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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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Musical Instruments https://www.artic.edu/artworks/44880/
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Francis Steegmuller
December 22, 2025 at 3:14 PM
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Girl with Pail https://www.artic.edu/artworks/49085/
Gift of Mrs. Arthur T. Aldis
December 22, 2025 at 1:52 PM
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Portrait of Marcel Duchamp https://www.artic.edu/artworks/53007/
Bequest of Maxine Kunstadter
December 22, 2025 at 12:23 PM
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Earthly Paradise https://www.artic.edu/artworks/144361/
Following a period spent producing Parisian scenes in the style of Édouard Vuillard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard virtually reinvented his art around 1905. The artist’s new emphasis on large-scale compositions, bold forms, and brilliant colors shows his awareness of the work of his contemporaries Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, as does his focus on Arcadian landscapes, a theme he had not previously explored. Part of a series of four canvases painted for his dealers, Josse and Gaston Bernheim, between 1916 and 1920, Earthly Paradise demonstrates Bonnard’s new, daring investigations of light, color, and space. Here the artist used foliage to create a proscenium-like arch for a drama involving a brooding Adam and recumbent Eve. The contrast Bonnard established between the figures seems to follow a tradition in which the female, presented as essentially sexual, is connected with nature, while the male, essentially intellectual, is able to transcend the earthly. Heightening the image’s ambiguity is an array of animals, including birds, a monkey, rabbits, and a serpent (here reduced to a garden snake). This less-than-Edenic paradise may reflect the artist’s response to the destruction of Europe during World War I, which was still raging when he began the painting. Estate of Joanne Toor Cummings; Bette and Neison Harris and Searle Family Trust endowments; through prior gifts of Mrs. Henry C. Woods
December 22, 2025 at 8:56 AM
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Lemons on a Pewter Plate https://www.artic.edu/artworks/153703/
A Millennium Gift of Sara Lee Corporation
December 21, 2025 at 7:53 PM
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Stags https://www.artic.edu/artworks/79058/
Gift of Samuel Lustgarten
December 21, 2025 at 3:34 PM
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Animal https://www.artic.edu/artworks/185186/
Gift of Albert Robin
December 21, 2025 at 1:06 PM
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Golden Bird https://www.artic.edu/artworks/91194/
Trained in both folk and academic traditions, Constantin Brancusi sought his own path for sculpture around 1907. Breaking with the currents of the time, he adopted direct carving, combined different materials for single works, and simplified form in his search for his subjects’ essential characters. His works have profoundly influenced the development of twentieth-century abstraction. More than any other theme, Brancusi’s series Bird summarizes his quest for a self-sufficient form. “All my life, I have sought to render the essence of flight,” the artist once said. He began the first of twenty-seven Bird sculptures around 1910 and completed the last in the 1940s. He called the earliest variations Maiastra, referring to a bird in Romanian folklore that leads a prince to his princess. In the Art Institute’s Golden Bird, details such as feet, a tail, and an upturned crowing beak are only suggested in an elegant, streamlined silhouette. Brâncusi perched this refined shape on a rough-hewn, geometric base, contrasting the disembodied, light-reflective surface with an earthbound mass. The central polyhedron was cut from the middle of a tree trunk, and its circles (indicating the tree’s age) rotate like a sun, as if radiating light over the bird. Partial gift of The Arts Club of Chicago; restricted gift of various donors; through prior bequest of Arthur Rubloff; through prior restricted gift of William E. Hartmann; through prior gifts of Mr. and Mrs. Carter H. Harrison, Mr. and Mrs. Arnold H. Maremont through the Kate Maremont Foundation, Woodruff J. Parker, Mrs. Clive Runnells, Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson, and various donors
December 21, 2025 at 12:18 PM
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Seated Nude https://www.artic.edu/artworks/7124/
Ada Turnbull Hertle Fund
December 21, 2025 at 10:00 AM
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La Java https://www.artic.edu/artworks/24202/
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Carter H. Harrison
December 20, 2025 at 3:45 PM
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The Circus Rider https://www.artic.edu/artworks/118614/
Gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman
December 20, 2025 at 1:34 PM
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Thorn Extractor https://www.artic.edu/artworks/193867/
Gift of the Ruth Stanton Family Foundation
December 20, 2025 at 12:45 PM
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Christopher Columbus https://www.artic.edu/artworks/118759/
Gift of Albert A. Robin
December 20, 2025 at 10:14 AM
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Self-Portrait https://www.artic.edu/artworks/30341/
Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection
December 19, 2025 at 7:11 PM
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Poupée-basset https://www.artic.edu/artworks/53016/
Bequest of Maxine Kunstadter
December 19, 2025 at 5:28 PM
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Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically https://www.artic.edu/artworks/210471/
During the year he created this work, Salvador Dalí wrote the foundational text, “Surrealist Objects” (1931), in which he described it at length: “A woman’s shoe, inside of which a glass of warm milk has been placed, in the center of a soft paste in the color of excrement. The mechanism consists of the dipping in the milk of a sugar lump, on which there is a drawing of a shoe, so that the dissolving of the sugar, and consequently of the image of the shoe, may be observed. Several accessories (pubic hairs glued to a sugar lump, an erotic little photograph) complete the object, which is accompanied by a box of spare sugar lumps and a special spoon used for stirring lead pellets inside the shoe.” Bringing together these ordinary and highly charged elements to illicit a psychological response, Dalí conjured Sigmund Freud’s theory of fetishism, which describes the unconscious impulse for sexual gratification fixating on a single body part or object, such as shoes. Throughout the 1930s, shoes continued to appear in the artist’s work, often serving as stand-ins for Gala, the woman who would become his muse, alter ego, and later, his wife. Through prior gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman
December 19, 2025 at 1:55 PM
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Midday Sorrow https://www.artic.edu/artworks/125663/
The Catalan artist Àngel Planells began training in 1917 to become an engraver, but after two and a half years, he turned his attention to painting. He was introduced to Surrealism through Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. In 1936 Planells exhibited three paintings, including Midday Sorrow, in the first International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London, the foremost major exhibition to survey the history of the movement. The first owner of this painting was Roland Penrose, one of the primary organizers of the exhibition; an artist and poet, he was married to the Surrealist muse photographer Lee Miller and was a close friend of many Surrealist artists. Block, Serlin and Saidenberg, and Twentieth-Century Purchase funds; through prior bequest of Clara S. Binswanger; through prior acquisitions of Chester Dale, Mr. and Mrs. Carter H. Harrison, Ella M. Schapper Memorial Fund, Joseph Winterbotham, and Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection
December 19, 2025 at 10:28 AM
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Untitled (Match-Woman I) https://www.artic.edu/artworks/118733/
Picabia was at the center of Dada's more celebrated activities between 1917, the year he brought out the first issue of his irreverent journal 391, and October 1924, when he published the final issue of 391 (no. 19) attacking the new movement of Surrealism. Although he frequently collaborated with the Dadaists, he also occasionally denounced them from the platform of 391, of which he carefully retained control. Le Pilhaou-thibaou, the name given to issue number fifteen of 391 (July 10, 1921), inveighed against Paris Dada, but by the following year, the wounds were healed and Picabia happily collaborated with André Breton and his group on a new series of the journal Littérature, designing many of its most provocative covers (see London, Hayward Gallery, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, 1978, exh. cat. by Dawn Ades, pp. 161-75). While Marcel Duchamp, beginning in 1912, was the first to explore the symbolicand anti-aesthetic possibilities of the machine and mechanical imagery, it was Picabia who, perhaps more than any other artist, later pursued the theme with magnificent inventiveness. In many ways Picabia represented the public face of Dada, regularly exhibiting at the official salons in Paris, which he taunted through his use of highly unconventional materials, a characteristic exemplified by the Bergman work. While acknowledging this picture's indisputable originality, scholars have raised some questions about the accuracy of the date 1920 inscribed at lower right. If correct, this date would place the work several years before any other work of its kind. William Camfield and Charles Stuckey have suggested that Picabia may have mistakeningly added this date well after the painting was completed. It is difficult to date Picabia's work from the Dada years because he often experimented with radically different styles. This work seems to relate most closely to a group of collages which are dated roughly between 1923 and 1926, and which are composed of such diverse mateials as matches, toothpicks, drinking straws, coins, curlers, combs, hairpins, feathers, curtain rings, noodles, a tape measure, and even shoe soles. As in the Bergman picture, in these works Picabia arranged the collage elements on a simple, flat, painted background, and diverted the objects from their original, utilitarian function to make a coherent, clearly recognizable image. Several factors, nevertheless, seem to support a date of 1920 for this work. The March 1920 issue of 391 (no. 12) relfects Picabia's increasing opposition to accepted art forms, an attitude that may well have prompted him to experiment with readymade materials. On thecover of this issue, he reproduced his own version of Duchamp's Tableau Dada: LHOOQ—an image of Leonardo da Vinici's Mona Lisa penciled over with a mustache (Picabia forgot the beard; Camfield 1979, pl. 19, between pp. 70 and 71, p. 141 n. 240. In addition, Picabia's "Manifeste Dada" published in the same issue beneath the reproduction of Duchamp's work, is one of his more aggresive attacks on modern art and its values— above all on Cubism. The following year he would utilize collage materials with a vengeance, culminating in his raucous submissions to the Salon des Indépendents of 1922. These consisted of The Merry Widow, Straw Hat?, and Saint Guy's Dance, all of 1921. The last two include string, which is also a component of the Bergman collage. Finally, the rough capital letters of the signature and numerals of the date on the Berman work are consistent with those on a group of 1920 portraits of his Dada colleagues and on a self-portrait. The other version of this work, Match-Woman II, formerly in Breton's collection and dated 1924/25 can easily be distinguished from the Bergman version by the pendant on the woman's necklace, signaled by a larger coin. In this second version, the arrangement of matches and white highlights gives the impression of lonfer, more disorderly hair; the figure's head is also shorter and slightly wider. Most significantly, the face and neck are outlined with thick lines of light blue paint, rather than the string used in the Bergman collage and in workds of the early 1920s, such as the 1921 collage Straw Hat?. The tipped matchsticks, of which there are three different styles in the Bergman collage, convey with precision the prinked and permed appearance of a fashionable woman of the time. Dada's relationship with fashion is intriguing and unexpectantly multifaceted. Breton was strongly influenced by Jacques Vaché, a dandy in the purest sese, while Picabia himself moved simultaneously in the worlds of the fashionable le tout Paris (Parisian high society, which included famous figures from the literacy and artistic worlds) and Dada. Fashion was a major theme of the 1921 "Salon Dada" exhibition at the Galerie Montaigne in Paris: an elegant male mannequin, for example, was poised high up on the wall above the installation, with a long row of knotted ties hanging from a balcony below his feet (Washington, D.C., National Museum of American Art, Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray, 1988-90, exh. cat., p. 92, ill.) In 1921 Picabia described the Dadaists, with whom he was then at war, as ripe for Paul Poiret, a fashionable French couturier (Le Pilhaou-thibaou [July 10, 1921], p. 6). The back page of the July 1924 issue of 391 (no. 18, p. 126) featured an enigmatic photograph of a pearl necklace of French coins in the Bergman collage. That particular issue of 391 in fact focused on modern art and fashion: "Picasso," Picabia wrote in one of his typical aphorisms, "creates modern anxiety in the manner of Paul Poiret" (p. 125). — Entry, Dawn Ades, Surrealist Art: The Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1997, p. 216-218. Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection
December 19, 2025 at 8:02 AM
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Woman Leaning on Her Hands https://www.artic.edu/artworks/118601/
Through prior acquisition of the George F. Harding Collection
December 18, 2025 at 6:22 PM
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Departure of Summer https://www.artic.edu/artworks/118597/
Through prior gift of the Mary and Leigh Block Collection
December 18, 2025 at 3:22 PM
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Cagnes https://www.artic.edu/artworks/12402/
Worcester Sketch Fund
December 18, 2025 at 2:24 PM
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The Seine at Vernonnet https://www.artic.edu/artworks/111381/
Clyde M. Carr Fund
December 18, 2025 at 12:50 PM
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Untitled (Blue Sand Box) https://www.artic.edu/artworks/99781/
Lindy and Edwin Bergman Joseph Cornell Collection
December 18, 2025 at 8:40 AM
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The Cello https://www.artic.edu/artworks/73646/
Bequest of Mima de Manziarly Porter
December 17, 2025 at 7:13 PM
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Claudine Resting https://www.artic.edu/artworks/22191/
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Carter H. Harrison
December 17, 2025 at 5:20 PM