE care of the Department of Decorative Arts, textiles were among the earliest acquisitions of the Art Institute. The Antiquarian Society donated the first pieces in 1890-several fine tapestries and church vestments. These were followed by several hundred pieces presented by Martin A. Ryerson in 1894 and by the Edward E. Ayer Collection, acquired from the Field Museum in 1907. The Ryersons' private collection came to the Art Insti-

tu te in 1937 as a bequest.

The Agnes Allerton Textile Wing was built in 1927, providing much needed exhibit and storage space. In 1961 a separate Department of Textiles was established to accommodate the continuously expanding collection. Superb new exhibit, storage, and conservation facilities, especially designed to meet the unique needs of the preservation and study of textiles, have recently been installed in this department.

The Feudal Lile, ca. 1500. French [Touraine?]. Wool , tapestry weave. Gift of Kate S. Buckingham, 1922.

Chicago History

31

The Col lections

Oriental Art Department of Oriental Art was not established until 1921, the Art Institute had been active in collecting and exh ibiting works of art from the Near and Far East since before the turn of the century. The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 had introduced Chicagoans to a magnificent array of Japanese prints and had converted at least seven citizens into avid collectors. These men would make Chicago second only to Paris as a center for the collection of Japanese prints.

In 1908 the Art Institute mounted a milestone exhibit of Jf!panese prints, comprising 649 items loaned by five Chicago collectors.

Frank Lloyd Wrigh t, who designed the innovative installation for the exhibit, was one of the ALTHOUGH A SEPARATE

collectors involved. Many of the prints, however, belonged to Clarence Buckingham, whose collection was donated to the Art Institute after his sudden death in 1913. His sister, Kate Sturgis Buckingham, not only continued to add to this very significant print collection, but also donated Chinese ceremonial bronzes, T'ang stone sculpture, and ceramics in memory of her sister. She also left a bequest in 1937 for acquisitions and care of the collection.

Since then, the Oriental Art Department has expanded the scope of its collection significantly with the help of more recent donors. ewer major acquisitions include Japanese and Indian sculpture and Indian, Rajput, and Mughal manuscript paintings.

To mb fig ure of a ho rse , T'ang Dynasty, 618-906 A.O. Chine se. Glazed pottery. Russell Tyson Collection, 1943.

32

Chicago History

The Collections

Chigo Daishi, The Priest Ki5bi5 as a Child , 14th century . Japanese.

Hang ing scroll , watercolors , ink, and gilt on silk. Gift of the Joseph and Helen Regenstein Foundation, 1959.

Ch icago History

33

The Collections

American Arts American Arts, established in 1975, is responsible for American painting and sculpture prior to 1901 (works executed after that date are generally in the custody of the Department of 20th Century Painting and Sculpture) as well as American decorative arts and architectural ornament of all periods.

The collection of American art has been a concern of the Art Institute since its beginning, but the first marked surge in interest came in 1910 with the formation of The Friends of American Art. Several concerned trustees and benefactors had examined the holdings of the Art Institute that year and found a total of just 55 American paintings. Among these, in THE DEPARTMENT OF

Mrs. Joseph Klapp (Anna B. Milnor), 1814. Thomas Sully (1783-1872), American . Oil on canvas . Gift of Annie Swan Coburn to the Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection , 1950.

Hattstaedt Bowl [punc h bowl, ladle, and tray], ca . 1912. Robert Jarvie (1865-1941) , American. Silver. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John R. Hattstaedt in memory of his father, John J. Hattstaedt, 1974.

34

Ch icago History

The Collections

Croquet Scene, 1866. Winslow Homer (1836-1910), American. Oil on canvas. Friends of American Art, 1942.

their own words, there were only "15 or 20 of such importance and quality as to form adequate representations of the artists."

The first meeting of The Friends of American Art was held in June 1910, and by July the group had gathered 142 subscribers, each of whom pledged $200 a year for five years. The organization prospered and made many significant contributions over the years, including Winslow Homer's Croquet Scene (shown here).

It disbanded in 1945.

Presently, the department's collection surveys American painting from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. It includes an especially

rich representation of works from the colonial period, the mid-nineteenth century Munich School, and pictures by such artists as Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. American painting in the latter half of the nineteenth century is well-represented, especially the work of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, and John Singer Sargent.

The department's holdings in sculpture range from the works of Horatio Greenough, the first American -sculptor to acquire an international reputation, through the neo-classic sculptures of Hiram Powers and Randolph Rogers, to the works of such nineteenth century exponents of Chicago History

35

The Collections

The Bath , ca. 1891. Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), American. Oil on canvas. Robert A. Waller Fund, 1910.

naturalism as Thomas Eakins and Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

Significant development of the collection of American decorative arts began as a response to an identified need by another of the museum's affiliated organizations. In I 941 , the Antiquarian Society extended its support of the European and Oriental collections to include American decorative arts. That same year, the Behrend Collection of "Pilgrim century" furniture was 36

Chicago History

purchased, g1vmg the museum a broad representation in the early colonial period, including many examples of regional variations. The silver and glass collections survey American manifestations of international styles from the seventeenth century to the present. Systematic collecting by the Antiquarian Society has combined with the efforts of many others to give the Art Institute a rich collection of American decorative arts.

The Collections

20th Century Painting and Sculpture

Man with a Pipe, 1915. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish. Oil on canvas. Gift of Mrs. Leigh B. Block in memory of Albert D. Lasker, 1952.

La Negresse Blanche , 1928. Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), Rumanian. White marble, black marble, caen stone, and wood. The Grant J. Pick Purchase Fund, 1966.

CHICAGO COLLECTORS have always been interested in contemporary art, from the early purchasers¡ of impressionist paintings to current collectors of the most recent works. The Art Institute has benefited from this interest in two ways: as the recipient of works purchased for it by these collectors and as the recipient of their support for its many exhibitions of contemporary art.

The Department of 20th Century Painting and Sculpture comprises both European and

American works and although the two are hung in separate parts of the museum, the viewer can see a clear progression of stylistic development in both. For the past two decades the curatorial staff has emphasized the collection of recentand thus sometimes controversial-art. The Society of Contemporary Art (founded in 1940 as the Society of Contemporary American Art and renamed in 1968) has been supportive of these efforts, as have individual donors.

The European galleries include a fine sampling of cubist works by Braque, Delaunay, Picasso and Gris. Works representative of other major European movements in art are also to be found here, including a particularly fine group of German expressionist works by Kandinsky and Marc.

Chicago History

37

The Collections

The Circus Rider, ca. 1927. Marc Chagall (1887Russian. Oil on canvas . Gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman, 1949.

),

The American galleries display an excellent selection of American Regionalist paintings from the 1930s and 1940s, including Grant Wood's American Gothic (see page 45) and Edward Hopper's Nighthawl<s (shown here).

Both were purchased for the collection by The Friends of American Art. The American collection of twentieth century art has also received a significant number of acquisitions as a result of exhibition purchase awards. Chicago and vicinity artists have been exhibiting their work at the Art Institute in annual shows since 1897, while the biennial exhibition of the works of American artists is the direct descendant of the Exhibition of American Oil Paintings first held at the Art Institute in 1888. One of the many paintings acquired for the collection as a result of the latter exhibitions is Hans Hofmann's work The

Nig hthawks, 1942. Edward Hopper (1882-1967) , American. Oil on canvas. Friends of American Art, 1942.

38

Ch icago History

The Collections

The Golden Wall, 1961 . Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), German. Oil on canvas. Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize Fund, 1962.

Golden Wall (shown here).

The collcCLion of twentieth century paintings benefited from the estab lishment in 1921 of the Joseph Winterbotham Trust Fund. Money from this fund was allocated for the purchase of modern paintings by foreign artists.

In 1964 the Art Institute received a completely unrestricted bequest from the estate of Grant .J. Pick, which the trustees assigned to the collection of twentieth century art . In using this bequest, particular emphasis has been

placed on acqumng representative pieces by such major twentieth century sculptors as Louise Nevelson, David Smith, Picasso, Mir6, Brancu i, and Giacometti. Among the pieces purchased with money from this fund is Brancusi's La Negresse Blanche (shown here). With generous gifts from a number of other donors, the departrnent has been able to develop a collection of twentieth century sculpture whose quality and scope matches its collection of modern paintings.

Chicago History

39

The Collectio ns

Prints and Drawings THE ART INSTITUTE's collection of prints and drawings was originally under the care of the library staff. The first acquisition of some five h u ndred assorted items came in 1887. Additions to the collection were only haphazard, at best,

until 1911, when the print collection was formally organized into an independent curatorial department within the museum.

During the first few decades of its existence, the department had a rather li mited scope,

A Guardian An gel Servin g a Little Breakfast, 1920. Paul Klee (1879- 1940).

Swi ss. Lithograph and watercolor. The Buckingham Fund, A. Kunstadter Family Fo un dation Fu nd, and France s S. Shaffner Pri ncipal Fu nd, 1970.

40

Chicago History

The Collections

concentrating primarily on nineteenth century French prinLmakers and English mezzotint artists. The arrival of the Buckingham Collection in I 938 did much to broaden the scope of the department's collections and to focus attention on the importance of its collecting activities. The gift contained works by the finest Dutch and German masters including 95 prints

by Rembrandt, 57 by Durer, and 21 portraits

by Van Dyck.

The expansion of the department and the interest in its activities generated by the Buckingham gift laid the foundation for significant growth during subsequent decades. Curatorial leadership, backed by generous support from donors, enlarged the scope of the collection enormously. In John Maxon's words, "the collection ceased entirely to be provincial in its

character and became one of the great printrooms of the world."

Since 1940 the department has also significantly increased its collection of drawings. An effort has been made to acquire drawings which on the one hand complement the painting collections and on the other stand as important works of art in their own right.

The changing exhibits to be found in the galleries and corridors adjoining the Department of Prints and Drawings are clearest testimony to the breadth and quality of this department's collections, here exemplified by Rembrandt van Rijn's etching and drypoint The Presentation in the Temple from the late 1650s and Paul Klee's lithograph and watercolor, A Guardian Angel Se,-uing a Little Break/ ast, executed in 1920.

The Presentation in the Temple, late 1650s?

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), Dutch.

Etching and drypoinl. Clarence Buckingham Collection, 1950.

Chicago History

41

The Collections

Primitive Art of prim1 t1ve art was originally the responsibility of the Decorative Arts Department, but was pursued without any particular direction until 1955. That year an important group of Peruvian art, the Gaffron Collection, was purchased by the Art Institute and was soon complemented by Nathan Cumming's gift of the bulk of the '\,Vasserman Collection of Peruvian ceramics.

Combined, these gave the Art Institute one of the finest collections of Peruvian art in the world, acquired in the short space of two years.

The Art Institute moved quickly to accomTHE ACQUISITION

OF WORKS

Female fig ure with offering bowl, ca. 1880. Nigerian, Yoruba people. Wood, beads, pigment. Ada Turnbull Hertle Fu nd, 1977.

Portra it stirrup spout vessel , ca. 400-600 A.O. Peruvian, Moche Culture. Terracotta. Buckingham Fund, 1955.

42

Chicago History

modate its newest major collections and formed a separate Department of Primitive Art in 1957. The acquisition policies since then have stressed the aesthetic value of each piece considered for accession and not merely its ethnographic qualities. Since the department has no desire to duplicate those areas already well represented in the collections of the Field Museum of Natural History, it has collected few pieces from Melanesia and Polynesia. Instead it has focused on Africa and Middle and South America, building a strong and representative collection of the arts of these areas.

Photography was one of the first museums in the country to accord photography the status of art by mounting a photography exhibit in 1900. This pioneering effort turned into an annual event, but the Art Institute itself did not make any major acquisitions in this area until 1949, when Georgia O'Keefe donated a collection put together by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz. In addition to 150 Stieglitz photographs it included some fine nineteenth century photographs and examples of the early work of Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, and Gertrude Kasebier, among others.

The photography collection grew apace and in 1951 the Art Institute appointed a curator of photography. An independent Department of Photography was established in 1974.

THE ART INSTITUTE

The Steerage , 1907. Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), American. Photogravure. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.

Great Wave, ca. 1856-57. Gustave LeGrey (1820-1862), French. Albumen print from collodion negative. Hugh Edwards Photography Purchase Fund , 1971.

Chicago History

43

A Museum and a School

( continued from page 23)

fact, from 1925 to 1965 there were numerous flare-ups over space allocation; but the situation provided for eyeball contact, social intercourse, and, in sum, for mutual awareness.

Perhaps even more important than all of these circumstances was the fact that before the 1950s key administrators, curators, and teachers often understood one another's roles, and in several significant cases served in diverse capacities. William M. R. French, brother of sculptor Dan iel Chester French and director of the Art Institute from 1885 to 1914, established the school's first basic curriculum, taught classes, served as chief executive officer, and worked as a curator. He personally embodied the unity of museum and school. One of his successors as director of the Art Institute, Robert B. Harshe, was also an amateur artist who liberally gave his time to students and faculty. One student remembered Dr. Harshe as "a Sunday painter and it was not at all unusual [for us] students ... suddenly to turn around and Dr. Harshe was standing there watching the class work. And that was really important." And oldtimers at the Institute still speak of Charles Fabens Kelley, who served in various administrative positions in both the school and the museum and then became a curator of Oriental Art. The versatility of people like French, Harshe, and Kelley helped maintain the informal, personal relationships that k<"pt open the lines of communication between the museum and school. These relationships occurred so natu rall y in the pre-World War II decades that in later times, to the detriment of the organization, their role as a fundamental tool for efiective management went unnoticed.

Sharing aesthetic principles, sharing space, and sharing key personnel united the museum and school at the Art Institute. Yet another binding element was a vague but very real sense of shared social responsibility. Born between the two great cu ltura l events of the late nineteenth century, the Centennial Exh ibition 44

Ch icago History

Artist Grant Wood's art education included evening classes at the Art Institute. His ironical, muchreprod uced American Gothic (1930) was acquired for the museum by The Friends of American Art .

Art Instit ute.

in Philadelphia (l 876) and the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893), the Art Institute thrived in an atmosphere in which fine art was considered capable of raising tie level of public taste and improving the design of everyday objects.

These and other pragmatic purposes motivated nineteenth-century America to establish institutions like the Art Institute. Leftist historians maintain that the museum was a kind of release valve for mounting class pressures, a mechan ism for soothing social injustice by feeding fine art to the masses. They attribute this precedent to the Louvre, and find it especially applicable to America. Economic historians see the establishment of museums as an inevitable stage in the accumulation of wealth by Amer-

A Museum and a School

ican tycoon . Urban historians define the museuin a a symbol of a city's maturity, while social historians perceive it as a demo ratic mixing bowl-a people's palace \\"here fine art is available to everyone. In the case o( the ,\n Institute each of these theories (and others) can be justified Lo some extent, but another line of reasoning is especially pertinent to its museum-school organization: the practical value of fine art in industrial activity.

When the Art Institute was being establi heel, the relation hip of fine art to manufacturing was a hotly debated social and economic issue.

In the late 1870s the United tates government commissioned l aac Edwards Clarke to study the status of art education here and to recommend a course of action for improvement. His finding, publi heel in three volumes in 1885, three years after the Art InstiLUte wa renamed, provided historical ba kground and contempora1 y analysis. In Art and Industry. Education in thr' Jndu trial and Fine Arts in the U.S., he CO\'ered numerous topic, but industrial deign and production were his primary interests. In hi imroduction he was unequivocal: a knowledge of art (particularly drawing), he wrote, "increases the wage-earning apaci ty of the worker in all mechanical industries." For Clarke, the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia (1876) s;mboli1ed the need for an Art Institute.

As he saw it, the Centennial was, to the people of these nited States: a great object lesson, and the one thing it taught aboYe all others was, that for some reason, the citi1cns o( this model republic, with all their boasts and all their free education of the people, were far inferior to the leading nations of the world. European and Asiatic, in all those industries into which the art element enters; and for the first time in their history, the American public had an opportunity to see into how Yast a portion of the productions of man this element does enter .... Look into the shop windows of our great cities, mark there how many beautiful objects you see that you first saw at the Centennial, and then ask yourself how do they come here? How are they paid for? Who

g ts the money? These are all questions whose answcn, arc pertinent to this discussion. They come on foreign ship ; they arc paid for by the toil of American workmen; the foreign merchants get the money for their production and transportation, and our workmen arc idle for want o( the work; our country is the poorer for all that we buy but ought to make.

This pragmatic evaluation of fine art was echoed in the charters of most American museums founded between 1869 and 1910, but the commitment to practical art education seldom amounted to more than lip-service. Th is was not true of the Art Institute. Before the turn of the century, courses in architecture, newspaper illustration, and wood carving were taught in the school along with drawing, painting, ¡culpture, and anatomy. The theory amounted to this: a fundamental training in fine art could be applied to numerous practical activities, particularly designs for textiles, carpets, wallpaper, crockery, glas , jewelry, etc.

Thi¡ derivative philosophy did not satisfy everyone. Pressure for even more practical courses and more emphasis on originality in industrial de ign became ommon in the early decades o( the new century. Instead of applying fine art designs to practical goods, the trend called for originality within industrial art itself.

By the 1920s the school had, in fact, recognized the split and set up an industrial arts curriculum, leading to a degree.

The momentum to fulfill practical needs remained strong in the first four decades of thi cenwry. During ¡w orld War I, the school received much favorable publicity for de igning war posters. Immediately afterward the desire for a new industrial look in America put tremendous pressure on the Industrial Art Department. Robert B. Harshe, director of the Art Institute, noted in 1922 that the "times have changed." {-\rt schools, he said, "have come to reflect accurately the needs and purposes of the industrial community from which they draw their sustenance." Large and small newspapers around the country carried the same message.

Chicago History

45

A Museum and a School

The Clinton, Iowa, Herald (April 1, 1922) stated flatly: "Industrial Art Is Having Boom."

The Palo Alto, California, Times ran: "Demand Great For Graduates of Art Industry Courses." These courses seldom related to the burgeoning electrical industry of the late 1920s or to other high technological businesses which designed their own machines and appliances in their industrial research laboratories, but dealt with interior decoration, costume, design, printing, toy making, weaving, and other craftoriented businesses.

The cry for practicality in art met the exigencies of the Depression years. "Students Fit Their Art to Social Needs," read one Chicago news headline in J932. Another paper that year explained that the school "Offers Practical T raining Designed to Aid Students in Earning a L iving from Some Form of Art." One Art Institute brochure published in 1938 noted: The School of Industrial Art was the only departmen t of the School to keep an undiminished enrollm ent during the depression. This undoubtedly means that the public thinks it is the most practical, or necessary, of the School's activities, and believes that a graduate of the School of Industrial Art can more read ily find an outlet for his activities upon graduation .

T he emphasis on practicality in the school widened the gulf between the school's philosophy and that of the museum.

By the 1950s a host of new, less tangible problems confronted the Art Institute-many of them precursors of the troubles to come in the course of the next decade. Museums and art schools all around the country felt the pain caused by rapid change throughout American society. Following World War II, students on the G.I. Bill appeared in large numbers, and more and more men could be seen in studios seriously pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Art was becoming a career for those expected to support families and carry the assortment of financial burdens associated with a 46

Chicago History

middle-class businessman. No longer a polite part-time activity, no more a feminine hobby, the pursuit of the B.F.A. was now serious business for more people than ever before.

Moreover, a new attitude, arising out of the spirit of abstract expressionism, declared that modern artists should ignore the past and throw off the excess baggage of formal styles and ideal forms. This was rebellion against established tastes, with "Experimentation" and "Individuality" the battle cries. A new freedom was injected into the pedagogy, and one visiting artist at the Institute defined the modern system as "loosey-goosey." Art schools all around the country went through numerous curriculum changes, but those schools associated with museums found themselves in particularly tense circumstances. For as long as student work seemed to flow from the tradition of museum masterpieces, most trustees and administrators and even the public could justify the existence of the school and fantasize that the museum was helping to prepare the art ists of tomorrow.

This aesthetic coherence was smashed in the 1950s as students began dripping paint on canvases or re-examining the basic, abstract elements of line and color. Old masters and plaster casts were no longer for imitation. Not only aesthetic differences, but also technical novelties in materials and methods made the art in the museum and the art in the school look as if they had originated on separate planets. v\Th ile sophisticated museum visitors could accept that the Art Institute's world-famous impressionist collection was produced by rebels, the aesthetic turmoil of the 1950s was more bothersome to them. Preferring their art well defined and professionally certified, they could not fit the avant-garde and student work into their perception of what constituted art. This new movement threatened to shatter the already fragi le bond between museum and school.

The question was clear: "Do a museum and an art school really belong together?" When

A Museum and a School

the Art Institute was founded there were very few art schools in America. As the first historian of American art, William Dunlap, wrote in 1834, the failure of schools to remain open was "the consequence of a want of union, between those who held the purse and those who possessed the knowledge." During the 1870s the idea of discussing the appropriate relationship between the museum and the school would have seemed absurd. Belief in a collaborative pursuit of fine art, both in the studio and the exhibition gallery,reigned. One of the founders of the Art Institute, Charles L. Hutchinson, dismissed the issue of the possible incompatibi lity of schools and museums by applying a simple test: "The value of an Art Institute shou ld be measured by the services it renders to the Community in which it stands."

A broad generalization, this was, of course, open to innumerable interpretations; and even as early as the first decade of the twentieth century, critical observers had begun to say that schools and museums did not mix. Sir Caspar Purdon Clark,* writi ng on "Museums and Art Schools" (Independent, March 2, 1905), noted: I would not advise the establishment of schools by the Metropolitan .... The Museum should prepare for, welcome and accommodate the students, but should not be responsible for them. Organizing of schools is not the business of a museum.

And at approximately the same time the assistant director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, M. S. Prichard, stated that save for the passive encouragement of artists, the museum, so far as its exhibition is concerned, has nothing to do d irectly with the tra ini ng of those who make art a profession. This is a separate fu n ction and is fulfilled by schools of art.

This welded steel sculpture, Hero Construction (1958), is by Richard Hunt, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute and winner of the lnstitute's Logan Prize in 1956, Palmer Prize in 1957, and James Nelson Raymond Foreign Traveling Fellowship for 1957-58. Art Institute.

During the 1950s and into the 1960s problems between the- museum and school continued to

*Clark became director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1905.

Chicago History

47

A Museum and a School

Red Grooms, known for his spectacular and colorful three-dimensional creations like City of Chicago (1 968) shown here, is an alumnus of the School of the Art Institute. Art Institute.

increase, giving support to this theory of separate function. As the museum questioned the school's very existence, students seem to have felt unwanted. Tension grew. One faculty member stated flatly in a l 955 interview: "I have watched the museum become progressively less and less friendly toward students."

Student passes to the museum became badges of second-class citizenship. One former student remarked: "As we walked through the museum and saw men polishing the leaves of potted 48

Chicago History

plants we reflected that the plants got more attention from the museum than the students."

Student complaints are standard fare, and were especially so in the 1960s, but at the Art Institute a dramatic protest by the faculty brought home the magnitude of the problems.

In I 965 the faculty of the school staged a strike.

The teachers were embittered over the firing of the dean, orman Boothby, an action that, in their eyes, had been taken without proper consultation. ¡while the justice of the strike is not

A Museum and a School

here at issue, resort to such radical action indicates that something was not right.

There were many difficult issues in the midJ960s which further divided the museum and the school. Poor communication was a fundamental flaw in the system. The questions of salary, tenure, school autonomy, and direct representation of the school at trustee meetings were debated endlessly. At a time when protest was a way of life in America, the tensions between the school and the museum became a public issue. Faculty members felt that a split was inevitable and there was much talk about finding a new location for the school--one detached from the mu eum. One idea was to buy or lease an ore freighter and set up a school which would continually sail around the ,vorld.

The Art Institute was not alone in its difficulty. At virtually the same time the character of the Corcoran Gallery and School of Art was being questioned. While the Corcoran faculty did not formally strike, and no one seems to have proposed an art-afloat solution, its protests made the news. Undoubtedly, common issues created ~imilar problems in both institutions.

The upshot of the strike at the Art Institute was a cleaner definition of the school's status.

The director of the school was appointed an officer of the corporation of the Art Ins ti tu te, thus giving him the right to attend meetings of the board of tru tee. (Direct school representation on the board had been a serious issue.) Also, the financial reporting of the school's income and expenditures was clarified and regularized.

This permitted long term planning in an intelligent manner. A dramatic increase in faculty salaries also aided morale, as did the introduction of a tenure system. Finally, a faculty handbook which outlined both rights and duties was produced. Numerous smaller issues were also addressed, and in the encl the museum-school union survived.

Despite these successful negotiations, echoes of these problems continue to reverberate.

Daniel Catton Rich, a former director of the Art Institute, suggested that one solution might be to detach the school (as well as the school of the Goodman Theatre*) from the museum. and reattach them to a university or university branch in Chicago. This would accomplish two objectives: do away with the great expansion o[ space contemplated (with attendant expenses of maintenance), and improve the art offerings of other educational institutions in the area.

When the Art Institute started, there were very few true an schools in America. The A merican Art Annual of 1903 officially listed 241 "art schools," some as sma ll as R ose Polytechnic Institute in Terre Haute, Indiana, which had 5 art students. By 1939, the Art School Directory listed 594 schools which offered degrees in art, and by 1961 there were 7 I 5 such schools. In 1970, the Bureau of Educational Statistics reported 1,005 schools awarding degrees in art, with un iversity art departments accounting for the greatest increase.

And yet, despite the apparent practicality of separateness, the museum-school continues to thrive. Though purposes may differ and problems innate to the relationship continue, a trong bond persists between the two, albeit one which cannot be readily articulated. Perhaps a feeling for art i tseH is the cohesive force. The files of the school of the Art Institute contain numerous transcripts of interviews with students and teachers wh ich offer glimpses of that intangible force that holds the museumschool together. One student commented, "The great strength of the School was that the m useum and the school were connected." Another called it a "great advantage" and insisted that separat ion would be bad: "It would be like a medical school which h ad no access to a hospital." A thir~l cited the advantages over university-based art departments:

â&#x20AC;˘see page 52.

Chicago History

49

A Museum and a School

There can never be quite the same thing as when you have a good school connected with a fine museum and its entire thrust is going to be art. Not just an art department in a University. There has to be a difference. And it is the museum that makes the difference. I'm sure, of course, it is my feeling that this is what made the school the greatest art school in the United States.

Throughout its history the Art Institute has insisted that the presence of a magnificent art colleclion makes the school experiences richer and deeper. One teacher in the early 1970s said it best: "closeness of the objects ... is a great plus." This belief in the value of art, past or present, has been Lhe cornerstone of the schoolmuseum relationship, and despite the eroding force of numerous problems, an essential strength remains. The trustees of the Art Institute displayed their commitment to the union when they voted to include the art school as an essential beneficiary of their successful development campaign of the mid-1970s.

At present, the most obvious point of communication between the school and the museum is in the curatorial department of twentieth century art. Yet it is precisely in that area of museum activity that standards seem most difficult lo articulate, and where personal whim and ind ividual taste often preside. For a museum like the Art Institute, which has favored past masters, contemporary art exhibitions can appear as afterthoughts instead of integral units.

They do not flow naturally from the other permanent exhibitions; indeed, they seem to flow from the school. For in most museum-school complexes the presence of students and teachers generally pushes the whole institution toward contemporary art in general and local art in particular.

Over lhe years the Art Institute's commitment to local artists has fluctuated tremendously. In the early decades there were numerous small exhib itions of work by sludents, teachers, and Chicago area artists; but these declined in importance as one great collection of art after 50

Chicago History

another was installed in various additions lo the museum. The collection and building policies were so successful, in fact, that the Art Institute today has more wings than a flock of birds.

Despite the focus on "masterpieces," the museum had mounted one main student show per year as an annual expression of student accomplishments until a special gallery in the new school complex became available. The existence of this separale student gallery reinforces the segregation of school activities, Lhough the gallery does serve as a laboratory to help prepare stuclenls for Lhe realities of exhibiting fine art.

Local anists today, many of whom teach at the school, are not handled quite so easily. Prime exhibilion space is not readily available in any city, so museums like the Art Instilllte are eyed jealously by thousands of Chicago artists who want their work to be seen by the righl people.

Ironically, it is the school that helps lo bring some of Lhese potentially disgrun tlecl artists together. Although most faculty members do not really lake the time to undersland the problems and point of view of the museum, Lhey do know (or believe) that the museum should pay more atlention to Lheir work. It's a no-win situalion for the museum, simply because even Lhe mosl liberal, open-ended commilment to local artists could only satisfy a handful : compelition is fierce and opporlunilies are few.

Today the school is housed in new quarters above and across the railroad Lracks behind the older museum building. Physically connected by a bridge of buildings across the lrack , the museum and school have not gone separate ways.

The challenge of today is to affirm the symbiotic relationship between apparently divergent parts. The Art Institute should continue to appeal lo the widest possible audience. To see it simply as a trade school or an art school or a museum would be to mi sits brilliance.

The fortitude of those truslees and employees who dared to keep the Art Institute intact may well prove prophetic. Museums are beginning

A Museum and a School

Completed in the course of 1976-77, the Columbus Drive addition to the Art Institute building shown here was designed by Walter A . Netsch, Jr., of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. It includes the new quarters of the School of the Art Institute. Art Institute.

once again to perceive the importance of having young artists working in their institutions.

In 1966 tlie l\f. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco added a school which now enrolls nearly 600 students per year. And established museums like the Metropolitan in New York and the National Gallery in v\Tashington have arranged for art students from the ew York Studio School and the l\Iaryland Institute of Art, respecti\'ely, to use their galleries for study.

Students within the galleries, they believe,

stimulate the visitors' interest. Indeed, in 1974 Sherman Lee, director of the Cleveland MuseUin, hired a local art student to copy paintings and answer visitors' questions.

These developments seem to confirm what The Art Institute of Chicago has known all along: museums and schools of art can live and work together to the ultimate benefit of the public. Such a union, though fraught with tension, is built on the most solid of foundations-faith in art.

Ch icago History

51

A Museum and a School

Sel ecte d Sources I am indebted LO the staff of the Art Institute for their assistance in the preparation of this essay. They made available numerous archives, reports, and published documents which make up the body o( my sources. In addition to the Institutc's files, the following citations will lead the reader to other accounts which were most hclp[ul: Art School Directory . Washington, D.C.: The American Federation of Arts. 1939-40.

Art School Di,·ectory. New York : Watson Guptill Publications, 196 1.

Burg, David F. Chicago's White City of 1893. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1976.

Clark, Sir Casper Purdon . "Museums and Art Schools." Independent, March 2, 1905: 464.

Clarke, Isaac Edwards. Art and I ndustry . Education in the llldustria/ and Fine Arts in the U.S. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1885.

Dorr, Da lton. Art Museums and Their Uses. Philadelphia: Edward Stern, 1881.

The Kenneth Sawyer Goodman Memorial Theatre and Goodman School of Drama 1925 THE FAMI LY of Kenneth Sawyer Goodma n, who had d ied in 19 18, established a theater in h is memory at The Art Institute of Chicago. Goodman had been deeply involved in theater and had written and produced many plays. The p layb ill shown here announces th e first two productions staged at the theater.

D uring the Depression, the Goodman stopped operating as a professional theater and in 1930 became primari ly a drama conservatory wh ich staged plays produced and acted by its facu lty and students. After 1957 guest stars began to participate in the productions.

In 1969 a professional company took over the Mainstage while students conti n ued to give studio performa nces. In 1977 the Art Institu te severed its relationship with the Goodman T heatre and a new organi zation, the Chicago T heatre Group, assumed responsibility for fi. nancing th e Ma instage prod uctions. T he following year the Goodman School of Drama became part of De Pau l University, where i t contin ues to function as a drama conservatory.

Katz, Herbert and Marjorie. Museums, U.S.A. Garden City: Doubleday, 1965.

Lee , Sherman £., ed. 011 Understanding Art Muse!tms. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Levy , Florence N. , ed. American Art Annual. New York: American Art Annual , 1903.

Law, Theodore. The Educational PhilosoJ,hy and Practice of Art 1\1useums in the U.S . New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1948.

Newsome, Barbara and Silver, Adele, eds. The Art J\1useum as Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

Pach, \ \'alter. The Art J\fuseuni in America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1948.

Pierce, Bessie Louise. A History of Chicago. Vol. 3, 1871-1893. cw York: Al[red A. Knopf, 1957.

Prichard, i\lialthcws S. "Current Theories o[ the Arrangement of i\fuscums of Art and Their Application to the 1luscum of Fine Arts." Communicalio,is to the Trustees. Vol. 1, 1904-06.

Roswn: ;i.tuscum o( Fine Arts .

Richards, Charles R. 111-dustrial Art and the Museum.. New York: Macmillan Company, 1927.

TiiE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

IN

THE GOODMAN THEATER EAST MONROE ST. AT SOUTH PARKWAY

THE FOREST BY JOHN GALSWORTHY

NOVEMBER,

5, 6, 7, 12, 12, 14,

A New Production of a Comedy

THE ROMANTIC YOUNG LADY

By G. MA RTINEZ ,m,uk,cd by GRANVILLE BARKER

NOVEMBER, 19, 20, 21, 26, 27, 28 PERFORMANCE OF THE REP E RTORY COMPANY EVERY THU RSDAY, FRIDAY&.

SAT. EVENING&. EVERY FRIDAY MATINEE

CHS.

52

Chicago History

Looking Backward Archibald J. Motley and The Art Institute of Chicago: 1914-1930

BY ELAINE D. WOODALL

Subject matter plays a most important part in my art. It is my earnest desire and ambition to express the American Negro honestly and sincerely neither to add nor detract . ... [I] believe Negro art is someday going to contribute to our culture, our civilization.)) a

J

Archibald J. Motley in

J. ,?.

Jacobson's Art of Today (1933)

J. MOTLEY (1891) holds a unique place in American and African-American art history; in the early decades of this century, he did more to advance and shape the course of black art than any other painter of his day. Active primarily in the 1920s and 1930s, Motley provoked criticism both from blacks and whites by portraying contemporary black culture as it was, rather than depicting traditional stereotypes as whites had clone, or turning his paintings into propagandistic devices, as many blacks advocated. But the firmness of his commitment to his own vision never wavered throughout his career-a career fostered and given impetus by The Art Institute of Chicago.

There seemed little likelihood that Motley, black and poor, would be able to find training for his obvious artistic talents when he graduated from Chicago's white Englewood High School in 1914. His father, deeply impressed by his son's talent and commitment to art, tried to find a way to further his son's art education.

Through his position as a Pullman porter for the l\Iichigan Central Railroad, he knew the president of the Armour Institute, Frank W. Gunsaulus, and was able to arouse this educator's intere t in his exceptional son. When Gunsaulus met the young man he was so impressed that he offered l\Iotley a full four-year scholarship to study architecture at the Armour InstiARCHIBALD

Elaine D. Woodall is editor of Minority Voices.

This article is based on a longer unpublished work entitled "Archibald J. i\fotley, Jr.: American Artist of the Afro-American People, 1891-1928."

tute. But Motley, interested solely in painting, convinced Gunsaulus to pay for his first year's tuition at The Art Institute of Chicago instead.

Motley recalled his time at the Art Institute as "the happiest days of my life. The students made . . . no [racial] differentiation. They treated me with a great deal of courtesy and respect." The facu lty at the Art Institute also treated Motley solely on the basis of his merits as an artist, and after the Gunsaulus scholarship expired the young man's manifest talent won him a tuition scholarship for the remaining three years of study. In exchange for dusting the pedestals of statues before the museum opened in the morning and moving chairs and tables for banquets and meetings, Motley received his tuition and a stipend of $15.00 a week. With money always in short supply, Motley and two fellow students who were to become his lifelong friends-vVilliam Schwartz and a young Czechoslovakian named Tomanek--clelightecl in finding the cheapest way to buy their lunch. Their ultimate solution proved to be a bar near the Institute where, for the price of a beer, they could stuff themselves with food from the hors d' oeuvres tray. l\Iotley was strongly influenced by several of his teachers at the Art Institute. In his second year he studied draftsmanship with John Norton and composition with George Walcott.

George 'v\T alcott, l\Iotley remembers, "taught me more about composition than I could have learned from a dozen painters .... If you followed his guidelines you could never miss." But the instructor who made the greatest impression on l\Iotley and taught him "more about painting than any man," was Karl Buehr, with whom Chicago History

53

Archibald J. Motley

Archibald J. Motley's Blues (1929), painted in Paris, depicts an interracial nightclub of the kind to be found in both Paris and Chicago at that time. Photo courtesy of the author.

he studied portrait painting in his third and fourth years.

One of the few Chicago blacks to have completed the full four-year course, Motley graduated from the Art Institute in 1918 near the top of his class. But in the fall of 1919 he was back-to audit classes taught by the celebrated George Bellows. Among the most important artists in America at the time, Bellows had also made an important contribution to the treatment of black subjects on canvas. Traditionally, blacks had been rendered in the most superficial manner: portrayed in the same piece with whites, they were always shown in servile posture; portrayed alone, they were invariably rendered in insipid, stereotyped fashion, usually as half-comic figures. But Bellows, a realistic painter, became one of the first to offer sensitive, true-to-life portrayals of blacks in his work.

Undoubtedly, Motley was impressed.

In the summer of the year after Motley's graduation from the Art Institute, Chicago was 54

Ch icago History

convulsed by a three-day city-wide race riot.

Long the only residents of an all-white neighborhood, the Motley family was attacked by angry mobs during the riot. They were saved only through the intervention of white neighbors, as Morley's father listened behind the door, shotgun in hand. The young Motley narrowly escaped death at the hands of another mob; he, too, was saved by white friends.

It was at this time that Motley, armed with his Art Institute diploma, applied for a job as a commercial artist with a white firm. It was denied him, and, he later learned, given to a white classmate from the Institute whose standing had been far below his own. Philosophical rather than bitter (a posture he has maintained throughout his life), l\1otley knew he had lost this opportunity only because of his race.

Unable to earn a living in the field in which he had been trainee!, l\Iotley was forced to work at the menial jobs which were to sustain him during most of his life, pursuing his painting in

Archibald J. Motley

his nonworking hours. He sorely missed the advice and guidance of his teachers at the Institute.

It took me a long time to get accustomed to being alone, away from the instructor, and depending solely on myself. ... I wondered what Buehr would say about this color or what Walcott would say about this arrangement, and I would worry about it ....

Lacking confidence in his own judgment, he did not attempt to exhibit his work. His friends who had graduated with him from the Art Institute were beginning to submit their work and were being accepted by the area's most important juried exhibition for young artists, the Art Institute's Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity. By the encl of 1920, l\,Iotley had completed Portrait of My Mother and shown it to his friend Tomanek. The latter insisted that his friend submit the work, offering to make the frame for it if he would agree. Motley acquiesced. Portrait of My Mother competed with over 900 other entries for inclusion in the 1921 show and was one o( 400 pieces of painting and sculpture accepted for exhibition that year.

Once the barrier was broken Motley's career gained momentum. Over the next two years four o( his other paintings were accepted in the Jnstitute's show-three portraits and his first compositional piece, Black and Tan Cabaret.

The subject-one of the interracial nightclubs to be found in Chicago at that time-came out o( his own experience. He had been elating a white neighbor, Edith Granzo, whom he married in 1924. But the subject pleased neither whites nor blacks. Local reviewers of the show reacted with utter silence.

Undeterred, Motley continued to depict themes from the night life of Chicago's black belt. But as he was preparing to submit another work on a similar subject, Syncopation (ca. 1924), to the Art Instilllte exhibition, he encountered strong opposition from the leader of the black artistic community in Chicago, William Farrow, artist, critic, and president o( the black Chicago Art League.

Farrow was a leading figure in the egro Renaissance, a surge of black creativity in literature and the arts which gained momentum in the early 1920s. He was dedicated to furthering its aims: the development of specifically black styles and themes in the arts. What he objected to in Iotley's work was the depiction of blacks enjoying such "low life" amusements as cabarets and dance halls. One of the tenets o( the Negro Renaissance was that stereotyped depictions in art were detrimental to the race. Farrow misunderstood Motley's aim and feared the potentially negative effects of his choice of subject.

Farrow told Motley he should not even bother to submit Syncopation-it would never be accepted. But Motley, recalling the event years later, explained: "They [black artists] were awfully afraid years ago to send anythi ng that was Negroid to any of the exhibitions. Well, I, myself, felt they belonged .... I said [to Farrow], Tm going to send this painting in.'"

But Farrow's prognostication proved wrong.

Syncopation was accepted along with two other works, A Mulaltress and Mending Socks, for the 1925 Institute exhibition. In that show Syncopation won the Joseph Eisenclrath cash award, and A Mulattress the Frank G. Logan medal and cash award. With two awards for paintings on such overt racial themes, Motley created a stir among local art critics. Yet all the reviews were favorable, even Farrow's, although his evaluation of Syncopation was predictably terse. A few days later an article about Motley appeared in the French magazine, Revue du Vrai et du Beau.

Recognition from Chicago art crit ics, combined with international interest in his work, increased the pace of Motley's professional life.

He joined a number of white organizations, including the Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists, and was named director of this group for the 1926-27 term, quietly making history as the first black ever to hold this post. A few of his paintings began to sell, and he started to teach art privately. In 1926 several paintings were accepted by the Institute's broad-ranged and Chicago History

55

Archibald J. Motley

more prestigious Annual Exhibition of American Paintings.

Yet it was the intervention of Robert B. Harshe, director of the Art Institute from J921 to 1938, which dramatically altered the course of l\Iotley's career. In 1927 the Newark Museum assembled and staged an exhibition, Paintings and TVatercolors by Living American Artists, specifically composed of artists not from New York City. The museum secured a list of artists from each region of the United States and invited them to submit works to the show.

Harshe, the most influential man in the Illinois art world, must have been contacted. It seems certain that he recommended Motley as well as the six other Chicago artists who subsequently participated in the exhibition. Motley entered the painting Mending Socks, acclaimed by public vote as the most popular in the show. This could not have happened even just a few years earlier.

The Negro Renaissance, centered in Harlem, had begun to spark an interest in black culture among whites. Harshe, on a visit to ew York City, called on a number of gallery owners and tried to arrange a one-man show for Motley. l\[otley was offered the most favorable terms by George S. Hellman of The New Gallery, 600 l\laclison Avenue, who agreed to give him a one-man show there from February 25 through l\Iarch l 0, l 928.

The Exhibition of Paintings by Archibald].

Motley,Jr. was the unrivaled hit of the season.

The New York art world was astonished that a black could produce paintings of such quality.

The New York Times gave extraordinary coverage to the show: the opening day notice appeared on the front page of the newspaper; a review followed in another issue; and shortly after it closed, a comprehensive assessment of Motley and his work appeared in the Sunday art section. Other newspapers and magazines-both black and white-also reported the event, while the Chicago papers gave full coverage to the achievements of this local artist.

56

Ch icago History

Arch ibald J. Motley in 1929, the year in which he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for study in Paris. Photo courtesy of Archibald Motley, Jr.

The publicity and fanfare virtually guaranteed financial success. All but three of Motley's works were sold; six were purchased by one buyer alone. Motley netted between .$6,000 and 7,000 from an exhibition which had lasted only two weeks.

More importantly, the show was instrumental in helping him win a Guggenheim Fellowship for study abroad. Motley had long wanted to live and study in Paris, and had applied for a fellowship in 1928, using Harshe and Buehr, among others, as references. The success of his one-man show had come too late to be used in support of his application that year; but when he reapplied the following year, he won the grant.

He left for Paris in the summer of 1929, and his year there rivaled the happiness of his days as a student at the Art Institute. He loved the French, finding their lack of discrimination toward blacks a welcome change from the United States. He was able to take his wife with him to Paris, and life in that cosmopolitan city must have been considerably easier for the interracial couple. As Motley points out, "They treat

Motley painted this work, Gettin' Religion (1948), as a study in the interplay of the artificial street lamps and the natural light of the moon. Photo co urtesy of A rchibald Motley, Jr.

[blacks] with all the respect in the world."

Motley returned home in 1930 to an America deep in the Depression. The stock market crash of 1929 had brought an end to the Roaring Twenties and to the flow of money which had, for a brief period, supported white interest in black culLUre. For Motley, and for most American artists, black and white alike, the only prospects for work resided in government patronage through such programs as the Federal Arts Project. l\Iotley participated in all the programs, painting numerous canvases for public buildings throughout the state. In these and in his subsequent work, he never abandoned his commitment to paint blacks.

It may be that i\Iotley's reluctance to go beyond innovations in the choice of subject matter to a more daring exploration of technique limited his scope. Perhaps he remained too concerned with "following [the] guidelines" of his various teachers to give his imagination free rein. Nevertheless, his work assures him a place in American art. As he himself said,

I feel my work is peculiarly American, a sincere personal expression of the age, and I hope a contribution to society. . . . [It] is, indeed, a racial expression and one making use of great opportunities which have long been neglected in America.

The egro is part of America and the Negro is part of our great American art.

Selected Sources Chabricr, C. "Expositions de !'Art Institute de Chicago, du No Jury Exhibition et du Cincinnati i\luseum." Revue du Vrai et du Beau 4, (Juillet 10, 1925): 26-30.

Jacobson, J.Z., eel . .-lrt of T oday: Chicago, 19JJ. Chicago: 1933. ~lotlcy, Archibald J., Jr. H ow I Solve My Painting Problems.

[1947].

In the Harmon Foundation papers. Library of Congress.

--Inter\'icw with the author. Chicago, June, 1972. Transcript deposited at Pennsylvania State University.

---"Notes on Art, etc." ndated. Papers of Archibald J . ~lotley, Jr. CHS. Motley, \Villard, rc\'isecl by Archibald J. Motley, III. Biographical Sketch of Archibald John Motley. [Chicago]: undated. CHS. The New Gallery. Exhibition of Paintings by Archibald ].

Motley, J r. New York, February 25-March IO, 1928.

The Newark ~fuscum. Paintings and Water Colors by Living American Artists. Newark, New Jersey, l\Iarch 22-April 21, 1927.

Ch icago History

57

The Ryerson and Burnham Libraries

BY FRANK JEWELL

WILLIAi\1 l\f. R. FRENCH, the first director of The Art Institute of Ch icago, took the initial step in establishing an art library of international significance in 1879 when he bought a copy of A Grammar of Painting. French recogn ized, as did his counterparts in other newly established American museums, that a library was essential to the creation of a museum and school of the scale which he envis ioned. It is doubtful, however, that he intended to create a major research facility, because the sole financial provision he made for the library was an annual assessment of $2.00 from each student in the school.

The growth of the library during the next two decades was consequently slow-only 200 books were acqu ired in the first five years. No significant gifts came to the library until 1887 when l\Irs. A. l\f.

Ellis provided its first endowment. Yet annual spending remained below $1,000, mostly absorbed by administrative costs.

The financial plight of the library and the need for a better reading room prompted a call for contributions in December of 1898. Martin A. Ryerson responded with a pledge of 50,000, made conditio n al on the success of a drive to eliminate the floating debt of the Institute. " ' ork began at once on what was to be called the Ryerson L ibrary. Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, the architects of the present Art Institute building, were comm issioned to prepare plans for the addition.

Completed in October 1901, the library occupied the courtyard which had been set aside for it when the main building was constructed in 1893. An aps ida l-shaped reading room was set off by a row of columns supporting a vaulted ceiling. A large, handsome skylight made the reading room the bestill umi nated in the city. Shelving, readers' tables, and other furniture were of rich mahogany.

The fine reading room stood in stark contrast to the library's small collection of books. \ <\Tant lists of

Frank Jewell, bibliographer for the Society, is the author of an Annotated Bibliography of Chicago History, to be published soon by the Ch icago Historical Society.

58

Chicago History

works critical in the history of art were prepared for friends of the library, who acqu ired many of them for the collections .

Until 19 11 acquisitions reflected the needs of the school. In that year the trustees decided to make the library a first-rate research collection, and this goal intensified collecting. Acquisitions were not limited to books. Reproductions of art works in a variety of media poured in: engravings, autotypes, chromolithographs, heliotypes, water colors, and lantern slides . Journals, pamphlets, auction catalogs, and clippings were also acquired. These collections of ephemera and periodicals have since grown into one of the major strengths of the collections.

A $50,000 bequest from Daniel Burnham , leading Chicago architect and friend of the Art Institute, led to the creation of the Burnham L ibrary of Architecture . A committee of trustees resolved that: The Burnham Library follow the broad lines of the Avery Library of Columbia College, and cover the field of architecLure and landscape architecture as generally .. . as its funds will allow, since it was found in consultation with the librarians of the Chicago Public Library, and the John Crerar Library, that none of these libraries specialized on architecture nor had any special funds for the purpose of architectural books . ...

The income from the trust established with Burnham's gift was used in a vigorous acquisition program. The first major purchases were the architectural collections of the Ryerson Library and the Crerar Library. Thus from its origin, the Burnham Library was the city's major architectural library.

The collection grew more rapidly than had the Ryerson Library in its first twenty years; by 1919 there were 2,750 volumes in the Burnham Library.

Available space was soon exhausted, and in 1920 the Burnham Library was given separate space in a remodeled corridor o[ the Ryerson Library. Progress continued. Because it was the source of important research materials, the library established itself as the medium of cooperation between the city's arch itects and the Art Institute. As its holdings became better known, the number of annual users, including many Armour Institute students, rose to 21,724 in 1929. In the same period, the number of books almost doubled.

It became obvious in the late I 920s that the

The Library

Burnham Library would have to move again. Money was raised and the gallery of the Ryerson Library was remodeled to accommodate the architectural collection, an arrangement which lasted into the 1960s. Four intervening decades o[ growth and change created a need to consolidate the two libraries, and their adm inistrations were combined in 1957, followed by the physical integration of the two collections during the 1960s.

This merger coincided with the construction of an addition, comprising four floors, above the reading room. i\fore usable space was created by the incorpora ti on of two light courts on the east and west sides of the library. The shape of the reading room was retained and an exhib ition gallery designed around it. The magnificent skylight was also retained, although it is now illuminated by artificial light. In all, the new construction was a minor architectural triumph in finding satisfactory solutions to the technical and artistic problems posed by having to build within the 1901 structure.

The art and architecture collection currently housed in the new facility is one of the most important in the United States, with special strength in the areas of French and American nineteenth century art, in graphics, and in the arts of China and Japan. The library's collection o[ Japanese and Chinese woodblock books is among the best in the Western world. Added in 1926 and catalogued by Kenji Toda in his descriptive Catalogue of Japanese and Chinese Illustrated Books in The Ryerson Library of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, 1931, supplement, 1963), it includes, in the words of the Art Institute's Bulletin: The great wood engravers of Japan .... These are swift sketches, but with ne,¡er a hint of carelessness. The subjects range through the familiar scenes of daily life, representing popular actors, favorite landscapes, women at their toilet, natural subjects that run the whole school of Ukioyc (The Passing World).

The Walter Brewster Collection of books, catalogs, offprints, and indexes provides an important resource for. the study of the work of James Abbott ~lcNeill Whistler. The Ernest Hamill Collection brings together a group of rare books and fine bindings on Russian art, many of which are unique in the West. The effects of Mary Reynolds, an intimate of some of the most important Surrealists, include many valuable hand-bound books and periodicals described in Hugh Edwards' Surrealism and Its Af]i.nities: The Mary Reynolds Collection-A Bibliography (Chicago, 1956).

The Burnham Library has also made several

important acquisitions. One o[ the first major acquisitions came in 1927 with the purchase of the library of Pierre-Franc;ois-Leonard Fontaine, which comprised nearly 500 old and rare architectural imprints, including almost 150 drawings. Fontaine was Napoleon's architect, and with his partner Percier was responsible for establ ish ing the Empire style of architecture in Europe. Fontaine's collection provides documentation for the development of this style and that of the French R enaissance from which it was derived.

The Burnham Library was also able to obtain materials on Louis H. Sullivan. The architect had fallen on hard times and in the 1920s accepted a comm ission from the library to describe his theory of ornament. Upon Sullivan's death the library acquired all o[ the papers pertaining to his System of Architectural Ornament. The executor of Sullivan's estate, George Grant Elmslie, added personal and family papers to the collection, and the library gained many more of Sullivan's working documents and sketches from other sources as well.

It is no surprise that the papers of Chicago arch itects Daniel H. Burnham and John Wellborn Root also came to the Burnham Library. These include " .. . working drawings of buildings, office letter books and diaries 1891-1912, personal correspondence, papers and memorabilia relating to the World's Columbian Exposition, the Chicago Plan, and other major Burnham projects." Particularly valuable is a massive report by the Director of Works of the World's Columbian Exposition, which includes all the ard1itectural and landscaping plans for the fair.

The Burnham Library was one of the first in the United States to recognize the importance of architectural drawings as research sources and as works of independent artistic value. As a consequence, the collection of American architectural drawings is one of the largest in the world. In add ition to those of Sullivan and Burnham, there are important works

by David Adler, Solon S. Beman, Edward H. Bennett, Walter Burley Griffin (some of these are particularly beautiful), Frank Lloyd Wright, Peter B. Wight, and the firms of Schmidt, Garden &: Martin, Tallmadge & Watson, Treat & Foltz, and Willett and Pashley. Drawings from this collection have been exhibited around the world.

As well as collecting literature on the arts, the libraries of the Art Institute have made a major contribution to its accessibility: the reference staff compiled the Ryerson Index to Art Periodicals, first published in eleven volumes in 1962 by G. K. Hall with a supplement appearing in 1974.

Chicago History

59

The Library

The Ryerson Index is also the key to the library's unique file of newspaper and magazine clippings on the cultural and artistic life of Chicago and the l\Iidwest. Though the Ryerson Index has been discontinued because of improved commercial indexing, the scrapbooks continue to be maintained.

The Burnham Library has also compiled a similar, as yet unpublished, index for architectural periodicals which is used by a wide range of patrons .

Currently, lacunae in the serials collection which developed during the Depression and World War II are being filled with reprints and microform edi-

tions. Whole new fields of collecting, such as photography, have been begun in earnest. A professional architectural archivist has been added to expand the size and scope of the Burnham Library's archives and to prepare ÂŁor publication a guide to that collection. Finally, national and international access to the library's collections has been greatly increased by linking its catalog with those of other important collections via a national computer network. The library of The Art Institute of Chicago can thus look back on a distinguished past as it prepares for the future.

The Reading Room of the Ryerson library, ca. 1901, showing a portion of the handsome skylight by Louis J. Millet. A n architect and designer, Millet taught at the Art lnstitute's school. Art Institute.

60

Ch icago Hist ory

Toward a History of The Art Institute of Chicago: A Survey of Sources

BY ROHERTL. BRU BAKER

EAS il. Y A VAil.A RL E works provid e so m e b as ic in fo rm a ti o n a bo ut th e history o f the /\ rt Institute.

J o hn 1\Ja xo n 's Tlt e Art Institu te of Cltirngo (Ne w Yo rk : Ir. N . J\b rn ms, 1970) includ es a ten -page di scus~ io n whi ch foc uses o n th e d evelo pment o f its coli c ti o ns a nd d c p;1rtmc m s. H ele n L efkowitz H orow itz's C: 11 /ture & tlt e City: Cu lt u ral Pltilantltro/Jy in Chicago fr om tlt r 1880s to 1917 (L •x in gto 11 : U ni ve rsit y Press of Ke ntu cky, 1976) in cludes ma teri a l o n th e fo undin g a nd ea rl y histor y o f th e /\ rt fn s1itutc in th e broad er co nt ·x t o f th e cs tablishm ·nt o[ o th er cultura l instituti o ns in C h icago by th e sa m e group o f phil a nth ro p is ts.

Th •re arc ma n y ot her short a co unts, including o ne by th e first directo r, Willi a m M . R . F rench , T WO

ll i.1 lorira / Sketclt and n escritJtion of th e Art ln stilllt l' of Clt icago ( 1901 ). Ma n y o f th ese acco unts have b • ·n i> ro uglH toge th er in a vo lume e ntitled " Histories o f th · /\rt lns ti tu t • o f Chi cago" ava ilable o nl y i11 th e Rye rso n a nd Burnh ,1m Libra ri es. /1. d e fin iti ve scholarl y hi Hory o f Th e An Tn , titutc o f Chicago, however, lrns yet to be written . Th ree di sser ta ti o ns p rov ide a useful suppl em ent to th e sho rt er atco unt s, but th ey a rc o utdated o r li m ited to ce rt a in as pec ts o f thi s impo rtant instituti o n , and fa il to ta ke full ad va ntage o f th e unu suall y ri ch bod y o f so urtes avail a ble.

Th e sto ry o f th e early yea rs to 1921 is prov icl din /1.1111 F ·Ii ia C ierpik 's flistory of the Art i nstitute of Chicago fr om its l ncorpora tio11 on May z.t, 1879 to th e 1)1,a th of Charles L. Ilulchinson, a mas ter's th es is co mpl eted a t D e P a ul U ni vers it y in 1957.

J\l1h o ug h th e orga ni, a ti o n a nd writin g leave mu ch to be desired , this stud y is com iclerccl to b · fa irly acc m a te. Ci erpik co nsult ed a nn ua l re po rts, s ra pboo ks, a nd va ri o us publi ca ti o ns o f 1hc /\rt Institute, but she did no t use minut es o f th e trustees' m ee tin gs o r 01h 'r unpubli heel r ·cord s.

Euge n ia R em e lin Whitridge's A rt in Chicago:

'f'lu, Struc t11 r!' of th!' Art W orld in a J\ll'lro polilan Comm unity; a Ph.D . disserta tio n co mpl eted in th e Depa rtm ent of Sociology a t the U ni versity o f Chicago in 1946, includes several sec ti o ns, based a lmos t

R obert L. Bru ba ker is the ocie ty"s chi ef librari a n. Hi s 'T he Devel opm ent of an Urban Hi story R esearch Ce nter : Th e Chi cago Hi stori ca l Society's Library," ap pea red in Chicago History, Spring 1978.

·n tire ly 0 11 a nnu a l 1e ports, trac in g develo pm e nts a t the /\r t Jnstitute Im m 1879 to 191 0, as we ll as a cha p t r a 1rn lyzin g the /\ rt Inst itu te as a so ial o rgani 7a ti o 11 . Ve ra L •nchn er Zolbe rg's Tiu, Art !11.1t it1tt e

of Chicago: Th 1' Socio logy of a C: 11/ tu ra l O rgan ization, ;1 Ph . D. d isserta ti o n in socio logy co mpleted a t th e U ni ver, ity o f C hi cago in 1974, p rov id es a p re •pti ve a na lys is o f such topi s as th e rel a ti o nships a mo ng tru stees an d sta fT durin g difTere nt peri ods o f the Ar t lnsti tute's history. Zo lberg based her co nclu,i om o n strn ctu r ·d interviews witl1 direc to rs, cura to rs, a nd a n cr iti cs, as we ll as o n published so urces sut h as th e a nnu a l re ports, but she did no t m e unpublished reco rds.

Furth r research w ill p ro ba bl y sta rt, but sho uld no t encl , w ith th e Jn stitut •'s published a nnu a l re po rt s ava il a ble fro m 1883 0 11. Ea rl y r ·ports were b1 icf, !)lit gre w to a bo ut 100 pages durin g th e 1890s, a nd by th e la te l!J30s were a bo ut 200 pagc.s lo ng. l\ lm t o f this spa e was d evo ted to lists o f a cquisiti o ns a nd m embe rs, hut t omm e nts on ex hibition s a nd o th er a tiviti es were includ ed in th e re po rt s o f th e tru stees a nd (beginnin g in 188!>) th ose o f th e director. Rec nt a nnu a l re po rts and so m e ea rli er o nes a b o in clude sec ti o ns sig ned by cura to rs o r d e partm ent heads: th e first such was b y the curato r o [ C lass ica l Antiquiti es for th e J8!J0- !JI repor t.

Th e form a t o f th e a nnual re ports has vari ed co nsid era bl y th ro ug h th e yea rs, refl ec tin g aclministra tiv t ha nges : th ere was no se pa ra te director's r e po rt fro m 19 18 to 1933; clep artm e11ta l r epo rts were inc.fuel ed as part o f th e directo r's re po rt durin g so me yea r,; ;111d th e ;rn11ual repo rt was cut so d ras ti al ly durin g th e mid- I 910s th a t it di d n o t ntain a11 ove rall ac:co unt o f th e ac ti viti s o f th /\rt Insti tut e, bu t nl y lists o f members a nd bri e f co mm ents o n a few ex hibits o r a cquisitio ns . R eports beca m e mo re info rmati o na l aga in in 1958-59, w hen th e prese nt for ma t was aclo pt ccl . Jt in clud es re po rt s b y chic[ admi11istra to r · a nd d epartments together with lists o f acquisitions, co ntributors, etc.

P eri odi cals publi shed b y the Art Institute, beg innin g in 1907 with th e Bulletin, provide anoth er eas ily ava ilable source of informa tion. Quarterly issues, 15 to 20 pages in len gth, conta in brief an no un cem ents o f acq uisitions, exhibits, and lectures.

By 1951, when the n am e was changed to the Quarterly, th ere wer e a lso short articles on such to pics as " America n P a inting a t th e Art Institute." In 1965 th e Quarterly was supersed ed b y two publica tions: the Ca lendar, limited to brief a nnouncements about Ch icago History

61

Toward a History

exhibits and other events, and the much more substantial Afuseum Studies, published annually from I 966 to I 972, which contains long scholarly art icles on the collections of the Art Institute by staff and outside specialists. In I 973 the Calendar was renamed the Bulletin . For a while it seemed that Museum Studies might not survive, since no volumes were published for three years, but publication resumed in 1976 and another volume appeared in 1978.

All the catalogs of exhibitions at the Art Institute published since 1879 are available, with the possible exception of a few leaflets issued during the first decade. For the period from 1879 until the Art Institute moved into its present building in 1893, for instance, there are over sixty catalogs. Some of the noteworthy catalogs issued during subsequent years include the Catalogue of a Century of Progress Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture (1933, and another edition in 1934); the catalog for an exh ibition of works by Rembrandt and his circle in 1935 and a similar exhibition in 1969; catalogs for exhibits on Goya in 1941, Seurat in 1958, Picasso in 1968, Renoir in 1973, and i\fonet in 1975; the catalog for an exhibit in 1965 of Primitive Art in the Collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the catalog for an exhibit in 1977 entitled The Antiquarian Society of the Art Institute of Chicago, the First One Hundred Years, featuring furniture, textiles, and other objects obtained by the group (which began in 1877 as the Chicago Society of Decorative Art); and the catalog for a 1978 exhibition of European Portraits, 1600-1900, in the Art Institute of Chicago, with full-page illustrations and several pages of carefully researched commentary on fifty work; thought to be the best in th e collections.

Through th e years many comprehensive catalogs of the Art Institute's collections have been published, some intended to be complete, at least for a particular genre, but most intended only as guides to all objects then on exhibit in the galleries.

Among the earliest are the Catalogue of Paintings, Sculpture, and Other Objects Exhibited al th e Opening of the .\'ew Museum (1893): and three editions of a Catalogue of Ob jects in the ,1Iuseum, Part ! , Scu lpture and Paintin gs (1895-1898), with descriptions arranged by galleries. A General Catalog of Objects in the Museum, also arranged by galleries or by specific collections occupying a group of rooms, and including about fifty plates to illustrate selected objects and Yiews of galleries, was first published in 190 I and went througl1 at least five more editions by 191-J . I\umerous similar guides were published during subsequent )Cars, some much shorter, such as A Brief Jlluslrnl ed Guide lo the Collections, first pub62

Chicago History

lished in 1935 and reissued at intervals until 1956, with the commentaries on galleries citing some examples but not describing the en tire contents. The most complete recent list of paintings is in Paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago; a Catalogue of the Picture Collection (1961). This guide, and its typed supplements issued at intervals until 1972, are arranged by anist and include references to earlier Art Institute catalogs as well as to scholarly commentaries. Other noteworthy guides, although highl y selective, include John i\ Iaxon's Th e Art In stitute of Chicago with illustrations and comments on a few of the most important objects in each d epartment; and 100 Masterpieces, published in l 978 by the Auxiliary Board of the Art Institute to celebrate the centennial. It includes plates and brief commentaries on representat ive paintings. i\Iany guides or bibliographies provide information on specific genres and collections at the Art Institute. Early exam ples include A Handbook of the Egyptian Co/leclion, by Thomas George Allen (Chi cago: University of Chicago Press for the Art Institute of Chicago, 1923), and the Handbook of the D epartment of Orienta l Art (Chicago: The Lakeside Press, R . R. Donn elley &: Sons, 1933).

Archaic Chinese J ades from the Edward and Louise B. Sonnenscl1ein Collection (1952), by Alfred Salmon y, is a comprehensive catalog o( one of the major strengths of the Department of Oriental Art. Similar guides include Margaret Gentles's Turkish and Greek Island Embroideries from the Burton Yost Beny Collection in the Art Institute of Chicago (1964), with descriptions and plates, most in color, of masterpieces of needlecraft from the 16th to 19th centuries, and Hugh Edwards' Surrealism and Its Affinities; the Mary R eynolds Collection, a Bibliography (1973), a revision of a catalog first published in 1956 describing the books, periodicals, exhibit catalogs, and other materials concerning contemporary an movements collected by Reynolds during her thirty years in Paris. Definitive guides to two important collections are provided in Ken ji Toda's Descriptive Catalogue of Japan ese and Chinese Illustrated Books in the Ryerson Libra1y of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, 1931, supplement, 1963), and in Helen C. Gunsaulus' The Clarence Bu ckingham Collection of Japanese Prints.

Two volumes of the latter work have been pub!i; hed since 1955, describing about 1,000 of the prints (the collection, one of the best in the world, now LO ta ls more than I 0,000), and a third volume on Japanese theater prints will be published soon.

Forthcoming in 1979 is Harold Joachim and Suzanne Folds l\kCullagh's Italian Drawings in the Art In stitute of Chicago, a selective catalog of the

Toward a History

most important drawings from the 16th to 18th centuries.

Published articles on the Art Institute which appeared in newspapers from 1879 to the present are available in a remarkably thorough and extremely useful series of scrapbooks (those prior to 1961 must now be consulted on microfilm) in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. E ighty-nine volumes, including indexes, were compiled by 1956.

Beginning in 1957 these clippings were included in a series of scrapbooks elating from 1875 on "Art and Artists of Chicago." There was a further merger in J 975 with another previously separate series on architecture, so that all subsequent clippings are located in one set of scrapbooks on "Art and Architecture in Chicago and Vicinity." News releases circulated by the public relations staff from l 938 to date arc also available in the library.

Another series of scrapbooks, compiled by the secretary of the Art Institute but now in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, contains printed circulars, announcements, invitations, admission tickets, and other notices to members. Sixteen volumes are available for the period from 1890 to 1937, but there are gaps in the series.

All these publications provide an abundance of information about the Art Institute and related topics. Serious researchers who wish to learn the inside story on many developments, however, would need to consult minutes of meetings, correspondence, and other unpublished records accumulated through the years by trustees, directors, and other staff. Much, though not all, of this material still exists. There are some restrictions on the use of such records, especially those that are recent and those containing information on the prices paid for works of art. Inquiries concerning access to the unpublished materials described in the following paragraphs (except materials transferred to the library) should be addressed to the secretary of the Art Institute. The publications described above are all available in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. i\linutes of trustees' meetings are available from the earliest years. Two handwritten volumes in the Ryerson anct' Burnham Libraries contain the minutes of an earlier organization, the Chicago Academy of Design, from the time of its reorganization after the 1871 fire up to 1907. Another volume in the library contains the minutes of the Chicago Academy of Fine Art ¡ from 1879 until its name was changed to The Art Jnstitute of Chicago in 1882, and subsequent minutes until 1891. Twenty-eight volumes in a vault in the administrative offices include the minutes from 1891 to 1973 of meetings of trustees, governing members, the executive com-

mittee, and trustee committees for the various departments. These minutes genera ll y record action taken rather than the details of discussions, but they also include the texts of many committee reports, lists of acquisitions and employees, and sometimes the texts of letters or recommendations which prompted discussions . An index to subjects is included in each volume.

Correspondence files, internal memoranda, and similar records retained by directors and departments still exist. The secretary's file room contains around two hundred linear feet of records dating from about 1894 to 1974. Some are still in file cases, but most are housed in letter boxes on shelves, with labels giving some indication of the contents. However, the boxes have not yet been arranged in order, or inventoried.

Among the earliest records in the secretary's file room arc nineteen volumes containing letter-press copies of letters written between 1894 and 1914 by the Art Institute's first director, ¡William M. R. French . Letter boxes contain some letters received

by French in I 914, and perhaps for earlier years.

The correspondence files of Daniel Catton Rich, who became director in 1938, and of his successors appear to be relatively complete. There are some boxes of the correspondence of Rich's predecessor, Robert B. Harshe, but these may be less complete.

The secretary's file room also contains correspondence of the Antiquarian Society of the Art Institute dating from J 908, and extensive files from the 1950s and J 960s, evidently relating primarily to exh ibitions, from the Department of Painting and Sculpture and the Department of Oriental Art. Other records are held by the departments. The Department of Earlier Painting and Classical Art, for instance, has a file concerning acquisitions which contains correspondence and other records from the 1880s to the present (altho ugh the department is reluctant to permit access even to earlier records if they contain information on prices paid for works of art). Similar records concerning acquisitions and exhibitions are available in other departments.

The secretary of the Art Institu te plans to prepare an inventory of the records in the secretary's file room soon. Some of these records could and should be transferred to the custody of the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, where they could more easily be made ava ilable to researchers. It is to be hoped above all that any restrictions on the use of these unpublished records adopted in the future will be reasonable and will enable researchers to prepare the thorough, objective, scholarly history that The Art Institute of Chicago deserves.

Chicago History

63

THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY Clark Street at North Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60614 Telephone: Michigan 2-4600

OFFICERS

Harold K. Skramstad, Jr.

The Chicago Historical Society is a privately endowed institution devoted to collecting, preserving, and interpreting the history of the city of Chicago, the state o( Illinois, and selected areas of American history. It must look to its members and friends (or continuing financial support. Comributions to the Society are tax-deductible and appropriate recognition is accorded major gifts. The Society encourages potential contributors to phone or write the direcwr's office to discuss the Society's needs.

TRUSTEES

MEMBERSHIP

Theodore Tieken, President Stewart S. Dixon, 1st Vice-President Philip W. Hummer, 2nd Vice-President Gardner H. Stern, Treasurer Bryan S. Reid, Jr., Secretary DIRECTOR

Bowen Blair Philip D. Block III Cyrus Colter Emmett Dedmon Stewart S. Dixon James R. Getz Philip W. Hummer J\Irs. Frank D. Mayer

John T. McCutcheon, Jr. Andrew J\IcNally III Arthur E. Osborne, Jr. Bryan S. Reid, Jr. Harold Byron Smith, Jr. Gardner H. Stern Theodore Tieken J\Irs. Edgar J. Uihlein

LIFE TRUSTEES

Willard L. King J\Irs. C. Phillip Miller Hermon Dunlap Smith HONORARY TRUSTEE

Patrick L. O'Malley, President, Chicago Park District

J\fembership is open to anyone interested in the Society's activities and objectives. Classes of membership and dues are as follows: Annual, S20 a year and Governing Annual, $100 a year. Members receive the Society's quarterly magazine, Chicago History; a quarterly Calendar of Events listing Society programs; invitations to special programs; free admission to the building at all times; reserved seats at movies and concerts in our auditorium; and a 10% discount on books and other merchandise purchased in the Museum Store.

HOURS

Exhibition galleries are open daily from 9:30 to 4:30; Sunday from 12:00 to 5:00. Library and museum research collections are open Tuesday through Saturday from 9:30 to 4:30 except for July and August when they are open Monday through Friday. The Society is closed on Christmas, New Year's, and Thanksgiving.

EDUCATION AND PUBLIC PROGRAMS

offers guided tours, assemblies, slide talks, gallery talks, craft demonstrations, and a variety of special programs for all ages, from pre-school through senior citizen.

ADMISSION FEES FOR NON-MEMBERS

Adults S1; Children (6-17), 50¢; Senior Citizens, 25¢. Admission is free on Mondays.

Single copies of Chicago History, published quarterly, are ~2.25 by mail; S2 at newsstands, bookshops, and the Museum Store.

In 1977 the Art Institute was enriched by the reconstruction in its Columbus Drive addition of the Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room, originally designed by the firm of Adler and Sullivan in 1893-94. Among th e room's most arresting features are its ceiling and walls, intricately patterned in 52 subtly shaded tones of red , yellow, and green. The designs were created by Louis Sullivan and executed by the firm of Healy and Millet; the reinstallation was carried out by architects John Vinci and Lawrence Kenny. Photo by Bob Thall, courtesy of John Vinci.