I was in Chicago for a conference late last week, and I slipped away for a few hours to go to the Art Institute. It's a cliche for a person to say that she loves the Art Institute, but I love the Art Institute anyway. I used to visit regularly in the days when I could hop on the el and go, but we're too far from Chicago these days for regular visiting. So I just get there when I can.
The thing I especially love about the Art Institute is that being there shows me how long people have been hungry for beauty. If you were making an amphora in ancient Greece, it would have been sufficient to make sure it didn't leak. But everywhere you turn, there's evidence of the insufficiency of the apparently sufficient. You can see that people wanted beauty around them: that someone had the itch to turn the functional into the beautiful, and that someone else, or a long string of someone elses, had the drive to preserve that beautiful object so it could be enjoyed far into the future.
I used to love the medieval art in particular, with its wonky perspective and inscrutable faces. In college I would stand in front of those images and think, "Eight hundred years ago people cared about the same stories I am trying to understand." I always have to visit the Inness landscapes on the lower level too. I think if I were a genuine art buff I would look down on Inness, but I love his paintings too much for that. I'd never heard of him before the day I stumbled across a temporary display at the Art Institute: Inness and Remington together. I still don't care much for Remington, but there's something magical for me in the way Inness looked at the world.
Change at the Art Institute makes me a little grumpy, although I recognize that it is unreasonable for me to expect them to preserve the 1988 configuration that I first learned to navigate. (Okay, I am still kind of miffed that they moved the Burgher of Calais. That was my standard meeting spot. Coming to the Art Institute? Let's meet by the Burgher of Calais. How do you move the Burgher of Calais in the first place? And where did they put him?) Anyway-- I entered the modern wing a little skeptically. I was pleased to see a couple of delicious Jackson Pollocks right off the bat. (I might vote to eradicate pictures of Jackson Pollock's work. You have to see the texture of it, I think, or else it does look preposterous.) And then I was unexpectedlly taken by a Tobey painting. I don't know anything about Tobey, and I don't even remember what this painting was called, but I stood in front of it for a while -- tracing out the not-quite-patterns, soaking it in.
Beauty from prehistory, beauty from the moderns. I followed it up with some delicious squid and taramosalata in Greektown, and then hopped a train home to see my sleeping family.
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