Chicago - The Art Institute of Chicago

http://www.artic.edu/

In any art museum there are familiar names. With the Art Institute of Chicago is that it's not just that the names are familiar, but the paintings are familiar. These are the works that are used in encyclopedias, and in articles about the artist, and on the covers of paperbacks of classic novels. That is an amazing feeling.

Even when they did not have the best works, there was something. There are better places to go for Goya or O' Keefe, but there is still something here, and there is Miro and Calder and Grandma Moses. We spent most of our time in Impressionism and Renaissance, but there was just so much of everything. In that way it was similar to the Field Museum, where it seemed to keep growing as you explored. 

We did not see everything. We saw a lot, but it is huge. Also, there were some navigation issues, which I will get to more at the end. The point I am making now is that you really can't cover the whole thing, so I just picked various photos (none high quality, sorry) that stood out to me because of things that I felt. This is not even every story of an emotional reaction or hint of recognition that I had, but it is my attempt to make something vast personal.

Head of Medusa by Antonio Canova: This is silly, but we were there in October, so I had just changed my Twitter name to Gorgon Harris, and here was a gorgon. I thought about changing my AVI to a photo of the bust, but did not end up doing so. Part of what strikes me is how close the snakes are to hair. She could be so close to being an ordinary woman if you only caught a glimpse.

Self portrait of Vincent Van Gogh: One thing you hear a lot about famous artwork is that when people see it in person they are surprised by how small it is. This was surprisingly small, yet I think that lent it an intimacy, where I was really struck by Van Gogh's fragility and vulnerability, and it humanized him.

We got to Monet, and I saw pictures of water lilies, of course, because that is what you expect, and I remembered the Monet at the Portland Art Museum, which is a haystack, and so may not seem that memorable, but suddenly I saw four paintings of hay stacks (specifically, they were stacks of wheat) in a row, and this light went on, that was something he did. It's not an anomaly, where we got the painting that no one else wanted. This was something he did.

The Ancestors of Tehamana, by Paul Gauguin: This is one I have seen in magazines, so there was that thrill of familiarity. It was less so, because I have never really liked Gauguin, but seeing many portraits together that covered multiple time periods, I could see the evolution of his art style, and I could appreciate that.

American Gothic, by Grant Wood: This is one of the paintings that you have to see, and this was where I finally got it all sorted out. I think it is normal for people to assume that it is a couple, but I was always told that it was the dentist and his sister. However, "his" in this case does not mean the dentist, but the artist. So it is Grant Wood's dentist playing a farmer, and Grant Wood's sister playing the farmer's spinster daughter.

It occurred to me here that I was not aware of other work by Wood, but reading about him here, he didn't really live very long, and I think that is a big part of it. We know one painting of his, and may not even remember his name, but it is one of the most familiar images in the world.

Picture of Dorian Gray, by Ivan Albright: This was completely unexpected. I have seen the end of the movie this was created for, so I had seen the picture, and I had read a little about some of the choices they made with creating and filming the portrait, but I never thought about that picture being somewhere, and suddenly it was right in front of me. Nearby is another painting by Albright, and as it floridly conveys death, you can see that he was the right man for the job.

America Windows by Marc Chagall: Of course I had heard the name Chagall before, but I was not really familiar with his work, and I thought of him as painting on canvas. I did not know that he also did stained glass. We had seen a lot of stained glass and how it had developed the previous day, which may have caused this to resonate more. Even so, this is just a gorgeous piece, and it is large, and it is displayed perfectly to let the light through where you can really appreciate the color, and it is just beautiful.

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte by Georges Seurat: Again, this is one from the encyclopedia, and I would look through it a lot. Really, this picture is the masterpiece of pointillism, so any work that goes over different styles will show this one. There was that, but then also we remembered that this is the picture Cameron gets lost in from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I had only seen it on television, and was distracted, so I had thought it was some really abstract work. My sisters did remember, and we checked with the security guard to be sure. Watching the scene again, yes, focusing too much could be unsettling, but as a child flipping through pictures, I was always looking at the dogs and the monkey.

There were at least two field trips going through the museum, though I am not sure how the teachers would have felt about us inserting ourselves into their lines.

There was one famous painting that we did not see, Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper. It was visiting another museum. Again we asked a guard, and I could see this look on her face as we did, that she felt bad that she was going to disappoint us. It was only gone for another two weeks, but we were leaving that afternoon.

Actually, we spoke to multiple guards, and this is where we get to the navigation issue. There are many places that you cannot get to from other places, and if it is obvious that you can't, and what you need to do instead, that can be fine.  To get to American Gothic we actually had to press a handicap button in the elevator so the other side would open, and there was no way we would have gotten there on our own. There are things that the maps do not tell you.

To be fair, you can be in any section on any floor and see amazing things, which is pretty valuable. Navigation is not a reason not to go, nor is a really overpriced cafeteria. (That is a reason to make other plans for lunch, but not to skip the Institute.) And the fun and pointless trivia I will give you is that this was the only place we found in Chicago with toilet seat covers in the bathrooms. (The airport has automated plastic covers, so it does not feel like the same thing.)

Those things don't matter much, though, because it is really about the art.