The Art Institute and the Painting That Watches You Back
The Art Institute and the Painting That Watches You Back
The Art Institute of Chicago at 111 South Michigan Avenue is flanked by two bronze lions that have been guarding the entrance since 1894, and the museum behind them is one of the three or four finest in the world — a claim Chicagoans make without defensiveness because the collection makes it for them. Cézanne, Monet, Hopper, Pollock, Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte — and Grant Wood's American Gothic, which is smaller than you expect and more unsettling, the two faces staring back at you with the flat judgment of people who have been waiting for you to explain yourself since 1930.
The Impressionist galleries are the museum's crown — an entire wing of Monets and Renoirs and Caillebottes hung in rooms where the natural light from the skylights changes the paintings hour by hour, so a water lily you saw at noon is a different water lily at four. Paris Street; Rainy Day by Caillebotte fills a wall with a wet Parisian intersection so precisely rendered that you can feel the cobblestones and hear the umbrellas, and it's the painting that made me understand what "realism" means when an artist decides to make it transcendent.
The Modern Wing, designed by Renzo Piano, opens the museum to Millennium Park through a glass bridge that floats above Monroe Street, and the galleries inside are bright, spare, and arranged with the conviction that contemporary art doesn't need dark walls and dramatic lighting to be serious. The Cy Twombly room — a dedicated gallery of his scrawled, urgent canvases — is either the most brilliant or the most infuriating room in the building, depending on your tolerance for ambiguity, which is itself a kind of art test.
What visitors miss: The Thorne Miniature Rooms in the lower level — 68 tiny, meticulously furnished dollhouse-scale rooms recreating European and American interiors from the 13th to the 20th century. They were commissioned in the 1930s by a Chicago socialite, and they are absurd and exquisite and deeply strange, and the room is always nearly empty because people don't expect a world-class art museum to contain dollhouses. Their loss. The rooms are extraordinary.