Generative Nostalgia

It’s the summer of greatest-hits exhibitions. While I sit baking in the Chicago humidity, the Art Institute of Chicago has mounted two major summer exhibitions: Cezanne (not Cézanne—the curatorial team took care in titling the exhibition to style the artist’s name as he actually preferred to sign his work) and Mel Bochner Drawings: A Retrospective, which spotlights Bochner’s use of drawing in his largely conceptual art practice. Across the river, the Graham Foundation presents the work of Barbara Stauffacher Solomon in EXITS EXIST, featuring bold site-specific supergraphics (on view through the end of the year) designed for the first-floor interior of the Madlener House, a 1901 Prairie-style mansion. In New York, the Museum of Modern Art is running a Matisse show, while farther uptown a Kandinsky retrospective remains on view at the Guggenheim.

In this phase of postvax pandemic, packing crowds back into galleries seems to be a top priority after the long rollercoaster of Covid-related shutdowns. Blockbuster exhibitions like these bring a significant amount of foot traffic (i.e., ticket money) through the doors of these institutions. Seeing Cezanne requires an additional $7 ticket (on top of the already hefty $25 adult general admission fee) and a wait in a separate queue. Still, the show has been incredibly crowded each time I have visited this summer, no matter the time of day.

Meandering through the galleries, I found myself observing the conversations and actions of others, wondering what drew them to the show. A man next to me listened to soft classical music on his headphones as we both leaned in to examine Undergrowth (Sous-Bois), a vibrant landscape piece. Two older women sat on a bench overlooking the popular gallery dedicated to still life paintings of fruit; they conversed about a memory one of them had of viewing the beloved apples, red and abundant, spilling over in their bowls, for the first time with their mother on a trip abroad as a young girl. In the final gallery, a couple who appeared to be on a date asked each other what their favorite thing was about the retrospective; the man simply replied, “I loved the skulls.”

There was a nostalgia in these conversations, and while being herded into a packed exhibition space overcrowded with unmasked people is not usually my idea of a fun and relaxing afternoon at the museum, I eventually felt a sense of calm wash over my nerves. Cezanne did not provoke or challenge me. Rather, it made space for a pleasant moment. Uptown, hard-edged supergraphics in black, white, and vermillion line the crisp white walls of the Graham Foundation, offering a stark contrast to the existing warm and decorative wood detailing of the Madlener House interior. EXITS EXIST isn’t a blockbuster in the way that other exhibits in Chicago and New York are, but in it it’s easier to spot the driving idea behind all of these throwbacks: they showcase liberatory, ground-breaking moments in art and design.

A pioneering woman designer, Solomon learned the rules to break them, transforming graphic design from paper into architecture in a definitive act of anti-decoration. Her iconic supergraphics— well-known today as the large-scale, often colorful, graphic shapes painted directly onto a building that help craft a sense of identity or wayfinding—strikingly reshape their site, and they inform architecture as much as architecture informs them.

Solomon’s work offers glimpses of freedom through bold gestures that challenge conventional notions of expression. The same could be said for Cezanne or Matisse or Kandinsky or Bochner. Each of those exhibitions foregrounds a pioneering artist or designer, radical in their own time, who still exerts a palpable influence on the world at present. Through these visual encounters, we might experience nostalgia for a different era or place, offering inspiration to make us feel something other than where we are in this current disaster.

Art can serve as both a necessary reprieve in a deeply fraught time and as a catalyst for change, inviting us to see things just a bit differently. Take Cezanne, for instance—although we might not initially perceive his work as such, it was considered avant-garde by his peers in 1870s France, and his compositions were regarded as being too controversial. He imagined paintings and images as constructions of color, material, and brushwork, rather than pure representations. Cezanne was thought of by his contemporaries as a pioneer of creating from feeling, emotion, or sensation, and this notion liberated the act of art making during his time. As noted throughout the retrospective at the Art Institute, many prominent artists throughout history were inspired by this new way of thinking, from Matisse and Picasso to Jasper Johns and Kerry James Marshall. Cezanne’s subjects can appear traditional or mundane, often taken from observation and scenes of life, but upon closer examination, there are also hints of radicalism within: strange or awkward choices in perspective, angles, and orientations substantially modernize the work the more closely we are willing to look. Some paintings point to a clear desire to abstract, particularly in the later Mont Sainte-Victoire series (1904–06), where a construction of shapes through brushwork appears almost geometric in quality. The surface of each piece commands attention beyond its subject matter, a notion that pushed forward the course of artistic possibility. We, too, can open up new realities of our own if we are willing to take action.

We desperately need to consider new ways of seeing and being with each other in the world. Perhaps these current exhibitions serve as a potent reminder that breaking from the norm is not only possible, but critical.