(jazzy piano music) - [Man] We're in The Art
Institute of Chicago, looking at a painting by Todros Geller called Strange Worlds,
but despite the title, it's a painting that is located just a few blocks from
the museum, under the L. - [Woman] And the L is not a strange world to people who live in Chicago, rather it's a part of daily
life and was for people living in Chicago in 1928 when
this painting was made. So Todros Geller uses that
backdrop as a familiar point to invite viewers into this image. - [Man] Invite is such an
interesting word, because the man who stares back at us is not
what I would call inviting. - [Woman] I think that his
facial expression looks tense, he looks worried, he looks tired. And we see the wrinkles and
even the bags under his eyes, and his face is drawn-out and elongated. - [Man] The title isn't
strange world, it's strange worlds, and there
- Yeah. - [Man] is this bifurcated quality. There's everything that's in
the foreground: the newspapers, the face of the man, the
drapes that he wears, the diagonal of the stairs
going up to the elevated tracks, and then, there's everything beyond. - [Woman] That foreground is
actually extremely compressed, and then, you're launched
into a much larger space. - [Man] The world beyond
is full of energy, full of dynamism, it reminds me of Italian Futurism
where speed and movement and modernity was so important,
verus the foreground which, although also modern,
feels much more static. - [Woman] It's dark, whereas
the background is much lighter. There are many more figures and there's also brighter colors. - [Man] Chicago was in
flux at this moment. There had been an enormous
number of immigrants from Southern and Eastern
Europe, and Geller was an immigrant from Ukraine
who fled pogroms in 1906. Went to Montreal, became
a photographer, and then, comes to Chicago and enrolls in classes at the school of The Art
Institute of Chicago. - [Woman] Eastern European
immigrants were coming to Chicago and to the United States
since the late 19th century. We also had immigration from Mexico, we had the Great Migration
happening, as well. - And by Great Migration
we're talking about large numbers of African-Americans
moving from the South to the industrial cities of the North. This was a moment when the
agricultural traditions of the United States
were being transformed, and we were becoming an
increasingly industrial culture. So when you look at this
painting, you can imagine how vividly this must
have expressed that new, industrial modernism and
how threatening that was. A foreign figure in this new city - Yes.
- with people bustling, disassociated from the land. It seems to cut across everything that people had understood as American. - [Woman] In 1924, President
Coolidge, in signing the Johnson-Reed Act, said that, "America must remain American." This quote and this act come after a wave of anti-immigration sentiment. And this, tied with fears around the rise of industrialization and
concerns about the economy, lead to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. And Geller and the Jewish
communities in the United States are living amidst
heightened anti-Semitism. And the fears about what
was happening elsewhere in the world also contribute to this. World War I and the revolutions in Russia and elsewhere lead to
concerns about influences coming into the United
States through immigration, but there was this tremendous
dynamic between different communities and cultures
happening in Chicago. And at the same time, in
the wake of World War I, we see nativism emerging
on a national scale. - [Man] Geller isn't representing his own experience directly. He came to the United
States as a young man, but we know that Geller
was part of a community that was thinking about
what Jewish identity meant as it became part of American culture. Could it remain Jewish,
and also become American? - [Woman] Experiencing
modernity and all of the changes that it brought about was
not difficult only for people who were coming from another
country and maybe didn't speak the language or didn't have
the same cultural associations. - [Man] So even people born
here were experiencing a kind of alienation that he so
beautifully represents. - [Woman] Yeah, this
isn't a portrait of any particular person, it's
someone that, presumably, many people could associate
with, whether it was themselves or someone older in their
family that had come here. He looks out at us,
potentially making a decision to turn his back on
modernity that's behind him, but at the same time, we
get to see that modernity. So we as viewers are
propositioned to think about what we might do in this situation. Would we join them,
would we stay with him, where would we want to be, and he's almost prompting the viewer to
consider this question, rather than posing a response to it. - [Man] The way in which
you posed that made me look at this painting in a different way. It's fractured Modernism, the
way in which it has elements of Futurism, of Cubism, now
makes me see that it's part of the subject matter of a
fractured society and a lack of an answer as to how these
pieces will come together. - [Woman] I think he's capturing
this moment of alienation, and it's very poignant
for him as a member of the Jewish community, but there's
something universal about the image that allows this to be
accessible to wider audience. - [Man] And for me at least, that's often what great art does: it takes
the experience of the specific and makes it universal.
- Mm-hmm. (jazzy piano music)