Nancy Chen

I am an arts & culture writer and museum educator currently based in Chicago.

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Miró’s Studio and The Farm, painted in 1921-22

"The Farm was a résumé of my entire life in the country. I wanted to put everything I loved about the country into that canvas-from a huge tree to a tiny snail."

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Lovely plein air painting session and catch-up with Leslie yesterday 🤗 (at Humboldt Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/CQGbVD5D5ep/?utm_medium=tumblr

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“A work of Art is created for the pleasure of the artist and automatically for that of the audience. Where it requires indoctrination it is not Art.” 2/5/50 4 Stuart Davis Papers (Harvard)

Via Stuart Davis: a catalog raisonné

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Kurt Schwitters, Cherry Picture (1921)

Via MoMA: Schwitters pasted and hammered objects onto what appears to be an earlier oil painting, its moody greens and blues still partly visible. The reworking testifies to a conceptual shift: from the work of art as picture to the work of art as surface for the accumulation of matter.

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“I set up my easel in front of this piece of water which adorns my garden with its coolness; it is only 200 meters around and its image aroused in you the idea of the infinite...as in microcosm, the existence of the elements and the instability of the university which transforms itself, every moment, before our eyes.” –Claude Monet, who spent the last three decades of his career painting his garden at Giverny

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“I wanted to make music that wouldn't be for the ears. Music isn't just what you hear or what you listen to, but everything that happens.” –George Brecht

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Love this description of the raucous public response to the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art (the Armory Show) when it came to Chicago:

The Armory show was the first appearance of Post-Impressionist and Cubist art in America... a daring exhibition for the Art Institute of Chicago, a museum with pretty conservative taste up to that point. Source: "The Constant Improver". (2010). Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, 36(1), 68-91.

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A postcard showing Lorado Taft’s Fountain of the Great Lakes, 1907-13, originally installed along the Art Institute of Chicago’s South Terrace. The sculpture was commissioned by the B.F. Ferguson Fund, established to beautify the parks and boulevards of Chicago.

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Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

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Of childhood contentment; childhood as metaphor for hope and healing in the wake of trauma

“The Whittling Boy” by Winslow Homer

1873

Oil on canvas

From the Terra Foundation’s website:

Winslow Homer’s The Whittling Boy presents an idyll of rural childhood: a youth, casually seated on a fallen log in a sunny clearing, absorbed in an idle pastime. The close-up view shows the boy ensconced in his sun-dappled natural surroundings as he focuses his attention on his whittling (paring wood with a knife); the wide-brimmed straw hat shading his face casts his unseen features in shadow and suggests his lack of awareness of the viewer’s presence. The confined aspect of the setting, in which the horizon is crowded out of the composition, further suggests the innocent self-absorption of youth and the wholesome unselfconsciousness of a childhood in nature. The theme of rural youth, with which Homer was preoccupied throughout the 1870s, grew out of his own childhood ramblings in the countryside surrounding his native Cambridge, Massachusetts. The subject was also a popular one among Homer’s artistic contemporaries, as Americans looked to rural life and childhood as metaphors for hope and healing in the wake of the Civil War.

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Elaine de Kooning on Stuart Davis, in the April 1957 issue of ARTnews:

His is an art of solid certainties.

His subject has always been America—not America as seen in American art but as seen on a walk down Broadway or a drive past a harbor in a fishing village. He resists art by being true to life.More intensely than any painter in our history, he offers a specific, objective, national experience. It is the experience not of our natural landscape but of America as man-made. The brittle animation of his art relates to jazz, to movie marquees, to the streamlined decor and brutal colors of gasoline stations, to the glare of neon lights, to the flamboyant sweep of three-level parkways, to the fool-proof shine of stainless steel diners, to the big, bright words that are shouted at us from billboards from one end of the country to the other.

His style developed between two continents and two wars, is as insistently remote from the Synthetic Cubism that was his starting point as it is from the American Action-Painting that surrounds him today.

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Hazlitt on visiting the newly opened National Gallery in London in 1824: ”It is a cure (for the time at least) for low-thoughted cares and uneasy passions. We are abstracted to another sphere: we breathe empyrean air; we enter into the minds of Raphael, of Titian, of Poussin, of the Caracci, and look at nature with their eyes; we live in time past, and seem identified with the permanent forms of things. The business of the world at large, and even its pleasures, appear like a vanity and an impertinence. What signify the hubbub, the shifting scenery, the fantoccini figures, the folly, the idle fashions without, when compared with the solitude, the silence, the speaking looks, the unfading forms within? Here is the mind’s true home. The contemplation of truth and beauty is the proper object for which we were created, which calls forth the most intense desires of the soul, and of which it never tires.”

From William Hazlitt, Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries in England, London, Taylor & Hessey, 1824, pp. 2–6. -- as cited in Carol Duncan’s Civilizing Rituals, p.15

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Eva Hesse - Sketches of sculptures in Richard Serra’s Guggenheim exhibition, 1969

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Suzuki Harunobu (Japanese, 1724-1770)

Fidelity (Shin) from the Five Cardinal Virtues

About 1767

Color woodblock print, chūban

Art Institute of Chicago - Clarence Buckingham Collection 1928.925

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Standing Bear (Mato Najin), (Minneconjou Lakota, 1859-1933)

Events Leading to the Battle of the Little Big Horn, c.1899. 

Muslin, pencil, and red, blue, yellow, green, and black pigment

72 x 72 in.

Saint Augustine’s Indian Center, Chicago

via “All Our Relations” as an Eco-Art Historical Challenge: Lessons from Standing Bear’s Muslin by Jessica L. Horton (2018) in Ecologies, Agents, Terrains

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Capital with hell-beasts. Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne (photo by James Austin, via “Mouths and Meanings: Towards an Anti-Iconography of Medieval Art” by Michael Camille)

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Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make