Having an Art Attack

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Art Institute of Chicago

I spent today in only one Chicago sight, but it is an important one, the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Art Institute is the second largest art museum in the United States.

It is encyclopedic, with large collections of practically every art movement one can imagine.

Like any big art museum, the key to preserving sanity is being selective.

I spent most of a day there and still barely had time to see what I most wanted.



The art fest begins long before entering the museum.

It is located in Grant Park (the same park as the blues fest, see Chicago Gives me the Blues), which has a large collection of public sculpture.

The most famous after the Cloud Gate (see The Birth of The Modern City) is the Crown Fountain, by Jaume Plensa.

The Fountain consists of an open area with two pillars on either side.

The pillars are huge video screens that show people in close up blowing.

When they open their mouths, water pours out.

Kids can’t get enough.

European Modernism

The museum itself has a number of important collections.

The first, for me, was European Impressionism and Post-impressionism.

The museum has one of the larger public collections in the US.

For starters, it has nine of Claude Monet’s Haystack paintings.

Seeing them as a series, it’s much more apparent what Monet was doing painting the same haystacks over and over.

Every picture is colored differently, which for an Impressionist is the whole point; they are studies of the effects of light.

Next up is a late Water Lilies painting from 1906 that borders on abstraction; the entire picture is the surface of the water, reflections, and plants.

The collection has multiple pictures by Van Gogh, from all parts of his career.

One of them, The Bedroom, was painted less than a year before he committed suicide.

Finally, this section has a selection of work by minor impressionists I have never heard of before, such as Henri Edmond Cross.

In a small museum, they would look like pictures they picked up because they could not get any major names.

Here, they were a chance to compare different approaches to the same type of ideas.

This is one of the advantages of seeing art in a big museum.



The Institute has an extensive collection of European modern art.

The art is arranged chronologically by movement.

The collection includes A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, the most famous pointillist picture (see June 10^th) in existence.

The cubist section has Ma Jolie, an important early collage painting by Pablo Picasso.

Fauvist pictures include Bathers by a River, a dark and foreboding canvas by Henri Matisse.

Very different to his usually colorful work, it was painted in the middle of World War I.

The largest section was dedicated to Dada and surrealist works.

Many of them came from a single collector, and were displayed in a room named for them.

I got the impression the arrangement was as much to showcase their taste as to display the actual work.

American Art

The Art Institute has an entire wing of American Art between the Civil War and World War II.

Most museums have at most two pictures by John Singer Sargent, one of the most famous artists of the era.

The Institute has seven.

Two of them are his renowned portraits, along with still lifes and landscapes.

The latter show a side of his art that most people don’t know about.

The museum has an entire room dedicated to Winslow Homer.

Two rooms are dedicated to the Prairie School, which was based in Chicago.

The movement is most famous for its architecture (Frank Lloyd Wright was part of it) but it also encompassed decorative arts and painting.

All of it is relatively spare and highly geometric.





The museum owns two of the most famous and parodied (WARNING: parts of link may be offensive) paintings of the American Scene movement.

In the 1920s this movement emphasized paintings of realistic scenes of American life, many on rural themes.

The first painting is Grant Wood’s American Gothic.

It shows a farmer and his daughter standing stoically in front of their house.

I have seen this painting so many times in reproduction that the real thing initially looked like just another print.

The other painting is Nighthawks by Edward Hopper.

This painting depicts three customers at a late night diner in New York City, all lost in their own thoughts.

I find it highly appropriate that both are located in Chicago, the ultimate prairie metropolis.





The Art Institute also has two of the most important pieces of decorative arts in Chicago.

Louis Sullivan (see yesterday) designed a building for the Chicago Stock Exchange in the middle 1870s.

It was renowned for its trading floor, a large room with intricate geometric patterns painted on the walls.

The room looks a bit like a Moorish temple, and its influence on the later work of Frank Lloyd Wright (who started his career working for Sullivan) is obvious.

The building was scheduled for demolition in 1977, despite the work of preservationists.

They did convince the land owner to save the trading floor and donate it to the Institute, where it has been ever since.





The other item is a set of glass mosaic windows, the American Windows by Marc Chagall.

He created them specifically for the museum to celebrate the Bicentennial of the United States in 1977.

They are one of the last major works he completed before his death.

The windows are a highly symbolic meditation on the meaning of the United States in the world.

They have his distinct style, a cross between symbolism and surrealism.

Post-War Art

The last important collection I saw was work after 1960.

The work is arranged by movement.

For some reason, the museum has very few abstract expressionist canvases.

Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes make an appearance, along with one of his electric chair paintings.

Roy Lichtenstein has a painting of enlarged paint splotches, one of a series of works he did in the mid 1960s poking fun at the conventions of high art.

The museum has several minimalist works, including one of the infamous piles of metal plates by Carl Andre.

One room holds works that are made mostly of words, such as the prints Barbara Kruger did in the early 1980s.

Some of the work felt really meaningful; the rest were the sort of thing only an art theoretician really appreciates.

The final rooms held contemporary work, such as Hinoki by Charles Ray, a precisely carved wooden replica of a rotting log.

Touch Room

The final exhibit I saw is unique among art museums, as far as I know.

Art has historically been a highly visual medium.

Every museum has signs everywhere warning people not to touch things, because oils from people’s hands will degrade the work.

For people with visual impairments, this is a rather large problem.

The Art Institute’s solution is the Touch Room.

It contains six sculptures that have been specially treated so people can feel them with their hands.

People with sight are encouraged to close their eyes first.

I’ve used touch to navigate dark rooms before, but using it to explore artwork was a new experience.

It felt a lot like the blind men describing the elephant, where the different parts need to be integrated mentally to get the whole picture.





The Art Institute was exhausting, but I really enjoyed the visit.

The primary reason was the size.

This museum is big enough that it can be comprehensive and still collect work in depth.

I saw as much work in one day as two or three different museum visits in Ohio (see I Want to Rock Right Now, The History of a Misguided Intention, and Big Architecture in a Small City).

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Photos

Crown Fountain
The Crown Fountain in Grant Park, with water blowing