The Last Harvest: The Paintings of Rabindranath Tagore
Gallery 50
January 29 through April 15, 2012
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a transformative figure in the modern cultural history of India. Remembered primarily as a poet, playwright, musician, and philosopher, he is also recognized around the world as the first non-European recipient of a Nobel Prize for literature, which he received in 1913. Less well known, however, is his visual art, which he began creating in his mid-60s.

The Art Institute of Chicago announced today that Suzanne Folds McCullagh and Martha Tedeschi–both accomplished Art Institute curators with specialties in earlier prints and drawings and American modern prints and drawings, respectively–have been appointed to key positions within the Department of Prints and Drawings.

Contemporary Drawings from the Irving Stenn Jr. Collection
Art Institute of Chicago
November 19, 2011 – February 26, 2012
In only a decade, Chicago lawyer Irving Stenn Jr. has built a collection of more than 170 seminal drawings by more than 90 artists, a collection that focuses on the paradigm-shifting 1960s. This era saw a radical change in the way in which works on paper were made, used, and appreciated, and for the first time the public will be able to see this foundational moment in the history of drawing as represented through Stenn’s singular sensibility.

The Three Graces
Art Institute of Chicago
October 29, 2011 – January 22, 2012
Photographs of celebrations, vacations, and gatherings of family and friends are taken and kept with the aim of preserving moments in life for future generations. What happens, however, when a snapshot becomes an image “type”–transferred into the hands of a collector and folded into a broader cultural history? This subject is explored in the Art Institute of Chicago’s The Three Graces–on view October 29, 2011, through January 22, 2012, in the museum’s Photography Galleries 3 and 4. The exhibition, featuring a private collection of more than 500 anonymous images depicting female trios, spans nearly a century of female role-playing for the camera.

Art Institute of Chicago
May 23-September 3, 2012
This exhibition, the first assessment of the full scope and breadth of Roy Lichtenstein’s career since his death in 1997, aims to offer a new, scholarly assessment of the work of this foremost Pop artist. Lichtenstein is an artist whose work is widely known, reproduced, copied, and parodied–he is an artist that we seem to know well but in fact the true diversity and complexity of his oeuvre is little understood.