Director's Foreword

Wood, James N.

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Director's Foreword

James N. Wood

Window on the West: Chicago and the Art of the New Frontier 1890–1940

Director's Foreword

Author

James N. Wood

PublisherArt Institute of Chicago

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00176.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15742

Director's Foreword

Hermon Atkins MacNeil, The Sun Vow, cast 1901 (cat. no. 57), installed on the Art Institute’s McKinlock Terrace, 1929–47. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago Archives.

Hermon Atkins MacNeil’s sculpture The Sun Vow, cast in bronze in 1901 and initally installed in front of Ragdale, the Arts and Crafts-style north-shore home of Chicago architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, sat upon the McKinlock Terrace of The Art Institute of Chicago from 1929 to 1947. There, it attested to the story told in Window on the West: Chicago and the Art of the New Frontier, 1890–1940. Silhouetted against the Chicago skyline, in front of landmarks such as the Willoughby Tower, the Gage Building, and the Montgomery Ward Building on Michigan Avenue, it gave silent testimony to the eclipse of the early village of Chicago and the rise of the great metropolis of the West. Those original Chicagoans had long since been pushed west of the Mississippi River, but the legacy of the Indians remained in the art memorializing that earlier time.

This exhibition and book tell the story of Chicago’s connection to the Great West, through Native Americans, artists, collectors, writers, and dreamers. It describes the connections and affinities that Chicago’s artists—many of them students and teachers at the School of the Art Institute—felt for the Native American population and the western landscape. While many Chicago collectors looked to Paris for modernist art, many others turned to the West for new, inspired, and uniquely American subject matter. In doing so, they enriched the collection of the Art Institute immeasurably.

Judith A. Barter, Field-McCormick Curator of American Arts, has explored these avenues and found a permanent collection rich in western imagery. She and her staff delved into the storerooms of the Art Institute and several other Chicago institutions to find objects long neglected in terms of history, aesthetics, and conservation. As a result, many paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts objects that had not been seen for many years came to light. This reinterpretation of a facet of the collection brought about exciting new research and prompted the conservation of many objects. We are most grateful to our exhibition sponsors, The Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust, which made possible the conservation, publication, and exhibition of these objects; and the Oscar G. and Elsa S. Mayer Family Foundation, which supported the educational programming associated with the exhibition.

MacNeil’s Sun Vow is just one example of the important intersection of curatorial research and conservation. After standing outside in the elements for so many years, the sculpture was brought inside, cleaned, repaired, and repatinated. Within this exhibition, it represents both Chicago and the West, artistic interpretation and reinvention, the importance of patronage, and the continual symbolic value of the Native American—just as it did against the background of the quintessential industrial city. And, like the Chicago skyline, the interpretation of history is always changing, ever widening, to encompass people, images, and objects too long ignored. Window on the West: Chicago and the Art of the New Frontier, 1890–1940 tells the story of the art that helped the city shape its identity as the nation’s industrial and transportation hub, the meeting point of East and West—the metropolis of the Great West.

James N. Wood

DIRECTOR AND PRESIDENT

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Book details

BOOKWindow on the West: Chicago and the Art of the New Frontier 1890–1940

Judith A. Barter

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00176

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15740

With the landmark World's Columbian Exposition, held in 1893, Chicago established its identity as a "Window on the West": an economic and cultural hub linking the traditions of the East with the resources of the West after the official "closure" of the frontier declared that year by Frederick Jackson Turner. During the period 1890–1940, Chicago experienced tremendous population growth, pioneered numerous technological advances, and contributed to the development of artistic modernism.

Chicago artists looked back at an imagined, idyllic past and romantic Indian heroes, and forward to an equally utopian future in which American culture would rediscover its soul through contact with "authentic" native peoples and artistic expressions. A number of important patrons supported these artists in their quest to depict the West and Southwest. Individuals as diverse as railway entrepreneur Edward E. Ayer; five-term mayor Carter H. Harrison, Jr.; real estate mogul and politician George F. Harding; and progressively inclined Art Institute director Daniel Catton Rich shared a desire for uniquely American art, fostered in Chicago and featuring motifs found tin the West and Southwest. The art they commissioned and collected took many forms: the broad array of media and styles presented here range from the naturalistic sculpture of Frederic Remington and Hermon Atkins MacNeil, through the colorful Taos paintings of Walter Ufer and Victor Higgins, to the modernist abstractions of Georgia O'Keeffe.

This publication provides a focused social and cultural history of the role played by Chicago artists and patrons in the evolution of a visual language for depicting the landscape and people of the American West. These works of art both reflected and influenced the nation's perspective on its land, people, and history.

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Author

Judith A. Barter

PublisherArt Institute of Chicago

Print publication date January 2003 (out of print)

Print ISBN 9780865591998

EISBN 9780300234329

Illustrations 170 illus.

Print Status out of print

Publisher (out of print)

WorldCat

Google Books

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