THE WINDY CITY POLISHES ITS SCENE

CHICAGO — Burly city. Grips the shores of Lake Michigan like a suave weight-lifter pumping pig iron. Out on the water white sails scud, graceful as linen handkerchiefs. On land granite buildings parade like drum majors in gray tunics lined with brass buttons.

Up Michigan Avenue, down State Street, into the suburbs, a pop-up encyclopedia of modern architecture: Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Major Jenny, Holabird and Roche, Mies van der Rohe. Helmut Jahn’s new State of Illinois Center curves up, a twinkling high-tech tower of Babel. They say modern architecture was really invented here after Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over the lantern than burned the town down.

People who move to Los Angeles from the Midwest have a standard story about kid-visits to Chicago. Grandmother took them to the Art Institute and that was how they learned to love art. People who come to Los Angeles from somewhere else allow as how Chicago seemed like an interesting place once when they missed their connecting flight at O’Hare and had to stay overnight. Like to go back some time. Met a smart blond from Detroit in the bar at the Palmer House. She’d never been to New York. For her this is still The Big Town.

We tend to forget about Chicago. Used to be the undisputed Second Greatest City in the United States but then Los Angeles got bigger and Manhattan cranked up its panache to candlepower that must glitter all the way to Mars. Chicago doesn’t seem to mind. It has a kind of square-shouldered stubbornness trudging to the tune of two-beat jazz. The reigning sensibility is a vinegary combination of be-bop American black and transplanted om-pah German that have to have added up to some form of Expressionism, gritty and sophisticated, dedicated guardian of myth.

The Loop, the legendary old downtown, looks a little dog-eared but the icons are still in place, Marshall Field, Carson Pirie Scott. The garish marquee of the Chicago Theater has the lettering right. The name should never be written except in fat capitals, CHICAGO. Billie Holiday’s voice hangs around the lobby. The El still defines the Loop, clattering around on bolted green girders. If an automobile comes fast around a corner at night the visitor has a laugh on himself for wanting to duck the invisible gangster machine-gun poking out the window.

A lot of folklore is backed up here and you can see the layered decades like a geological map from the great fire to the Democratic Convention riots in ’68. Sometime after that we started forgetting about Chicago and Daley Center and the city’s monster Picasso sculpture.

Meantime the town toddled to its own drum, sprouting a remarkable art scene. A large art expo attracts attention and buyers, but the most official symbol of this renaissance is the expansion and remodeling of the Art Institute of Chicago. A big, new three-story building behind the old neoclassical pile on Michigan Avenue will open in ’88 featuring cavernous galleries for special exhibitions. Significant omen.

It whispers plans for the kinds of special changing shows that pull people from out of town. The last Institute show a California critic felt unconditionally obliged to visit was a superb Toulouse-Lautrec retrospective. That was in 1979. (As he checked into his hotel, the American Embassy in Tehran was besieged.)

It will not be another eight years until we are tempted back. As a harbinger on Dec. 1, the Art Institute will open the first American retrospective of the painting of Anselm Kiefer, the only German artist of the Neo-Expressionist generation generally regarded as possessing depth and sticking power. Artniks are salivating to see it. Luckily it will eventually come to Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art.

Last spring the AIC unveiled its restored and refurbished paintings galleries, a $6.6-million project carried out by New York’s Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. The Beaux-Arts building actually looks more traditional than ever. Local architect John Vinci got busy restoring the lobby and grand staircase to something like its original 1893 glory with handsome decorative detailing that suits Post-Mod taste. He also installed an elegant, melancholy show in the loggia. Called “Fragments of Chicago’s Past,” it includes architectural details from vanished masterpieces like Adler and Sullivan’s Stock Exchange.

Some 30 remodeled galleries tend to be white and sky-lit, blending the purist plaster-cast leanings shared by modern and neoclassical schools. Architects and curators made two crucial changes. Old period-style galleries were neutralized and the collections were re-hung to emphasize artistic quality rather than historical completeness. The Institute can afford to do this. El Greco’s “Assumption of the Virgin” does not need a lot of extras hanging around holding spears. Neither does Tiepolo’s airy, breathtaking “Rinaldo and Armida” cycle.

Yet the installation is not without such insightful juxtapositions as in the gallery where Romantic fantasy and violence are dramatized by the unexpected combination of Turner, Fuseli and Goya.

The AIC’s European collection picks up strength like a rolling snowball. Anyplace that peaks with Seurat’s serene “Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte” or Toulouse-Lautrec’s seething “At the Moulin Rouge” might very well convince the world that the greatest thing that ever happened to art was French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting.

In fact, one suspects the Institute of having made them the world’s most beloved styles, with their ability to serve up literal galleries full of Manets, Monets, Reniors and Degas. They even have offbeat, recently upgraded sleepers like Gustave Caillebotte’s “Paris, A Rainy Day,” Adolph Bougereau’s erotic camp “The Bathers” and Gustave Moreau’s pungently decadent “Hercules and Hydra.”

Seeing them all again, looking so handsome, is a delight if not a surprise.

Experienced adults grow grateful for forgetfulness. At a certain age one would never have a new experience if one didn’t forget one had already had it. Take the AIC’s Modern, American and Contemporary collections. At the moment, they look a little crowded into galleries in the European section because they belong in the unfinished new wing. But that is all right Jack because they are unforgettable, unless one happens to have not remembered them.

Forget that Matisse’s radical “The Bathers by a River” or Balthus’ “Patience” are here? Fail to recall the home of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks?” Require reminding that one finds a bewitching cache of some 50 Joseph Cornell boxes in this praiseworthy place? Maybe they were out on loan last time, along with one’s brain.

Never mind. There is a museum in Chicago that is unforgettable because last time it wasn’t here to remember. It is the new Terra Museum of American Art that opened in April at 664 N. Michigan Ave. on the so called “Magnificent Mile,” a glossy strip that is as close as Chicago comes to Beverly Hills, which is thank goodness not very.

The museum was established by Daniel J. Terra, who bears the title U.S. Ambassador at Large for Cultural Affairs and owns a recent collection of some 800 older American paintings he decided to make into a museum. That is not much of a collection these days. Critical reports have not been kind, but a visit seemed obligatory anyway. Part of the Chicago renaissance. Part of an international trend to making private museums such as London’s Saatchi, Houston’s Menil or Los Angeles’ unbuilt Weisman.

As it turned out, one left the Terra Museum almost as undecided as one arrived. Right away it is clear that this is a funny museum. It is stacked into a renovated office building entered by elevatoring to the top and walking down. That imparts a weird feeling compounded by the architecture. It is all handsome white and Steamship-Mod pipe railings, but the space is so chopped up you never actually feel inside a gallery. It’s like art is something to look at while waiting for the lift.

Good. There is a nice definite ding to write the folks back home. Whoops. What’s that? You say the museum bought the building in the back and is about to start expanding already? No sense launching into a tirade about the architecture if they’re going to fix it.

Maybe a few unkind words about the collection.

Easier done than said when it’s not there. It turns out the Terra Museum devotes part of its space to changing exhibitions, which is all its space in its current condition. Constant expansion is a great way to thwart criticism. “Don’t be such a kvetch. Wait till we’re finished.”

Two temporary shows are on view. “In Nature’s Way” (to Nov. 1) is an offbeat traditional show of about 50 late-19th-Century American landscape painters. Organized by the Norton Gallery of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla., it somehow acclimates itself to Chicago’s Expressionist sensibility. It shows our painters wandering in search of an identity.

Lila Cabot Perry went to France and painted haystacks at Giverny where she was clearly standing exactly in the much larger footprints of Claude Monet. Joseph Frank Currier traveled to Germany. His 1875 “Moors at Dachau” is unnerving in hindsight. Its troubled surface seems to sense the coming of an infamous death camp and to predict Kiefer’s tragic brooding. Charles H. Davis painted a blasted tree right out of Caspar David Friedrich.

The show is about housebroken artists in quest of the romantic and visionary. A New Englander like Martin Johnson Heade was bewitched by the exoticism of a sunset in the Florida tropics but it also made him uneasy. Edward Emerson Simmons painted the night on St. Ives Bay in a pearlescent moonlight where tiny boats sailed a fantasy sea. There is so much power and anxiety bottled up here it is no wonder we eventually had to have Abstract Expressionism.

The last two decades of Chicago art is surveyed in “Surfaces” (to Nov. 14). It sets out to prove there is more to this art than its ingrained reputation for figurative raunch, kink, fetishism and satire. Well, it proves there is more variety to it. Twenty-five artists range from the pure geometric abstraction of Rodney Carswell to the woozy space of James Valerio’s micro-realism. But a cat who changes his spots is still a leopard. Carl Wirsum has adapted his comix style to high-tech punk, Ed Paschke is still hypnotized by shooting gallery violence.

Don’t get scared. If anything, “Surfaces” is a little shy about serving up a full-strength dose of the local vintage. Maybe the Terra will be all right. It feels eccentric-conservative. There is always room for that.

Now we know Chicago has museums without even mentioning its respected Museum of Contemporary Art. And they have artists. You have to have galleries. Have they got galleries? Boy.

It is one thing to say there are some 75 galleries around town, another to tramp through the remarkable district that sprouted in the industrial underbelly a few blocks from the “Magnificent Mile” in the past three or four years.

Called SooHoo for satirical reasons, it does what downtown Los Angeles tried to do and fizzled. If there is a lesson for us here, it is about concentration. Los Angeles’ downtown galleries sprinkled themselves over several industrial miles often inhospitable to walking. SooHoo crams a beehive of commercial galleries into six square blocks. There are elegant pros like Richard Feigen around, but mainly one finds warehouses converted into cavernous loft spaces showing entry-level work. Never mind if you find a sign on one reading: “Open by Appointment or by Accident,” there is plenty more to see.

The seasoned viewer can go eyeball-dead from so much mediocre art, but the place is valhalla for young artists and entrepreneurs getting started. Weary feet are rewarded with a breeze of rejuvenated energy that blows across the town.