Featured Art Exhibition: 'The Artist and the Poet' at Art Institute of Chicago

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Featured Art Exhibition: 'The Artist and the Poet' at Art Institute of Chicago The Art Institute of Chicago, the nation's second largest art museum located in Chicago's Grant Park, is currently exhibiting 'The Artist and the Poet' on view now thru June 2013.

Planned to coincide with the Art Institute's major exhibition Picasso and Chicago, this presentation from the Department of Prints and Drawings is inspired by the modern master's love of poetry-Picasso was close friends with poets, including Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, and Paul Éluard, and collaborated with them from his earliest days in Paris.

Taking Picasso's passion as a jumping-off point, this collection of works on paper surveys the myriad ways visual artists have been inspired by or collaborated with poets in the 20th century.

Featured Art Exhibition: 'The Artist and the Poet' at Art Institute of Chicago David Hockney, printed by Maurice Payne. A Picture of Ourselves, from The Blue Guitar, 1976-77. Mrs. Solomon B. Smith Memorial Fund.

The exhibition begins with a selection of sheets from Robert Motherwell's A la Pintura (1968-72) and David Hockney's The Blue Guitar (1976-77), prints series inspired respectively by the poetry of Rafael Alberti and Wallace Stevens-who was himself inspired by Picasso. The presentation continues with an exploration of the various working relationships between the artist and poet. Sometimes they are one and the same, such as Chicago's own, Tony Fitzpatrick. Sometimes they work in tandem or tangentially to illustrate a text, as in the portfolios by Ken Price and Alex Katz. And sometimes artists independently co-opt the words of another; Lesley Dill, for instance, uses the words of Emily Dickinson in compositions such as A Word Made Flesh (1994).

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