208: GIUSEPPE NAPOLI, Mary De Leo < Arts 220: The Vision of Fern Moss Kalai, 25 July 2024 < Auctions

Arts 220

The Vision of Fern Moss Kalai

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.

Fern Moss Kalai. Photo courtesy of her daughter, Jill Simon

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.

Fern's retail boutique, Arts 220, in Winnetka, Illinois. Photo courtesy of Fern Moss Kalai via Instagram

Trained as an art historian, Fern opened Arts 220 in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1987 and exhibited regularly over the years at Chicago’s Merchandise Mart. Given her hybrid upbringing and innate curiosity, Fern conceived of art and design in an eclectic and holistic sense. Her knowledge of modernism was practically encyclopedic, largely because she never stopped learning.

“When you look at something, are you moved by it? If you are, then you can still pursue a collection in the old fashioned way, which is to learn everything you can, read everything you can, and see everything you can.” — Fern Moss Kalai

Through partnerships with local designers, such as Eric Ceputis—who advised on decor when Fern and her husband, Ehud Kalai, moved into their condominium at Optima Old Orchard Woods in Skokie, Illinois—Fern continually sought out the expertise and views of others. “Eric has an art history degree from Yale,” Fern told Chicago Magazine in 2009. “He traveled the world working with a famous muralist. He understands building materials, space planning, and colors. I wouldn’t do it without him.” Of Fern, Ceputis remarked: “She does things that are unexpected, like mix the formal with the funny. But she unifies it all under the umbrella of modernism.”

Fern with her husband, Ehud, at Ravinia in Highland Park, Illinois. Photo courtesy of Fern Moss Kalai via Instagram

Far from being merely a dealer or a retail proprietor, Fern endeavored to make personal connections based on a shared love of art and design. Fern’s clients would often later become her good friends, such as confidant Margaret Lundquist and many others. Fern also championed and befriended various creators, including the second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Goodnough.

Fern at home with Robert Goodnough's painting, Rectangles with Red and Blue, 1965 — Fern at home with Robert Goodnough's painting, *Rectangles with Red and Blu*e, 1965. Photo courtesy of *Chicago Tribune Magazine*

There was no separation between Fern’s interest in aesthetic concerns and humanity at large. She poured her whole self into learning about artists, designers, and the works they produced, while putting sometimes surprising objects and compositions into conversation through her inimitable curatorial sensibility. This was the delight and the reward in visiting Arts 220, or simply knowing Fern. Her fluid and felicitous vision was ultimately her own, but she shared it generously with us all.

“Good works work with other good works, and when you move them, you see them in a new way and they take on totally new perspectives.” — Fern Moss Kalai

Fern at home. Photo courtesy of Fern Moss Kalai via Instagram

A Visceral Guide to Art and Design

Reflections on Fern Moss Kalai from Murray Moss

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.

Twins Fern Moss Kalai and Murray Moss, both eight years old in 1957. Photo courtesy of Fern Moss Kalai via Instagram — Twins Fern Moss Kalai and Murray Moss, both eight years old, in 1957. Photo courtesy of Fern Moss Kalai via Instagram

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.