Carl Street Studios - Sol Kogen & Edgar Miller

Sol Kogen & Edgar Miller

Shortly after World War I, a clique of enterprising and innovative artists enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Two such art students, Sol Kogen and Edgar Miller, met at the school and became friends and leaders of an avant-garde group of art students. Sol Kogen’s parents were reasonably prosperous merchants from Chicago. A bon vivant throughout his lifetime, Sol entered the family business shortly after his experience at the Art Institute, and did well enough to “retire” from the business in the mid-1920s, travel to Europe for a number of years and pursue more independent and artistic endeavors.

In about 1927, Sol Kogen, having spent some years in Paris, and in particular the artistic Montmarte neighborhood of that city, conceived of a plan to develop an artist studio in Chicago where independent-leaning Midwestern artists could pursue, somewhat belatedly, the “moderne” artistic trends that developed in France, Germany, and Italy during the 1910s and imported to the United States starting with the famous New York Armory Show of 1913. Sol Kogen sought an environment in which modern art could be encouraged and flourish in Chicago.

To assist him in this enterprise, Kogen called upon his former fellow student and friend, Edgar Miller, whose earliest work at the School of the Art Institute showed a clear inclination toward modernism, and who won the Institute’s prestigious Logan medal for his innovative work on a stained glass panel that is still displayed in the Art Institute’s permanent collection. While little known today, Edgar Miller was one of the most well-known Chicago artists of his time and contributed mightily to the Chicago community’s modern art movement of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Initially, Miller opened a small art gallery on Pearson Street, quaintly referred to as the “House at the End of the Street,” where he exhibited his own diverse opus of work, as well as the work of other modern artists, including Lionel Feininger, Rudolph Weisenborn, John Storrs, and John W. Norton.

Edgar Miller’s artistic venue was as diverse as any artists’ in the world. He excelled at oil painting, watercolor, pastels, mural painting, plaster relief, sculpture, iron, steel and copper work, ceramics, textiles, mosaics, printmaking, wood carving, and stained glass. During his most productive period, Edgar was contracted to create extensive murals for the Tavern and Standard Clubs in Chicago, stained glass, sculpture and relief work for many commercial, government, educational and religious buildings throughout the Chicago area, New York and in other cities, and design work for restaurants and individual residences.