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HOTTEST TICKET fashion forward CLOTHING AND CANVAS CONVERGE IN THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO'S NEWEST EXHIBITION, "IMPRESSIONISM, FASHION, AND MODERNITY." BY THOMAS CONNORS W ith their penchant for depicting the play of light, the French Impressionists frequently turned to landscape. And you only have to visit Gallery 243 of the Art Institute— home to Claude Monet's arresting, hutlike bundles of wheat—to witness how environmental subjects continue to capture the public's attention. But in their determination to create images reflecting real life (jettisoning the historic for the humble, the mythic for the richly mundane), they took nearly equal inspiration from the street and salon, where the present eclipsed the past like never before. It was a brave new world, and as the Art Institute's big, bright new show "Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity" reminds us, the avantgarde was not about to be left behind. The Art Institute has presented several largescale Impressionist and Post-Impressionist shows over the years. But as Gloria Groom, the David and Mary Winton Green Curator of 19thCentury Painting and Sculpture, says with a laugh, "We've never had mannequins here. This is a big step!" Mannequins clothed in period dress are a key component of the exhibition's exploration of how a rising style consciousness played out in the Impressionists' renderings of contemporary life. "We'd been looking at these paintings without really seeing how these artists used fashion to say something different in paint," says Groom, who conceived the show. "Fashion blossomed during this time period. An artist who wanted to make his name had to address it. To be a modern painter was to paint fashion." The Impressionists' visually informal yet technically complex approach to painting was matched by a willingness to expand the range of acceptable sitters, advancing the notion that one need not be a personage to be the subject of a portrait, and that even a proper bourgeoise could be depicted at leisure. With the mass production of the sewing machine, the rise of the department store, and the circulation of fashion journals, fine attire became a fixation of the broadening The Two Sisters by James Tissot, 1863. 70 MICHIGANAVEMAG.COM 070-071_MA_SC_HT_SUMMER_13.indd 70 6/18/13 11:57 AM