ISSUE 16 // 3.4.2024

WHAT’S NEW?

Something Old, Something New

Madron Gallery’s largest contemporary group show to date opens today. System and Dialectics of Art brings together 15 artists from the Chicago area and beyond, working in a variety of media (from miniatures to collages to chicken wire sculpture), all at different stages in their careers. The point of connection for all these disparate energies? One mad man and his list of 129 questions. In a book written 87 years ago (one bearing the same name as the show), John D. Graham (1886–1961) asked the art world the heavy-hitting questions: what is art, what is beauty, what is the place of magic in art? He had his answers. And we have ours. Every artist in the show is paired with one age-old question, their work serving as a contemporary answer. Whether you agree with our assessments? Well, that part’s up to you. Come in to debate. Or just come in to see some really great art. Read more here.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Spring Forward, Party Down

Mark your calendars, friends: Exactly one month from now, on Thursday, April 4th, 2024, we’ll be hosting the Artists’ Reception for System and Dialectics of Art. Food, drinks, music, art…oh, you all know the drill. We’ll have a number of artists whose work is represented in the show joining us for the evening (also, if anyone knows how to get the ghost of John D. Graham to join, we’re all ears—that guy seems like he’d be a blast to have at parties). 5:30-8:30PM, free and open to the public. We’ll see you there.

WHAT’S THIS?

Sticks and Stones

Cutting and gathering heavy bundles of sticks (or fagots) to sell as firewood was a common activity for female French peasants; their straining, hunched figures, in turn, were a favorite subject of nineteenth-century French painters like Camille Corot and Jean-François Millet, who often used them as a heroic symbol of rural hardship. Robert Vonnoh’s image, in the same genre, seems to be of a quite different character (the woman in his painting walks free and unburdened through a lush, idyllic woodland flecked with light—perhaps she is only getting started on the day’s work, yet there is no hint of the demanding labor to come). But it may just be the other side of the same Corot/Millet coin. The forest outside of Fontainebleau (just ten miles from Grez-sur-Loing, a village Vonnoh frequented) was a site of intense struggle in the mid-nineteenth century between the French peasantry and burgeoning preservation movements, who made overblown claims about the peasants’ deforestation causing ecological destruction. The argument for preservation became one of nationalism and nostalgia, a desire to return the forest to its untouched form and make it a place for the spiritual renewal (of the bourgeoise class). In his painting, Vonnoh’s peasant walks away from the viewer, her head, wrapped in a bright red scarf, on the verge of disappearing behind some overgrown grass. Soon, she’ll be gone for good.