Member Conversation: The Paintings of Bruce Goff—Material Worlds

Why It Matters

By spotlighting Goff’s overlooked paintings, the exhibition expands the narrative of American modernism and demonstrates how interdisciplinary practice can deepen audience engagement with museum collections.

Key Takeaways

• Bruce Goff’s paintings receive first major exhibition in 30 years.
• Over 500 paintings parallel his 500‑plus architectural projects.
• Early watercolors show cubist, expressionist, and Asian influences.
• Conservators restored a wedding‑gift painting, revealing Goff’s material techniques.
• Collaboration with artists like Iannelli and Hrdy expanded his visual language.

Summary

The Art Institute of Chicago unveiled "Bruce Goff: Material Worlds," the first comprehensive survey of the architect‑designer’s painting oeuvre in more than three decades. Curated by Craig Lee and Alison Fisher, the show draws from the institute’s extensive Goff archive and recent acquisitions, offering members an exclusive look at over 200 objects, including watercolors, silk paintings, and archival drawings.

Goff, better known for his avant‑garde architecture, was equally prolific on canvas, producing roughly five hundred paintings alongside a comparable number of architectural projects. Early works reveal his engagement with cubism, expressionism, and Asian motifs, a visual vocabulary nurtured by childhood exposure to his great‑grandmother’s watercolors and high‑school art clubs. Researchers combed through more than 200 linear feet of archival material to map this evolution, despite many pieces being untitled, undated, and unsigned.

A highlight of the exhibition is a wedding‑gift watercolor restored by conservator Kelly Keegan, whose analysis uncovered Goff’s heavy dilution technique and fingerprint marks. The narrative also traces pivotal collaborations: Alfonso Iannelli’s 1927 Chicago exhibition of Goff’s watercolors and Olinka Hrdy’s murals for the Patti Adams Shriner House, both of which broadened Goff’s scale and media. Newly discovered works, such as a silk painting of Turner Falls, underscore the ongoing research that continues to reshape his artistic legacy.

The show reframes Goff as a multidisciplinary creator whose painting practice informed his architectural imagination. For museum patrons and scholars, the exhibition not only enriches understanding of mid‑century modernism but also illustrates the value of cross‑disciplinary exploration in contemporary cultural institutions.

Original Description

Though he is best remembered as an architect, Bruce Goff was also a painter. He made more than 500 works, rivalling the number of architectural projects that he designed over his six-decade career.

The exhibition "Bruce Goff: Material Worlds" showcases many of Goff's experimental paintings and, thanks to new research and technical analysis, reveals how he played with new materials, methods of paint application, and ideas of abstraction and modern creative expression.

This video features exhibition co-curator Craig Lee and paintings conservator Kelly Keegan discussing this little-known side of Goff’s unbounded creative practice.