Tag: art

Bruce Goff Exhibit

I briefly saw this exhibit when I was at the Art Institute with my granddaughters during their winter break, and I wanted to go back and see it one more time when not in a rush (and possibly more times later – I usually try to visit each new exhibit several times). My original plan to do it on January 3 didn’t work, so my next opportunity was this Thursday, when the Art Institute is open until 8 PM. I still had to visit my mom on that day, so I planned to be there for no more than 1.5 hours, and maybe come one more time later.

When I entered the hallway which led to the exhibit, I saw a sign “Free event today,” but since I had never seen any evening free events in the Art Institute (just fancy receptions sometimes), I thought that this sign was left there since midday. But to my surprise, when I walked into the exhibit hall, I heard a conversation which sounded exremely interesting, and I hurried up to join it.

It turned out that there were two docents conversing with the group of visitors. I can’t even call it a tour, because it was very informal, and both docents were passing the ball of the conversation to each other, happily including the visitors, and turning their questions into the prompts to tell more. It was a million times better than any lecture!

These drawings represented different music genres

Goff was an artist, an architect and a composer, and he didn’t want to follow conventional way in anything he did, including the choice of materials.

From Goff’s shirt collection. He loved extravagant shirts, and people were gifting shirts to him.
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Art Institute And CSO

On Thursday, I had a very packed after-work schedule. First, I went to the Art Institute to finally see the Strange Realities exhibit. Usually, I am among the first to see a new exhibit, but this time, I have something going on each Thursday, and I didn’t have time to make a separate trip to the Loop on any weekend.

Upon entering the exhibit, I realized that symbolism as an art movement had completely dropped from my radar many years ago. In high school, we studied symbolism in literature, including Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely. We “obligatory loved” Balmont, Annensky, and other poets of the “Silver Century” of Russian poetry. I just tried to find (unsuccessfully) a blog post where I wrote about how an “intelligent person” in Soviet Russia was supposed to admire certain poets and writers, who were not explicitly banned, but were not praised by the official propaganda; loving symbolists was one of those “requirements.”

Now I realized that for many years, it was not obligatory anymore, and this artistic movement dropped from my sight, and it took me a while to realize: yea, I know what it is all about!

Kupka: The Fools
Ensor: The Entry of Christ into Brussels
Hans Thoma: The Dream
Felicent Rops: The Greates Love of Don Juan
Alfred Kubin: Judith with the Head of Holofernes
Grasset: Morthin Addict

I think I will go see this exhibit again; I didn’t have enough time because I also wanted to catch up on the Elizabeth Catlett exhibit (I saw it as a “second one” when we were at the Art Institute with Boris in August, and it was not enough).

Next stop was the CSO. A week before, they advertised the pickup dinners at the Rotunda. I think it was in response to the disappearance of the affordable “before the show” dining options, which I also complained about. So I tried it, and the answer is no :). I would rather stop at Lea!

As for the concert, it was absolutely amazing! It was an all-Berlioz program with Klaus Makela conducting, and now I have finally started to like him. I won’t say I disliked him when I heard him conducting for the first couple of times, but he is so different from Riccardo Muti that it was a difficult switch! This time, I sat with my mouth open throughout the whole concert 🙂

Oh, and the violist Antoine Tamestit was absolutely outstanding!!! Loved every moment of his performance in the Harold in Italy.

Weekend With Lena

Lena finally made it to Chicago – in September instead of July, and it turned sharply cold, and we could not go to the beach. Still, our interests are so much aligned that we made it an absolutely perfect weekend.

Lena arrived on Friday evening and met with her Chicago-based coworkers. We chatted for a bit before and drafted the plan of activities.

Saturday was chilly, and since Lena uses each of her Chicago visits as an occasion to dress nicely, and I am happy to join her, we ended up being dressed not precisely to the weather, and were moderately cold most of the time :).

We started the day in the Field Museum, and I was able to properly see all the exhibits (and the recent updates to the “Evolving Planet,” which Lena didn’t see yet).

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The First Homosexuals Exhibit

Yesterday, I went to see The First Homosexual Exhibit at 659 Wrightwood. Now I can’t remember where I learned about this exhibit; the usual suspect is WBEZ.

The place is seriously guarded, and all tickets should be purchased online in advance (I won’t be surprised if they run background checks before issuing tickets – they don’t show up in your inbox instantaneously).

I planned to go with a friend who cancelled a couple of days before, but I didn’t find anyone to offer tickets, so I went by myself.

The exhibit is extremely interesting, and gianormous! I didn’t expect it to be so intense, and didn’t allocate enough time. They have curators in every room, and elaborate descriptions for almost every piece in the exhibit. I came earlier than my ticket said, and they said it’s fine. I thought I would be done in an hour, but more than an hour later, I realized that I had seen only half of the exhibit. At the end, I had to rush, and unfortunately, I won’t have another chance to see the rest, since I will be out of town for the second half of June.

I ordered a catalog, which should arrive in the beginning of July. I mostly wanted it to retain the loads of information. In the beginning, I tried to take pictures of almost everything, until I realized it was not possible 🙂

Below are two pictures of the space, which is absolutely amaizing.

And just t little bit of the exhibit itself, to give an idea.

…. and over 300 pieces, each with the load of information!

For those who are planning to go, plan on staying for 2.5 hours or so.

Art Institute: Ancient Roman Sculpture

I still keep myself muted about the activities that take most of my time these days, draining my whole self in the process. There still appears to be room for cultural activities (but no time to blog about them), so I will try to post a short summary of the past two weeks.

Myths and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from Torlonia Collection is a new exhibit that opened at the Art Institute last week. I was there on the opening night for the Members-only preview (and invited a friend). I didn’t expect anything groundbreaking from this exhibit (what could be new about the Roman Sculpture?) and mostly thought about taking my friend out, but there were plenty of new things!

This private collection was not on public view for over 70 years, and many sculptures where cleaned and restored for this exhibit specifically.

Men were always presented with their distinct personal features, and women in a more generic way, so it’s often difficult to identify the portraits, or even tell whether it was a portrait of a nobility or a goddess or a random person.
Younger and older Markus Aurelius on the right
As my friend noted, in most couples represented in this exhibit, the man looks way happier than the woman
Hercules is smaller than Athena and Apollo, probably because he was mortal
Arthemis with multiple breasts
Bacchus

After we saw this exhibit, I realized that my friend hadn’t seen the Black Planet exhibit yet, and we rushed there, and didn’t have enough time. And now, one more exhibit is about to open!

Ateneum

I am back in Chicago, and 200% of the time, I am busy, as anybody can figure out from my silence here. The previous post was drafted during my flight back and was not published because the in-flight internet connection went down in the middle of the flight, and I didn’t have time after that :). Still, I wanted to write a little bit more about what I saw in Helsinki.

Whenever I come to Helsinki, I immediately feel “everything is fine, and ok, and life is normal and orderly.” I know that my Finnish friends disagree with me, but we have different reference points :). This time, I worked every day, so it was not that much time to do something else. The only fun thing I’ve done was an outing with my friend Natasha: we went to the Ateneum Museum, which recently reopened after a major reconstruction.

The exhibit we saw is called Gothic Modern, and it explores the influence of Medieval art on 20th-century modern art. Each room is dedicated to one of the themes common to both historical periods: religion, life, death, sexuality, violence, etc. I didn’t know most of the Finnish artists who were part of this exhibit, and I even purchased an exhibit catalog with the hope of reading more! At some point, I stopped taking pictures because I realized I wouldn’t be able to remember what exactly had drawn my attention.

Munch
Max Klinger. On the Rails
Sasha Schneider. Feeling of Dependency

Getting back to the existing worries about the state of the economy and life instability. I would not say that the worries are unjustified. However, even now, even with all the economic uncertainties, I appreciate the virtual non-existence of homelessness, the accessibility of healthcare (yes, I know, but again – we have different baselines), and the fact that the buses run on schedule:))

Acropolis

When we were in Athens last time, we wandered around without tour guides, and I wanted to take one “proper” tour. I booked it for the first half of Tuesday so that I would be free to meet with people arriving on Tuesday afternoon.

Short summary: too many people! Back in 2014, we were in Athens in March. It was warm and there was enough tourists around, so I pictured pretty much the same in the second half of October, but I was wrong! This time, there were crowd and crowns, and one stream of people moving up the the Parthenon, and another stream moving dows. The marble steps polished my millions of feet made these ups and downs quite adventurous.

It was still beautiful, and the sky was still blue, but I missed the lonely climbs we had back then, when at least at some moments, there was nobody except of us, the mountains, and the marble.

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The Delphi Museum And Going Back

After visiting the archeological site, we went to the museum see some excavated artifacts. It was equally if not more interesting than visiting the site itself. Our tour guide was very knowledgeable, and we learned a lot from him, and each time after he had given us the information he would say: look, what a beautiful art! And now as I am looking at these pictures I took at the Delphi museum, and I do not want to write about each of the sculptures what/who do they represent and what is their significance. I just want to say the same thing our tour guide Kosta said: look, what a beautiful art! Look at all these muscles! Look at all these imperfect wrinkles of the clothes!

The ivory and gold statues of Apollo and Athena. They were buried near the temple in the antiant times when were became deteriorated of natural causes
Did you know that you could tell just by the clothes or absence of it that the first culture represents a polititan, the second one – a warrior and the third one an athlet?
The bronze Charioteer is considered to be a most valuable exhibit of the museum was created in 470s BC
I don’t know who has lunch at 2-30PM, but apparently, some Greeks do 🙂
That was supposed to be a picture by the #marathon hashtag, but I opted for the better view behind me

Women At War Exhibit

A speaker whom I invited to present at Chicago PUG on October 15 came to Chicago for the first time in his life. That meant that I had to show him the city, at least for a little bit.

I booked the Chicago Architectural Cruise, and we agreed to walk around after that. Fortunately, the weather was not bad, although not as gorgeous as last weekend. Also, the docent on the tour was really good. You never know; it’s always hit or miss, but this was really good!

As usual, when I have very little time, I try to show some non-obvious places, so when we disembarked, I walked my guest directly to the Chicago Cultural Center. There, on the first floor, i saw an exhibit that I had no idea about:

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“Almost Cezanne”

When I was in Ann Arbor, Lena and I visited the Artisan Market, and I put my eye on a fruit bowl.

I couldn’t tell what was so special about it except that the colors agreed with some of my tableware. Several bowls were made by the same artist. The colors of all of them were very similar, but I chose the one you can see in the photo below because of the combination of the size and the color.

The way it blended into my dining room exceeded my expectations. Wouldn’t you agree it’s “almost Cezanne”?!