Michael Van Zeyl at Gallery 180

Gallery 180, conveniently located at the corner of Wabash and Lake, does a good job of showing the kind of art that doesn't get shown much in Chicago any more - i.e. realistic depictions of healthy life - a genre in which the Palette and Chisel has specialized since 1895.

Louis Weiner

Louis Weiner (1892-1967) came to Chicago from Ukraine along with many other East European Jews in the early 20th C.

The above depiction of a slow day on Maxwell Street is included in "Chicago and the Art of Migration" now showing at the Art Institute.

It was his contribution to the Biro-Bidjan portfolio of 1937 - celebrating that remote corner of the Soviet Union, on the Chinese border, where Stalin had once planned to relocate Russian Jews.

The entire portfolio is now in the collection of Oakton Community College.



He is quoted as saying:

I avoid the introduction into my work of national, racial, or religious elements for their own sake. I believe that art is universal and makes use of elements, emotions, and phenomena which are in their essence the same the world over and in all time.

Spring Sale 2013

Stephanie Weidner


Tor, the animalier, told me to look out for this one - and I agree -- it's remarkable



Alison Rae Nichols


Chicago doesn't really need any more Surrealists -- but the Palette and Chisel does.


Errol Jacobson



Phyllis Brodny


Msybe it's only a photograph,
shot out her LSD window overlooking the lake,
-- but it still feels like Scandinavian expressionism to me.

Figure Drawing Elsewhere

As we all know, the Palette and Chisel is not the only place where models pose for life drawing.


Above is a 2011 painting by Nicole Eisenman that I bumped into at the Art Institute last weekend.





Previously it had hung at the Whitney, where, as shown in the video above, the artist was invited to conduct a life drawing workshop in the gallery itself so that visitors might better comprehend her kind of art.


Which is similar to our kind of art, except that people are expected to be nuttier and more conflicted about the human condition in NYC.

The Bernard Friedman Collection

Rudolph Ingerle

Here's the Palette and Chisel artists from
another online collection of Chicago artists
from the first half of the 20th Century,
this one by Bernard Friedman




Oskar Gross


A trip back to Maxwell Street




Carl Hoeckner


Hoeckner is showing up in most of the historic Chicago shows these days, including "They seek a City" now at the Art Institute.

Here's his cynical view of Chicago politics.







Rudolph Weisenborn is mostly known to us as a geo-form abstract painter, but here's his self portrait from the 1940's

Stephen Assael Workshop

It's kind of exciting to have one of the country's foremost realist painters doing a workshop at the P&C. It's like William Merritt Chase visiting the club a hundred years ago.










It says something about our own instructors how eager they are to study with a master when the opportunity presents itself.







(photos by Del Hall)










Here's some pictures of the Sunday demo portrait.


( photos by Adam Nowak )








(I don't think Jessie has ever been this intense in her entire life !)

Here's the painting that Stephanie Weidner did in the workshop -- convincing me that we should install an orange spotlite in the studio.