A Home for Surrealism
Fantastic Painting in Midcentury Chicago
“Thus the dream finds itself reduced to a mere parenthesis, as is the night.”
— André Breton
Last week I toured “A Home for Surrealism: Fantastic Painting in Midcentury Chicago”, the latest exhibition curated by Dr. Janine Mileaf at The Arts Club of Chicago. Paintings and prints by Chicago-based artists who were working in the surrealism genre fill the gallery, works largely borrowed from collectors in the Club and local museums.
Dr. Mileaf shared stories of how the paintings were discovered by their collectors along with how the paintings can be analyzed as a historical snapshot into the surrealist movement of the midcentury.
Right: Charles Wilson Peale, “The Artist in His Museum”, 1822
“The Genius”, painted by Harold Noecker in 1942 is a star of the exhibition. It pictures a man creating a figure drawing while looking directly at the viewer, which we understand only by a glimmer of his eye as most of his face is concealed in shadows. At the left of the painting, a curtain is pulled back with a yellow rope, a trope found in early American paintings, most notably in Charles Willson Peale’s “The Artist in His Museum” from 1822. Instead of the artist holding the fabric, Noecker has the artist holding a pencil to draw the viewer in a rather neglected apartment containing merely a bed, a gold-framed painting hung on a crumbling wall, and a garish hole leading our eyes to a mountainous landscape of a sunny day. The painting behind the artist conveys a landscape of a different kind: buildings in an urban environment with the horizon line aligning almost perfectly with the actual landscape outdoors. A subsequent painting by Noecker on the same wall of the gallery presents the same urban landscape in “The Genius”, but includes a man (presumably also the artist) standing at the edge of a short wall observing buildings which alternate in green and pink.
It’s easy to notice the geometry and colors of the houses are the same. Between the interior scene and the landscape painting existing in the painter’s studio and the museum gallery, the artist has merged the imagination of the artist existing in the painting and the actual world because the painting of the buildings exists in both, creating a perceptual twist and a wonderful mark of research from Dr. Mileaf.
The exhibition also contains paintings by Gertrude Abercrombie, an artist who is gaining popularity as of late due to a surrealist exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, also in Chicago. Both exhibitions contained a painting by the artist, titled “The Courtship”, painted in 1949.
The exhibition also contains paintings by Gertrude Abercrombie, an artist who has gained popularity recently partly due to the recent surrealist exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art earlier this year, also in Chicago. Both exhibitions featured the same painting by the Abercrombie, titled “The Courtship”, painted in 1949.
A second and smaller painting by Abercrombie has a direct connection with one of The Arts Club of Chicago’s members, who purchased the painting from the artist for $10. The collector couldn’t afford to buy the painting at the time, so Abercrombie allowed her to pay two dollars every other week to pay off the artist. The bargained painting paid on layaway is pictured below.
Both paintings present different stages of marriage in a dreary landscape with effective emotional use of clouds and vertical lines in the background to expressively and obliquely convey emotion.
Along with Abercrombie and Noecker, paintings by Dorothea Tanning, John Wilde, Julia Thecla, and Julio de Diego depict the widely-known European art movement from a uniquely American perspective, complete with a book designed by Marcel Duchamp and André Breton to help pull the origins of the movement into the exhibition:
Below are several additional photographs from the exhibition, which is open to the public until August 17th, 2018.
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About the Author
Joshua Hoering is a writer, designer, educator, artist, and speaker based in Chicago, Illinois. He’s currently working on an MFA in Graphic Design & Visual Experience at the Savannah College of Art & Design.
