Marta Kubrak, "Resistance to Snares," 2011, silkscreen

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Looking at Chicago Cultural Center’s exhibition of the Wroclaw School of Printmaking, one gets the sense that there might be more time in Wroclaw, Poland, than we have here. Three galleries filled with large, complex, detailed and technically brilliant prints provide evidence that artists in Poland have time to concentrate on dense, romantic images. Printmaking is a traditional form which, despite the rigors of its pre-twentieth-century technology, continues to speak to the present. Like glassblowing or textiles, both taught at the Academy where these artists are faculty, reproducing images somehow seems essential to human life. The craft of printmaking shifts and expands to absorb technical innovations over time, like photo and digital applications and modernist design sensibilities, but retains its connection with traditional forms. Read the rest of this entry »

Designed to represent an automated book-production facility, “Living Book” is a collaboration by Plural (the graphic design duo Jeremiah Chiu and Renata Graw) and Jonathan Krohn of The Center for Book Technology. The exhibition uses custom software designed by Michael Bingaman to capture images via an overhead camera, which are projected on a wall. Viewers may use an accompanying keyboard to make text appear over the projected images. In theory, a nearby printer would print out a page of the resulting text and images every sixty seconds for five hours a day, five days a week. However, a sound concept doesn’t always lead to flawless execution.

On a recent Saturday, the camera and keyboard were working with the images projected against the blank white wall, but the printer spat out blank page after blank page. A gallery attendant had to refill the paper tray just to demonstrate how the exhibit was intended to work. Read the rest of this entry »

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After eight years away from the copper plates, Tony Fitzpatrick has bought a new press, hired a master printer and staff, and is back in the printmaking business with two new, complementary series of multicolor etchings. As with his designs for collage, he starts with a big evocative figure in the center and then works out to the edges with the horror vacui of a medieval monk, compulsively free-associating to fill in the margins with energetic patterns that carry the mood of his story. His art is about life, not the art world, and it follows his endless exploration of what’s going on—in Chicago, Mexico, New Orleans, Japan or wherever else his voracious curiosity has led him. Read the rest of this entry »

Pavel Petrovich Sokolov-Skalia, "Wolf the Moralist," July 19, 1943.

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In 1939, Clement Greenberg famously distinguished avant-garde art from kitsch, the “predigested art” manufactured for the “ignorant Russian peasant” who knows “no discontinuity between art and life.” That distinction has framed the discourse of American art ever since, but it was a matter of life and death for Soviet artists once social realism was officially established by Stalin, and even more so after June 22, 1941 with the beginning of a Nazi invasion that would take twenty-three million lives.

In 1997, twenty-six mysterious brown paper parcels were discovered deep in a storage room of the AIC’s Department of Prints and Drawings. They turned out to be the legacy of a cultural exchange fifty years earlier that brought to Chicago a collection of war propaganda posters created by TASS, the Soviet News agency. Ranging in size from five to ten feet tall, their irresistible visual impact is stunning, especially now, after they have been restored to their original condition, augmented with spectacular pieces from other museums (including MoMA and the Hoover Institute), and displayed chronologically to tell the story of both the art studio that created them and the nation that was fighting for its life. Read the rest of this entry »

Arturo Garcia-Bustos

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There may be some doubt whether the populist, agrarian, folkloric ideals of the Mexican revolution still apply, a hundred years later, to a modern state on the verge of anarchy. But they have been inspiring many Mexican artists ever since, including Arturo García-Bustos (born 1926) and his wife, Rina Lazo (born 1923), whose prints are now showing  at Chicago’s newest Mexican art gallery, Casa Avilés, located  next to the Park West in Lincoln Park.

No pair of artists could have a better pedigree in twentieth-century Mexican art. Arturo was one of the four “Los Fridos” who studied with Frida Kahlo in her home in historic Coyoacan, while Rina was a studio assistant to Diego Rivera from 1947 until his death ten years later. Indeed, it was through their famous mentors that the couple first met, characteristically, at a political demonstration. Like their mentors, the couple works independently. Arturo tends to be more bombastic, while Rina is more lyrical. Read the rest of this entry »

Gustav Klutsis, "Worker Men and Women: Everyone Vote in the Soviet Elections," 1930

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The separation between everyday life and the visionary designers of the avant-garde is one of the ongoing ironies or misrepresentations of the twentieth century. An exhibition at the Art Institute retrieves the connections among graphic design, designed objects, art and “everyday life,” displaying book covers, teapots, postcards and the dynamic graphic work of six visual artists. What we now take for granted as industrial design was just beginning in the early years of the century when Ladislav Sutnar was designing dinnerware and posters celebrating commerce and industry. His sculptural china embodies the restrained play of spherical volumes, while Piet Zwart’s apple-green pressed glassware is more compact as tubular tea cups sit in hexagonal saucers. The emphasis on form rather than decoration not only severs ties with the clutter of the Victorian past but identifies everyday items with the values—efficiency, durability, mass distribution—of emerging industrial and communications technologies. Read the rest of this entry »

Henry Fuseli, "Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head," 1793. Oil on canvas. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington.

Something terrible happens in the world every day, so tragedy is the bread and butter of daily journalism, but as the subject of Aristotle’s “Poetics,” the foundational text of European aesthetics, it well deserves the scholarly attention which University of Chicago professors of art history, as well as philosophy, English and classical literature have given it in this special exhibition at the Smart Museum. Focusing on two centuries of Western European art, “The Tragic Muse: Art and Emotion, 1700-1900” attempts to trace changing attitudes towards what we call tragedy.

The highlight is the collection of paintings that relate to Shakespearean theater. There are portrait sketches (1785-90) of the actress Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth by George Romney from the Princeton University Art Museum. More impressively, there is the life-sized painting of the tragic actor Philibert Rouvière as Hamlet, from 1865, by Edouard Manet on loan from the National Gallery, and Henry Fuseli’s nearly life-sized depiction of “Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head” (1793) from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Read the rest of this entry »

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The mid-eighteenth century was the heyday of Georgian England. The civil and international religious wars of the previous century were a dim memory, revolution had not yet risen in France, and commercial swag was flowing into London from the far-flung empire. As brewers, gamblers, young women and musicians flocked to the capital, the prosperous citizens of London did their best to thoroughly dissipate themselves. Writers such as Henry Fielding (“Tom Jones,” 1749) and John Cleland (“Fanny Hill,” 1748) were developing the comic and pornographic novel to depict that scene, and Thomas Cannon was one of the first gay activists (“Ancient and Modern Pederasty,” 1749).

In 1768, thirty-four prominent British painters, sculptors and architects, with the official endorsement of King George III, proclaimed the establishment of a Royal Academy “to promote the arts of design.” Its first president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, proclaimed the purpose to train artists capable of creating works of high moral and artistic worth. But ten years later, two of its earliest students, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, were applying the exceptional pictorial skills of the European Baroque to that very English activity of mocking, laughing and celebrating the pomposity of authority and every other human foible. Which is to say that Rowlandson, who was himself no stranger to the gambling dens and brothels, was not the moralizer that his famous predecessor, William Hogarth, had been. Read the rest of this entry »

"Bathing," 1940

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“Lost troves” appear so often in the secondary art market one wonders whether their amazing rediscovery has something to do with marketing. Whatever the reason, several dozen early prints by Jun’ichiro Sekino (1914-1988) have recently surfaced in Chicago. They are a remarkable collection of work done during the dark days of Japan’s failing empire by a young artist in his twenties, and are augmented by some equally remarkable postwar prints that Floating World Gallery is not offering for sale. It’s a real festival of rambunctious creativity by a printmaker who would later become distracted by commercial success. Many of them are one-of-a-kind monoprints, and many of them are of nudes, done in a peculiar, lively style that is a hybrid of Japanese and European, though owing a bit more to Picasso and Matisse than to Utamaro and Hokusai. Read the rest of this entry »

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While the unbounded freedom of conceptual art is the empty kernel at the core of our aesthetic era, much art nonetheless still makes its point more effectively in what it does than in what it says. And it seems no coincidence that France, the nation that formulated sadism, the most perfected practical realization of modern solipsism (as well as other, lesser political and cultural revolutions), also gave us Le Dernier Cri (in French, “The Last Scream”). Le Dernier Cri is a printmaking collaborative, begun in Marseilles in 1990 by then-couple Pakito Bolino and Caroline Sury, that has printed mountains of eye-popping (or, more properly, eye-gouging) work by artists from Europe, the U.S. and Japan. Perversion of all sorts is rendered impeccably on sumptuously beautiful matrices, almost choking the viewer with a dazzling fecundity of bodily expulsions and amputations, presented in profuse silkscreened colors and pristine textures. Read the rest of this entry »