Smart Museum of Art University of Chicago

Exhibitions

• Current Exhibitions
• Upcoming Exhibitions
• Archived Exhibitions

Collection Galleries

• Modern Art & Design
• Asian Art
• European Art
• Contemporary Art
• Sculpture Garden & Reception Hall

Modern Art & Design

Elisabeth and William Landes Gallery

Dating from 1880 to the 1950s, the Smart Museum's collection of modern art and design comprises European and American painting, sculpture, decorative arts, and works on paper.

The works on view demonstrate the varied ways that European and American artists engaged with the challenges, experiences, and ideas of a rapidly changing world. Thematic clusters mix paintings and sculpture with decorative arts. Together, the works represent a diversity of modernist, abstract, and figurative styles and movements and touch on subjects like the city and its entertainments, emotion and inner states, and the formal and material properties of art itself.

Current highlights include paintings by Childe Hassam, Arthur Dove, and Mark Rothko and the dining room furniture designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the nearby Robie House.

Works on paper

A small area of the gallery is dedicated to thematic displays of works on paper; these change every four months to protect the works from damage caused by long-term exposure to light.

The current presentation features American figurative drawings. This small display of nudes and portraits reveals the various ways that modern American artists embraced an aesthetic rather than strictly realistic approach to figurative drawing through abstracted details or psychic probes of the sitter's identity. It includes works by John Graham, Allan Kaprow, Pavel Tchelitchew, Jack Tworkov, and Abraham Walkowitz.

Top: Installation view of the Smart Museum's gallery of modern art and design, showing paintings by Matta, Kurt Seligmann, and Kenzo Okada together with sculptures by Henry Moore and Hans Arp.