Art Institute of Chicago

On the sixteenth of April, nineteen thirteen, students walked out through the doors of the Art Institute of Chicago to the south portico. There they put the French artist Henri Matisse on trial. One student played the defendant; the others read out charges of “artistic murder” and criminal treatment of line and color. Instead of originals, the court was presented with student-painted copies of three Matisse paintings: Luxe, Calme et Volupté, Goldfish and Sculpture, and Blue Nude. After the verdict, the copies were burned.

The protesters came from the very building where the paintings they condemned were hanging. From its founding in eighteen seventy-nine, the Art Institute of Chicago combined a museum and an art school. The word “Institute” in its name is a reminder of precisely this arrangement: art was collected here, shown to the public, and future artists were taught, all at the same time. The museum and school moved into the present building in eighteen ninety-three.

The occasion for the students’ trial was the International Exhibition of Modern Art (the Armory Show), known by that name after its first presentation in a New York City military armory. Arthur Taylor Aldis, who made his money in real estate and served in the Institute’s leadership, decided to bring it to Chicago. In Paris, he met the exhibition’s organisers and promised them a Chicago venue, although the museum had not yet given its final approval. Aldis then persuaded the trustees to accept works by Picasso, Duchamp, Brancusi and Matisse, whom the American public had scarcely seen.

The Institute’s director, William M. R. French, found Aldis’s taste too radical. He suspected the modernists themselves of either madness or charlatanism. But French was responsible here for a museum open to the whole city, and he decided to give the artists a chance to appear before the public. For the exhibition, he canceled several displays already planned, cleared six galleries of the permanent collection, and insisted that above all the most unfamiliar European works be sent: Chicagoans could see familiar art without this exhibition.

Newton H. Carpenter, the executive secretary, took charge of the practical side—an administrator to whom attendance, ticket sales and newspaper attention mattered. He discussed shipping, insurance, installation and catalogues, while also stoking mocking talk about the Cubists. Carpenter expected the scandal to bring people into the museum. The calculation worked: on some days, as many as eighteen thousand visitors passed through these doors.

The school’s teachers led students through the galleries and discussed the new paintings with clear disapproval. At first, Carpenter feared the students would be carried away by modernism; soon he reported with relief to the absent French that this had not happened. The students, for their part, accused Carpenter of turning the Institute into a circus. Their trial of Matisse became a public reprimand of their own administrator. The administration forbade them to burn an effigy of the artist, so only the homemade copies went into the fire.

Carpenter got record crowds, Aldis brought the exhibition through his colleagues’ resistance, and the students ensured that the exhibition’s finale was discussed separately from the paintings. At the same time, the Art Institute of Chicago was the only museum on the entire American route of the Armory Show: in New York City, the works hung in an armory; in Boston, in the rooms of an art society. It was here that works by Matisse, Picasso, Duchamp and Brancusi first entered an American museum.

Eight years later, the industrialist Joseph Winterbotham, wishing to assemble art of his own time for Chicago, established a museum fund for modern European painting. Its first purchase was Matisse’s Woman at the Window. It was later sold under the fund’s rules, which allowed paintings to be replaced with stronger acquisitions. The fund itself still exists; its present holdings include Matisse’s Still Life with Geraniums. The south portico where the students burned copies of his works has survived as well.