The Collection
This collection of artworks, selected over the past thirty years by Bernard Friedman, is a cross section of the visual culture of Chicago from the early 1920s through the beginning of the 1950s. It was a culture graced with the iconoclastic liberty that life in this inimitable, burgeoning city afforded. Many of the artists in this collection were immigrants — Greeks, Italians, Jews, Poles, Russians, Spaniards, and Swedes. In Chicago they found a unique opportunity for artistic expression in a city vitalized through modernism. Yet they didn’t simply depict this vitality — they helped create it.
