Lakeshore modernists: for its final exhibition, the Terra Museum revisited the early days of Chicago's modest art scene, when stylistic diversity and unruly spirits flourished

"It's a Rube Town!" lamented Walt Kuhn in 1913 in a letter from Chicago's Blackstone Hotel. (1) As one of the organizers of the historic Armory Show, which appeared at the Art Institute of Chicago in March and April that year, Kuhn was dismayed by the city's now infamous reception of modern art. The outrage that the exhibition of Post Impressionist and early modern European and American painting and sculpture had pro yoked in New York paled before Chicago's sensational philistine reaction, especially the notorious attempt by art students to burn an effigy of Matisse, "Henry Hair Mattress," on the steps of the museum. (2)

Despite this colorful demonstration, modern art in the late 19th and early 20th century did have its proponents and practitioners in Chicago, as a recent exhibition at the Terra Museum of American Art handsomely documented. Before closing its doom on Oct. 31, the museum celebrated its hometown with "Chicago Modern 1893-1945: Pursuit of the New," a survey of painting in the city from the World's Columbian Exposition through World War II. Guest curators Wendy Greenhouse, Daniel Schulman and Susan Weininger, with Terra curator Elizabeth Kennedy, assembled 89 pictures in varied styles and produced an informative, full-color catalogue that will be an indispensable resource for future research on the subject, included were artists with established reputations in Chicago and beyond, such as Ivan Albright and Archibald Motley, Jr., as well as those wrenched from obscurity, exciting new discoveries like James B. Needham (1850-1931), an African American marine painter active in Chicago around the turn of the century.

During the 50-odd years covered by the exhibition, no single movement prevailed in Chicago; the unruly diversity of the city's artistic production is probably one reason that a comprehensive history of Chicago art has yet to be written. This heterogeneity corresponds to the polyglot nature of the urban population: the largely immigrant artists in "Chicago Modern" hailed from Austria, Germany, Holland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland; newly arrived Southern Blacks were also represented. In addition, an emphasis on individualism and inner necessity helped foster a proliferation of styles. Kandinsky's subjective imperative was seized upon as early as 1914, even before the publication in English of Concerning the Spiritual in Art, when Chicago patron Arthur Jerome Eddy disseminated the artist's theories in lectures at the Art Institute and in his book on Cubism and Post-Impressionism. in 1922, eschewing official sanctions, a group of independent-minded activists founded the Chicago No-Jury Society to promote egalitarian exhibition opportunities for artists of all stripes. Given this obstreperous tradition, there is something of a hodge-podge quality to "Chicago Modern." It encompasses tentative Impressionist efforts; Expressionist, Cubist- and Futurist-inspired experiments; Magic Realism; Social Realism; and a few fine examples of geometric abstraction, never a popular mode in the City of Big Shoulders.

The curators extracted several broad themes from their material: Impressionism in Chicago, the African-American contribution, socio-political concerns in painting, and fantasy. At the time of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, Impressionism, already familiar from the Chicago Interstate Industrial Trade Expositions (1873-90), became "the influence of the hour," according to Greenhouse in her catalogue essay? Sophisticated collectors had begun amassing what would later become the core of the Art Institute's great Impressionist holdings; the Potter Palmers, for instance, purchased 22 Monets in 1892. Despite conservative critics' objections to what they saw as the amoral materialism of French painting, artists seized the new mode, with its insistence on immediacy and direct observation of nature, as a vehicle to create something truly indigenous. Regionalist champion Hamlin Garland, who proclaimed that "Art, to be vital, must be local," promoted Impressionism in the Midwest and envisioned Chicago as the capital of a distinctly American art. (4)

Frank C. Peyraud's lovely Winter Light on the Farm (1896), with its snow-covered corn shocks beneath a wan blue Illinois sky, seems a thoughtful local response to Monet's more radical Grainstacks (1890-91), of which the Palmers, whose collection was open to the public, owned nine. With long shadows falling on frozen furrows, Peyraud imbued his landscape with twilight melancholy. Later, applying Impressionism to a similarly wintry, but this time industrial, scene, George Ames Aldrich painted The Melting Pot, Chicago (ca. 1926), with a smoldering South Side steel mill looming above ramshackle workers' housing in the foreground. This nocturnal, Dickensian view of industry as a hellish force puts atmospheric effects in the service of a moralizing message. In both its urban and rural variants, Midwestern impressionism remained an edifying or transcendent art. Greenhouse points to this as a defining characteristic of American Impressionism in general, whose "cautious" adaptation of the French style "was not just an 'academic' reluctance to surrender pictorial illusion to optical effects, but a driving search for meaning and significance in the representation of 'local color' and the expression of native artistic self-identity." (5)