Chicago Paintings At Illinois State Museum

More than 80 paintings by 50 artists, including new additions to the collection, are on view at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield through January 13, 2008.

"Chicago-area collectors Powell and Barbara Bridges have played a significant role in transforming our awareness of the artistic life of the Midwest in the period between 1880 and 1945. The present exhibition is the happy outcome of twenty five years of collecting, studying and living with the work of a generation of Chicago painters who are just now becoming well known outside our region," said Susan C. Larson, Ph.D., Collector for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

This exhibition reveals how some Chicago artists adhered to conservative representational painting traditions, while other artists developed a Midwestern approach to European Impressionism and still others experimented with emerging variants of Modernism. The exhibition arrangement invites viewers to compare the individual styles of artists as they paint similiar subjects. -- www.museum.state.il.us