One of the highlights of “Prague Days in Chicago,” the ongoing festival of Czech art, music, history and film, is the reintroduction of the prints and drawings of Oldrich Kulhanek through a large exhibition at the International Currents Gallery of the John David Mooney Foundation.
I say reintroduction because Kulhanek was shown with frequency here at the old Jacques Baruch Gallery decades ago. Then he was a dissident, creating densely packed figurative works on paper that were fantastically detailed and not without touches of the surreal. Now he is an acknowledged master who has stripped away everything extraneous to examine the human condition through tensions in nude bodies and homages to his artistic and political countrymen.
The most powerful works on view are large lithographs in which three or four nude figures grasp at each other in a free fall at the Last Judgment. They are voluptuous and wanton and desperate all at once, and Kulhanek renders every contortion and foreshortening with maximum graphic impact. Such drama will put some viewers off, though they then will miss how elsewhere he draws, say, Franz Kafka with the softness, even tenderness of an angel.
This is a show that glories in academic technique and convinces you the artist can do anything with it. For those attuned, the sheer largeness of his responses to art and life should be irresistible.
At 114 W. Kinzie St., 312-822-0483.
Last year’s installation of Magdalena Abakanowicz’s sculptural grouping “Agora” at the south end of Grant Park renewed interest in her work in Chicago and has led to her first small exhibition here in years, at the Thomas Masters Gallery.
Apart from a short documentary on “Agora” by Agnieszka Ziemacka-Masters, the pieces on view are not related to the public art project, presenting instead selections from two- and three-dimensional series that are largely unknown here.
The sculptures include “Sage C,” one large headless figure, this time seated, of the sort that many viewers long have taken to be existential statements. However, all of the other three-dimensional pieces are what the artist calls “hoofed mammal heads,” and they prompt very different reactions, as the rudimentary shapes plus residue from casting support the sense of encountering fragments of antique sculptures that depict mythological creatures.
Abakanowicz always was at her best when her work was the most abstract. The bronze mammal heads are a step in that direction, being blunt in form and powerful in surface without engaging sticky emotions. Little can be read into the pieces about suffering humanity, and that is all to the good. Storytelling is one of Abakanowicz’s least attractive tendencies.
Her large gouache drawings from 2004 and 2005 have a similar detachment, underlined by the series’ overall title: “Faces Which Are Not Portraits.” They interest because of the sweep of the artist’s gestures and the apparent rapidity with which each head is suggested. Shape and occasional surface texture are here more to the point than hints of personality or character.
An earlier group of pencil drawings, from 1991, is quite the opposite, being all self-portraits, grave and stressful. Each is of a head, sometimes apparently “masked” to show only the face, which is inevitably lined and worn by care. They do the artist something of a disservice, presenting her as an agent on whom forces act, without her habitual combativeness.
At 245 W. North Ave., 312-440-2322.
The last 30 years brought so many fine large shows devoted to the art of late 19th Century Vienna and Germany between the World Wars that it has been easy to forget that a good small one in Chicago was at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art in the 1970s. The show focused only on turn-of-the-century Viennese art and design but presented it so well that I was looking forward to a kind of reprise at the Smart this summer, in the broader “Living Modern: German and Austrian Art and Design, 1890-1933.”
This show is not, however, what I expected. It’s drawn entirely from the museum collection (whereas the earlier exhibition was mostly loans) and two-dimensional works predominate. So the emphasis has shifted from the decorative arts to prints and drawings, though some paintings are included, and high-style design objects by such masters as Josef Hoffmann and Marianne Brandt are now almost overwhelmed by other art historical and social currents.
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The 40 years under review included Symbolism, Expressionism, the birth of abstract art, World War I, Dada, the Bauhaus and the return to figuration known as the New Objectivity. This gives a lot of ground to cover, but the show does it cogently, through pieces by artists major and minor — still, don’t expect a Gustav Klimt or Egon Schiele — and lengthy explanatory panels.
Despite important groups of works by Max Klinger, Lovis Corinth, Max Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka, the main reason for a visit is Otto Dix’s “The War,” a portfolio of 50 mixed intaglio prints from 1924. Not long ago, Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art showed a generous number of selections, but the Smart presents the portfolio complete, in five sets of 10, ordered according to the artist’s own numbering. Only Francisco Goya’s “Disasters of War” is a comparable treatment of the theme. To see Dix’s attempt “to exorcise war” is a great and harrowing experience.
Lesser-known artists such as Robert Michel, Conrad Felixmueller, Rudolf Grossman, Friedrich Karl Gotsch and Rudolph Schlichter flesh out the picture so compellingly that one (perhaps unreasonably) wishes something equal could’ve been done within the decorative arts.
At 5550 S. Greenwood Ave., 773-702-0200.
Oldrich Kulhanek through July 31 at the International Currents Gallery
Magdalena Abakanowicz through Sept. 30 at the Thomas Masters Gallery
‘Living Modern: German and Austrian Art and Design, 1890-1933’ through Sept. 16 at the Smart Museum
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