LISA STONE AND KENNETH C. BURKART
leitmotif of 20th century art in Chicago.”
fundamental things that art history could teach us — basic and universal truths about design, which all artists have used in all times and places… Miss Gardner… believed devoutly that a choice coin or fabric can express a culture — or move the sensitive viewer — as profoundly as monumental architecture or painting…”
While Chicagoans had first-hand access to what has been considered canonical modernism, its art world consistently fostered assertive individuality rather than a codified style as a measure of modernity. Chicago artists, critics, and collectors valued risk-taking and a dedication to authentic self-expression as evidence of an avant-garde mindset. Many of the city’s artists derided the emulation of fashionable trends and established styles, organizing alternative groups to aggressively reject the status quo. They expected innovative form but demanded that art convey an emotional intensity that approached the visceral.
Gardner was in the vanguard of a generation of art historians who learned to appreciate not only modern art with all its surprises but also primitive, aboriginal, and folk art, and the previously overlooked arts of Russia and Hispanic America, which, in spite of high aesthetic quality, had been largely disdained by earlier scholars. Striving to broaden the appreciation rather than to limit it, Miss Gardner reveals in her books a progressively more generous vision that eventually embraced the whole world, all time, and both the major and “minor” arts.
Being outside the mainstream need not always imply ignorance of it. A few artists in Chicago Calling, particularly Lee Godie, Drossos Skyllas, and Pauline Simon, had magnetic relationships to the Art Institute of Chicago, reframing the supposed impassible chasm between non-mainstream artists and the academy. We can look to the histories and legacies of the museum and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the city’s cultural climate of risk taking (condescendingly referred to as “eccentricity” by art critic Donald Kuspit).
In the same essay Allen describes Gardner’s protégé, artist and art historian Kathleen Blackshear, who taught at SAIC from 1926 to 1961, “Miss Gardner was fortunate to have, during all her time at SAIC, the ideal team teacher, Kathleen Blackshear… Where Miss Gardner was solid in Classical and Renaissance, Miss Blackshear was an enthusiastic missionary for Modern and Primitive. Together they taught History of Art to a generation of SAIC students, and Miss Blackshear continued after Miss Gardner’s retirement till her own… Miss Blackshear, a frequent exhibitor in the Chicago art community, also maintained valuable and intimate connections with the rest of the school and its students. She was for many years among the best and most sought-after teachers of painting and drawing…”
A brief overview of the environment of inclusion that was nurtured here must include renowned art historian and educator Helen Gardner, known for her radical Art Through the Ages, the first history of world art in one volume. The classically trained and accomplished Gardner held various positions at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1919 to 1922 (and periodically after), when she resigned to teach the history of art at the School of the Art Institute until her retirement in 1943. Her unusual approach was to encourage artists to focus on the aesthetic, rather than the historical, details of the art of the past, and to study art history so they could be their own art critics. Professor Harold Allen recalled his beloved teacher and colleague in his essay “Helen Gardner: Quiet Rebel.” He wrote,
Blackshear was a progressive teacher who encouraged her students in expansive studies, and to explore cultures and genres outside their own, particularly non-Western cultures. Following in Gardner’s and Blackshear’s footsteps, Whitney Halstead and Ray Yoshida were profoundly influential, as artists, teachers, prescient thinkers, and collectors who exposed students to a wealth of non-mainstream art as art, unqualified.
“Of many remarkable things Miss Gardner did, her greatest accomplishment by far was writing Art Through the Ages, a pioneering attempt to provide — in defiance of narrow tradition — a one-volume survey of the history of all art… It quickly became, and remained, the standard college text for all art history surveys (there was no other, and never had been, in one volume)… Gardner … told us that although dates can be useful and might be mentioned from time to time, she did not value them as highly as she did the more
James Yood encapsulated the cultural, intellectual, art historical placeness of Chicago, that these educators and many others contributed to, “…it all comes down to an expanded consciousness of what 15