Visiting the Art Institute of Chicago

Last weekend YaYa and I had the unique opportunity to visit the Art Institute of Chicago.  Here’s the deal.  I love art museums.  Both times I had the opportunity to visit the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., I spent nearly the entire day wondering around the National Gallery of Art.  Seeing famous art up close and in person, completely changes your perspective about masterworks.

I had been wanting to visit the Art Institute of Chicago for a long time, and I knew that YaYa would love it too.  We rode the public transportation train from our hotel to downtown Chicago, and that in and of itself was an adventure!  We actually did a great job navigating the system, which was fortunately very straightforward for where we needed to go.  We got to the Art Institute just as it was opening, and we stayed until it was almost closing time.

I knew the museum held many famous impressionistic pieces, and by chance, that is where we ended up starting.  I love impressionistic art, and I especially love it in person because you get to see all the intricacies of color, all the brush strokes that look so different up close versus standing across the room.  Impressionistic artists could make anything beautiful:  train stations, bridges, haystacks, people, ponds, even carcasses of meat hanging in a butcher shop.  There were so many super famous pieces of art that we got to see in person.  I was swooning.

I also love medieval art, and there was a section of the museum devoted to that, as well as a wing of medieval armor that Mr. SP would have loved to see in person.  I enjoyed the American art section, and even lunch was great!  The food was tasty, and eating in the museum cafe, as YaYa noted,  was an artistic and aesthetically pleasing endeavor all on it’s own.

I knew nothing about the Thorne Miniature room section, which took our breath away, and I loved that there was a paperweight collection.  We loved the depth and unique color variations in the Chagall windows.

But the biggest surprise of the day for me was how much I enjoyed the modern wing.  I thought at the beginning of the day that we might just skip that part of the museum entirely if we ran out of time.  But we did not run out of time, so we wondered over there, and it was a lot of fun!  When I think of modern art, I think it will be strange and weird.  But I should have known better!  A lot of it is strange and weird, but I like strange and weird!  Seeing the super famous pieces of art that were in the museum in person was completely different than looking at them in a textbook!  They had so much texture and so much richness to them in person.  There was no question about why they were so famous when you were actually standing in front of them.

I grew up in a family of artists.  My great grandmother painted.  My great aunt painted.  My grandmother painted.  My grandmother loved to paint abstract art, and so did my great grandmother, although she only allowed herself to paint strange stuff for her own personal enjoyment after she had painted the other kind of art that people in the community liked looking at. My grandmother was an out of the box person, and she painted whatever she wanted whenever she wanted.  She would have LOVED seeing the modern art wing and all of its absurdity in person.  I loved looking at the art and making up my own stories about it, which is what I always loved to do with my grandma’s paintings too.  To me that is the best part of good art:  getting to imagine the stories behind it.

It was so interesting, because YaYa and I had somewhat similar tastes of what we liked in most of the other parts of the institute, but in the modern wing we ended up liking completely different pieces.  And we saw completely different things in the more abstract pieces of artwork.

My plan was to purchase a book in the museum shop, and a lot of postcards of the art that we saw, so I didn’t take very many pictures in the museum.  Unfortunately there were only a few postcards, and my very favorite pieces were not on the postcards.  I didn’t find the perfect book that had my favorites either.  If I ever go back (which I hope will happen someday) I will definitely be taking a lot more pictures as I wonder about.