More Museum Highlights

Continuing at the Art Institute, here's a painting by one of my favorites, Goya.  Goya is noted for painting gaunt figures...kind of the opposite of Reubens.

My favorite Dutch painter is Jan Steen.  He frequently painted people partying down severely, usually with tongue in cheek.  This painting is titled "Family Concert".  And a merry scene it is...blow up the pic for better detail.  But, things are a little disheveled.  In the lower left are a couple of dead wine bottles, one toppled over.  And it looks like the cat is scarfing the dog's food, and the dog is none too happy about it.  And the kid playing the cello?  Instead of a cello bow, he's using a pipe!  Delightfully disorderly!

The institute had Edward Hoppers classic, Nighthawks.  Tension?  Loneliness? Alienation?  Mystery?  You decide.

This is a local painting, "Nightlife" by Archibald Motley.  He was trained right here at the Art Institute in the 1910s, and executed this painting in the early 1940s depicting the goings on in a club on Chicago's South Side.  I love the colors and the people...the painting pulses with energy.

And here's American Gothic!  I misread this painting...thought it was of a farmer and his wife.  But, it's really a farmer and his daughter. But not really...The artist, Grant Wood, used his sister and his dentist as the models.

The Institute has a fascinating exhibition of Soviet WWII propaganda posters.  This is a famous one that I saw in a Time-Life book long ago.  Issued just days after the German invasion on June 22, 1941, it intimates that Hitler will meet the same disastrous fate as Napoleon, 129 years earlier.  Of course, this happened, but at the time the outcome was not certain at all.

Stalinist propaganda was, of course, often untruthful.  But the Nazis gave the Russian spinmeisters plenty of genuine material to work with.  This poster mocks the supposed German "Aryan ideals"  by showing that the Nazi leaders didn't measure up.  100 percent true!

This poster...not quite so accurate.  It's celebrating the "liberation" of the Baltic states from the Nazis in 1944.  Of course, four years earlier the Russians had marched into Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia and destroyed those countries' independence.  The poor Balts were tossed around between the Russians and the Nazis for five years...hundreds of thousands of them perished in the crossfire.