Celebrating 10 Years of the Edlis|Neeson Collection

Forty-four iconic works of contemporary art joined the museum’s collection, works by artists who quite consciously—and radically—changed the trajectory of art making after 1945: Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol, among others.

At the time, I was the chair of our Modern and Contemporary Art department, and it was such an honor to personally work with Stefan and Gael, whose deep relationship with the Art Institute began in the 1970s. For me and so many others, the couple represented the pinnacle of collecting—not only in Chicago, but nationally and internationally—and Gael has continued this legacy since her husband’s passing in 2019. 

Their gift was transformative on so many levels. With it, Stefan and Gael joined the pantheon of Chicago art patrons who have always embraced the contemporary works of their day and ensured that our museum can tell the story of modern art in depth, decade by decade. Stefan and Gael’s gift brilliantly addressed notable gaps in our postwar collection, forging a continuous path from Abstract Expressionism to the luminaries of Pop Art and beyond and making ours the most important collection of modern and contemporary art of any encyclopedic art museum in the world.   

In the 10 years since this gift was given, we have continued to build on their legacy in meaningful ways, adding to our holdings other remarkable works by Pop and postwar artists and their artistic descendants. Here, my colleague Giampaolo Bianconi, Dittmer Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and I reflect on some of the works from Gael and Stefan’s unprecedented gift and the ways these works connect with more recent additions to the collection. 

—James Rondeau, President and Eloise W. Martin Director

Andy Warhol and Beatriz González

Giampaolo Bianconi

The Edlis/Neeson Collection includes 10 works by perhaps the most recognizable name in Pop Art: Andy Warhol. These silkscreen paintings are based on images that were already circulating in the mass media at the time of their creation, from television and news photography to widely reproduced studio portraits. Among them is Four Mona Lisas, which repeats and crops Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting; Big Electric Chair, which transforms a bureaucratic site of state violence into a haunting, nearly abstract emblem; and Twelve Jackies, a sequence of a press photograph of Jacqueline Kennedy taken after her husband’s assassination, which charts the way intimate grief is recast as public spectacle through the relentless churn of news images. 

Across these works, painting becomes a vehicle for reprocessing existing media, exposing the uneasy entanglement of beauty with brutality and celebrity with catastrophe that shapes visual culture in the United States.

Colombian artist Beatriz González likewise builds her work from images already circulating in print and popular media, but she relocates this strategy to the textures of Colombian daily life. In Nature Living Table (Naturaleza mesa viva), acquired by the Art Institute this past year, she transferred a kitschy scene of cats around a fishbowl—originally produced by a local commercial printer of inexpensive home décor—onto enamel-coated metal sheets mounted on a mass-produced metal table. By choosing a piece of everyday furniture as her support and using industrial paints, she deliberately blurred distinctions between high art and commonplace decoration, taste and “bad taste.” González has described her practice, with pointed irony, as making “underdeveloped paintings for underdeveloped countries,” tying her rough execution, modest materials, and appropriated images to the economic and political conditions of Colombia. 

Taken together, the works of Warhol and González demonstrate how working from existing popular imagery can generate sharply critical yet visually seductive art, exploiting the repeatability of silkscreen and related techniques to foreground questions of taste, value, and spectatorship. Yet where Warhol focused on the spectacle of American mass media—glamour, political power, and televised violence—González adapts similar strategies to a different context, redirecting attention to class, “underdevelopment,” and the politics of everyday images in the Global South. In this way, her work both builds on the Pop-era insight that our visual world is saturated with second-hand images and decisively shifts it, insisting that the stakes of that saturation look very different when viewed from Bogotá rather than New York.

Roy Lichtenstein

James Rondeau

When Gael and Stefan sought to add Pop Art to their collection, Roy Lichtenstein was among the very first artists whose work they acquired. Because of this, Gael once told me, the artist held a special place for them.

I have always found Lichtenstein’s consistent style to be a defining attribute of his art. He continually reinvented his subjects within his own visual language, constantly finding something fresh. His decade-spanning engagement with art history is on full display in the two Lichtenstein paintings in the Edlis/Neeson Collection. With Woman III, Lichtenstein transformed the furious markings of Willem de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionist female figures, utilizing Pop’s flat, unaffected array of dots and parodic wide brushstrokes.

And in Artist’s Studio “Foot Medication” he playfully reconstructed the casual studio spaces of artists like Matisse, making references to his own commercially inspired figures, still-lifes, and geometric canvases. “The things that I have apparently parodied,” Lichtenstein admitted, “ I actually admire.”

In 2024, our museum received two works on paper from Lichtenstein’s estate: a small sketch and a large-format collage that built on the artist’s exploration of Western art’s icons—specifically the Laocoön, a Hellenistic triumph of antique sculpture. In the collage, Lichtenstein retains the writhing tension of the figures while translating the serpentine forms with his signature graphic vocabulary into cut printed and painted papers in bold colors.

Lichtenstein once mentioned that when looking at Matisse’s studio paintings he found it difficult to hold back a more gestural brushwork, and here, in the Laocoön drawings, he seems to lean into a looser, more expressive arrangement of his characteristic elements. In all four works, Lichtenstein brought high art into conversation with the visual language of advertising and popular culture that he co-opted and codified, reflecting both a reverence for and a critique of the art-historical canon. 

Gerhard Richter and KP Brehmer

Giampaolo Bianconi

Artists in postwar Germany developed their work in an occupied and divided country still reckoning with the destruction of World War II. Born in Dresden, Gerhard Richter escaped to West Germany as a young man and went on to build a long and complex career that probed photographs, memory, and the ways history is pictured. Four of Richter’s paintings are included in the Edlis/Neeson Collection, anchoring this story in the Art Institute’s holdings.

Richter’s contemporary KP Brehmer shared key formative experiences with him: both studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the early 1960s and were, at different moments, associated with “Capitalist Realism,” a label applied to a small group of German artists whose work responded to American Pop. While Pop in the United States could sometimes appear to revel in consumer culture and postwar abundance, artists in West Germany—living much closer to the ideological fault line of the Cold War—tended to approach similar imagery with skepticism, irony, and a sense of unease.

Brehmer’s Color Geography No. 4 (Farbengeographie Nr. 4), acquired through the support of the Society for Contemporary Art, encapsulates this attitude. Based on a National Socialist–era map of Italy divided by hair color, the painting uses bold, simplified graphics to expose the pseudoscientific absurdity and lingering violence of such classifications.

Richter, by contrast, often blurs his photographic sources, as in Hunting Party (Jagdgesellschaft), where figures and dogs dissolve into a haze. Together, Brehmer’s sharp graphic parody and Richter’s atmospheric muddling reveal two closely linked yet distinct strategies for confronting the persistence of the past in the present.

Cy Twombly

James Rondeau

The Edlis/Neeson gift included two pivotal works from postwar artist Cy Twombly’s artistic career: the 1953 Untitled, New York—an epic yet seemingly modest, weathered assemblage of wooden fragments bound by cloth, and Untitled (Bolsena), a painting comprising diagrammatic marks and sweeping gestures suggesting the passage of time and an incremental evolutionary process that echoes the material layering and spatial tension of his sculptural work.

Twombly’s lifelong dialogue between ancient vocabularies and places, memory, and modern forms finds full expression in his celebrated series of painted and whitewashed sculptures, including recent gifts to the museum Untitled, Lexington; the 1955 Untitled, New York; and Untitled, Bassano in Teverina. I understand these works to be a marriage of the whitewashed buildings and spaces of the ancient Mediterranean and common materials he salvaged and repurposed in his art. As with Untitled (Bolsena), Twombly inscribed language elements into these sculptures by scratching the upper layers, revealing contrasting passages of underpainting.

Sculptures by Cy Twombly

While the Edlis/Neeson gifts illuminate Twombly’s unity of vision across media—his sensitivity to surface, his embrace of imperfection—they also form a vital bridge to the artist’s broader sculptural corpus at the Art Institute. Collectively, these works affirm a career devoted to transforming the humble and ephemeral into objects of enduring mystery and enigmatic beauty.

Robert Rauschenberg and Japan’s Gutai Painters

Giampaolo Bianconi

Robert Rauschenberg’s work brings the outside world into the space of painting. With 1955’s Untitled, part of the Edlis/Neeson Collection and one of the artist’s most important early works, he combined painting with found objects, images from the media, and drawings—all on the surface of the canvas. This work notably includes a sock and a small parachute.

Rauschenberg was also deeply engaged with dance and performance, which he actively practiced in the 1960s, and he collaborated extensively with choreographers, dancers, and musicians. Thinking choreographically—about bodies moving in space, timing, rhythm, and chance—he approached painting as a staged encounter between artist, materials, and viewer. Around the same time, artists in Japan associated with the Gutai Art Association were also reimagining painting as action and event, using their own bodies, unconventional supports, and unpredictable processes to push beyond the limits of conventional brushwork.

In the years since receiving the Edlis/Neeson gift, we have dramatically enhanced our holdings of works by Japanese artists associated with the Gutai Art Association, including Shozo Shimamoto, Shiraga Kazuo, Atsuko Tanaka, Fujiko Shiraga, and Saburo Murakami. Like Rauschenberg, these artists interpreted Abstract Expressionism as a kind of performance that liberated them to push the limits of painting. (For Shiraga Kazuo, this famously included painting with his feet). Though emerging from a distinct cultural tradition, they likewise experimented with new materials, assemblage, radical performances, and experimental painting.

Looking to the Future

James Rondeau

In the nearly ten years that I’ve been director, the 42 works of the Edlis/Neeson Collection have become a part of our institutional DNA. This group of works not only continues to inform our approach to the growth and development of the museum’s modern and contemporary collection but has a generative effect that can be seen across all 11 of our curatorial departments.

While we’ve selected just a few works to highlight in this article, you could pick any one of these objects and draw a thread line to new acquisitions that allow us to see a broader view of the story of art history across the globe—whether that’s a fresh view of a contemporary American painting, an 18th-century French ceramic, or an ancient Greek figure. We are so fortunate to have been given such a foundational and forward-looking gift, one that continues to expand possibilities for our collection and visitors’ experiences alike.

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