Conflict & Creativity: Architects & Sculptors in Chicago 1871 - 1937

Timothy Samuelson and John Vinci

Arts Club of Chicago

Founded in 1916, the Arts Club of Chicago has long been committed to innovation in the visual and performing arts. Through the years, important commissions, purchases, and gifts from artists and patrons have formed an impressive collection of modern and contemporary paintings, sculpture, and works on paper, as well as rare examples of Asian and African art. Edited by Sophia Shaw, granddaughter of the Club's dynamic past president Rue Winterbotham Shaw (1940-1979), The Arts Club of Chicago: The Collection 1916-1996 documents more than a hundred objects, with in-depth essays on selected individual pieces by museum curators and scholars, a comprehensive chronology of exhibitions, and fascinating histories of the Club's collecting, programs, and avant-garde patronage. Unique modern masterpieces by Alexander Calder, Natalia Goncharova, Paul Klee, Picasso, and many others are beautifully reproduced in full color, with informative comparative black-and-white illustrations. Distinguished contributors include Douglas Druick, Neil Harris, Stephen Little, Christa Mayer Thurman, Franz Schulze, Robert Storr, David Travis, and others.

The Arts Club of Chicago: The Collection 1916-1996

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Stephan Balkenhol

Balkenhol, Stephan

Paul Thek: Paintings, works on paper and notebooks 1970-1988

Thek, Paul

Founded in 1916 in the wake of the scandalous Armory Show, the Arts Club of Chicago aimed to present the city with new images, sounds, and ideas. Conceived as an exhibition and social space that would cultivate sophisticated conversations around a range of media, the Arts Club has maintained its core interest in presenting culture “in the making.” Today, it continues to serve as a key venue in Chicago for the presentation of work by the national and international avant-garde, including such artistic luminaries as Sharon Lockhart, Josiah McElheny, Pedro Cabrita Reis, and many more. This volume addresses the visual art, music, theater, dance, architecture, and literature presented by the Club over its one-hundred-year history with new scholarship by leading writers in each field. Janine Mileaf and Susan F. Rossen offer an in-depth look at the tastemakers of modernism in the city, from Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein to local cultural player Rue Winterbotham Carpenter. In addition, each copy of the book also includes an original artist’s project by Walid Raad. A dynamic exploration of the intertwined histories of the Arts Club and Chicago, The Arts Club of Chicago at 100 celebrates both an institution and a city that have remained innovative and forward-thinking throughout the decades.

The Arts Club of Chicago at 100: Art and Culture, 1916-2016

Chicago has for decades years been one of the most prominent cities where European surrealism is avidly collected and displayed. However, there has yet to be a scholarly exhibition and catalogue that addresses the local manifestations of this international mode of art. A Home for Surrealism focuses on a select group of painters whose work in the 1940s and ’50s both transformed the domestic and domesticated the surrealist, particularly in Chicago. Working independently, but within a chain of social and artistic relationships, this group explored the interior as a site of projected imagination and fantasy, and the self as the generator of such altered perception. Including contributions by Robert Cozzolino, Adam Jolles, and Joanna Pawlik, the book provides a richly illustrated account of an international movement’s unlikely—but somehow ever so fitting—home in America.

A Home for Surrealism

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Arts Club of Chicago publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Arts Club of Chicago