Spanierman Gallery, LLC is pleased to announce The Friedman Collection: Artists of Chicago, an exhibition of paintings by artists who were associated with the vibrant city of Chicago around the turn of the twentieth century. The first survey of Chicago painting to be seen in New York, the show consists of sixty works collected with passion and enthusiasm by James Friedman over the course of twenty years. It is comprised of landscapes, figural images, and city views by forty-eight artists, including Adam Emory Albright, Charles Francis Browne, Theodore Earl Butler, Charles William Dahlgreen, Ruth Van Sickle Ford, Frederick Frary Fursman, Frederic Milton Grant, Oliver Dennett Grover, Lucie Hartrath, Wilson Henry Irvine, Carl R. Krafft, Lawrence Mazzanovich, Tunis Ponsen, Louis Ritman, Anna Lee Stacey, and Svend Svendsen. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with sixty full-page color plates, an essay by Dr. William H. Gerdts, and biographies of the artists (available from the gallery for $40 postpaid).

In the past few decades, American art from the Colonial era through the mid-twentieth century has been of considerable interest to scholars and the public, and exhibitions and books have examined many facets of this rich flowering. Much of the focus of these studies has been on the works produced in the large cities of the Northeast. It has only been in recent years that attention has been given to the development of art in other regions of the country. Such an emphasis was spurred by Dr. Gerdts's three-volume Art Across America (1990), and since its publication, regional art has come under closer examination. Nonetheless, the art produced in Illinois, and especially in Chicago, is just beginning to receive attention. The Friedman Collection, which provides a survey of Chicago's important and unusual achievement, contributes significantly to the broadening awareness of that city's artistic identity.

The development of art in Chicago was brief, by contrast with that of major Eastern metropolises. A few portrait and landscape painters were active in the Midwest city in the 1830s and 1840s. By the 1860s there was a lively artists' colony of portrait and landscape painters in the city, with an active Academy of Design serving both as a school and an exhibition venue. The great fire of 1871 disrupted the progress of art in Chicago. The academy's building was destroyed, and many artists left the city. A new school began in 1877, which in 1882 changed its name to the Art Institute of Chicago. In the years that followed, the institute would be the focal point of the art life of Chicago, training and producing many of the city's finest artists. Chicago's vitality was propelled in the 1880s by numerous art clubs and organizations as well as by exhibiting venues including the Chicago Inter-State, which was national in scope, as well as the Cosmopolitan Art Club, the Palette Club, the Art Students League of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Palette and Chisel Club, and the Bohemian Club.

The era was one of cosmopolitanism, and even the energy of the rebuilt city could not keep Chicago artists at home. Like their counterparts on the East Coast, many pursued training in the art capitals of Europe, but the dynamism of Chicago's art scene eventually compelled most of them to return. Once they had re-established themselves in Chicago, landscape painters turned their attention to the beauty of countrysides accessible to the city, and many were associated with nearby artists' colonies, such as Nashville, in Brown County, Indiana, where Lucie Hartrath and Carl Krafft painted Impressionist scenes of the hilly rural terrain, and Saugatuck, Michigan, where Frederick Frary Fursman ran a popular summer art school and inspired students with his colorist intensity, which had been influenced by the works of the French Fauves that he had seen in Europe in 1913-14. Daniel Folger Bigelow found his inspiration along the southern shore of Lake Michigan in northern Indiana, where he captured a surprise fall snowfall in his subtly toned and decoratively composed The Land of Song and Sky (ca. 1918). Others ventured farther into the state of Illinois. The painter, teacher, and critic, Charles Francis Browne created quiet, tonal landscapes in Oregon, and the Swiss-born and Paris-trained artist Frank Charles Peyraud specialized in scenes of the farmland near Peoria, painted in the mysterious glow of twilight, as in October (ca. 1915), a glistening scene of autumnal fields. The Swedish expatriate Alfred Jansson traveled south of Chicago to paint Fall Landscape, Galena (1915), using a loose Impressionist handling and offsetting sparkling orange foliage against a lavender, mauve, and pale-green toned mist.

For many Chicago artists, the city itself was an inspiring subject, and the Friedman Collection provides one of the first opportunities to see the range of the urban imagery created in the city in the early twentieth century. Echoing the fascination with the city expressed in the writings of Theodore Dreiser and Carl Sandburg and inspired by the new "functionalist" architecture of Louis Sullivan, Chicago artists captured many facets of urban life. Occasionally painters, such as Frank T. Moore Beatty emulated earlier New York artists such as Childe Hassam and Colin Campbell Cooper in painting tall skyscrapers and urban "canyons," as in his LaSalle Street (1967). More often, Chicago artists were drawn to the gritty appeal of the industrial landscape, and especially of the Chicago River, as in James Jeffrey Grant's Michigan Avenue Bridge (ca. 1925), in which the artist contrasted monumental vertical architecture with the busy horizontals of the street and bridge traffic over the waterway. Other Chicago views include Charles William Dahlgreen's sunlit industrial scene, Rush Street Bridge (ca. 1910), Torey Ross's softly toned, realist Watertanks, Chicago (ca. 1927), Gerda Ahlm's Fishing in Chicago, where the focus is on small pleasure boats with the smoky city in the background, and Tunis Ponsen's loosely painted Winter Streets, Chicago (ca. 1935), a scene of a local neighborhood where streets are wet with melting snow.

Urban leisure also attracted Chicago painters. Torey Ross evoked James McNeill Whistler in Riverview Park (ca. 1930), a nocturnal scene illuminated only by the artificial glow of a pleasure park. Frederic Milton Grant celebrated Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition of 1933-34 in a view of fair-goers milling around before the yellow facade of Western Union Hall, the exposition's "Electrical Building" in which a century of telegraphic history was on display. A sophisticated populace enjoying boating at one of the favorite summer retreats of wealthy Chicagoans at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin is portrayed in Carl R. Krafft's Holiday (Lake Geneva) (ca. 1925), while Minnie Harms Neebe's Oak Street Beach (ca. 1910s), depicts the local populace engaging in the commonplace pleasures of sunbathing, swimming, and boating. Lake Michigan itself attracted local painters. Norwegian-born John Olson Hammerstad painted several sailing vessels far out on rough seas under a brilliant sunset sky in his Lake Michigan (1887), while a cheerful spirit prevails in Harold Betts's Clouds Forming over Lake Michigan (1917), a calm panorama of small pleasure craft on the lake.

It was perhaps a reaction against the industrialization of the city, combined with the mobility possible in an era of transcontinental railroads and ocean steamers, that gave Chicago artists the impetus to spend summers far from their urban homes. One who did so was the Impressionist painter of landscapes, figural subjects, and beach scenes, Pauline Palmer, who made annual trips to Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the 1890s. Among Chicago's most prominent and versatile artists in the first half of the twentieth century, Charles William Dahlgreen lived in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, but he often traveled to the Ozarks of northern Arkansas and the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, one of which is probably the location of his closely cropped scene of haystacks and pumpkins in the snow, Frosty Morning (ca. 1915). An active member of the Chicago art scene, Oliver Dennett Grover was also an inveterate traveler, who made frequent sojourns to Venice as well as an expedition to the dramatic wilderness of Montana's Glacier National Park, which he portrayed in his glowing Avalanche Lake (ca. 1920s).

Still other Chicago artists chose to establish their careers elsewhere, while maintaining connections with the Midwest city by sending their works there for exhibition and returning for visits. Wilson Henry Irvine, a prominent figure in the art scene in Chicago in the first decade of the twentieth century, was drawn to the intimate rural scenery of Old Lyme, Connecticut; after moving there in 1914, he became a leading figure in the town's popular Impressionist artists' colony. Lawrence Mazzonovich, an exponent of decorative Impressionism who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, became the leading landscapist in Westport, Connecticut, after settling there in 1909. The Vienna-born Rudolph Frank Ingerle, who trained in Chicago and was part of the artists' colony in Brown County, Indiana, discovered the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and eastern Tennessee about 1925, and soon thereafter became the leading painter in that region, renowned for his decorative, naturalistic style, as exemplified by his Oconolufty (sic) (ca. 1920).

A number of Chicago Impressionists became renowned primarily for the work they created in Giverny, France, in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It was here that Claude Monet lived and that a vital colony of Anglo-American artists had been active since the late 1880s. Frederick Frieseke, Lawton Silas Parker, and Karl Anderson had all studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before going abroad and painting in Giverny, followed by Karl Buehr and Louis Ritman, both represented in the Friedman Collection. Three works by Ritman in the show are all devoted to female imagery and reveal the emphasis among the Givernois on the portrayal of attractive young women in elegant and decoratively adorned spaces.

In all the paintings in the Friedman Collection, Chicago artists working at the turn of the twentieth century were forging their distinct identities in defining their explicit environments. Bringing together so many facets of these artists' work, the Friedman Collection illuminates a fascinating era in American art, in Chicago, and in the nation.