This Old Palette: February 2013

The Christine Schwartz Collection

James William Pattison

Jerome Klapka

Being creative, playful, and artsy, the early members of the Palette and Chisel, as well as their other Chicago colleagues, exemplified Bohemia, at least as far as their Midwestern neighbors were concerned.

But compared with the Bohemians of Montmartre, and all the avant garde enclaves that followed, they were rather conventional -- and so they remain outside the Modernist-centered history of 20th C. art.

But that doesn't mean that their paintings were any the worse for it.

And since major art museums won't touch them, it's left up to discerning private collectors to preserve that era, and one of the best is the Christine Schwartz Collection, which has gone online to give these artists a permanent display.

It's also commissioned a local art historian, Wendy Greenhouse, to document the artists with brief biographies of each one.

Above, are paintings from two Palette and Chisel members whose work I'd never seen before.

Below, are pages for each of the other P&C members in the collection, with excellent images and lots of new information about them.

Adam Emory Albright

J. Jeffrey Grant

Louis Oscar Griffith

Otto Hake

E. Martin Hennings

Victor Higgins

Rudolph Ingerle

Alfred Jansson

Jerome Klapka

Karl Krafft

Arvid Nyholm

James William Pattison

Faculty Show 2013

Steven Assael

It's kind of exciting to have a new, prominent figure painter teaching a workshop this year. You can usually see his work every year when Forum Gallery comes to Chicago for the annual art expo.