Cather Studies, Volume 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures

9. Thea at the Art Institute

182 9 Thea at the Art Institute J U L I E O L I N - A M M E N T O R P In an important scene in The Song of the Lark, Thea Kronborg finally goes to the Art Institute of Chicago—something she has been urged to do for months. Cather not only describes Thea’s joy at her discovery of this museum but also tells readers which sculptures and paintings Thea finds particularly interesting . Although scholars have noted the importance of this episode in the novel and identified the paintings that draw Thea’s attention (Duryea), the young singer’s experience in the Art Institute merits closer analysis—an analysis not so much of the artworks themselves as of Thea’s response to them. Through this short episode (it covers less than two pages in the novel), Cather conveys a good deal about this provincial girl who is in the early, stillinarticulate stages of turning herself into a sophisticated artist. Cather implies a progression in Thea’s gradually growing understanding of beauty, with her experience in the Art Institute building on her childhood experiences in Colorado and laying the groundwork for her later insights into art in Panther Canyon. Further, reflection on the painting central to Thea’s experience in the Art Institute, Jules Breton’s The Song of the Lark, suggests that that artwork may have influenced Cather’s technique in the novel’s concluding pages, and, perhaps, her later shift from the “full-blooded method” of The Song of the Lark (Cather, “My First Novels” 96) to a sparer, more modernist style. 183 Thea at the Art Institute When Thea arrives in Chicago to study piano, she is unaware that she needs an education not only in music but in the arts in general. As her teacher Andor Harsanyi observes, she is strangely “incurious” about the opportunities Chicago offers (463). Her landlady, Mrs. Lorch, and her landlady’s daughter, Mrs. Anderson , different as they are from Harsanyi, also remark that Thea has “so little initiative about ‘visiting points of interest’” (464). When Mrs. Lorch asks Thea over dinner one evening if she has been to the Art Institute, Thea asks her if that is “the place with the big lions out in front? I saw it when I went to Montgomery Ward’s. Yes, I thought the lions were beautiful” (464). For the still-provincial Thea, the Art Institute is initially notable only for its lions and its location—on the route to the “big mail-order store” which, with Chicago’s meat-processing plants (464), are the two “points of interest” that most intrigue the Colorado native . As part of her effort to be sociable “without committing herself to anything” (464), Thea “reassure[s]” Mrs. Lorch and Mrs. Anderson that she will go to the Art Institute “some day” (465). When Thea does finally take herself there one “bleak day in February” (465), the museum is a revelation to her; she leaves it chastising herself for not having gone sooner and promising herself that she will return regularly. This is a pledge she keeps; Cather implies that Thea develops a regular pattern at the Institute , always visiting certain artworks when she is there. With one exception, Cather is quite specific about the works to which Thea turns her attention. But despite her later remark that in this novel she “told everything about everybody” (“My First Novels ” 96), Cather leaves it largely to the reader to discern why these particular works are so important to Thea. In doing so Cather puts her readers in Thea’s position: if Thea is drawn to these works repeatedly by some quality she cannot quite define, so we, too, are drawn back to this passage to wonder exactly how each work contributes to Thea’s growth as an artist. Thea always visits the casts first, finding them both “more simple and more perplexing” than the paintings; they also seem 184 julie olin-ammentorp to her “more important, harder to overlook” (465). Cather mentions four casts (i.e., copies of famous sculptures, widely found in American museums of that era), three of which Thea examines only briefly. She almost dismisses The Dying Gladiator (or Dying Gaul) because she is already familiar with it from Byron’s “Childe Harold,” a poem she has pored over while ill in bed; for her...