However, a new Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts exhibition curated by a native of Chicago aims to shed new light on the Second City as a place that inspired and spawned trailblazing visual art.

"There's a real need for rethinking 20th-century art to include the whole country," said curator Bob Cozzolino.

"Art in Chicago: Resisting Regionalism, Transforming Modernism," which runs through April 2, features about 80 works, with about one-fourth coming from the academy's holdings and the remainder from private collectors.

Why a retrospective on Chicago art in Philadelphia? Because, Cozzolino said, both cities have old, influential and complementary art schools: the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Many artists studied or taught at one school, then the other, creating a sort of cross-pollination between the cities.

"These artists didn't live in a vacuum," Cozzolino said. "There was a lot more exchange between artists and institutions than we tend to believe."

The exhibition challenges the notion that American Modernism was largely a staple of New York City, and that art from the Midwest was limited to bucolic landscapes and Grant Wood's American Gothic.

The show looks at Chicago artists working from the 1910s through the 1980s. All three generations steadfastly rejected following the aesthetics championed by New York modernists; they refused, for example, to jettison the human figure from their work.

The Chicago artists in the exhibit also have in common a continued inspiration and fascination with Surrealism, and work that is highly detailed even during the era of Abstract Expressionism championed by New York artists like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.

Such marked differences in style led to unfair criticism through the years that Chicago's art scene was behind the times, Cozzolino said.

"One of the unique characteristics of Chicago is there's always been a very pronounced effort to not be derivative, to not follow the status quo," he said. "They insisted on following their own vision."

Among the exhibition's highlights is a group of seven created by New Deal-era Chicago artists employed by the Works Progress Administration. The pieces, 8 feet by 4 feet, depict the "seven lively arts" painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature, dance and drama.

They hung behind the bar at the famous Chicago restaurant Riccardo's from 1947 until sometime during the 1970s. Restaurant owner Ric Riccardo was himself a WPA artist and painted one of the murals.

Riccardo's closed in 1991 and the murals were split up and sold. In 2002, philanthropist and art collector Seymour Persky tracked down and purchased all seven murals; the Philadelphia exhibition is the first time they have hung together in a museum.

The show also includes Pennsylvania Academy works by Leon Golub and Jim Nutt, and privately owned works by Ed Paschke, Ivan Albright, Don Baum, Gladys Nilsson and others.

Works from the Chicago Imagists that city's answer to New York's Pop Art scene are also featured in the exhibition, with raucous comics from the Hairy Who, a collaborative of art students that gained fame in the late 1960s, and their contemporaries who showed under the name False Image and made humorous decals and bubblegum cards.

"In Chicago, they were really trying to do something that goes in a different direction from what was happening in New York," Cozzolino said. "There's a real continuity and a particular flavor to Chicago visual arts."
 
by Joann Loviglio, Copyright 2006 Associated Press