Highlights
Evening Event
A pirate, a masked reveler, and an angel celebrate Halloween at the Art Institute
Under Georges Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte"
DePaul University Jazz Trio perform by the Marc Chagall stained-glass windows
Swingin' with Matisse, O'Keeffe, and Renoir
Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
Sunday, October 31, 7 to 10 p.m.
Surrounded by the masterpieces at one of the world's great museums, attendees enjoyed a chance to catch up with colleagues over a delicious buffet dinner. Jazz musicians from DePaul and Northwestern Universities played at different locations throughout the galleries. Upstairs, guests enjoyed coffee and dessert, with piano accompanyment, while overlooking the new Millennium Park. Downstairs, they socialized in the historic Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room, while others danced to the 17-piece jazz band. To view photos of this festive Halloween evening, please visit our Photo Gallery.
The following areas were open for viewing:
- Chagall Windows, first floor
- Historic Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room, first floor
- Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, second floor
- American and Contemporary Art, second floor
- Millennium Park Room, second floor
Here are some highlights of works on display:
Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884). In scale, technique, and composition it appeared as a scandalous eruption within art, a deliberate challenge to Impressionists such as Renoir and Monet. It immediately changed the course of painting. Seurat died at age 31; La Grande Jatte has remained his definitive achievement. Its visibility was dramatically increased in 1924, when it was first displayed at the Art Institute. Seurat's first major painting to enter a public collection, La Grande Jatte has become an icon, one of the art world's most recognizable images.
Pierre Auguste Renoir, Acrobats at the Circus Fernando (1879). This painting, one of the Art Institute's most beloved, depicts the daughters of a Montmartre circus owner taking a bow after completing their gymnastic and juggling act. Renoir surrounded the children with a virtual halo of pinks, oranges, yellows, and whites.
Paul Gauguin, Ancestors of Tehamana (1893). By removing himself to such remote places as Martinique, Brittany, and, finally, Tahiti, Gauguin rejected the modern world and what he considered to be its tired and decadent aesthetic traditions. As its title indicates, Ancestors of Tehamana is not just a portrait of a young Tahitian woman, but a study of the mythic elements of non-Western culture.
Henri Matisse, Bathers by a River (1909). In this monumental canvas, Matisse chose a traditional subject, the human form in a natural setting, and reinterpreted it in a totally new way. The figures have been radically simplified, their forms defined in heavy, bold outlines. The flattened space and muted colors indicate Matisse's awareness of Cubism, while the curved, sensuous lines and strong color contrasts reveal his highly personal, expressive vision.
Georgia O'Keeffe, Black Cross, New Mexico (1929). A pioneer of American abstraction, O'Keeffe approached er subjects, whether buildings or flowers, landscapes or bones, by intuitively magnifying their shapes and simplifying their details to underscore their essential beauty. In Black Cross, New Mexico, the large, dark cross seems to stand watch over the rolling hills at sunset, proclaiming a human presence in this stark landscape.
Edward Hopper, Nighthawks (1942). Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by a restaurant on New York's Greenwich Avenue, but the image, with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative, has a timeless quality that transcends its particular locale. One of the best-known images of 20th-century art, the painting depicts an all-night diner in which three customers, all lost in their own thoughts, have congregated.
