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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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When I went to Chicago, the Chicago Art Museum was a revelation to me. At the Chicago Art Museum as far back as then there were examples of what we now know as impressionist painting. Cubism hadn't come in. We never saw cubism until the Armory Show. At least I never did, and I hadn't seen it in Paris. I suppose it might have been in the back alloys, but it wasn't being talked about. In the Chicago Art Museum among the permanent collections there was a Frederick Carl Frieseke, for instance. He was an American painter who painted in Paris. He was in the Barbizon School. There was Cecilia Beaux and Mary Cassatt. There were examples of their paintings in the Chicago Art Institute on the lake front. I haunted that place. I was there a great deal. Whereas their collection then was meager compared with today, they did have quite a lot of what was then very modern. I'm not very positive, but I think I saw a Camille Pissaro there and I think I saw a Georges Seurat. I certainly had seen something of the pointillism school at Chicago in the Chicago Art Institute. Always when you went in to see it, people would say, “Oh, don't go into that art gallery. It's full of that dreadful stuff. Over here are the good things they have.” The “good things” were the





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