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The Arts Club of Chicago
The Arts Club of Chicago

A Home for Surrealism: Fantastic Painting in Midcentury Chicago

A woman in a pink dress is blindfolded. Her hair and dress are pinned to the wall. Her left hand reaches out towards a teal blue door. A black cat crouches nearby.
Gertrude Abercrombie, Untitled (Lady with a Cat), 1961. Oil on board; 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm). Private collection, Chicago.
A woman in a pink dress is blindfolded. Her hair and dress are pinned to the wall. Her left hand reaches out towards a teal blue door. A black cat crouches nearby.
Gertrude Abercrombie, Untitled (Lady with a Cat), 1961. Oil on board; 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm). Private collection, Chicago.

Past exhibition

A Home for Surrealism: Fantastic Painting in Midcentury Chicago

About the Exhibition

A Home for Surrealism offers an in-depth exploration of a select group of painters who planted domestic roots for the surrealist idiom in the 1940s and 1950s. Working in and around Chicago, Gertrude Abercrombie, Dorothea Tanning, John Wilde, Julia Thecla, Harold Noecker, and Julio de Diego interpreted the European movement as something at once more personal and more accessible to its audience.

Thematizing the interior while also reconceptualizing ideas of imagination and fantasy, these artists offer tableaus that emphasize the narrative capacities of self and home. While Chicago has long been acknowledged as an important center for the exhibition and collection of European surrealist painting, its own practitioners deserve more widespread recognition. Through their distinct motifs and styles, these artists made surrealism into something that was local to Chicago, even as it acknowledged its international foundations. Working with a team of scholars, The Arts Club, which was on the forefront of introducing surrealism in the 1920s and 1930s, offers a focused and revelatory snapshot of Chicago surrealism.

Installation Images

A group of framed surrealist paintings of various sizes arranged in a horizontal line of a tan, soft lit gallery wall.
Installation view, A Home for Surrealism: Fantastic Painting in Midcentury Chicago, The Arts Club of Chicago, 2018. Photo: Michael Tropea.
A group of framed surrealist paintings of various sizes arranged in a horizontal line of a tan, soft lit gallery wall. At the end of a long corridor to the right of the paintings, another framed painting is visible.
Installation view, A Home for Surrealism: Fantastic Painting in Midcentury Chicago, The Arts Club of Chicago, 2018. Photo: Michael Tropea.
A grouping of surrealist paintings of varying sizes arranged salon style on a tan gallery wall. The largest image hangs centered over a fireplace mantle facsimile of identical color to the wall. The painting depicts a small bedroom or dwelling space painted in blues and grays.
Installation view, A Home for Surrealism: Fantastic Painting in Midcentury Chicago, The Arts Club of Chicago, 2018. Photo: Michael Tropea.
Three paintings installed in a horizontal line on a tan, soft lit gallery wall. The left most painting depicts a monochromatic blue/ gray scene of birds. The middle painting depicts a solitary female figure in a white gown standing in a strangely shaped room and hugging herself. The far right painting depicts a room, perhaps a kitchen, painted in peach and red tones.
Installation view, A Home for Surrealism: Fantastic Painting in Midcentury Chicago, The Arts Club of Chicago, 2018. Photo: Michael Tropea.
A glass case stands in the middle of a soft lit gallery with tan walls. Inside the case is a row of drawings and a bright orange booklet on the right end. Behind the case on the wall is a row of framed paintings, the far right of which depicts a ghostly image of a woman's face seemingly floating in the sky.
Installation view, A Home for Surrealism: Fantastic Painting in Midcentury Chicago, The Arts Club of Chicago, 2018. Photo: Michael Tropea.
Seven framed surrealist paintings of various sizes arranged in a row across three tan gallery walls. The closest painting to the viewer depicts a male figure with his back turned to the viewer gazing at a scene of green and pink multistory houses. A far wall painting depicts a figure in bright orange with their back to the viewer who appears to be surveying a scene of blue and gray ruins.
Installation view, A Home for Surrealism: Fantastic Painting in Midcentury Chicago, The Arts Club of Chicago, 2018. Photo: Michael Tropea.
A row of surrealist paintings of various sizes arranged in a row across three tan gallery walls. The closest painting to the viewer depicts a male figure with his back turned to the viewer gazing at a scene of green and pink multistory houses
Installation view, A Home for Surrealism: Fantastic Painting in Midcentury Chicago, The Arts Club of Chicago, 2018. Photo: Michael Tropea.
Three framed surrealist paintings on a tan gallery wall. The two paintings on the right side are small and arranged in a column, both depicting an elongated, slender and solitary female figure in a dimly lit room. The larger painting on the left depicts a room with impossibly high ceilings, inside which a trapeze artist and a swirling vortex spin chaotically.
Installation view, A Home for Surrealism: Fantastic Painting in Midcentury Chicago, The Arts Club of Chicago, 2018. Photo: Michael Tropea.

Funding

A Home for Surrealism is funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art, as well as a gift from the Zell Family Foundation. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue distributed by the University of Chicago Press (available June 2018), including essays by Robert Cozzolino (Minneapolis Institute of Art), Adam Jolles (Florida State University), Janine Mileaf (Arts Club of Chicago), and Joanna Pawlik (University of Sussex), and artists’ biographies by Marin Sarvé-Tarr (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).

A Home for Surrealism is proudly part of Art Design Chicago, an initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art exploring Chicago’s art and design legacy, with presenting partner The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.

About Art Design Chicago

Art Design Chicago is a spirited celebration of the unique and vital role Chicago plays as America’s crossroads of creativity and commerce. Spearheaded by the Terra Foundation for American Art, this citywide partnership of nearly 60 cultural organizations explores Chicago’s art and design legacy and continued impact with more than 30 exhibitions, hundreds of events, as well as the creation of several scholarly publications and a four-part documentary presented throughout 2018.