Second cities are competitive hotbeds of innovation, commerce, enterprise and creativity. In the late 19th century, Chicago and Glasgow were twinned – Chicago as the Second City of the USA with Glasgow the Second City of the British Empire, and links can be seen in their architecture. In Chicago, architects such as Louis Sullivan, Burnham & Root and Frank Lloyd Wright were transforming the city while in Glasgow it was Alexander (Greek) Thomson and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Both cities were, at their height, wealthy and prosperous but have since had to deal with changing fortunes, technology and decline of their traditional industries.
Glasgow at the time was also leading with the new art of the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists in the early 20th century and the Glasgow art dealer Alexander Reid being a great advocate of the relatively new and unknown artist Vincent van Gogh.
What is relatively unknown in the UK are the activities of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago whose roots go back to 1866 and how, in post-war Chicago, the School was a hotbed of creativity, with many artists coming out of the School known collectively as the Chicago Imagists, creating new work from a variety of influences including pop art, advertising, cartoon illustrations, eastern art and American vernacular art.
Chicago has now come to the perhaps unlikely location of New Cross in London, with the first major exhibition of the Chicago Imagists in the UK for 40 years, at the Centre for Contemporary Art at Goldsmith’s in collaboration with Hayward Gallery Touring and the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, with many loans from collections in the US – plus a major work from the National Galleries of Scotland!