Before you go on a tour of the Art Institute of Chicago, make sure you have room on your camera memory card! A visit to the museum promises to be very full and the number of photos to be record-breaking. People desperately click their cameras when they approach the massive staircase that leads to the museum: two enormous bronze lions created in 1894 by American sculptor Edward L. Hayes greet them. The emerald lions guard a beaux-arts neoclassical building built for the Columbus World’s Fair with the expectation of organizing an art collection after the event closed. In fact, the Academy of Design, founded in 1879 and called the Art Institute of Chicago since 1893, moved in here and exhibited its collection of masterpieces. Since its founding, the new art school has received nothing but rave reviews, winning awards and recognition from the beau monde.
The Art Institute of Chicago’s art collection impresses with its collection of European Impressionist masterpieces.
With the construction of the Contemporary Wing in 2009. “In 2009 the Institute added a Contemporary Wing that houses a collection of 20th and 21st century European painting and sculpture, architectural and design masterpieces, photography and contemporary art. The renovation also created an interior garden, with an open-air sculpture terrace for refreshment and views of the nearby Millennium Park.
Learn more about the exhibitions
The museum’s art collection is impressive in its number of masterpieces of European Impressionism. Several days is not enough to leisurely and meticulously explore this wealth of canvases and enjoy the intimacy of world-famous paintings. Connoisseurs and connoisseurs of Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Auguste Renoir will be delighted to watch the works, with which they are familiar in detail from the albums and pictures on the web. The canvases “Sunday afternoon on the island of Grand Jatte” by Georges Seurat, “Bedroom in Arles” and “Self-portrait” by Vincent Van Gogh, “Paris street in rainy weather” by Gustave Caibotte, Toulouse-Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge, Auguste Renoir’s Two Sisters need no special introduction.
The exhibition of contemporary art is no less comprehensive and representative. The halls of the new wing of the Modern Wing feature American and European paintings, including works by Grant Wood, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse.
In April 2015, it was announced that the museum had received the most valuable gift in art history. Collectors Edlis and Neeson presented it with a collection of pop art with the condition that it must be exhibited for 50 years.
Even if you don’t see the point in contemplating the framed rectangles painted and hung along the walls, other Art Institute exhibitions are worth checking out. For example, the exhibition “Arms and Armor”, which presents military ammunition for several centuries, arts and crafts artifacts, the famous collection of photographs or the exotic exhibition from Asia, which illustrates five thousand years of art development in China, India, Southwest Asia, the Middle East and the Near East.
“The assortment of countries and sides of the world is complemented by classics from Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt, the halls with collections of African art excite imagination and fantasy.
Children bored with walking the endless corridors should go to Kraft Educational Center, where various interactive attractions are organized. You may now have to wait for enthusiastic children to “taste” all the amusements of the center before going home.