Flash in the Pan

The Restaurant-Gallery and How Chicago’s Art Scene Redefined Itself After the Second World War

Over the growing din at Riccardo’s Restaurant and Gallery — the clink of silverware, the clack of bocce balls, the muttering of Tribune reporters complaining of long weeks with incompetent bosses — rose a familiar Italian tune. Roberto Rossi and his bellowing accordion laid the base, but at the very latest hours of the night and the very earliest hours of the morning, when the 3-oz. martinis made opera singers of even the shyest diners, the renditions of “O Sole Mio” became ever more messily impassioned as table after table joined in. When the singing reached a great enough pitch, the paintings and prints up on the walls acted like sounding boards, sending voices reverberating anew through the space. And behind the bar, shaped like an artist’s palette, was the crown jewel of the restaurant, the reason it was Riccardo’s Restaurant and Gallery (or, occasionally, Riccardo’s Studio Restaurant) as opposed to simply Riccardo’s Restaurant: seven massive and striking paintings that went by the name, The Seven Lively Arts.[i] Amidst temporary exhibitions and ephemeral evenings of raucous merriment, these works held permanent court, absorbing smoke, reflecting conversation, and acting as a dynamic backdrop to a city making itself new again. If this doesn’t sound like a scene typical for an art gallery, that’s because it isn’t. But Riccardo’s wasn’t a typical sort of place. It was a prime example of a novel concept. Enter the Chicago-style gallery.

As the nation emerged from the rubble and chaos of the Second World War, Chicago’s cultural critics began to wonder, with some degree of impatience, what kind of new work would come from the wounds and scars. Noticing the dearth of galleries in the city, they also asked why there were no great spaces to display the art they were anticipating.[ii] Artists in Chicago responded with a heavy sigh. For decades they had contended with neglect in various forms, ignored by their city’s own critics and institutions and cast as the perpetual underdogs to their East Coast counterparts, their inferiority complex fomented by a longstanding comparison to art from an ever-shinier elsewhere. “The lack of art coverage,” complained Ivan Albright (who was, funnily enough, one of the best-known artists in the Midwest), “has inadvertently made our city provincial.”[iii]

In the 1940s, the perennial neglect of artists in Chicago took on a triple-pronged nature. First there was the 1943 drop-out of federal funding for the Federal Art Program (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), eliminating the steadiness of a regular paycheck for artists. Then there was the Art Institute of Chicago and its ever-wandering eye, directors and department heads preferring to source materials from New York and Europe rather than supporting local talent (private collectors and Chicago art critics could be accused of much the same). And finally there were the galleries, some of which had shuttered during the war, and the rest of which were, on the whole, disinterested in the project of showcasing local progressive art.

In the void left by neglect multiplied by three, Chicago artists concocted an unexpected sort of art space, one to rival New York’s white cube galleries that had come to be so synonymous with modernism. Drawing from the turn of the twentieth century’s living-room gallery model, Chicago’s history of ad hoc artist-run programs, and the art as part of everyday life ethos of the FAP/WPA, the Chicago-style gallery fused art, architecture, and design into an eclectic amalgamation like no other.[iv] They were a postwar experiment in introducing art into more casual spaces of consumption, folding it into the fabric of the day-to-day, encouraging a loud way of existing in a typically more ascetic space. They welcomed not just the wealthy elite but also the newly-minted middle class. They despised the elitism of gallery culture, seeking to turn it on its head by blurring the lines between private and public art. They reflected the idiosyncratic tendencies of Chicago’s modern artists — where the tabula rasa of New York’s white-walled galleries spoke to the relative extremism and unidirectionality of artists there, the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink quality of Chicago-style galleries was a fitting complement to the unusual blending, merging, and integrating of genres that Chicago artists had a particular proclivity for. These galleries were sprawling and unwieldy, lived-in and alive, a fleeting but significant deviation from and alternative to the prototypical display of modern art. They were one answer to the blank spot on the canvas that was the 1940s Chicago gallery scene: olive oil and oil paints; art with a side of spaghetti.

Before the white walls of New York and the wild fusion of Chicago-style lay a long history of symbiosis between art galleries and the upper class. At the turn of the twentieth century it was the living-room gallery that reigned supreme, a sumptuous coalescence of plush and velvet and afternoon tea. These galleries beckoned the monied elite from their well-appointed homes into art spaces that mimicked them, paintings pre-integrated into a familiar atmosphere.[v] As Manhattan galleries began to take up residence in the mansions of 57th Street after the First World War,[vi] one model for the purveyance of art was cemented, the shuttling of painting and sculpture from simulacrums of affluent lives to their real-world actualities.

The cerebral ideas of modern art demanded different ways of looking, though; the living-room gallery was too gentle to some. Enter Alfred Stieglitz’s pivotal gallery, 291, which crash-landed on Fifth Avenue in 1905.[vii] Stieglitz wasted no time tossing out the couches and the afternoon teas of the living-room galleries that came before him, forcing patrons onto their feet in rooms filled with harsh lines and hard surfaces, inhospitable to the corporeal needs of the human body. By 1937, more galleries and museums on 57th Street and beyond had taken up Stieglitz’s mantle of cool alienation (including, significantly, the Museum of Modern Art, which opened its Midtown doors in 1929).[viii]

Chicago was hardly impervious to these New York trends. Marshall Field & Co.’s flagship location, the high-end behemoth on State Street that opened in 1905, was host to a gallery for art that fell into the living-room model.[ix] Catering as the store already did to the city’s well-to-do — their pinched and laced feet weary from traversing so many floors even as their pocketbooks grew lighter by the hour — it made intuitive sense that the inviting furniture, heavy drapery, and intimate atmosphere of the store should slip its way in amongst the paintings and sculptures. The white cube, meanwhile, found its Chicago manifestation in the renowned Katharine Kuh Gallery, which opened its doors in 1935 at the corner of North Michigan and Ohio and electrified the city’s art scene (so much so that a few livid detractors even felt inspired to smash the gallery’s single glass window one night). To Kuh’s mind, a lily-white wall was the logical choice for her boundary-pushing programs of surrealism and abstraction, which she frequently sourced from Europe (think Joan Miró, Paul Klee). When the Second World War made shipping art overseas impossible, Kuh shuttered her gallery endeavors and absconded to the Art Institute, significantly shaping that museum in the years to come in her role as their first Curator of Modern Art, including, to the chagrin of the abundant homegrown talent that surrounded her, an ongoing perpetuation of anti-local sentiments in her selections for both shows and the permanent collection.[x] Though the Institute technically dedicated a gallery to the exhibition of Chicago artists, it was rarely seen as more than a charity case, and one that continued to show the same favorites year after year. Within the city, the museum’s influence was vast, its stranglehold tight on the artistic scene. As Lynne Ward put it: “little else could grow in its shade.”[xi]

Those who grow used to abandonment, however, can also grow in spite of it; wherever a curator or critic failed, it seemed, a new artist-run space in Chicago would crop up. In 1922 the No-Jury Society formed, seeking independence from what its members saw as the Art Institute’s conservative bent; for a nominal fee anyone could hang their art on the walls of the No-Jury Society’s shows.[xii] In 1926 Neo-Arlimusc got its legs, banding together artists and thinkers of all stripes — musicians, poets, sociologists, psychiatrists — under the same roof, the studio/gallery of modernist Rudolph Weisenborn, who hosted monthly themed exhibitions, welcoming those who’d been shunned elsewhere.[xiii] The same year Around the Palette emerged, an organization of Jewish artists who gathered to reflect on art’s role in society, developing streaks of independence and interdependence, learning that creative flourishing required both.[xiv] Time and again, progressive Chicago artists turned their simmering rage into fresh possibilities. Where there was too much shade, in other words, they simply made more sun. 

Of course the Depression threatened the paths of many independent-minded artists. Subsidized as the FAP/WPA was by federal and state governments, artists stepped off their pedestals of celebrity and took on a new status as equals among other laborers.[xv] The FAP/WPA would also force a new kind of reckoning for the art world and the kinds of spaces it fostered. Easel painting, relatively petite and mobile, had been the primary mode of consuming painting for U.S. audiences.[xvi] But in the mid ‘30s and early ‘40s, murals became near-ubiquitous, blossoming bright and loud across the nation — in post offices, schools, hospitals, train stations. Suddenly the question of where art belonged and who it belonged to loomed large, even (and perhaps especially) when federal funding was withdrawn in 1943. 

That withdrawal and the war it set in motion sent artists scrambling anew, taking on roles as crafters of blueprints for airplane construction or war correspondents for the Army’s art unit.[xvii] Merchants and museums, meanwhile, staged campaigns (print sales, department store window displays) ostensibly intended to lure in potential collectors, but even more so to reassert art as a private commodity. By attracting both upper and middle-class clientele, they planted the idea that art was a wise and affordable investment, asking individuals to once more take the government’s place as main patron of the arts.[xviii] This simultaneously placed pressure on artists to lean back into their highly personal aesthetic ideations should they hope to survive. “The artist is again on his own,” wrote Art Institute director Daniel Catton Rich, “and painting has once more become his private affair.”[xix]

Chicago artists responded to this by continuing to cultivate their million little stylistic threads: the hyper-precise street scenes of Aaron Bohrod, the grotesque and finely-wrought portraits of Ivan Albright, the vivid and brash geometries of Rudolph Weisenborn. It was a disparateness that called for unconventional display solutions. Plenty of new galleries sprung up in the postwar boom in Chicago — Madeline Tourtelot, Frank J. Oehlschlager, Benjamin[xx] — but it was Baldwin Kingrey, located at that same corner of Ohio and Michigan Katharine Kuh had previously occupied not too long before, that would be the first true Chicago-style gallery. In 1947 Baldwin Kingrey renewed the living-room gallery with a middle-class twist. With nearly every available surface covered in glass, bowls, textiles, and art (“A jumble of jewelry, ceramics, and furniture,” lamented critic Marilyn Robb Trier[xxi]), they upended some of the snooty sterility of the white cube and sold the vision of midcentury design at a price point within reach.[xxii] It was a gallery for real people, in all their wonderful disorder.

One of the more inventive iterations of this new Chicago gallery type was the sensorial mashup of the restaurant-gallery, perhaps best exemplified by two beloved establishments: Riccardo’s, on the northeast corner of Rush and Hubbard, and Well of the Sea, housed down in the basement of the Sherman House Hotel, at Clark and Randolph. At Baldwin Kingrey, the chairs were carefully arranged for display and intended for sale. At Well and Riccardo’s, patrons could pull up a seat and stay a while, in a place that wasn’t quite home but wasn’t quite not. Diners at Well downed flaming rum punches, at Riccardo’s the famed green noodles, as the art on display shifted around them in the form of rotating monthly exhibitions. Each restaurant also had something unique, something that gave the valuation of art a different kind of meaning — a large-scale work (or several) permanently tied to the location, either literally painted on the wall or installed with the intent of forever. It was in that tenuous intersection of commodification and community that the Chicago-style restaurant-gallery negotiated its identity, claiming its stake in the greater artistic postwar conversation, bringing regular folks into it in the process.

Riccardo’s opened its doors in 1934 — in the midst of the Depression and at the tail-end of Prohibition. The proprietor, Ric Riccardo (formerly Richard Novaretti), an Italian immigrant and veritable jack of all trades (chef, sign-painter, painter-painter, vaudeville artist),[xxiii] bedecked the walls with his own art in the restaurant’s earliest configuration, a decorative scheme that included two nudes placed on the ceiling and framed rather ostentatiously with lightbulbs (“too many pounds and too few clothes”[xxiv] complained one critic in 1937; “a la Sistine Chapel”[xxv] another wrote cheekily in ‘72). As Riccardo’s initial (and likely somewhat facetious) goal for his restaurant was to “provide proximity to a lamb chop for himself and his artist friends,”[xxvi] it should follow suit that the artistic program had a somewhat slapdash character, at least at the outset. Artists from the neighborhood, as well as ones Ric knew from the FAP in Illinois, would drop by for a bite, asking if they could hang their work up on the walls, too. Ever the generous host, Ric cleared a spot, in the process creating, as one reporter noted, something of an ad hoc artist’s colony.[xxvii]

As word got round that bona fide painters (like Aaron Bohrod, Ivan Albright, and William S. Schwartz) had made Riccardo’s a regular haunt, the crowds soon followed: curious folks, radio personalities, “writers, journalists, opera singers and movie stars, admen, drunks, scalawags and bon vivant, real and would-be.”[xxviii] To accommodate the hodgepodge and hoi polloi, Ric started knocking down walls, first taking over one adjacent building in 1944, then another in ’47,[xxix] making room for more art in the form of monthly exhibitions (co-curated by artist and interior designer Don J. Anderson[xxx]) and the palette-shaped bar, complete with those seven unmissable, eight-foot-tall Lively Arts paintings.[xxxi] When even three rooms (and a banquet hall upstairs) didn’t seem to be enough for him, Ric laid claim to the outdoors, too, creating Chicago’s first sidewalk café (and a heated one, to boot),[xxxii] where only drinks were served,[xxxiii] conducive as an afternoon aperitif might be to inspiring philosophical debate. Though a private room dubbed the Padded Cell tended to cater to celebrity clientele who “didn’t want to be bothered”[xxxiv] — like Igor Stravinsky and Burl Ives[xxxv] — the spirit of Riccardo’s in general was one of inclusivity and conviviality, with nights marked by games of bocce in the basement, impromptu musical performances on the guitar and accordion, plentiful liquor, and Ric’s massive Great Dane, Gus, who wove gracefully in and out of the increasingly inebriated crowd.[xxxvi]

To say Riccardo’s was just a raucous and chaotic joint, one of the many “Rush Street ravioli resorts,”[xxxvii] would be a disservice to all the ways Ric oversaw its goings-on with an eye equal parts careful and theatrical. With an office on the second floor and an apartment on the third, both of which sat directly above the restaurant,[xxxviii] Ric and Riccardo’s were a part of each other. He found any excuse to throw a soirée: returning from a big game hunting trip; celebrating Ivan and Malvin Albright’s brush with Hollywood as the artists behind the mangled and magnificent Picture of Dorian Gray portraits; coordinating the reunion of an organ-grinder with his sister, flown in all the way from Italy, after decades spent apart.[xxxix] But Ric also went about his work in quieter ways, whether it was keeping his kitchen skills sharp making minestrone, or funding, without limit, a publishing house run by Stuart Brent, so long as he promised to promote the work of Chicagoans.[xl] It was this duality Ric kept in finely calibrated balance — of showmanship to bring in business and tireless, under-the-radar detail work to keep it all afloat — that held the center in the midst of his culinary-artistic sprawl.

At Riccardo’s, the promotion of local talent trended more toward the representational. This was hardly any cause for surprise: Ric had been in the FAP of Illinois alongside the artists who would come to paint The Seven Lively Arts (the others being the Albright twins, Aaron Bohrod, Vincent D’Agostino, William S. Schwartz, and Rudolph Weisenborn),[xli] and curator Don J. Anderson had studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts under the tutelage of cityscape realist Ruth Van Sickle Ford.[xlii] But representational didn’t inherently mean regressive. In one invitation for an exhibition in the ‘40s, Ric laid out an explicit mission statement for the gallery: “In presenting our monthly exhibitions, we are endeavoring to cover two objectives: first, to give promising artists an opportunity to exhibit their canvasses; secondly to bring to the public a variety of modern work selected on the basis of visible talent, and without jurisdictional discrimination.”[xliii] In many respects, Ric made good on his word. Students of established artists found their works hung high on the walls, doctors and teachers and homemakers and young folks with no labels to their names yet whose paintings otherwise might have languished in studios and bedrooms instead had the opportunity to be seen, to be treated as true artists.[xliv] Ric hosted, too, the fiery brigade of the Exhibition Momentum group in 1948 as they plotted their takedowns and takeovers of Chicago’s conservative artistic contingency,[xlv] another in the lineage of radical artist-run groups fed up with the Art Institute and intent on carving out spaces of their own. And as advertised, there was variety aplenty in the exhibitions, from the starkly surreal work of Sidney Rafilson to the Orozco-inflected lithographs of Eleanor Coen.[xlvi] Ric gave artists a chance, and he extended that chance to his Midwestern audiences, too, allowing them to absorb new ideas through the periphery, in the comfort of a space that felt like theirs.

Where Riccardo’s made itself welcoming with a kind of boisterous camaraderie and sundry programming, Well of the Sea took a different approach to the restaurant-gallery, crafting an immersive environment of upscale spectacle whose relative seamlessness reflected the well-oiled machine of the Sherman. In their heydays, Ernie Byfield was the hotelier and restaurateur behind both the Sherman and the wildly popular Pump Room, a frequent stopover in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s for known names (like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall) transferring trains as they shuttled from Los Angeles to New York and back again.[xlvii] In the lower reaches of the hotel was the College Inn, a night club and jazz venue. Next to the dynamic and clamorous College Inn, however, sat an empty space, one that theoretically could’ve been folded into the club but for the awkward intrusion of beams that interrupted sightlines to the stage. It was a neglected nothing of a room until, sometime in the late ‘40s, Byfield saw its potential. This is what would become Well of the Sea.[xlviii]

Byfield was a Renaissance man with a flair for theatrics. Describing the preponderance of hats he had to don and doff through the days and weeks, Byfield said: “A hotelman must be a master of opposites. He needs to be a greeter and a bouncer, pious but ribald, an interior decorator and bartender; he must understand the arrangement of flowers and the disposal of garbage… he must walk with beauty, but only walk with it… Only a man of very loose moral character should accept the job.”[xlix] But even Byfield knew when to tap other talent and step to the side to let them flourish. Within the pages of Interiors Magazine he found Robert E. Lederer, a designer from Vienna, who Byfield entrusted with the madcap, high-concept idea of making Well a restaurant that felt like dining at the bottom of the ocean. Lederer didn’t hesitate. Instinctively he knew the first step would be to dim the lights, so from out of the darkness could emerge glowing Lucite ribs to conjure the effect of a ghostly ship hull, blacklights to illuminate the white clothing of waiters and diners (though hilariously it would appear flashlights were still necessary to be able to read the menu), and abstractions of enormous fish and all manner of undersea-life silhouetted with fluorescent paint, the workings of New Bauhaus graduate and abstract painter Richard Koppe.[l] A few years after its 1948 opening, Shenango China designed dishware featuring pared-down versions of the clean lines of the murals,[li] tying the bow on an all-encompassing dining experience where patrons were smoothly transported as they descended into a low-lit marvel, eyes adjusting to both brushwork and bouillabaisse. And in the space between the real and the sublime, just before the restaurant’s threshold, perched a foyer for art, a galley-cum-gallery.[lii]

The roster of artists exhibited at Well of the Sea leaned largely in the direction of abstraction in its varying forms, in keeping with the visual world laid out by Koppe and Lederer. The very first show was the triple-threat of Koppe, Emerson Woelffer, and Robert Bruce Tague,[liii] three abstractionists working in exceptionally disparate styles — wiry surrealism from Koppe, washy color blocks from Tague, and jagged saturation from Woelffer. It wasn’t long before Well was bringing in heavy-hitters like Marguerite Hohenberg (whose work appeared at the highly-influential Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York City) and Werner Drewes (considered to be one of the founders of American abstraction).[liv] 

It was the murals at both Riccardo’s and Well of the Sea, though, that cracked open the traditional gallery model in some more significant ways. They occupied a decidedly hazy territory, neither belonging explicitly to the public in the way of murals created for the FAP/WPA nor being entirely privatized in the way of the art for sale in the galleries around the corner. Riccardo’s especially, being at street level, at least offered glimpses of its art to passersby, providing a more colorful quotidian existence to even those who couldn’t pay (though The Seven Lively Arts are often referred to as murals, they qualify as large-scale paintings, as they were not painted directly onto the wall). In a way, those Seven Lively Arts, with their artists assembled from the FAP of Illinois, did seem to represent something of a callback to an era of true government funding for the arts. Or maybe the paintings were more like a through-line, a way of asserting that the arts would find a way to thrive with or without the explicit support of the nation. When Ric asked his six friends to take a four-by-eight-foot blank canvas — each one assigned a different art form, told to create precisely what they wanted, however they wanted, the only instruction being they could not look at any other artist’s work in the group until the grand reveal of all seven paintings in 1948 — he was reintroducing a little bit of that freedom and hope that the government had pulled out like a rug.[lv] The results are touchingly singular, and notably a bit strange. The dimensions are unusual, demanding a kind of forced vertical monumentality that contrasts with the tight-handed tendencies of a few of the artists. But it seems fitting, too, a transparent navigation of artists just trying to redefine their voices in a changed world.

Maybe, though, the better clue as to what function the mural served in the restaurant-gallery is in the name Seven Lively Arts. The seven arts (sans “lively”) are the ones found on the restaurant’s canvases — traditional, epic, understood as high culture. The seven lively arts, on the other hand, are a creation of Gilbert Seldes, a cultural critic who published a book in 1924 about the significance of arts often pushed aside because of their associations with the lower class: movies, vaudeville, comic strips, burlesque. Though he called them low, he argued for their relevance, claiming that in the realm of the arts we needed two kinds: ones specific to our time, and ones that would transcend it.[lvi] When The Seven Lively Arts was published, it was widely read, a provocative argument that would pave the way for new kinds of cultural criticism in mainstream media. And while it’s uncertain as to whether Ric got his hands on a copy at any point, his own Lively Arts do a fascinating thing. Moving almost in the opposite direction of Seldes, Ric took the elevated and elite forms of opera, ballet, and literature and placed them among the people, enlivened through a newfound proximity to smoke and drink and copious laughter.

The oddity that was the Chicago-style gallery confounded critics. In 1948, C.J. Bulliet declared in Art Digest that “a new bohemia is gradually taking form in Chicago… artists are forgetting some of the anxieties of the depression, the war and the atomic peace, and are beginning wholeheartedly to discuss art and the problems of art that lead to creation. Chief center of this bohemia is Riccardo Riccardo’s Studio Restaurant.”[lvii] In 1951, Daniel Catton Rich complained in The Atlantic that exhibitions in Chicago were impossible to find as they were “apt to be hidden down basement stairs or found ‘fronting’ for something else, most often a theater or restaurant.”[lviii] Some saw it as an affront, others as a possible future. As with most things in life, it fell somewhere in between.

One of the better frameworks for trying to make sense of the Chicago-style restaurant-gallery might be Ray Oldenburg’s idea of the third place, a location that is neither home nor work but something else altogether. It’s a common space to gather in regularly, free from obligation, abundant with conversation, a social leveler that raises the spirits and encourages both spontaneity and connection.[lix] Oldenburg cites World War II as the moment these establishments start to disappear in the United States, coinciding with a massive outflux to the suburbs, even as the opening of Well of the Sea and Riccardo’s expansion both took place after the war’s end. At some point along the line, Riccardo’s earned itself the moniker “the Montmartre of the Midwest,”[lx] modeled as it was after Paris sidewalk cafés. Oldenburg uses those exact cafés as perfect examples of the third place, a neighborhood joint where one could easily spend a few hours or lose a whole day. Where decades of neglect may have seeded a sense of isolation among Chicago artists, the creation of such third places as the restaurant-gallery fostered precisely the opposite feeling, a place where people of all classes and art of all kinds might belong.

On any given night, the drinks flowed freely at Riccardo’s and Well of the Sea, the volume increasing until some described it as possessing “enough decibels to curdle your spaghetti sauce.”[lxi] Seated at the palette-shaped bar at Riccardo’s, the Albright twins were often found in spirited debate, a glass of Chianti in hand as they argued with anyone who dared throw their hat into the conversational ring on art, politics, and everything in between.[lxii] It was precisely the atmosphere Ric hoped to cultivate, one of “warmth, wine, cigarette smoke and well-seasoned food and conversation.”[lxiii] The eye and the body were not separated but instead treated as co-conspirators in consumption, and as such fed in equal and abundant measure. Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still, in a moment of exquisite snobbishness, once stated to gallerist Betty Parsons: “My work is simply not understood by those who would equate it with a beige settee or take it with a glass of Chianti.”[lxiv] Riccardo’s and Well of the Sea scoffed at his words. Every libation denied the viewer of Clyfford Still’s work was not just tolerated but outright encouraged in the space of the Chicago restaurant-gallery. Art here wasn’t merely a part of the life of the mind. It was a part of life.

Endnotes

[i] Rick Kogan, “Last Call at Ric’s: A Final Toast to the Watering Hole Ric Riccardo Left Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, September 15, 1995, F1; Jack Star, “Riccardo’s on Rush: Hip, Hip, Hurrah for the Palette-Shaped Bar, the Padded Cell, the Sidewalk Cafe, the Seven Murals of the Lively Arts,” Chicago Tribune, October 1, 1972, H22.

[ii] Eleanor Jewett, “Near North Side Proposed as Art Gallery Colony,” Chicago Tribune, January 11, 1948, E4.

[iii] Maggie Taft, “The Meaning of Place,” in Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 99.

[iv] Taft, “Meaning of Place,” 119.

[v] Erin Hogan, “Traveling with the Eye: The Sites and Spaces of Modern Art in New York, 1915–1950” (University of Chicago dissertation, 1999), 34.

[vi] J. Clydesdale Cushman, "Keystone of Uptown Business Section Will Always Be 57th St," New York Herald, March 26, 1922, 74.

[vii] Robert Doty, Photo-Secession: Photography as Fine Art. (Rochester: George Eastman House, 1960), 43.

[viii] Whitney B. Birkett, "To Infinity and Beyond: A Critique of the Aesthetic White Cube" (Seton Hall University thesis, 2012), 209.

[ix] Daniel Hautzinger and Hannah Edgar, “Marshall Fields,” WTTW, accessed July 21, 2022, https://interactive.wttw.com/art-design-chicago/marshall-fields

[x] Oral history interview with Katharine Kuh, 1982 Mar. 18-1983 Mar. 24. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

[xi] Franz Schulze, “Art in Chicago: The Two Traditions,” in Art in Chicago: 1945–1995 (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996), 15.

[xii] “No-Jury Society,” Smithsonian Archives of American Art, accessed July 21, 2022, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collection-features/chicago-art-and-artists/no-jury-society

[xiii] “Neo-Arlimusc,” Illinois Historical Art Project, accessed July 21, 2022, https://www.illinoisart.org/neoarlimusc

[xiv] Louise Dunn Yochim, The Harvest of Freedom: Jewish Artists in America, 1930s-1980s (Chicago: American References, 1989).

[xv] Victor A. Sorrell, A Guide to Chicago’s Murals: Yesterday and Today (Chicago: Chicago Council on Fine Arts, 1978), 7.

[xvi] George J. Mavigliano, The Federal Art Project in Illinois, 1935–1943 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 17.

[xvii] Robert Cozzolino, “Aaron Bohrod at 100,” Wisconsin People and Ideas 53, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 31; “Individual Exhibitions” (Richard Koppe: Artist File, Pamphlet 10784, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago).

[xviii] Mary Caroline Simpson, “The Modern Momentum: The Art of Cultural Progress in Postwar Chicago” (Indiana University dissertation, 2001), 468.

[xix] Daniel Catton Rich, “Freedom of the Brush,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1948, 49.

[xx] Barbara Jaffee, “Pride of Place,” in Art in Chicago: 1945–1995, ed. Lynne Warren (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996), 65.

[xxi] Art News from Chicago,” ARTNews 52, no. 5 (September 1953): 49.

[xxii] Blair Kamin, “Kitty Baldwin Weese, 87; Co-owned Pioneering Design Store,” Chicago Tribune, March 20, 2005, 4C.7.

[xxiii] Star, “Riccardo’s on Rush,” H22.

[xxiv] Chicago Daily Tribune, November 13, 1937, 12.

[xxv] Star, “Riccardo’s on Rush,” H22.

[xxvi] C. J. Bulliet, “New Bohemia,” Art Digest (March 1, 1948): 20.

[xxvii] Chicago Daily Tribune, November 13, 1937, 12.

[xxviii] Kogan, “Last Call at Ric’s,” F1.

[xxix] Star, “Riccardo’s on Rush,” H22.

[xxx] Riccardo’s Restaurant and Gallery, Inc. (Chicago, Ill.) – Newsletter. John M. Wing Foundation Printing Ephemera Collection, Newberry Library.

[xxxi] Keith M. Stolte, Chicago Artist Colonies (Chicago: The History Press, 2019), 124.

[xxxii] Chicago Daily Tribune, “Riccardo Cafe Remodeling Set at $175,000 Total,” October 26, 1947.

[xxxiii] Jill Riccardo (daughter of Ric) in discussion with the author, January 2022.

[xxxiv] Jill Riccardo in discussion with the author, January 2022.

[xxxv] Star, “Riccardo’s on Rush,” H22; Ed Lowe and Jim Sterne, “Riccardo’s Restaurant Art is Saved by Real Estate Mogul,” Inside (August 2002): 10-11.

[xxxvi] Kogan, “Last Call at Ric’s,” F1; Star, “Riccardo’s on Rush,” H22.

[xxxvii] Chicago Daily Tribune, “Tower Ticker,” March 12, 1949, 13.

[xxxviii] Anne Douglas, “Studio Apartment Decorated Tastefully for an Artist: Ric Riccardo Finds Locale Ideal for Him,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 9, 1954; Jill Riccardo in discussion with the author, January 2022.

[xxxix] “Hi-Jinks at an Artists’ Party,” Chicago Daily News, February 23, 1946; “Sam’s Dream Comes True,” Life, June 13, 1949.

[xl] Alson Jesse Smith, Chicago’s Left Bank (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953), 153; Stuart Brent, The Seven Stairs: An Adventure of the Heart (New York: Touchstone, 1989).

[xli] Mavigliano, The Federal Art Project in Illinois, 1935–1943, 112–137.

[xlii] “Donald J. Anderson” (Artist file, Harold Washington Library, Chicago).

[xliii] “Individual Exhibitions” (Rudolph Weisenborn: Artist File, Pamphlet 05500, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago).

[xliv] Edward Barry, “Artistic Vies with Practical in New Show,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 16, 1949, F11.

[xlv] Simpson, “The Modern Momentum,” 67.

[xlvi] “Paintings Exhibit,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 18, 1953, A8; Will Leonard, Chicago Daily Tribune, October 18, 1951, N9; also October 28, 1951, F4.

[xlvii] Lucius Morris Beebe, The Lucius Beebe Reader (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967), 203.

[xlviii] “Down to the Sea in Tips,” Interiors 10, no. 5 (May 1949): 126.

[xlix] Jimmy Savage, “Tower Ticker,” Chicago Tribune, February 13, 1950, 19.

[l] “Byfield Discovers an Artist and Brings Him Fame,” March 1949, 21 (Richard Koppe: Artist File, Pamphlet 10784, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago); “Down to the Sea in Tips,” 126; “Individual Exhibitions” (Richard Koppe: Artist File, Pamphlet 10784, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago).

[li] Michael E. Pratt, Mid-Century Modern Dinnerware: A Pictorial Guide Red Wing to Winfield (Atglen: Schiffer Publishing, 2003).

[lii] “Down to the Sea in Tips,” 126.

[liii] “Down to the Sea in Tips,” 126.

[liv] Eleanor Jewett, “Chicago Artists Show Works in Eastern Cities,” June 19, 1949, G7.

[lv] “Thanks to Riccardo: 7 Ex-WPA Artists Sign $100,000 Contract,” Chicago Daily News, January 15, 1947.

[lvi] Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishing, 1924).

[lvii] Bulliet, “New Bohemia,” 20.

[lviii] Daniel Catton Rich, “Romanticism in Chicago,” The Atlantic, April 1951, 58.

[lix] Ray Oldenberg, The Great Good Place (Cambridge: De Capo Press, 1989).

[lx] Kogan, “Last Call at Ric’s,” F1.

[lxi] Star, “Riccardo’s on Rush,” H22.

[lxii] Smith, Chicago’s Left Bank, 171.

[lxiii] C. J. (Clarence Joseph) Bulliet papers, circa 1888-1959. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

[lxiv] Hogan, “Traveling with the Eye,” 220.