MADRON

“The Little Nude Model, Reading” is a simple, quiet scene that seems breezily executed but carries the weight of decades. Whistler’s history with printmaking stretched back to the 1850s—after being kicked out of West Point in 1851 for collecting too many demerits and getting mouthy with his teachers, he was briefly employed as a draftsman at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey making etchings on government-owned copper plates of coastlines (which was in the job description) and doodled self-portraits (which was not). Later on, two distinct periods in the 1870s and 1880s/90s marked Whistler’s more autonomous exploration of lithography; particularly in the latter period, he was moving towards an ever softer and more atmospheric technique. As he told his friend the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, he wanted his prints to look like “the most delicate drawings out of a museum.” In other words, he was trying to make prints that didn’t look like prints at all. 

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Summer Reading

William S. Schwartz: Color and Coloratura delves into the vibrant and wide-ranging oeuvre of a man who helped define what it meant to be a twentieth century Chicago artist working during the tumultuous period encompassing the Jazz Age, Clutch Plague, and Second World War. From his early years as an opera-singing Russian immigrant who shocked instructors with his unprecedented palettes, to his later, more mature explorations in form and abstraction — particularly his famed Symphonic Forms series — William S. Schwartz: Color and Coloratura traces the winding journey of a prolific and unapologetic artist through in-depth analyses of more than 20 of his genre-defying paintings and lithographs.