So many Chicagoans adore the painting Un dimanche après-midi à lÎle de la Grande Jatte or A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884). This article describes how this wonderful painting came to be in the permanent collection of the Art institute of Chicago. In his best-known and largest painting, Georges Seurat depicted people relaxing in a suburban park on an island in the Seine River called La Grande Jatte. Its name translates as Island of the Bowl or Island of the Big Bowl. I am posting the painting and a photo of what the area looks like today. Ownership history Prior to its acquisition by the Art Institute of Chicago, the painting was owned successively by Seurats mother (d 1899), Paris, 1891; by descent to Emile Seurat, the artist’s brother; sold for 800 francs to Casimir Brû, Paris, 1900; given by him to his daughter, Lucie, Paris, 1900; Lucie Brû Cousturier and Edmond Cousturier, Paris; sold for $20,000 possibly through Charles Vildrac, Paris to Frederic Clay and Helen Birch Bartlett, Chicago, 1924. The Collectors Frederic Clay Bartlett (1873–1953) and his second wife, Helen Birch Bartlett (1883–1925), Chicagos premier art collectors in the early 20th century. Frederic Clay Bartlett (1873–1953) and his second wife, Helen Birch Bartlett (1883–1925), were a fixture of Chicago’s civic-minded elite during the first decades of the 20th century. An active and successful painter, Frederic was committed to promoting the work of fellow contemporary artists—beginning in 1905, as a member of the Art Institute’s Art Committee, and later, in 1916, as a founding member of the Arts Club of Chicago, a pioneering organization dedicated to the advancement of modern art. Helen, likewise devoted to the fine arts, was a well-regarded composer, poet, and supporter of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago-based Poetry magazine. Leading a cosmopolitan lifestyle, the couple traveled regularly to Europe, where they acquired an adventurous collection of contemporary French avant-garde art. They purchased recent works by André Derain, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, André Lhôte, and Amedeo Modigliani. In the spring of 1923, they acquired Henri Matisse’s Woman Before an Aquarium (1921–23). The following year, less than one year after Frederic succeeded his father as a trustee of the Art Institute, the Bartletts made a ground-breaking 19th-century acquisition: Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte--1884. This purchase was made specifically with the museum in mind, at a time when the artist was not yet represented in any American or French public collection. Over the next several years, with the intention of placing La Grande Jatte in an appropriate artistic context, the Bartletts purchased major paintings by key Post-Impressionist artists—Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec—as well as important works by other modern masters, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Rousseau. The Bartletts’ marriage and collecting partnership was tragically cut short by Helen’s death in 1925. The following year, Frederic presented the extraordinary collection that they had formed together to the Art Institute in Helen’s memory. The Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection was permanently installed in the museum in May 1926. The Collection included twenty-four paintings by artists then considered radically avant-garde: Matisse, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, and Seurat, for example. It was exhibited in a single gallery, a mode of display intended to highlight the taste and contributions of particular donors that was customary at the time. Frederic was deeply involved in the details of this first installation, specifying a unified modernist setting of off-white walls, white frames, minimal moldings, and ample space between the paintings. It is likely that the acceptance of the Birch-Bartlett gift was not easy or unanimous. In considering the gift, the museum’s trustees were in effect being asked to trust the instincts of a private collector and a director. In several articles about the reception of the collection, phrases can be found such as “finally accepted after seriously debating the acquisition,” “accepted, a bit grudgingly,” and “rather reluctantly, at first.” In a 1935 newspaper article, one trustee (Robert Harshe, who favored the modernists) is described as nearly having had to go down on his knees to beg for acceptance by skeptical trustees of the paintings, prophesying that within ten years the collection would be the “glory of Chicago.” Acceptance was by “narrow vote, probably more out of deference to the Bartlett family than for any convictions about the paintings.” The Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection was permanently installed at the Art Institute on May 4, 1926. When the collection was unveiled, one newspaper called it “the best and most representative collection in the United States, if not in all Europe.” The headline of an editorial in a New York paper read: “Chicago Leads the Way.” The editorial said, “Americans who wish to enjoy the acquaintance of the leading European modernist artists must make the journey to the metropolis of the Middle West. That Chicago, rather than New York, had the first collection of works by PostImpressionists and first-generation modern artists on permanent display in a public gallery was a major event. But it should be remembered that Chicago was consistently in the forefront of adventurous exhibiting and collecting. Frederic Clay Bartlett Chicago-born Bartlett (1873-1953) was from a wealthy and cultured family. His father, Adolphus Clay Bartlett had risen from office boy to the presidency of Hibbard, Spencer and Bartlett, a prosperous hardware company. He became a millionaire hardware and mercantile magnate and a member of the Art Institute of Chicago’s board of trustees for 35 years. Young Frederic went off to Munich to study art, inspired by what he saw at the World’s Columbian Exposition. In October 1898, he and his new wife Dora left for an extended stay in Europe, first in Paris, where Bartlett was one of the first students to enroll in the short-lived school opened by American expatriate painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler. He studied in Paris and Munich. After more than five years of European study, he concluded that his schooling was over, and he brought Dora to Chicago, where they settled. In 1900. In 1900, he rented a studio on the tenth floor of the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue, which housed many of the city’s artists, musicians, and writers; and he received his first commission, a portrait, for which he was paid $75. In 1902, Frederic built his own home on fashionable Prairie Avenue. Dora and Frederic soon became part of Chicago’s fashionable circle. In 1917 Dora, who was described as “one of the prettiest, sweetest, and most entertaining women of the South Side,”’ died, after nineteen years of marriage. In 1919 Frederic married Helen Birch. While he had been eclectic in his collecting tastes in prior years, in the 1920s, after his marriage to Helen, Frederic turned his attention to works of avant-garde, mainly French, artists. There is no written evidence that indicates why this focus occurred, whether it was due to Frederic, Helen, or to the influence of an outside advisor. As for Helen, a friend said that “contemporary experience and expression enthralled her.” Family sources suggest that Helen played an active role in their collecting activities. Bartlett’s life as an artist and as part of the cultural and social circles of Chicago and elsewhere in the early years of this century is the fascinating story of a millionaire son of a millionaire who eschewed a traditional life as heir to a major mercantile establishment and instead embarked upon an uncertain creative path. His career brought him a degree of personal fame and success, particularly as a painter of murals but also as an easel painter and imaginative decorator of interiors. Helen Birch Bartlett In 1919, Helen Louise Birch became Frederic’s second wife. She was also a child of a pioneer Chicago business and civic leader. Born in Chicago on February 27, 1883, Helen was the only one of three children to survive past her twenties. Her father, Hugh Birch was as much a self-made man as Adolphus Bartlett. Hugh Birch arrived in Chicago in the 1860s from Ohio. Even though she could have led a comfortable and idle existence, Helen chose not to. She was both a published composer and poet. She studied music with the German expatriate Bernhard Ziehn, a music theorist and teacher of harmony and composition in Chicago; in 1915 and 1916, several of Helen’s songs, settings for poems by Yeats, Matthew Arnold, and others, were published by a Chicago music company. Between 1919 and 1926, her poems and book reviews were published in Poetry magazine, the famous journal started in Chicago in 1911. Helen Birch Bartlett died of cancer on October 24, 1925, in New York at the age of forty-three. Modern art made an irresistible appeal to her. She had always wanted people to express life as they really saw it, unsentimental and unshadowed by tradition.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 02:20:16 +0000
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