Generative Nostalgia

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.

EXITS EXIST Photo courtesy Nathan Keay.

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 th…

Kelly Pope is a Chicago-based graduate student of design history, theory, and criticism and likely drinking too much coffee.

Cezanne’s The Sea at L’Estaque behind Trees is courtesy Musée Picasso, Paris.

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