Chicago's Visual Arts: A Quest for World Class, #1

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

WORLD-CLASS CHICAGO

INTRODUCTION TO CHICAGO’S VISUAL ARTS

1850’s-1860’s Beginning of an Art Community

1870’s-1880’s A Fire Caused Setback-Rise of the Art Institute-Demise of the Academy of Design

1890’s-1900’s A World’s Fair Makes Chicago Center of the Art World

1910’s-1920’s The Armory Show-Some Chicago Artists Become National Celebrities

1930’s-1940’s Another World’s Fair-Government Becomes a Large Art Market

1950’s-1960’s Traditional Art Markets Decline-Chicago Gets a New Museum

1970’s-1980’s Art Exhibit Blockbusters-Traditional Art Markets Disappear

1990’s-21st Century New Art Galleries and Institutions Established-Art Institute Ends Chicago Traditions

Lessons Learned from History

Reference and Source Material

WORLD-CLASS CHICAGO

In the spring of 1896 a passenger train approached Chicago from the East. As Chicago came within view, a stranger told the gentleman sitting next to him that Chicago’s got hustle, bustle, rush, go, snap, vim, and other things too numerous to mention. It is destined to be the metropolis of the new world. The gentleman made no contrary argument and he was no ordinary traveler. He was Frank Merriwell, great American sportsman from Yale and highly successful amateur detective. Even fictional Americans seemed cognizant of Chicago’s claim that its manifest destiny was to be America’s largest city and its cultural capital. The passage came from Frank Merriwell in Chicago; or, Meshed by Mysteries, one of the earliest Frank Merriwell dime novels of which there would eventually be over two hundred. While Merriwell was a literary contrivance, the author and the fiction factory that published the dime novels were not only real but they were from New York and they didn’t take issue with the claim either. They no doubt had heard it numerous times from boastful Chicagoans for at least ten years.

In the waning years of the 19th century, Chicago’s boasters became convinced that the destiny of their city was to be the Paris of the New World or the capital of an inland empire and they were not sly about stating so. All the evidence reinforced their assumptions. Chicago is where the Mississippi Valley meets the Great Lakes. All roads may lead to Rome but all railroads lead to Chicago the great transfer point for anyone traveling across the North American continent. The railroads were bringing a stream of humanity to Chicago and the Midwest. No city in human history had grown as fast and as large as Chicago in such a short period of time. In the course of one generation Chicago had grown from a frontier mud-hole to a continental metropolis. In the course of another generation Chicago had risen from the ashes of a major conflagration to become the second largest city in the nation and there was no known restraint preventing Chicago from continuing to grow into the nation’s paramount city. As Henry Blake Fuller, the first native Chicagoan to become an esteemed national novelist, stated in an article in the Atlantic Monthly: the increasing centrality of her (Chicago) position, coupled with the widening exercise of her powers, appears to her confident and rather arrogant mind a sufficient earnest of her final supremacy, commercial, intellectual, and political.

Two generations past the heady decade of the 1890’s at mid-20th century, Chicago had not only not become America’s largest city or its cultural capital but the City was more likely to be described as a cultural desert. There was no resident opera company, no dance company, no commercial theater producers, no literary publishers and no literary periodical publishers with the exception of Harriet Monroe’s endowed poetry magazine. And perhaps at the City’s cultural nadir, its plight and tribulations were exposed to the world by a series of articles in a New York magazine, the New Yorker, called Chicago: the Second City. According to the author, the City that had once fancied itself the ineluctable cultural capital of the entire nation now possessed citizens who were incapable of judging the worth of a play, the value of a painting or even the proper style of dress that a women should wear in public to be en vogue. They needed an imprimatur from New York to make a decision. It had been New Yorkers who bequeathed Chicago its first moniker, the Windy City, based on its constant boasts of future greatness, and now another New Yorker had bestowed a second moniker on Chicago: the Second City that reflected its failed ambitions.

Instead of becoming the Paris of the New World, Chicago had become a city suffering a group psychosis marked by a deep inferiority complex. Fate had dealt Chicago a nasty setback. Circumstances seemed to have reversed conspiring against the City. America’s western migration went through Chicago and then kept going until it reached the Pacific Ocean and it moved faster as planes replaced railroads. Instead of being the center of a vast inland empire, Chicago became situated between two coastal civilizations whose citizens would fly over Chicago instead of through Chicago. In the golden age of Vaudeville and the annual Follies, Chicago was known as the turn because everything went through Chicago in one direction or another. Two generations later it was known as a flyover city. There was a sense of being out of the mainstream of national cultural activity living in Chicago which exacerbated the frustration with the City’s cultural failures and which seemed to fuel the constant exodus of talent from Chicago making the City the cultural desert that it had become.

The issue of Chicago’s declining position in the nation’s cultural affairs continued to fester in Chicago until the City’s powerful Mayor, Richard J. Daley, responded by commissioning a plan for the Arts through an economic development committee composed of business and labor leaders. The plan was developed by a consulting company from New York who had no prior experience in the realm of art or commercial entertainment development. It would seem to bespeak to a root problem that Chicago’s civic leadership felt that they needed the advice of people from other cities to tell them what Chicago should produce in art or in entertainment but it would also be the start of a tradition. Succeeding mayoral administrations would also turn to extraneous consultants for advice on cultural development reinforcing the observation that Chicagoans don’t know what they should want.

Nevertheless, the consultant utilized a thorough survey of a diverse cross-section of Chicagoans for their input on art and entertainment. The greatest preference of citizen consumers was for more and diverse entertainment in the Loop. Clearly there were many residents of Chicago who remembered when the Loop was teeming with entertainment venues with diverse offerings from Ragtime to Grand Opera, from Burlesque to the Bard, from Jazz to Country. Chicago’s downtown Rialto was never as big as New York’s but it had always been more diverse in genre choices. The consultants, the civic leaders and the Mayor ignored what the citizenry desired and instead the Mayor’s Planning Department came up with a plan to demolish every theater in the Loop except the Auditorium Theater which was made of granite and owned by a liberal arts University or it too likely would have been a target for the wrecker’s ball.

Chicago’s Government would be demolishing elegant old theaters long after lesser American cities had started reviving their theater Rialtos and similarly be in an adversarial stance with Chicago’s music venues long after smaller cities had become world famous for music that had once been nurtured in Chicago. And yet, by the end of the 20th century despite a benighted political and civic leadership, Chicago seemed to have experienced a revival in at least some of the traditional arts and entertainment endeavors. Less often heard in conversation was the term Second City Syndrome and more often proffered was the term world-class city. Chicago’s modern Gascons no longer claimed their City’s karma was to be the planet’s largest concentration of humanity nor the nation’s cultural capital as their Victorian predecessors had; but they would just as vehemently aver that Chicago had achieved similar stead with the highest ranking centers of culture and business in the world. It would be asserted repeatedly that Chicago was world-class. Certainly there exists evidence to make their case especially in affairs of business and national politics. And yet in many more ways little has changed. There are no publishers in a city of novelists, none of the downtown theaters are controlled by the City’s commercial producers who still finance productions meant for New York. The City’s media giants all ended in bankruptcy. Chicago does not seem to achieve its maximum potential.

There are shelves of history books about Chicago’s culture, its art and entertainment preferences. They are all written from the perspective of the artist not the business that produced the art. That is human nature. People are curious about the novelist not the publisher, the musician not the manager, the play not the owner of the stage. Yet if you look at the business of art instead of the art or the artist, you can understand better how Chicago came to be what it is. That is what the various volumes of Chicago’s Quest for World-Class will do. You will know Chicago better after reading these histories. Chicago has a richer history than even its greatest boasters are aware and yet these traditions are all too often repeated which denies the City its maximum potential.

INTRODUCTION TO CHICAGO’S VISUAL ARTS

We point with pride to industrial and commercial prosperity of Chicago, but this alone will not be sufficient to give it a great name in the world’s history….Chicago’s crowning glory should be in art, to become the art center of the New World as Paris is of the old.

Chicago Tribune, 1889

On a sultry, summer afternoon in August of 1967 between twenty-five and fifty thousand people crowded the recently constructed Civic Center Plaza to witness one of the most exciting events in the history of Chicago’s arts: the unveiling of a statue by the world’s most eminent artist: Pablo Picasso. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra played An American in Paris, Mayor Richard J. Daley orated about vitality of the city and then, the blue percale veil was dropped from the fifty foot high statue. Chicago became at that moment the only city in the world to possess a Picasso statue as a public monument. Some viewers were clearly awestruck while others were obviously befuddled. What was it? Picasso had neither named nor interpreted the statue. To some, it was the head of a woman. To others, it was an Afghan dog. Or was the European artist playing a cruel joke on benighted hog-butcher Chicago? One unimpressed alderman famously suggested that the Picasso statue should be replace with one of a local Major League baseball hero.

Within a decade, the Picasso statue was followed by a Chagall mosaic and a Calder stabile causing Mayor Daley to proclaim the Loop one of the world’s largest outdoor museums for contemporary sculpture. But the acquisition of public art from the masters of Europe spawned as much controversy as approbation among many Chicagoans especially within the local art community. The European artists being commissioned by Chicago’s art benefactors were elderly and their art was anything but contemporary. The Art Institute first added a Picasso painting to their collection in 1915. These were controversial artists when Grandma was young. While European artists with name recognition received patronage from Chicago’s wealthy benefactors, the City’s own artists never seemed as fortunate. This controversy would follow Mayor Daley to his grave.

Following the death of Mayor Richard J. Daley late in 1976, the City fathers decided to honor the late Mayor with a memorial placed in the Civic Center Plaza, recently renamed Daley Plaza. Yet the initiative soon bogged down when the artist selection committee went to Europe to interview European artists. Defenders of the selection committee countered that artist ability, not residency, should be the selection touchstone but skeptics noted that the selection committee was interviewing only internationally known artists, most of whom worked in a style that Chicagoans would find unbefitting the late Mayor’s persona. The controversy and grousing seemed to have transcended the purpose of the memorial, so it was never built.

It is in the visual arts that Chicago has experienced the least success. Chicago has never produced an artist tantamount in recognition and influence with its great architects or novelists. There is no Frank Lloyd Wright or Louis Sullivan equivalent in the realm of art. There is no Chicago School of Art that is recognized as a unique and important movement as there was a Chicago School of Literature that many scholars aver as the first uniquely American literature responsible for liberating America from European literary colonialism. There have always been artists resident in the City with a national or even international reputation who have been collected and exhibited in distant galleries and museums but none have had the influence tantamount to the greatest of the City’s architects, writers or musicians. Chicago’s greatest success in the visual arts has been in the collection of great art not in its creation. It is in the visual arts that the conflict between personal preference and parochial responsibilities has been most obvious. Any event of an artistic nature from an art exhibition to the commission of a memorial will generate a dispute about art and the support of art in Chicago. The most enduring tradition in Chicago toward the visual arts is a schism between resident artists and the benefactors of art.

A History of Chicago’s Visual Art Traditions

1850’s-1860’s Beginning of an Art Community

On March 22nd, 1859, a meeting of Chicago’s civic and social leaders was called to consider the rueful state of art appreciation in Chicago. The concerned citizens decided the best prescription for Chicago’s lack of art exposure was an Art Exposition, to consist of such select and approved paintings and sculptures as are in possession of our citizens, in order to afford to the public, and especially all persons interested in the Fine Arts, an opportunity to gratify and improve their taste in Art matters.

Just two decades and two years from its incorporation as a city, and Chicago’s nouveau riche upper-class society had become concerned with matters of art and culture. The Art Exposition of 1859 was an effort to nurture Chicago’s artistic development and, based on attendance, an unqualified success. Twelve thousand people, in a city barely over one hundred thousand in total population, attended the exposition that included three hundred and sixty-nine works of art loaned by seventy local contributors. Local artists, scant though they were, were well represented in this first Chicago art exposition. In fact, the art of G.P.A. Healy, a portrait painter, and Leonard Volk, a sculptor, were regarded commensurate with the best of the Eastern artists. George Peter Alexander Healy and Leonard Volk, two of the earliest Chicago artists, have proven to be two of the most accomplished. That Healy and Volk had studios in Chicago at this time was, likewise, due to the efforts of Chicago’s earliest business and civic leaders.

Leonard Volk was born in New York in 1828 and as a young man worked in his father’s marble shop in Massachusetts cutting marble for domestic industries but Leonard wanted to sculpt marble into statuary so with no formal artistic training, he moved to St. Louis at age twenty and opened his own studio. Volk would proudly claim to be the first American sculptor west of the Mississippi to have sculpted a marble bust: a copy of an existing Henry Clay bust, although there wasn’t a lot of competition in the marble sculpting business on the American frontier. In 1852, Volk married into Chicago aristocracy when he married the cousin of Senator Stephen A. Douglas. Douglas, an investor in railroads and a man of means, offered to defray the cost of a formal art education in Europe as a gift to Volk. After two years of study in the Old World art centers, Volk returned to America and opened a studio in Chicago. With Senator Douglas as a patron, Volk had access to wealthy Chicagoans for commissions. It was Douglas who urged Volk to make a bust of the man who he had defeated for Illinois’ senate seat and whom he had come to admire even though they would compete soon again for the Presidency: Abe Lincoln. Volk convinced Lincoln to allow him to make a plaster mask of his face and hands for a bust which eventually won an award at the Paris Exposition of 1865 and assured Volk’s stead in American art history. Volk’s casts of Lincoln’s face and hands are today posited in the National Museum in Washington, D.C. Volk’s best surviving Chicago statuary is of his patron, Stephen Douglas, the little giant, at the Douglas memorial on Chicago’s Near South Side but the statue is placed atop a pedestal of such height that it can barely be seen.

George Peter Alexander Healy was lured to Chicago in 1855, not for its cultural ambiance but for its economic possibilities. Indeed, Healy lent the young frontier city a degree of cultural respectability. Healy came to Chicago with an established international renown. He had been the favorite painter of French King Louis-Philippe and he had just won a metal at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1855 for his painting Franklin Pleading the Cause of the American Colonies before Louis XVI. But it was also in 1855 that Healy met William Ogden, businessman, investor and former first Mayor of Chicago, who stopped in Healy’s Paris studio looking for a portrait artist. Ogden’s enthusiastic description of Chicago’s economic destiny piqued Healy’s interest and he decided to visit the City on Ogden’s invitation. While he found a culturally callow city especially in comparison to where he had been living, he too saw the economic potential in the growing city and decided to move his family to Chicago. With a studio in Chicago, Healy received commissions for portraits from the City’s growing upper-class society. Probably no artist resident in Chicago has had the international reputation as G.P.A Healy.

The appreciation and collection of art in Chicago during this period was hindered and plagued by rampant counterfeiting. It was not uncommon in the 19th century for a self-proclaimed established and respected art dealer from New York to tour the West selling art that was more con than aesthetic. Even at the Art Exposition of 1859 two paintings were catalogued as (supposed) Rembrandt. Chicago lacked an art establishment with educated experts who could authenticate provenance and estimate market value. Far too many early collectors purchased bogus masterpieces based on expensive looking frames than on the quality of the art execution. Rather than risk making public fools of themselves by purchasing gaudy looking counterfeit paintings, many of Chicago’s early parvenu rich avoided art all together.

Following the Art Exposition of 1859, the next major impetus made in Chicago to advance the state of the visual arts was Uranus Crosby’s Opera House opened in 1865. Uranus Crosby in a burst of civic enthusiasm invested his entire fortune, about six hundred thousand dollars, from his distillery business into the construction of an Opera House second to none west of the Hudson River. The Crosby Opera House was the first multi-use theater building constructed in Chicago. While it contained offices for professionals and storefronts for retail purposes, it was also a near complete cultural center with a huge auditorium for grand opera, a small theater for drama and chamber music, artist studio space plus a gallery for exhibition and sales. Unfortunately, the Crosby Opera House plagued by debts