Touring the Art Institute of Chicago

Yesterday we were in downtown Chicago for a visit to the Art Institute.  I haven't been there in years.  Chablis and I were really looking forward to going.  She had an assignment for school where she had to locate 10 out of 30 specific paintings.  Now, the biggest problem was that the museum doesn't open until 10:30 am and we had to be back at the train station by 2:30 pm to catch our train back home.  Between Chablis' school and work schedules, she has very little free time to run places like downtown.  But we were determined to do our best.

The Art Institute is HUGE!  It has 3 floors and hundreds of galleries.  Now, here was our problem - we walked in the doors, looked at her list of pictures and we had no idea how to go about finding them.  We grabbed a brochure that breaks down the sections into themes, like American, Modern, African, etc.  We scratched off the sections that we knew wouldn't apply to any of the paintings we needed.  Then we started wandering around the rooms.  BIG FAT ZERO!  After an hour we had only found 4 paintings and we were starting to panic.

We began asking the museum employees if they knew where specific paintings were and not one could tell us.  Finally we went to the information desk and explained our problem to the woman there, and she tried to help by looking up paintings in their data base.  But half of the paintings wouldn't even come up and when they did come up, all it said was if the painting was in the museum or loaned out.  I was more than a bit annoyed at that.  I mean, it's a database.  Wouldn't you think they could list which room a painting was in?

We started speed walking around the place, just scanning the names on the paintings and looking to see if they matched anything on her list.  It took us 3 1/2 hours but we actually, eventually, found all the paintings we needed.  Thank goodness! 

Anyway, I know nothing about art in general, other than a few of the more famous artists.  Monet is my absolute favorite....

I really like Picasso, especially his painting "The Old Guitarist."

And I love Georgia O'Keeffe....

I remember a copy of this hanging in the hallway where my kids went to grade school...

I also like Renoir.....

I couldn't find a plague for this sculpture, but it was my favorite one......

There were lots of sculptures and we didn't really get a chance to study them at all.  I just snapped pictures as we were breezing through!

The very last gallery we ran thru had a lot of really old stuff, from the 1500's through the 1800's.  I never imagined that I would like the works from that period so much.  Here are some of my favorites...

Chablis and I both want to go back there again one day soon when we have more time to stroll through the galleries and really study the paintings more closely.   We felt so disappointed in our day yesterday because we didn't get to enjoy it at all.   The whole experience was ruined because we had to locate specific paintings and had no way of knowing where to find them.  Seriously, they could benefit from some sort of an on-line database that allows you to locate specific paintings.

Overall tho, the Art Institute is wonderful and I think that if you can go and just wander around, that it would be a fantastic experience.