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aicmodernart.bsky.social
AIC: Modern Art (Bot)
@aicmodernart.bsky.social
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Sharing artworks from the Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Art department.
Automated thanks to @andreitr.bsky.social and @botfrens.bsky.social
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L'Estaque https://www.artic.edu/artworks/9010/
Émilie Charmy was among the first women to exhibit paintings in the Fauvist style. Traveling to rugged sites on France’s Mediterranean coast, such as L’Estaque, depicted here, she created landscapes suffused with emotion and subjective expression. Laying down vibrant color in broad unstructured planes, she composed the scene as a collection of loosely joined organic forms. The swelling and tapering shapes along the composition’s edges produce a dynamic sense of movement that dissipates at the center, where we glimpse the calm waters of the Bay of Marseille.Charmy was celebrated during her lifetime, but the accolades she received feel wildly gendered today. In 1921, for example, a French writer described her as an artist who “sees like a woman and paints like a man…from the one she takes grace and from the other strength, and this is what makes her such a strange and powerful painter who holds our attention.” Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection
December 9, 2025 at 11:00 AM
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Landscape with Sunbather https://www.artic.edu/artworks/200684/
Bequest of Sylvia Simons Sights
December 9, 2025 at 9:28 AM
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Laurette with a Cup of Coffee https://www.artic.edu/artworks/122232/
Estate of Marguerita S. Ritman; Marian and Samuel Klasstorner Endowment; through prior gifts of Philip D. Armour; through prior bequests of Dorothy C. Morris and Marguerita S. Ritman
December 8, 2025 at 6:44 PM
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The Inventors https://www.artic.edu/artworks/62317/
Mary and Earle Ludgin Collection
December 8, 2025 at 4:42 PM
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The Last Supper https://www.artic.edu/artworks/55498/
Gift of Mrs. Frank R. Lillie
December 8, 2025 at 2:11 PM
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The Bunch of Grapes https://www.artic.edu/artworks/90863/
Gift of Mary and Leigh Block
December 8, 2025 at 12:01 PM
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Dancing Girl https://www.artic.edu/artworks/10018/
Directly affected by the Nazis’ ascent to power, Paul Klee was dismissed in 1933 from his teaching post at Dusseldorf Academy, where he had spent two years after leaving the Bauhaus. Exiled to Switzerland, Klee suffered physically and psychologically, and his artistic output diminished significantly. Between 1937 and 1940, however, Klee regained artistic momentum and produced several hundred paintings and over 1,500 drawings. In these later works, Klee continued to experiment with unusual media and techniques to produce multidimensional effects. Dancing Girl also reveals Klee’s limitless humor—his signature at the lower right was made by a monogrammed handkerchief, which he laid over the surface to begin his painting. Gift of George B. Young
December 8, 2025 at 9:05 AM
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Harbor at Neppermin https://www.artic.edu/artworks/117242/
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Maurice Fulton
December 7, 2025 at 6:47 PM
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The Praying Jew https://www.artic.edu/artworks/23700/
Marc Chagall had a prolific career that spanned more than eight decades of the twentieth century. While his work often exhibits influences of the contemporary movements he encountered in France and Germany, his subjects and decorative lyricism reveal his love of Russian folk art and his roots in Hasidic Judaism. In his 1931 autobiography, My Life, Chagall related how, while visiting Vitebsk (present-day Belarus), the city in which he was born, he realized that the traditions in which he had grown up were fast disappearing and that he needed to document them. He paid a man to pose in his father’s prayer clothes and then painted him, limiting his palette primarily to black and white, as befit the solemnity of the subject. This portrait is noteworthy for the simplicity of its execution; nonetheless, its striking patterns, abstract background, and the slightly distorted features of the model demonstrate Chagall’s absorption of modern trends, especially Cubism. Chagall often painted variants or replicas of works he particularly loved. The Art Institute’s Praying Jew is one of three versions of this composition. He painted the original canvas in 1914, and when he traveled back to Paris in 1923, he took this painting with him. He learned upon his return that much of the work he had left in France had been lost during World War I. This prompted him to make two versions of The Praying Jew before it left his studio: they are the present work and another in the Ca’ Pesaro, Venice; the original is now in the Kunstmuseum, Basel. The later compositions differ from the original only in small details. Joseph Winterbotham Collection
December 7, 2025 at 3:56 PM
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Untitled (Bird Box) https://www.artic.edu/artworks/239356/
Gift of Dale Taylor and Angela Lustig
December 7, 2025 at 11:28 AM
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Standing Woman https://www.artic.edu/artworks/28433/
Grant J. Pick Purchase Fund
December 7, 2025 at 8:36 AM
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Untitled (Sequestered Bower) https://www.artic.edu/artworks/99783/
Lindy and Edwin Bergman Joseph Cornell Collection
December 6, 2025 at 6:25 PM
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The Checkerboard https://www.artic.edu/artworks/86246/
Ada Turnbull Hertle Endowment; gift of Mrs. Leigh B. Block
December 6, 2025 at 3:13 PM
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Longeuil, Normandie https://www.artic.edu/artworks/150071/
Gift of Clara Hoover Trust
December 6, 2025 at 2:29 PM
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White Cap https://www.artic.edu/artworks/251140/
Promised gift of Charlotte Sanford Mason
December 6, 2025 at 11:44 AM
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Composition with Red Arrow https://www.artic.edu/artworks/17444/
In 1915 Marcel Janco joined fellow artists Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Tristan Tzara in Zurich, Switzerland, to respond to World War I and an emerging modern media and machine aesthetic. United in this "anti-art" movement, Dada artists led a creative revolution that profoundly shaped the course of subsequent art. Their performances and assemblages—works made with the stuff of modern life, including newspapers, ticket stubs, mechanical parts, food wrappers, advertisements, and hat racks—were intended to provoke awareness of the conventions of life that had led to the disasters of war. Born in neutral Zurich and New York, two cities that served as independent points of origin for the movement, Dada rapidly spread to Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, Paris, and beyond. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Markus
December 5, 2025 at 6:50 PM
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Dead Fowl https://www.artic.edu/artworks/23643/
Like many artists associated with the School of Paris, Chaim Soutine moved to Montparnasse upon his 1913 arrival in Paris. He did not adhere to one particular artistic style, though he admired earlier artists like Rembrandt and Jean-Siméon Chardin and the more recent Fauves and Expressionists. In the mid-1920s, Soutine produced a group of still-life paintings primarily featuring hanging game and meat carcasses, subjects found in European art for centuries. Rather than depicting the dead animals as lifeless and limp, however, he often portrayed them as tragic figures; in works like Dead Fowl, the visceral quality of the thick, swirling paint suggests the bird’s writhing battle against death. Joseph Winterbotham Collection
December 5, 2025 at 5:08 PM
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Femme a la Cruche-une Orientale https://www.artic.edu/artworks/21711/
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Carter H. Harrison
December 5, 2025 at 3:02 PM
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Figure and Flowers https://www.artic.edu/artworks/28548/
Gift of Richard Feigen
December 5, 2025 at 10:44 AM
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Nude Seated in a Bathtub https://www.artic.edu/artworks/47141/
Gift of Mrs. Marcel Duchamp
December 5, 2025 at 8:21 AM
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Girl with Cat https://www.artic.edu/artworks/117241/
Balthus's legendary secretiveness has inhibited critical commentary on his paintings. His son Stanislas appears at times to have been his spokesman, arguing that the girls in his father's paintings are "emblematic archetypes... their very youth the symbol of an ageless body of glory, as adolescence (from the Latin adolescere: to grow toward) aptly symbolizes that heavenward state of growth which Plato refers to in the Timaeus" (Klossowski de Rola 1983, p. 10). He also suggested, a little more plausibly, that the paintings emphasize the act of seeing, though unfortunately he used this as an excuse to propose that an ideal state can be achieved from their contemplation "wherein the act of seeing, the seen and the seer become one" (Klossowki de Rola 1983, p. 8). All the evidence of these senses appealed to in such paintings— nostalgia, lubricity, frustration— work against such a reading. Most literature on this painting considers alternative identifications of the cat, with either Balthus's model, Therese Blanchard, the daughter of a neighbor, or with the artist himself. The latter interpretation is supported by Balthus's long-standing fascination with cats. In 1920, at the age of thirteen, he published a series of prints narrating the story of a cat called Mitsou; even more directly relevant to the artist's personal identification with this animal is his 1935 self-portrait entitled H.M. the King of Cats (New York 1984, no. 9, ill.). In addition in the work of writers in Balthus's circle, there is considerable support for the association of the cat with sexuality. Georges Bataille's erotic novel Histoire de l'oeil (Paris, 1928), for instance, has a chapter entitled "L'Oeil de chat" (The Cat's eye) in which a sixteen-year-old boy and girl engage in sexual play with a cat's saucer of milk. However, an exclusive emphasis on these readings overstresses the biographical in Balthus's work and overlooks the degree to which he refers to and plays upon traditions of representing sexuality in Western painting. The genre of salacious images of women with which Balthus's Girl with Cat is aligned traditionally include a small animal: cat or lap dog. The most famous examples perhaps are Jean Antoine Watteau's Lady at Her Toilette of 1716/17 (London, Wallace Collection) and Edouard Manet's Olympia of 1865 (Paris, Musee d' Orsay), but any number of thinly veiled Venuses or clothed beauties in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting carry, fondle, or are watched by a pet. Typical commentaries of the time would remark on how fortunate the pet was to enjoy such privileged proximity to the desired object. Unspoken, but often visually very obvious parallels were also made between the creature and the female body. Traditionally the animal thus has a double identity, related to both the artist/ voyeur and the female sex. The setting of Girl with Cat has many of the traditional trappings of the painter's studio. Therese lies on a daybed that figures in several other paintings by Balthus; on the left, the back of an upholstered chair is barely recognizable because of the rococo swatch of blue fabric bunched around one of its arms (similar chairs appear in Balthus's paintings The White Skirt of 1937 and Therese of 1938). — Entry, Dawn Ades, Surrealist Art: The Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1997, p. 6-7. Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection
December 4, 2025 at 8:00 PM
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Fragment of "Mother and Child" https://www.artic.edu/artworks/28884/
Gift of Pablo Picasso
December 4, 2025 at 5:16 PM
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Baudelaire https://www.artic.edu/artworks/90865/
Through prior gift of Mr. and Mrs. Carter H. Harrison
December 4, 2025 at 1:41 PM
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Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler https://www.artic.edu/artworks/111060/
Gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman in memory of Charles B. Goodspeed
December 4, 2025 at 12:03 PM
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Turning Point of Thirst https://www.artic.edu/artworks/118592/
Upon settling in Paris in 1930, Victor Brauner established a deep friendship with the artist Yves Tanguy, who introduced him to the Surrealist circle. Three years later, Brauner joined the group with the support of Tanguy, and his 1934 solo show at the Galerie Pierre, for which André Breton wrote the catalogue introduction, solidified his position. Like other Surrealists of the period, such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, Brauner was inspired by dreams, the unconscious, and mysticism, as well as diverse religions and ancient mythologies. Such influences are present in the artist’s Turning Point of Thirst, one of the works included in his 1934 exhibition. Of this work, Brauner wrote that "representing this personage in withered tatters expresses unremitting solitude and should pound the senses." Promised gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer, Jr.; restricted gift of Richard Gray; Alyce and Edwin De Costa and the Walter E. Heller Foundation
December 4, 2025 at 10:13 AM