The Art Institute Has Dollhouses Most People Never See

The Art Institute Has Dollhouses Most People Never See

111 South Michigan Avenue. Two bronze lions since 1894. One of the three or four finest museums in the world — Cézanne, Hopper, Seurat's La Grande Jatte, and Grant Wood's American Gothic which is smaller than you expect and more unsettling, those two faces staring with flat judgment since 1930.

The Impressionist wing is the crown. Monets and Caillebottes hung under skylights that change the paintings hour by hour. Paris Street; Rainy Day fills a wall with a wet intersection so precisely rendered you hear the umbrellas. The Modern Wing by Renzo Piano opens to Millennium Park through a glass bridge. The Cy Twombly room is either brilliant or infuriating depending on your tolerance for ambiguity — which is itself a kind of art test.

The Thorne Miniature Rooms in the lower level — 68 dollhouse-scale rooms recreating European and American interiors from the 13th to 20th century. Commissioned in the 1930s by a Chicago socialite. Absurd, exquisite, deeply strange, and the room is always nearly empty because people don't expect dollhouses in a world-class museum. Their loss.