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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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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
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Standing Woman https://www.artic.edu/artworks/28425/
Grant J. Pick Purchase Fund
December 3, 2025 at 7:16 PM
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Forest and Sun https://www.artic.edu/artworks/185760/
Among his many recollections of childhood, Max Ernst often recounted his fear and fascination with the forest that surrounded his home. He wrote of feeling “delight and oppression and what the Romantics called ‘emotion in the face of Nature.’” By expressing his thoughts in these terms, Ernst linked himself with the spiritual landscape tradition of Romanticism, which conceived of an invisible realm at work in the natural world. This dark and mysterious forest scene dates to one of the most creative periods of Ernst’s career. Spurred by the Surrealist leader André Breton’s proclamation of “pure psychic automatism” as an artistic ideal, he developed the innovative technique of frottage, his term for the method of reproducing a relief design (like the surface of a piece of wood) by laying paper or canvas over it and rubbing it with a pencil, charcoal, or another medium. In Forest and Sun Ernst used this technique to create a petrified forest, which he imbued with a sense of primordial otherworldliness. By scraping away almost-dry paint on the canvas (a process he called grattage), the artist produced the encircled sun at the center of the composition. Ernst painted six variations of the forest and sun theme. As in the other five canvases, the tree trunks suggest a letter in the artist’s name: in this case, a capital M. Bequest of Richard S. Zeisler
December 3, 2025 at 4:29 PM
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La Pythie Philippise https://www.artic.edu/artworks/37939/
Gift of Edward H. Weiss
December 3, 2025 at 11:16 AM
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Couple https://www.artic.edu/artworks/20527/
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harry L. Winston
December 3, 2025 at 8:14 AM
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Still Life https://www.artic.edu/artworks/82418/
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harry L. Winston
December 2, 2025 at 6:09 PM
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The Red Armchair https://www.artic.edu/artworks/5357/
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Saidenberg
December 2, 2025 at 3:24 PM
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Abstract Composition https://www.artic.edu/artworks/18830/
Bequest from the estate of Hedwig B. Schniewind
December 2, 2025 at 1:26 PM
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Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz https://www.artic.edu/artworks/27987/
After receiving his artistic training in Italy, the sculptor and painter Amedeo Modigliani moved to Paris in 1906. Three years later, he helped pioneer a general migration of artists to the neighborhood of Montparnasse, which remained the center of avant-gard activity in the city until World War II. Scores of artists lived there, and many of them shared a Jewish heritage—including Modigliani and his friend the Lithuanian-born sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. Lipchitz commissioned Modigliani to paint this portrait on the occasion of his marriage to the Russian poet Berthe Kitrosser, as a way of helping his troubled friend financially. The double portrait is one of only three in the artist’s oeuvre and, according to Lipchitz, took two days to paint. Modigliani made about twenty drawings on the first day; the next day, he declared the picture finished. At the modest price of what Lipchitz remembered as “ten francs per sitting and a little alcohol,” however, he persuaded Modigliani to work on the portrait for another two weeks in an effort to provide more financial assistance to his friend. Despite Modigliani’s exceptional talent, his work found a market only after his death in 1920, which was hastened by tuberculosis and his legendary bohemian lifestyle. Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection
December 2, 2025 at 12:31 PM
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Maquette for Richard J. Daley Center Sculpture https://www.artic.edu/artworks/25809/
Gift of Pablo Picasso
December 2, 2025 at 10:04 AM
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The Policeman https://www.artic.edu/artworks/111654/
Bequest of Claire Zeisler
December 1, 2025 at 7:39 PM