Other Braques may be found at Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
SG
17. Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877)
Gustave Caillebotte (1848–94)
Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877
Oil on canvas, 212.2 x 276.2 cm
Charles H. and Mary F.S. Worcester Collection, 1964.336
The Art Institute of Chicago
Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images
This vista is still there, sadly marred by the commercial trappings of twenty-first-century Paris. Motorcycles abound. Traffic lights, too, and a neon green pharmacie nearby. What is missing, of course, is this handsome Parisian couple out for a stroll in the inclement weather.
Gustave Caillebotte was consumed by his surroundings — the people, landscapes, and other artworks. Born into a wealthy family, he had the leisure to eschew careers in law and engineering. He studied art at the École des Beaux-Arts but didn’t stay for long. He befriended fellow Impressionists like Degas, Monet, and Renoir, and, along with many of theirs, purchased works by Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Alfred Sisley, and Berthe Morisot, amassing at one time the most prestigious collection of Impressionist art in France.
Caillebotte’s most famous painting, Paris Street, Rainy Day , captures a fleeting, impermanent moment in the Saint Lazare streets of Paris. A fashionably dressed couple, glancing away, walks along the rain-dappled street toward the viewer. Caillebotte’s cropping of the scene sweeps us into the very real image, evoking a momentary truth. Cleverly using the street lamp to divide the foreground from the background, offering a pleasing geometric aesthetic, the painting reflects the radical urbanization of Paris by Napoleon III and his architect, Baron Haussmann. For Caillebotte, this meant fresh inspiration, along with the chance to explore the modernity of his own city.
Indifferent to fame, Caillebotte created his art for himself, showing rarely. His renown came years after his death, demonstrating the timeless beauty of his work.
While Paris Street, Rainy Day was his masterpiece — it never fails to evoke a poignant wish to be there at that moment in time — and the piece for which he is best known, you can see other Caillebottes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
SG
18. White Crucifixion (1938)
Marc Chagall (1885–1985)
Marc Chagall, White Crucifixion, 1938
Oil on canvas, 154.6 x 140 cm
Gift of Alfred S. Alschuler (1946.925)
The Art Institute of Chicago
© SODRAC and ADAGP 2017, Chagall
Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images
Normally a painter, a sweet and gentle colourist, depicting scenes from his shtetl life in Lithuania, Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion is the first in his series created to call global attention to the persecution of European Jews in the 1930s. Like many of Chagall’s works, the canvas features multiple images on which, individually, a viewer feels drawn to focus. The dominant figure of Christ on a white cross stabilizes the piece. The smaller images depict untoward action and random violence. The overall grey shading creates a cohesiveness while the passivity of the figure provides a pervading calmness, allowing the viewer to return to that point for respite.
Typical of Chagall’s style, White Crucifixion makes heavy use of symbolism. Chagall shows Christ as a Jewish martyr by substituting his usual adornments with classic Jewish motifs. His traditional loincloth is replaced with a tallit (a Jewish prayer shawl), his crown of thorns with a head cloth, and the mourning angels as three biblical Jewish patriarchs and a matriarch.
In this sobering and intense work, Chagall borrows the moral condemnation of Christ’s tormentors to evoke the same condemnation toward the Nazis. Safe in Paris (as it would be two more years until the Nazis invaded France), Chagall painted White Crucifixion to draw attention to all the anti-Semitic violence sweeping Europe and, more specifically, Kristallnacht — the horrifying anti-Jewish pogrom officially decreed by Nazi Germany.
This painting succeeds both as an artistic and moral creation. Its message, urgent at its birth, and at full strength today, pushes us to engage with Chagall’s sense of horror engulfing Europe in 1938. Here, Chagall leaves no room for apathy and indifference. Only the hard heart fails to respond to this tragic scene.
Other pieces by Chagall, such as I and The Village (1911), may be seen at the MoMA while La Fontaine Fables is found at the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Laurel, Mississippi.
SG
19. The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (1455–60)
Giovanni di Paolo (1403–82)
Giovanni di Paolo,
The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, 1455–60
Tempera on panel, 69.6 x 39.1 cm, surface: 66.3 x 36.6 cm
Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection (1933.1014)
The Art Institute of Chicago
Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images
Florence was the driving force of the Renaissance. Lorenzo Ghiberti, the Italian sculptor, spent his life on the Florence Baptistry doors, called by Michelangelo the Gates of Paradise.
From 1403 to 1452, three years before his death, he laboured on this huge, huge project. The result represented the Renaissance’s aspirations, and artists who followed used it as their model. Architecture and sculpture was more important than painting in Florence during this time.
Here we have an artist, Giovanni di Paolo, painting twelve panels, six of which are here in Chicago. A few years after Ghiberti’s thunderbolt bronze sculpture Gates of Paradise , stylized and primitive with rough landscape, grand architecture, raised bronze, and extreme emotions: its influence is clear.
Why do I love this? Well, it is a magnificent picture of the Renaissance, its colour and its glorious architecture. Buildings were important to the citizens. They were a matter of pride.
The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist — the ugly deed of beheading juxtaposed with the lovely architecture. Was blood ever more graphically splattered?
Saint John the Baptist Entering the Wilderness — so much a mirror of Ghiberti’s ragged mountains of bronze, but look at the crenulated exits overlooking an elysian church in the valley. The flicker of mountains against the straight pattern of the fields.
Christ and John — the patterns of land off to a misty church. The figures all posing but intense, yes, intense, on a patterned zigzag parquet floor.
Saint John the Baptist in Prison Visited by Two Disciples — grey flat squares, arches, fluted columns with an archway to geometric fields. All the angles that architecture can provide and, oh yes, the dog. Maybe one of the first dogs in painting.
Salome Asking Herod for the Head of Saint John the Baptist — look at the cantilevered angles of the architecture. Ballustrades, stairs, arches, a backdrop to a beseeching for death.
The Head of Saint John the Baptist Brought Before Herod — this is the one! I love it for two reasons. First, the whacky architecture — the feeling of multiple rooms, busy, connected