One April evening 75 years ago a coterie of Hyde Park intellectuals and art connoisseurs gathered at the University of Chicago’s Quadrangle Club. Bonded by a nostalgia for the cultural havens back east–where most of them were educated–they decided to establish a society “to stimulate love of the beautiful and to enrich the life of the community through the cultivation of the arts.”
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Shortly after taking office, Schutze stated that one of the society’s purposes was “to stimulate study of the art of the present time, the new renaissance.” True to her word, she made use of extensive ties in the art world to mount group shows that introduced to the midwest the works of Brancusi, Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Noguchi, and other modernists. Not only did she offer six or seven exhibits a year, but her commitment was such that each exhibition also served as a model of scholarship, meticulously documented through catalogs and checklists. With the help of board member Thornton Wilder, she started a program to publish books on society exhibitions–the first books devoted to modern art to be published in the U.S. The crowning achievement of her tenure was the Leger show, which bestowed recognition on the French painter years before the east-coast arts arbiters would. The knack for discovering significant artists on the verge of international renown was to become the society’s hallmark. By the time Schutze died in 1936, the Renaissance Society was no longer an obscure arts club in the cultural backwaters; it had a prominent place on the art-world map.
These days the society occupies an airy, light-filled gallery on the top floor of a neo-Gothic building on the U. of C.’s main quadrangle. While still loosely affiliated with its host institution, it’s free to choose potentially controversial materials. “Other than the use of the space, we don’t receive any subsidies from the U. of C. And they’ve been good about not interfering with what we do,” Ghez explains. “Our budget comes from foundation grants and private donations.” The operating budget, shoestring by museum standards, supports a small staff and five exhibits a year. Ghez says she and her colleagues gladly pay the price of their creative independence. Besides, she adds, “we’re planning to set up an endowment during our anniversary, so we can meet escalating costs of mounting substantial shows.”
