Displaying items by tag: surrealists

When Ruth Horwich, a fixture in Chicago’s art community for over fifty-five years, passed away in July 2014, she left behind an extraordinarily diverse and deeply personal art collection. Horwich and her husband, Leonard, began collecting art in the late 1950s, often focusing  on unknown and emerging artists. The couple amassed a fascinating collection that included works by Chicago Imagists, European Surrealists, and self-taught and folk artists. They also acquired many notable pieces by Robert Matta, Alexander Calder, and Jean Dubuffet.

In addition to growing her collection, Horwich was dedicated to providing key support to many Chicago art institutions.

The eccentric paintings of Piero di Cosimo (1462-1522) have intrigued people ranging from Giorgio Vasari to the Surrealists—André Breton described him as the “ultimate incarnation of what was best in the Renaissance.” But it is only now, nearly 500 years after his death, that the Florentine artist is being honoured with his first retrospective. The exhibition, opening in Washington, DC, and going on to Florence, will be remarkably complete, reassembling nearly all his surviving paintings. There will be 34 fully accepted works (plus four attributed paintings), leaving only half a dozen or so which could not be borrowed.

The 16th-century art historian Vasari described Piero as a solitary person, “more animal than human,” who never cleaned his rooms and allowed his garden to grow wild.