Ellen Lanyon

Ellen Lanyon (December 21, 1926 – October 7, 2013) was a painter and printmaker from Chicago, Illinois. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), her MFA from the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History and studied restoration at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She also received an honorary doctorate from SAIC. As a child, she visited the "Midget Village" at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933, a rather surreal experience that had a strong impression on her as an artist. She attended Hyde Park High School while holding a part-time job as an artist in the foundry where her father worked, drawing machine parts. She credits her careful rendering of line to this experience.

In 1944, Lanyon was invited to a work-study program at the Ox-Bow School of Art. It was her experience there, including her work at the Museum for Contemporary Arts and the Department of Prints and Drawings – which inspired her to pursue painting and printmaking. Earlier that year, the Art Institute had restricted students from entering the juried exhibition. In response, Lanyon joined with other students to recruit New York artists and curators to jury the Momentum. Three years later, the Art Institute opened its exhibition to students again. Her first paintings were of cityscapes. Toward the end of her life, she began depicting objects from her collection of curios, many of which were inherited from relatives, such as a tobacco jar which once belonged to her grandfather. The jar, which is shaped like a toad wearing a red waistcoat, appears in several of her works.

Lanyon's art has been characterized as Surrealist or Magical Realist, and she sometimes used the term "dreamscapes" to describe it. Her fantastical compositions often feature animal, vegetal, and floral motifs. Later works frequently depict everyday objects imbued with both domestic and menacing overtones and have been compared to the metaphysical art of the 1910s and ‘20s. Her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Museum of American Art; the National Museum of Women in the Arts; the Walker Art Center; the Milwaukee Museum of Art; the Spencer Museum of Art; and the Wadsworth Atheneum, among others. Lanyon has also taught art at several institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cooper Union and the School of Visual Arts. She also painted the 28-panel historical mural along Chicago's lakefront Riverwalk Gateway.