Renaissance Society

The Renaissance Society, founded in 1915, is a leading independent contemporary art museum located on the campus of the University of Chicago, with a focus on the commissioning and production of new works by international artists. The kunsthalle-style institution typically presents four exhibitions each year, along with concerts, performances, screenings, readings, and lectures—all of which are free and open to the public. “The Ren” also produces publications in conjunction with many of its exhibitions.

History

Early Years

The Renaissance Society was founded in the wake of the Armory Show of 1913 at the Art Institute, which had travelled to Chicago after its contentious time in New York. Then called the International Exhibition of Modern, the show was met with outrage and incomprehension in New York, leading to a similarly fervent uproar when it traveled to Chicago. In the aftermath, it was clear that the city, and the American populace as a whole, were generally opposed to the post-impressionist, cubist, and futurist art that was presented.

The Society was founded shortly after in 1915. Member and secretary of the University of Chicago Board of Trustees, James Spencer Dickerson, felt it would be a nice to have particular portrait of poet Robert Browning in Harper Library, but there was no fund for such an acquisition. Consequently, he proposed an organization called “Friends of Art of the University of Chicago” which could provide said funding. On April 20, 1915, ten professors of the university convened at the Quadrangle Club in an exploratory meeting; and subsequently, a larger meeting was held on June 3 in Harper Assembly Hall of Cobb Hall to garner broader support for this organization. There, “a committee of five ��chaired by J. Laurence Laughlin, professor and head of the Department of Political Economy, was appointed to consider the organization of the art society and draft a constitution.” The president of the University approved and worked to assist in the establishment of the society. However, it was not until April 24, 1916 that the next formal meeting was held in the Classics Building. Twelve women and fourteen men voted to accept the constitution that was drafted by the committee. They then elected a president and an all-male executive committee. A further three women were added as vice presidents to rectify the gender imbalance.

The constitution ensured that the society would not become a collecting museum by stipulating that “all acquisitions of The Society, except money, shall become the property of the University of Chicago.” The document stated the mission:
:It shall be the aim of The Society to provide at the University such material means and personal influences as will contribute to the cultivation of the arts, and the enrichment of the life of the community.
The society would organize exhibitions, encourage gifts of art to the university, sponsor lectures on the arts, issue publications, and use other such means to accomplish its mission. Programming elements were open to the public (as is still the case now) in order to enrich the life of the community and the university.

Art in the First Decade

The impetus behind the cultural renaissance in Chicago was the desire to improve society. For wealthy patrons, this aspiration drove philanthropy and the establishment of Chicago’s most preeminent cultural and educational institutions. Similarly, the academics of The Renaissance Society wished to use their scholarly status to lead their community. Rather than take upon the duty of art education as non-professionals, they turned outward in the name of public service. The pervasive sense of idealism that underlies the Society undoubtedly excluded educating its community about modernism in its first decade of programming. The original tenets included a sense of morality to “uplift humanity, a prescription that honored the art of the past, particularly that of the Renaissance, as well as the rigid aesthetic dictates of academic realism.” To the academics, the modernists were radical in promoting self-expression in art-making rather. Thus, the Society attacked the artists of the early twentieth century avant-garde, “bringing to the University some of the most beautiful things in the world.”

The Transition

In 1927, Agnes C. Gale was elected president—the first woman and non-academic to hold this post. In the first of a five annual exhibitions of modern French paintings, Gale included pieces by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Gauguin, who were originally maligned by the Armory Show. The shows proved popular, marked by a jump in membership during Gale’s brief tenure. The Renaissance Society recruited the important photographer Eva Watson-Schütze in the late 1920s to be president of the organization. She was elected in 1929 to become the Society’s first full-time staff person as exhibition director. Schütze made clear her progressive intent: “Part of the program of The Renaissance Society is to stimulate study of the art of the present time, the new renaissance.”

The 1930s

Throughout the 1920s, modernism was scarce in the city. Only a handful of exhibitions and few commercial galleries displayed avant-garde works. In the dearth of progressive leadership, The Arts Club, under the direction of Rue Winterbotham Carpenter, became the Midwest center for the examination of twentieth century art. Schütze knew Carpenter and The Renaissance Society began to exchange programs with The Arts Club. In the 1930-31 season, the Club brought Fernand Léger to Chicago to screen his film ''Le Ballet Mecanique'' and subsequently lent it to the Society.

Under Schütze, The Renaissance Society expanded its curatorial programming into other art forms. The 1930 exhibition of modern American architecture was a pioneering example of a visual art institution investigating this art form. And In 1933, two film series were presented on campus: “Movies of Today and Yesterday” included D.W. Griffith’s ''Birth of a Nation'' and ''The Brahms Symphony'', and “foreign talking motion pictures” included four works by French director René Clair. The Society’s events also explored dance and music.

In the last years of Schütze’s leadership, curtailed by her failing health, the Society introduced Chicago’s audience to avant-garde art that was seldom or never before seen before in the United States. Among the most groundbreaking exhibitions at The Renaissance Society, a solo show presenting Alexander Calder’s early mobiles was his first in the country. However, it was James Johnson Sweeney who presented the Society’s boldest curatorial statements in his exhibition ''A Selection of Works by Twentieth-Century Artists''. Non-representational works by seminal abstractionists—Jean Arp, Constantin Brâncuși, Alexander Calder, Juan Gris, Jean Hélion, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso—were included in the comprehensive catalog of which much material had never before been exhibited in the country. Building on the founding principles of the Society, Schütze initiated a publishing program to expand the Society’s role as “an independent, experimental laboratory for search of legitimate meaning in art.”

In her ultimate act as president of the Society, Schütze organized the 1936 exhibition of Léger, which she believed to be the institution's crowning achievement. The massive undertaking almost did not happen. In a feat of miscommunication, Léger had sent a costly, unauthorized, and uninsured shipment of works with collect on delivery to the Society in March 1935. Though Sweeney had met with Léger in Paris the summer prior and explained that Schütze had decided to hold a show for him, the exhibition date had not been set. Eva Watson Schütze died before the plans were complete. Eventually, the show would open at The Renaissance Society and then travel to the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Milwaukee Art Institute, before Léger was regarded as one of the most important abstractionists of his generation. Included in the exhibition was The City—widely regarded as a revolutionary work from his mature period.

After Schütze’s tenure, the Renaissance Society continued to pioneer groundbreaking exhibitions in her footsteps. In the 1936-37 season, ''Paintings and Sculpture by American Negro Artists'' became the Society’s first show to prominently feature African American artists. The next season, they showcased works by refugees from Europe in ''Paintings by Josef Albers and E. Misztrik de Monda''. In 1939, László Moholy-Nagy, who had just moved to Chicago to direct The New Bauhaus (renamed the School of Design in Chicago, and then eventually the IIT Institute of Design), exhibited for the first time in America in the month-long show ''Paintings by László Moholy-Nagy''. A decade later, another great Bauhaus figure, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was then teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology, was shown in an architecture exhibition at the Society. The following year, he personally installed an exhibition of ''Theo van Doesburg: Paintings, Drawings, Photographs, and Architectural Drawings''.

The War Years through the 60s

The war years proved to be a prolific period for the Society. From 1941 to 1962, artist Francis Strain Beisel was director of the Renaissance Society, which became the “preeminent site for exhibitions in the Chicago area in the 1940s and 1950s.” In 1939, the Society held the ''Exhibition of Hand-Woven Textiles'' produced by the Federal Art Project of Milwaukee; in 1940, ''Book Illustrations by Modern American Artists''; and three exhibitions in 1941: ''Fifteen American Sculptors and Contemporary American Lithographers'', the conceptually pioneering show of ''American Humor: Cartoons from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present'', and ''Works by Chicago Artists Loaned by Chicago Collectors''. In October 1944, a second exhibition of African-American artists was held, organized out of the Hampton Institute and featured several artists then serving in the military. A significant show during this period was ''War Art'', which opened April 12, 1942. Locally organized, the exhibition particularly drew upon the School of Design’s interest in practical art that responded to the present emergency.

After the war, the Society did not exhibit New York artists who emerged in the late 1940s; instead, it showed Ben Shahn and I. Rice Pereira. The Society even ignored Pollock and de Kooning