International studio (60.1916/1917)

Chicago in Art

BACKWATER BY HENRY B. SNELL


HICAGO IN ART
BY MAUDE I. G. OLIVER
At the risk of seeming trite, Chicago
art lovers are proclaiming the current
annual exhibition at the Art Institute to be the
most important within memory. This excellence
they attribute not alone to the merits of the ex-
hibits themselves but in part to the successful—
even extravagant—hanging, and in part to the
spacious new environment. Indeed the new East
Wing plays no inconspicuous role in the appear-
ance of both this twenty-ninth exhibition of
American Oil Paintings and Sculpture, and the
notable exhibition of American Sculpture, re-
cently seen at Buffalo.
Upstairs the superior overhead lighting en-
hanced the air of hospitality, and the comfortable
extent of the eleven galleries made it possible to
hang with ease the two hundred and eighty-nine
paintings included in the annual show. Below,
in one vast room, the large assemblage of sculp-
ture, brought together at the Albright Gallery

in June by the National Sculpture Society, was
installed to advantage. At the close of these two
displays, the rooms above were placed at the
disposal of passing exhibitions, and the lower
gallery, to be known as the Frank W. Gunsaulus
Hall of Industrial Arts, will contain most of the
applied arts belonging to the museum collections.
Judging from certain examples in this exhibi-
tion of American Art, one might assume that
symbolism is the goal toward which modern art
expression is tending. Not long since, the ideal
was to express the spirit of things; before that,
it was to represent the actual form; now, how-
ever, both form and spirit are giving place to a
cult of symbolism—“story-telling,” as it were,
transmuted to a higher plane, a philosophy rather
than an art.
This tendency is strikingly observed in the work
of Stanislaw Szukalski, a young Pole, to whom
the most adverse critics will grant imagination,
however sensational they may regard his mind
creations to be. Apostle of the Ugly, if you will,
this youth strikes a wild, primal note. Unbeau-


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