So last time I promised you all a “beach episode,” and still made you learn stuff about medieval Japan, which was arguably kind of an abuse of the term beach episode. So this week, I thought I’d give you a real break from our current stream and do a museum entry instead!

Because last week my wife and I spent some time in Chicago, and while we did all the other touristy things—observation deck at Willis Tower (0% visibility), riverboat tour (85% humidity), cross-town Cubs/Sox game (actual decent weather!)—we also spent a (rainy) day at the Art Institute, and since I’d never been, I have feelings. So like my Met entries from a couple of years ago, I thought I’d take you all around with me and gander at what caught my eye.

This is something a little easier to do with AIC than the Met because it’s what I’d consider a mid-sized art museum. It’s bigger than CMOA—if you want to see everything, you really do have to devote the day to it—but unlike the Met, I do think it is actually possible to thoughtfully view the whole thing in a single (long) day. But let’s take a look around!

While not literally the first thing I saw, London-based Kashmiri artist Raqib Shaw’s magnum opus, Paradise Lost, was impossible to ignore—and not just because I had to crisscross the Southeast Asian annex it was in six million times getting from here to there during the day. Unfortunately pictures just can’t do justice to the sheer scope and beauty of this piece. Because of its size, Paradise Lost is often exhibited in pieces, but AIC has all four panels on loan together through mid-November, and having seen them as a whole, I can’t imagine them apart. The museum literature says that Shaw isn’t directly referencing the Milton poem, but instead rather dialoguing with it through the lens of Kashmir’s fraught political history and Shaw’s wide-ranging interest in both eastern and western art and mythology. And while nothing specifically references it, my first thought walking in on it was, “Oh, it’s like someone trying to express the Mahabharata in a single painting!” 

Aside from its jaw-dropping size and eye-catching color palette, the other thing that arrests about Shaw’s style is his use of enameling techniques that give his paintings both texture and an almost cloisonné-like appearance.

But so we don’t spend the whole entry on just one (amazing) painting, let’s see what else we can find…

As you can see, like CMOA/CMNH, AIC doesn’t have an extensive Egyptian collection, but there were some pieces of interest. One them is a relatively famous, relatively rare beaded mummy portrait covering (see below). The design over the neck is of Khepri in his scarab beetle form as an amulet symbol of rebirth and resurrection.

And speaking of mummies, as perhaps befitting an institution bigger than CMOA, but smaller than the Met, AIC is apparently staking out a middle-of-the-road position in the display of remains debate. They have only one mummy (on display), a man named Pa-ankh-en-Amun, who served in the ceremonial role of doorkeeper to a temple of Amun, and he is here, but only within his coffin and not visible to the public. You all know how I’m always hesitant to share remains on main here, but Pa-ankh-en-Amun’s coffin is a really beautiful specimen and is worth seeing, and I can understand—particularly in light of Egyptian burial beliefs—AIC’s decision that it is potentially less disrespectful to not separate Pa-ankh-en-Amun from his coffin, while trying to honor his dignity by not leaving his body visible.

Speaking of the Horus’ Fab Foursome, AIC has a really beautiful set of canopic jars as well, although this set—as is sometimes the case—uses human heads for all the jars, rather than differentiating the three gods who are not Imsety by their animal-headed iterations. Also, like most canopic jars you’ll see in a museum, these ones lost the organs preserved within them long ago, and are therefore usually not apart of the display of remains debate.

Gosh, there’s more I could go on about even in this tiny Egyptian gallery, but we gotta get out of the basement or this entry will be a billion pages long. So let’s go to the real treat of a surprise for the whole day: the extensiveness of AIC’s Greco-Roman gallery!

After the size of the Egyptian section, I had tempered my expectations, but if I really wanted to bore you all, I could probably do a whole entry just on this gallery because there was a ton of interesting stuff to see. One of the big surprises was how gorgeous their collection of kraters, kylixes, and other Greco-Italian pottery was. I like classical pottery, but I frankly found the Met’s collection overwhelming in scope, and this was much more manageable.

Okay, so AIC has a lot of vases. What else do they have? Honestly, some really high-quality marble busts and statuary.

I cleaned up a lot of my photos in this gallery to get other patrons out of my shots so you can’t see him anymore, but when I looked past Africa here, I was met by the gaze of an extremely idealized bust of a handsome man in an Egyptian nemes headdress, so it was time to play one of my favorite classical sculpture games: Augustus Or Antinous???

Melpomene is a good segue for us to use to go fight the heaviest crowds up in the Impressionism galleries, where we find her with her sisters in Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ oil painting, The Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and the Muses. Chavannes was primarily a muralist and the style of Sacred Grove is meant to evoke Roman-era wall frescoes. Those of you who are math-inclined might have noticed that there are more than nine women in this painting, and that’s because Chavannes has added personifications of the beaux plastic (in the older sense of the word, meaning molding or shaping) arts—sculpture, painting, and architecture—to the muses’ grove. They are the three seated figures at center (see the detail below), and you can see that Chavannes has differentiated them from the goddesses by their bare heads, while the muses all wear gold-leaf laurels.

And while everyone is here to see Georges Seurat’s famous pointillist masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, I was actually more intrigued by AIC’s small oil sketch (see below) that Seurat did as a test for the larger piece. It was interesting to compare and contrast the two to see how Seurat’s vision for the final composition evolved over time.

AIC also has several really nice Van Gogh pieces, including most famously The Bedroom above; their collection isn’t as large as the Met’s, but unlike the Met, they have a really nice spread of paintings from all points in the artist’s career, from his earlier, less personally-distinctive paintings to later works that really highlight his experimental approach to form and color that would ultimately lead Post-Impressionism into Modernism and Cubism.

Indeed, La Berceuse seems to specifically presage one of AIC’s other most-desired works, Picasso’s portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter in The Red Armchair. And I know it sounds super-basic to praise a painting they sell on magnets in the gift shop, but it is a truly beautiful painting to see in person. AIC is blessed to have several Picassos, but his use of color in this particular piece is the most striking. The only other one that even came close for me was the lovely painting of Sylvette David below, which is ignobly hanging next to an emergency stairwell.

The other most-crowded gallery in AIC probably belongs to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942) and Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930), but here I will buck trend and give you the two other pieces you might miss while waiting in clusters to see those:

I’m going to have to start rapid-firing through some of this as I’ve already gone on too long, but I have to give a particular shout out to another crammed-in-a-nook piece that I just loved, which is Kara Walker’s Free, Black, and Passive Aggressive. Walker used thrifted mirrors to paint a conversation about Black identity and the limits of Afrocentrism, and this was another piece that was just very striking in person.

My hottest take of the trip is that I think AIC’s medieval art collection is more interesting than the Met’s, but as with everything else there’s way too much to show, so I’ll just do a couple that stand out.

But it was another episodic panel painting of Giovanni’s about the Battle of Pharsalus and the death of Pompey Magnus that had me snorting out loud and probably scaring the other three people in the room with me. Like with the earlier Odyssey painting, Giovanni’s Romans wear medieval Italian clothes instead of togas, and while I think the Pharsalus part of the painting is very well done in a medieval battle painting way, the left half of the painting just had my God’s Wife-loving heart dying with laughter.

To wrap up by linking up my first book with my latest, we’ll duck into the Japanese art gallery to see what’s shaking…

But for me, the most exciting part of the Japanese wing was the Ando Gallery, designed by architect Tadao Ando. Meant to be a modernist take on a traditional Japanese interior space, this small gallery uses its own clean lines of black wood pillars and frameless glass cases to showcase contemporary Japanese art. In this instance, some contemporary takes on traditional bamboo art, but is using older techniques to make modern organic sculptures. Much of this art comes out of hanakago, woven bamboo flower baskets, one of many possible traditional stagings for ikebana, traditional flower arranging.

So yeah, this was a sprinting look at just some of the stuff I saw (didn’t even get to show you any Matisse, or Magritte, or Tang pottery, or medieval armor, or the special exhibition they had on de Kooning…). But if you’re in Chicagoland and you’ve never been to the Art Institute (or it’s been a while), I really would recommend it. There’s a little bit of everything for every taste, with enough space to grow and attract interesting rotating exhibits. It’s very difficult for one art museum to encapsulate the breadth of both ancient and modern art in a way that doesn’t feel overwhelming, but AIC does a pretty darn good job of it.