Caillebotte Is the Anchor Tenant
September 2022
(Reading Time: 3 min)
(Reading Time: 3 min)
On the second floor of the Art Institute of Chicago, after trekking up the Woman’s Board Grand Staircase, the first piece of artwork that came into our focal point was Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day. The painting was utterly conspicuous, even though we were seeing it through the tinted curtain wall, which marks the entrance to the Pritzker Galleries. The artwork was hung on a painted gypsum wall that was positioned in the middle of the gallery like an island with crown and base molding. It is indisputable that Caillebotte’s painting is the star of the show.
We found ourselves stopping in front of this painting, partly because we couldn’t seem to locate where to go next. That is, until we followed the crowd and discovered a tunnel passage right behind the drywall island. At the end of the tunnel, we spotted another wall hanging Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. This time, however, rather than an island of drywall, the wall implied the end of the visiting axis. Seurat’s post-impressionist painting occupied the largest wall real estate in the gallery and was also centrally placed. We were then faced with the option of two openings on both sides of the painting to embark onto the next gallery.
As we continue to traverse through the series of galleries, another large canvas emerges into our sightline—O’Keefe’s Sky above Clouds IV. This painting was hung on the wall on top of a grand staircase, which leads to the lower level. It was clear that this was the end of the axial visiting route for the second floor.
This visit sequence somehow conjures the nature of American retail spaces, specifically, colossal suburban malls. First, both the Art Institute and malls are air-conditioned. During the summer, the air conditioning alone might be sufficient for tourists to Chicago to visit the Art Institute and for suburban families to spend the entire Sunday afternoon in a mall. In the 1950s, Victor Gruen’s meticulously crafted interior storefronts and the implementation of anchor stores in malls proved to be commercially successful. The exterior facades of the malls did not matter, but it was the interior that Gruen heeded, designed, and planned with a single goal in mind—to trap people in the interior. It was both for profit and to offer a walkable shopping and social experience. In the Art Institute, we can see that Gruen’s interior retail planning was clearly instilled when it comes to placing artworks.
If all the smaller and lesser-known artworks on the second-floor galleries were small tenants in the “boulevards” of a mall, Caillebotte, Seurat, and O’Keefe would naturally be Macy’s, JCPenney, and Nordstrom. Both the well-known paintings and the anchor stores call for increasing foot traffic and mark spatial transitions. Caillebotte blocks the sightline of gallery movement and encourages viewers of art to wander more in the gallery before moving on to the next. Seurat induces visitors to pause and forces them to decide on an opening to enter to continue with their visit. O’Keefe occupies the whole gallery, which houses the pivotal moment of vertical and spatial transition. Anchor stores such as Macy’s, JCPenney, and Nordstrom usually sit at the end of linear or multi-linear malls and occupy more than one story. They mark spatial transitions and alter mallgoers’ travel paths.
Even though anchor stores occupy more space than small tenants, the rent per square foot for tenants like Macy’s is usually much lower than, say, Banana Republic. In other words, the real estate value of Banana Republic is much higher than that of Macy’s. If it is correct that specific paintings by Caillebotte, Seurat, and O’Keefe are anchor stores, then does this mean the less-known artworks around them have higher values in the Art Institute?
Perhaps the less-popular artworks do possess higher values than the famed paintings by more notable artists, thanks to the retail planning logic of the Art Institute. Without the retail-logic orchestration and positioning of Caillebotte, Seurat, and O’Keefe, tourists might not even stop and admire the vast collection of art. Without the forced moments of pausing and stopping for smaller paintings, we might just feel like the viewing experience was not worth the admission ticket.