By Jim Chandler

Opinion:
A new Department of American Art Gallery has opened at the Chicago Institute of Art. This is part of the overall re-imagining of the Chicago Institute of Art, the institute has increased gallery space, added to a collection of contemporary works and the museum has opened a new American Art Gallery that includes handcrafts and decorative art celebrating the American experience and American history.
The curators have included in this gallery, in the way of including all things American, the paintings of many diverse artists including portraits by John Singer Sargent, Georgia O’Keefe’s abstracts derived from nature, Mary Cassett works including “The Bath” and “American Gothic” by Grant Wood.
This is not unprecedented, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston one gallery down stairs is dedicated to colonial American art, handcrafts and decorative art. All these items are displayed together and provide a context for the environment in which the art was created, this arrangement is sensible and the gallery makes sense of the items on display.
The artwork in Boston is “primitive” and the way the gallery is curated it is clear that the purpose is to provide a historical context. All of the works fit together and provide a real sense of what was occurring in the American British colonial world.

In Chicago the purpose of hanging sophisticated artwork that, in many cases, are breakthroughs in conception and medium with lamps and tables from the early 20th century is not at all clear. In one case, Grant Wood’s “American Gothic “, one of the most iconic paintings in the American pantheon hangs on a wall with Tiffany lamps very near by.
Mary Cassett, for example, is an American artist. However she also trained and worked in Europe; her painting “The Bath” at the Chicago Institute of Art, one of her most reproduced paintings now hangs in a room containing Art Noveau decorative arts and Craftsman era furniture. My argument here is that Mary Cassett’s work would be more appropriate hung in the same room as her contemporaries with whom she participated in Impressionist exhibitions in France towards the end of the 19th Century. Especially as her methods are Impressionistic and her more intimate work on household and family subjects is even more striking when compared directly to the landscapes her contemporaries were painting. One can only understand Cassett’s greatness by comparing her choice of subject with her peers. Hanging her work in an American Gallery accomplishes none of this.

John Singer Sargent and Georgia O’Keefe also worked in methods and concepts that reflected a world of art that, while to some extent, reflected the material world that they lived in, was not defined by that world. John Singer Sargent with his portraits of commissioned upper class subjects would be closest to a period artwork. Nevertheless the decision of the Chicago Institute of Art to place impressionist work alongside formal portraits and the abstracted work of Georgia O’Keefe does not work and may confuse many museum visitors looking to view these paintings. This is particularly obvious when the work is sometimes even partly screened by decorative art placed in front of the paintings as I done in the new Gallery of American Art.

My opinion is that fine art should be displayed in the artistic context to which it belongs.
Another curating decision of the Chicago Institute of Art is placing Picasso in various galleries depending on the style of the work itself. The Institute has placed one work the “Old Guitarist”in with other post-impressionist artists while other Cubist examples of Picasso’s work go into galleries containing Cubist work from many different artists.
It is sensible to place art more interesting as reflecting a historical era like in Boston with other artifacts from that same period of time providing context and fleshing out a visual reference of that period. Primitive American Colonial portraits do work in a setting that includes the decorative arts and handcrafts of the same period. Fine art is better placed in the context of the art movement with which it belongs, an artist’s work alongside the artists that the work shares passions and methods.