painting of the month

Nuns on the Roof -- Marjorie Phillips, 1922 (The Phillips Collection)

northside algren

Chicago author Nelson Algren would have marked a 103rd birthday today, if he hadn't left our sphere in 1981 after suffering a heart attack. Though Algren was born in Detroit, his family moved to Chicago when he was a child and he would be emotionally and artistically linked with the city for the rest of his life. He did abandon Chicago for the East Coast in his later years, feeling that he wasn’t appreciated by his hometown despite the fame he had achieved through publication of such novels as The Man with the Golden Arm and Never Come Morning.  Apparently at the time he left you could barely find his books in the Chicago Public Library, though they are certainly there now.

Algren was streetwise yet poetic, turning blighted urban views into hauntingly beautiful scenes. He could also peer into the soul of a desperate man or woman and find a whole range of experiences and emotions -- and what had led them to turn to the needle or the bottle, or to a life of crime. He wasn’t much of a schmoozer and called things as he saw them, which often led to his disenfranchisement from the literati of his day. He had a long-time affair with French writer Simone de Beauvoir, but that ended with a bittersweet (generally more bitter than sweet) resentment, much like his departure from Chicago.

Reading Algren’s works is a great way to learn about the man and the Chicago neighborhood in which he found his writing “zone,” the then-predominantly Polish area called The Triangle. Algren probably wouldn’t recognize much of his gentrified, hipped-up Triangle now, but a fine way to go back in time beyond reading Algren’s fiction is to check out Call Northside 777, a film based on the real case of a Chicago man imprisoned for a murder he didn’t commit. It has an unusually low-key tone for a 1948 movie, with Jimmy Stewart playing a reporter unraveling errors of justice. Stewart's quest leads him to the Polish corners of the South side, but Call Northside 777 also hits the titled North side as well, offering a cinematic window into some of the bars, streets, and people of the Triangle area and truly bringing Algren’s words to life.

At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing ever since. -- Salvador Dali

painting of the month

The Artist's Party -- Joseph Delaney, 1941-43 (Indianapolis Art Museum)

the success of curiosity

Artist and diarist Marie Bashkirtseff's reaction to first seeing John Singer Sargent's 1884 Portrait of Madame X or Portrait of Madame Pierre Gautreau:

"It is a success of curiosity; people find it atrocious. For me it is a perfect painting, masterly, true. But he has done what he saw. Beautiful Mme. ____ is horrible in daylight...."

the individualist

Author and philosopher Ayn Rand was born today in 1905 and died in 1982 at the age of 77. Her perhaps best known work is the architectural epic The Fountainhead, which follows the career of the intense and uncompromising Howard Roark along with many other less idealistic yet occasionally more intriguing side characters. This uncompromising cat enjoys idling by the novel for some reason and tries her best to shred its 695 pages. She may be identifying with The Fountainhead's (anti)heroine Dominique Francon -- and like Dominique is also willful, beautiful, and gets a twisted pleasure out of destroying things.

painterly spirit of the place

Above all, the outdoor painter should get the character and feeling of the place he portrays on his canvas. If in Spain, his picture must look like Spain. The air must be transparent, the architecture clean-cut against the azure. If it be Holland, the atmosphere must be moist, the air like a veil, and with all this there must be nothing in the work that will be mistaken for the smoke-laden air of England. Only thus, by this fidelity to the very nature and spirit of a place, can the picture be made to express the essence of its life, which is really the heart of the whole mystery.

Excerpt from Francis Hopkinson Smith's Scammon Lectures at the Art Institute of Chicago given in 1914, which is probably why the outdoor painter portrayed scenes on his canvas while all the ladies perhaps stayed indoors and made a nice pitcher of lemonade to quench the outdoor painter's deep artistic thirst.

Pictured: The Port of London -- Claude Monet, 1871