“Modern and Contemporary Works on Paper”

Picasso, Woman with Helmet of Hair, 1904.

Two incredible paintings by Pablo Picasso welcome you to “Modern and Contemporary Works on Paper”: a Blue Period portrait of a woman (pictured), completed in 1904, and a Cubist portrait of a woman from 1909, which seems to have been inspired by a very bad breakup. Most amazing: Picasso’s masterpieces aren’t the highlights of this exhibition.

These 80 paintings, drawings, prints and collages from the museum’s permanent collection are so fragile they’re rarely displayed. Some of the works created after 1960 have never been shown to the public before, such as Laurie Anderson’s fascinating New York Times, Horizontal, China Times, Vertical (1971–79), in which the artist weaves the two newspapers together to create a sporadically legible hybrid.

An Ellsworth Kelly collage that evokes computer pixels is among the many prescient mid-20th-century works on display. Chicago’s well represented by Ellen Lanyon’s 1947 cityscape Elevated Nite, a silver-leafed valentine to the El, but the section devoted to local artists suffers in comparison to the rest of the show. The dark, fragmented composition of Ludwig Meidner’s drawing Street with Pedestrian (1913) and Hans Bellmer’s still-shocking artist’s book The Doll (1936) demonstrate that the German Expressionists and Surrealists are still the best at mirroring the anxieties of modern urban life.

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