Transcript:

Megan Fontanella: This painting is Gabriele Münter “Still Life with Queen” an oil on canvas from 1912. Gabriele Münter often combined unrelated objects from her private world in her paintings, as in the “Still Life with a Floating Puppet”, her Queen, and framed behind a vase of flowers. Gifted to her by the Russian dancer Alexander Sakharov, the puppet takes on a life like presence. Without that context, however, viewers may not immediately recognize the figure as a puppet. Instead reading it as disproportionately small beside the bouquet of flowers. Such deliberate dissonances, slippages between artifact and human were characteristic of Gabriele Münter’s practice. The artist Vasily Kandinsky observed that her uneven translation of objects in one in the same painting helped her to achieve a “strong, complicated inner resonance.”

“Still Life with Queen” entered the Art Institute of Chicago's holdings in 1931 through the Distinguished modern Art collection of Arthur Jerome Eddy. It was therefore among the first of Münter’s works to appear in a US private collection by 1914, and later in a museum collection

Senior Curator Joan Young introduces Robert Rauschenberg: Life Can't Be Stopped

Senior Paintings Conservator Julie Barten gives an inside look at how "Barge" traveled from Bilboa to New York.

Senior Curator Joan Young on the centerpiece of the exhibition.

Barge, which was executed in a 24-hour period, is the largest of the series of 79 silkscreen paintings the artist made from October 1962 until June 1964. While its imagery is devoted primarily to transportation and transportation-related structures—freeways, trucks, spacecraft, radar, etc.—the painting is bargelike in its scale and dimensions. The canvas also contains many other recognizable images—athletes, a key, clouds, buildings under construction, mosquitoes, caged birds, passages of stenciled text, and images from Old Master paintings (Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus [1647-51] and Peter Paul Rubens’s Toilet of Venus [ca. 1606-11], for example). This panoply or cacophony is typical of the artist, who liked things to be messy, complicated, and full of the juxtapositions of everyday life.

Senior Curator Joan Young discusses the significance of "Untitled (Red Painting)"

Grounded in Rauschenberg’s belief that art operates between art and life, this section contrasts the open, experimental technological culture of E.A.T. with today’s opaque AI systems. It reflects on how generativity—and artistic agency—changes when technology becomes inaccessible.

Discover how Rauschenberg used newspaper rubbings, solvent transfers, and inkjet prints to pull everyday imagery into layered works grounded in an age-old printmaking tradition.

Noam connects contemporary AI to Rauschenberg’s Revolver, tracing a shared logic of generative systems, interaction, and distributed authorship across art and technology.

See how Rauschenberg’s newspaper and magazine transfers blur drawing and print, revealing hidden dates and sources that can be traced through tiny fragments of text embedded in the work.

Senior Curator Joan Young talks about Rauschenberg's extensive history with the museum.