When I was growing up, the Art Institute of Chicago had a real, honest-to-goodness treasure chest behind the central staircase on the main floor. This was not just a plain box, up-graded to Arabian Night stature via rose-colored remembrances. It was a real treasure chest, worthy of Long John Silver’s scowl or Aladdin’s cave. Its brass-studded lid was elaborately engraved, its lush interior was upholstered in red velvet, and it was filled with glittering coins. A small sign above this remarkable container proclaimed that any cash contributed (Clink. Clink. Clink) to the chest would pay for art student tuition at the Art Institute School.
Art student tuition!
Romance on top of Romance!
What child intent on becoming an adventuress could stand before such an Altar of Art and resist tossing pennies, nickels, dimes and dreams through the burnished-brass mesh to bounce, glisten and tinkle against the other nickels, dimes, quarters and sometimes even dollar bills already amassed below?
I glared and stared at the treasure. I dreamed, not of what money could buy, but of lives dedicated to sculpture, to painting, to art. I conjured up images of slim and starving artists in garret rooms. At the bottom of that chest, I saw what I wanted from life: The pure and unadulterated passion to create, and therefore to be really and truly alive.
My father had a lifetime family membership to the Art Institute of Chicago, for which he had paid a princely sum. This membership entitled us to an unparalleled array of earthly delights, including discounts at the gift shop (my second favorite exhibit at the museum), admission to the Members Library (a sanctified place with polished wood chairs behind smooth, wooden tables at which it would be a sacrilege to read anything less erudite than illuminated manuscripts), and priority admission into every Art Institute exhibition.
This life-time membership imparted to each of my father’s children a sense of boundless elitism. During a recent trip to Chicago on a pilgrimage to the Art Institute, I discovered that an exhibition of Edward Hopper’s paintings was all the rage. People were standing five wide in a line that staggered down the stairs and continued down Michigan Boulevard. Not for me, though, the common herd. I gazed pittyingly at the rabble, strode up the steps, and flashed my father’s membership card at the guard.
“Go right in,” he said. And I did.
Other children may have had their own speed boats or yachts, country club memberships, jewels, boyfriends, tuitions at Ivy League colleges, gardeners, butlers and cars, and in our neighborhood, they did. But we children of Samuel Reuben…we were members of the Art Institute! We strode past glum guards with confidence and aplomb. We knew every inch of the place, from the administration offices, to the school, to the Thorn Miniature Rooms where tiny parlors and palaces evoked images of what dream domiciles might be. We marched up the stairway beneath Picasso’s Guernica, we drifted beyond boring Chinese vases and expressionless Buddhas, and like cream, rose to the inexpressible wonder of the paintings and sculpture on the second floor.
Now, one thing I have learned over the past few decades is that objects which remain on view in one’s mind do not necessarily remain on view in one’s museum. This means that the “permanent exhibit” in my head doesn’t coincide with any permanent exhibit installed on the Art Institute’s second floor.
Central to my permanent exhibit is a painting of a peasant girl who has obviously just heard something that set her spirit on fire. It is called “The Song of the Lark,” and looking at it, I realized for the first time what art is and what an artist must do: Take what is transitory, extract what is meaningful, and successfully render that thing, instant or interaction permanent.
My first love … my first encounter … my first awe before objective, external art, was “The Song of the Lark.” And in my heart and mind, the Art Institute is still the most wonderful museum in the world.
