The Art Institute of Chicago. Wow. What can one say? There is so much art there it is hard to know where to begin the discussion: Manet, Monet, van Gogh, Cezanne, Matisse, Courbet, just to name a few. I spent six hours in the galleries taking in as much work as I possibly could. I decided to write about two pieces that really made me stop and wonder. The works are The Banquet by René Magritte (right) and Shattered Tree by Otto Dix (below). These are both pieces I have never seen before, and I wouldn’t have immediately recognized them to be by those artists. I am familiar with Magritte’s more common themes such as sky and bowler-hat-clad men and Otto Dix’s harsh and darkly expressionistic portraits. These two fiery red images stayed in my mind days after leaving the Art Institute.
The works both appear to be landscape paintings of trees. But they are so much more. The paintings convey the visible and invisible; the expected and the unexpected. The orange-red hue might have initially attracted my attention because it reminded me of the fires in Montana that I recently saw on the train to Chicago (and now from seeing photos of a red sun in a smoke riddled sky from Victoria and other parts of B.C). Did I gravitate to these works because of what is happening to our part of the world this summer? What happens in our lives changes how we see and read paintings.
In Magritte’s oddly named painting The Banquet, everything seems like it is in the right place and yet of course things are not right. Is that a sun in the middle of the painting? Its hard to tell if it is the sun in front of the trees, or if a hole has been cut through the trees, and we are not looking at the sun at all, but rather an orange sky through a negative shape. And what does the title have to do with anything? We associate banquets with times of plenty; not somewhat dark and stark landscapes. The painting is not giving us a straight answer to any of the questions it imposes.
The Dix painting of a tree is similarly striking because of the intense orange-red. It doesn’t seem right. The trees seems as if they are the colour and shape of flames. The title Shattered Tree indicates that something catastrophic has taken place. The viewer is made to imagine what kind of force could be so great as to shatter a tree? Dix, a German, served in WWI and was very traumatized by his experience. He was forced to join the Nazi government’s Reich Chamber of Fine Arts and was made to promise he would only do innocuous landscapes. But as you can see from the image below, he was not interested in, nor probably capable of, making a typical landscape painting. Thus Shattered Tree depicts an environment in upheaval and distress.
Both these paintings feel as if they are depicting the world as it is right now; they evoke a sense of imminent danger. While they may be painting of trees, the results are unsettling depictions of something that is not right with the natural world. These works are examples of artists going beyond what they see in front of them, and how colour and design can be used to create an uneasiness, giving a true sense of how the artists perceive the world around them. The work is as relevant and striking today as it would have been sixty or seventy years ago.
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| Otto Dix, The Shattered Tree, 1941 |
Contemporary Art Thoughts 