More at the Art Institute
Paradise Lost
On a previous visit to the Art Institute of Chicago, we had a sneak peek at a new exhibit. Although we were able to view it without a crowd, we had to keep our distance, so we went back another day for a closer look. It was an epic work by Raqib Shaw titled Paradise Lost, painted on twenty-one wooden panels and measuring nearly ten feet high and over 100 feet long! Shaw grew up in Kashmir, in the Himalayas of northern India, and studied in London. This autobiographical masterwork was more than twenty years in the making, and now it was being shown for the first time.
Paradise Lost was both immense and intricate. From afar, the landscapes looked serene. Up close, there were hundreds of fanciful figures - animal, human, and hybrid - depicted in glowing jewel tones and meticulous detail. Many scenes were gory and violent, with unexpected touches of glitter. It was mysterious and beautiful and disturbing and mesmerizing.
“I believe deeply that art has the power to transform sorrow into meaning, and it has this wonderful quality to alchemize personal pain into something luminous and enduring. In a time where attention is fleeting and meaning often feels fractured, I do hope that this work invites the viewer to slow down and to look carefully and to feel without haste. ”
Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris
While Frida Kahlo was visiting Paris in 1939, she became ill and convalesced at the home of Mary Reynolds, an American artist and bookbinder who was the partner of surrealist Marcel Duchamp. It was interesting to imagine Kahlo at intimate gatherings in Duchamp and Reynold’s home with their artist friends, such as Constantin Brancusi, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, and Yves Tanguy. Though Kahlo didn’t consider herself a surrealist - she said that she didn’t paint dreams, but rather her own reality - that month in Paris clearly influenced her later work.
Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World
Like most people, the only work by French painter Gustave Caillebotte (KY-bott) that I knew of was Paris Street: Rainy Day, the iconic 1877 painting at the Art Institute. (Remember that board game “Masterpiece”?) It turns out Caillebotte was quite different from the other noted Impressionists. He was independently wealthy and supported struggling artists like Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet. He was an avid sportsman and gardener. Instead of female models, he painted his male friends or local male workers. He even scandalously painted intimate portraits of nude men in traditionally female settings, like the bath. But it’s Caillebotte’s scenes of Paris - framed and cropped much like photography, a new medium that was just becoming popular at the time - that I will remember most.
Fun fact: When Caillebotte died at age 45, his will bequeathed 68 paintings by Renoir, Monet, Cezanne, Pisarro, Manet, and Sisely to the French government, but France didn’t want them. Renoir, as the will’s executor, finally persuaded officials to accept about half of the collection.
