It's a feeling of perfect balance, [neoplasticism], as if you suddenly have discovered the final solution, which of course is nothing but an illusion, but there is a spiritual feeling of a solution.
Ilya Bolotowsky
Beloved to family and friends, as well as the Chicago art and design community, Fern Moss Kalai—also known as Fern Simon—passed away on February 16, 2024. Yet her legacy as a passionate collector and a knowledgeable dealer lives on through the many people she touched plus the enduring influence of her longstanding retail boutique, Arts 220.
In many ways, Fern was born into her eventual vocation. Along with her twin brother, the acclaimed design expert, Murray Moss, and her late sister, Jean Moss, an award-winning Esquire portrait photographer, Fern was raised in an aesthetically focused atmosphere by her mother and father. “My parents had remarkable and prescient visual acumen,” Fern told Chicago Tribune Magazine in 2009, “and passed it on to us, so there must be a genetic component involved.” Her father was Merton Moss, an engineer who invented and manufactured X-ray machines. His “hard-core, ultra-modern industrial ideals” contrasted in a stimulating manner with the playful outlook of Fern's mother, Ann, in which the lively unruliness of art often prevailed over logical design imperatives.
If someone were to ask me did I know my twin sister Fern well, given we lived our adult lives in different cities, I would have to say I didn’t know, but I, like most everybody who knew her, suspected so, hoped so.
Certainly I knew her the longest. We grew up comfortably together in my mother’s womb and yet she was the one who left first, diving into the world headfirst, leaving me alone on March 29, 1949, for six minutes until I had to come looking for her, I’m sure inspired by a pre-natal excitement she triggered even then—as well as a curiosity and her faith that there was a world out there rich with the complimentary contradictions she so loved.
It was the first time and I believe the only time I lost her even for a moment. Until now.
But in following her for 75 years, I early on found evidence of her looking almost everywhere, in every direction, determined to find a signpost that one would find at a junction in the road, with a hundred different arrows pointing to “Modernism, German Expressionism, Brutalism, Abstraction, Giuseppe Napoli, Picasso, Maarten Baas, Portanier.”
Fern delighted in the richness of human artistry—Fern was looking for the best way to get lost, to wander further and further into unknown, or known but overlooked, ideas expressed in art and design by famous and unfamous creators.
Please understand: Fern Moss was not a Collector. She was a Guide, with an ever-blooming passion for art, a visceral connection to historic and diverse ways of thinking and to the unique ways artists expressed that thinking. Fern led the way for many of us into the human heart that she was able to unearth in art.
Ilya Bolotowsky 1907–1981
Ilya Bolotowsky was a prominent figure of American abstract painting who dedicated his artistic outputs to finding “ideal harmony and order.” He immigrated to New York from Russia in 1923 and enrolled at the National Academy of Design from 1924 to 1930 where he met Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko. He later joined "The Ten", a leading group of avant-garde artists, and became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists in 1936. Bolotowsky’s body of work centers on geometric, nonobjective forms executed in grid-like arrangements. The focal point is the relationships between primary colors created on unusually shaped canvases. His main artistic influences can be linked to Cubism, the works of Joan Miró and Kasimir Malevich, and the De Stijl principles of Piet Mondrian.
In 1935, Bolotowsky was hired by the U.S. Works Progress Administration (WPA) for several mural projects making him one of the first abstract artists to participate. His first mural project was for the Williamsburg Housing Project in Brooklyn designed by architect William Lescaze completed in 1939. After serving the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, he replaced Josef Albers’ teaching position for two tears at Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he tutored students including Kenneth Noland. In the years to come he held numerous adjunct faculty positions at institutions such as University of Wyoming, Hunter College in New York, and the University of New Mexico. During his later years he turned to filmmaking and working as a playwright.
Bolotowsky received his first solo exhibition held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1974. His work is collected by many important institutions including the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art among others.
Auction Results Ilya Bolotowsky
_1720727584.png "Fern with her husband, Ehud, at Ravinia in Highland Park, Illinois. Photo courtesy of Fern Moss Kalai via Instagram")
_1720727700.png "Fern at home. Photo courtesy of Fern Moss Kalai via Instagram")
