Review: “Strange Realities, The Symbolist Imagination” at Chicago AIC

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

I was in the room at Sotheby’s in 2012 when a version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) sold for $119.9 million, including the buyer’s premium. This was the most anyone had paid for a work at auction at the time and what I remember the most is the hullabaloo: all my fellow writers leaving the press corral to phone in a story like we were radio reporters, yelling to our editors over wild applause. In retrospect it is this clapping that dominates the memory. Who was its intended recipient? The buyer Leon Black? The giant pile of money itself? They couldn’t be celebrating the work, because it hadn’t done anything but sit on a rotating wall, in quiet pastel.

The Scream was an odd choice for the most expensive artwork in the world because it is so weird and delicate. A version of it appears in “Strange Realities: The Symbolist Imagination,” a new show at the Art Institute of Chicago that surveys the mysterious movement of the late 19th Century known as Symbolism across more than 80 works on paper from the museum’s prints and drawings collection.

Symbolism swept the colder parts of Europe and can be considered a response to Impressionism’s fascination with the visible world. Symbolists explored the psychological and fantastic across visuals and literature like Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884) in which the protagonist orders a live tortoise to be encrusted with jewels so that it will better harmonize with his Oriental carpet. It dies.

The works on paper at the Art Institute are only a little less fabulous than this. The Scream only appears as a black and white lithograph, but quite similar to it, in color, is Gustaf Fjæstad’s Moonlight, Örebro (1897). In this, a woman looks out on a lake under moonlight, leaning against a chain as the ripples undulate in her direction. The swirls feel like an alien presence and across the way a house seems to watch with two blazing lanterns.

Odilon Redon offers a host of works, two of them wild. Sita (c. 1893) is drawn from the Hindu epic Ramayana and sees the protagonist surrounded by “a golden-green radiance… stardust falling, a shower of gold” to use the artist’s own words. She appears to glow in an amulet, removed from the world, touching on the movement’s interest in myth and magic. Flower Clouds (c. 1903) shows an evolution in large format as two sailors watch an otherworldly sunset that does seem to bloom with emotion.

Contrast that with the inward energy of Franz von Stuck’s Lucifer (c. 1890) a monochrome etching on chine collé. The fallen angel’s wings are at a thoughtful angle as he broods with slitted eyes at the viewer. I’m struck by how realistic the feathers are, bunched under his seat. It captures his discomfort and indignity, though everything else about the image reminds us that his power is still intact. He’s the original problematic fave.

“Strange Realities: The Symbolist Imagination” is at the Art Institute of Chicago through January 5, 2026.

More exhibition reviews