Burcu Karsi

The Bewitched Mill Marc painted The Bewitched Mill following a sojourn to the Italian town of Merano in the southern Tirol. The work's title refers to the "magical" harmony he sensed there between human life, represented by the houses and mill on the left, and nature, embodied by the lyrical region of trees and animals on the right. Through the theater, Expressionist writers were able to visually enact the scenes they witnessed as well as the scenes they foresaw to relate their vision to large audiences. Many writers took part in the theme of revolt against the growing industrialization. Gas by Georg Kaiser is a good example of this theme because it tells the story of a mill that is run in a democratic way and by profit shared methods that were revolutionary in itself at the time.

The Portrait of Joseph Roulin This portrait of Joseph Roulin is one of six van Gogh painted of his close friend, a postal employee in the southern French town of Arles, a fifteen-hour train ride from Paris. Van Gogh had moved to Arles in 1888, hoping to create an artists’ cooperative there. The plan never came to fruition, and the artist became lonely and isolated. He found comfort and companionship with the Roulin family, and they are the subjects of many of his paintings.

The Panciatichi Holy Family According to Giorgio Vasari and Raffaello Borghini, the painting was commissioned to Bronzino by Bartolomeo Panciatichi, whose coat of arms dominates the fort in the background. It portrays, using the sculptural forms of Michelangelo’s painting, the meeting of the Holy Family with John the Baptist on their return from Egypt, as indicated by the presence of the travel bundle on top of which Jesus is sleeping. It has been in the Uffizi Gallery since 1919.

The Lady of Shalott This is the first version of the Lady of Shalott painted by Waterhouse. This is the most Pre-Raphaelite of his paintings, set out in the open air with a typically English landscape illuminated by natural early evening light and with close attention to the autumn leaves, the reed choked river's edge and medieval details. This lady is far younger than the Edwardian woman of his later painting. She is no more than a girl with the wistful, tragic quality of so many of Waterhouse's dreamy heroines. The scene shows the doomed Lady of Shalott setting of on her final voyage along the river to Camelot. The tapestry she has spent her life creating, trails behind her in the water and there is a lantern, candles and a crucifix on the prow of the boat, like a small alter.

The Harvesters This is one of six panels painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder for the suburban Antwerp home of the wealthy merchant Niclaes Jongelinck, one of the artist's most enthusiastic patrons, Jongelinck owned no less than sixteen of Bruegel's works. The series, which represented the seasons or times of the year, included six works, five of which survive. Bruegel created a watershed in the history of Western art, suppressing the religious and iconographic associations of earlier depictions of the seasons in favor of an unidealized vision of landscape. The Harvesters represented the months of August and September in the context of the series. It shows a ripe field of wheat that has been partially cut and stacked, while in the foreground a number of peasants pause to picnic in the relative shade of a pear tree.

The Giant It made for those who are on the same eye level, walking the streets and taking public transportation, an anomaly for Los Angeles drive-by culture. Bradford uses the repetitive language, texture, and colors of contemporary commercial life, layered like organic sediment to represent the shifts in the lives of the urban poor. Bradford has observed that the “merchant posters” increase in volume as the economy subsides, giving his chosen material a direct correlation to the state of the nation. The language or advertising contained within them, which the artist leaves only barely legible in some cases and in others numbingly repeated, indicates the type of vulnerabilities faced by those they are designed to appeal to. Pest control, money wires, cheap divorce, credit lines, and prison phone services, Bradford captures linguistically the abjection of poverty and the subtle changes in undocumented labor as reflected in the paper fliers

The Birth of Venus Art historians who specialize in the Italian Renaissance have found a Neoplatonic interpretation, which was most clearly articulated by Ernst Gombrich,to be the most enduring way to understand the painting. Venus is shown as a beautiful and chaste goddess and symbol of the coming spring. At this time in Renaissance history, when almost all art was of Christian theme, nude women are not often depicted and when they are they symbolize sinful lust. Most paintings of women during the Middle Ages symbolize the Virgin Mary, showing her in a demure appearance with an angelic smile and covered head.

Alka Seltzer The exhibition begins with a display of the department’s rich early modern collection. Highlights include works by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, as well as German School artists such as Max Beckmann and Ernst Kirchner. A selection of Dada and Surrealist drawings will be shown alongside In Alka Seltzer, Lichtenstein exploited everyday practices of visual representation and magnified them, indicating the gas bubbles rising over the glass by meticulous scraping away extra spaces from a field of imitation hand stenciled benday dots. Displaying major works by many of the artists that will be featured in the permanent galleries of the Modern Wing, this exhibition showcases the Art Institute’s long-held commitment to collecting and exhibiting the art of our time. He drew flat black graphite shapes a parody, like the dots, of the reductive, linecut effect of pulp advertising. The artist's use of mechanical reproduction conventions served to unify his composition and produce movement and volume on a two-dimensional surface.

The Starry Night This morning star, or Venus, may be the large white star just left of center in The Starry Night. The hamlet, on the other hand, is invented, and the church spire evokes van Gogh's native land, the Netherlands. The painting, like its daytime companion, The Olive Trees, is rooted in imagination and memory. Leaving behind the Impressionist doctrine of truth to nature in favor of restless feeling and intense color, as in this highly charged picture, Van Gogh made his work a touchstone for all subsequent expressionist painting. Van Gogh's night sky is a field of roiling energy. Below the exploding stars, the village is a place of quiet order. Connecting earth and sky is the flame like cypress, a tree traditionally associated with graveyards and mourning. But death was not ominous for van Gogh.

The Portrait of Pablo Picasso Calling himself Juan Gris, Jose Victoriano Gonzalez moved from Madrid to Paris in 1906 and took up residence in the same building as fellow Spaniard Pablo Picasso. In this portrait, Gris paid homage to the founder of Cubism by fracturing Picasso’s head, neck, and upper torso into various planes, shapes, and contours so that, when recombined, they resent his form simultaneously from several points of view. Despite the painting’s dissolution of traditional, identifiable shapes, Picasso’s unique facial features that his full lips, intense, dark eyes, and thick, black hair are recognizable.

The Gleaners is an example of Realism. It features three peasant women prominently in the foreground, stooping to glean the last scraps of a wheat harvest. Their gaze does not meet the viewer, and their faces are obscured. In the background, bountiful amounts of wheat are being stacked while a landlord overseer stands watch on the right. Millet has chosen to center the women and paint them with a greater contrast. The earthy figures blend into the color of the piece, ingraining them well into the scene.