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Today, some 110 years since it first opened,
the Museum features thousands of artworks spanning more than five millennia
of human creativity around the globe.
Museum Highlights
In line with its status as one of the best
art museums in America, it has
an exceptionally strong collection of paintings, including the following
famous masterpieces.
• Nighthawks
(1942) - Edward Hopper
• American
Gothic (1930) - Grant Wood
• Wheatstacks (End of Summer) (1890-1891) - Claude Monet
• Water Lilies (1906) - Claude Monet
• A
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-86) -
Seurat
• Two Sisters (On the Terrace) (1881) - Pierre-Auguste Renoir
• By the Water (1880) Pierre-Auguste Renoir
• The Bay of Marseilles, view from L'Estaque (1885) Paul Cezanne
• The Basket of Apples (c.1890s) - Paul Cezanne
• The Bathers (1900) - Paul Cezanne
• Assumption of the Virgin (1577) - El Greco
• At the Moulin Rouge (1892-5) - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
• Paris
Street, Rainy Day (1877) - Gustave Caillebotte
• Bedroom in Arles (1888) - Vincent Van Gogh
• Self-Portrait (1887) - Vincent Van Gogh
• Why are you angry? (No te aha oe Riri) (1896) - Paul Gauguin
• Woman at Her Toilette (1900-1905) - Edgar Degas
• Portrait of Picasso (1912) - Juan Gris
The Permanent
Collection
As the above list indicates, the Art Institute
of Chicago is most renowned for its holdings of 19th century French
Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as well as
its 20th century American classics. However, with more than a dozen different
curatorial departments, the AIC's collection has far greater depth than
its headline highlights would suggest. Here is a brief departmental overview
of the Museum's permanent collection.
African Arts
The Museum's collection of African
art features some 400 items that highlight the diversity of artistic
expression in the sub-Saharan continent, with a close focus on the sculptural
traditions of West and Central Africa. Exhibits include masks and figure
sculptures, beadwork, furniture, regalia, textiles and other tribal
art from Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic
of Congo, Ghana, Ethiopia, Mali, Morocco, Nigeria, and South Africa. The
display of African ceramics is the largest in the United States.
American Art
The Museum's collection of American
art consists of over 1,000 paintings and sculptures, dating from the
18th century to 1950, alongside almost 2,500 decorative art objects from
the 17th century to the present. Particular strengths in the display,
are the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, as well as works of American
Impressionism (works by Mary
Cassatt and others), paintings by the great John Singer Sargent, the
Symbolist James McNeill Whistler, and the Realist subject painter Winslow
Homer. (See also Ashcan
School.) Modern American art is exemplified in works by Grant Wood,
Georgia O'Keeffe,
Edward Hopper and the Mexican muralist Diego
Rivera.
Art of the Ancient World
The Art Institute's collection of ancient
art features Etruscan, Roman, and Greek
art, Egyptian sculpture (in most media), along with a number of outstanding
items of decorative art such as jewellery, vases, glass, and mosaics.
Highlights include the mummy and mummy case of Paankhenamun, as well as
several rare gold and silver coins.
Architecture and Design
This section concentrates on architecture
history and design, with a focus on progressive thinking and practice
across all design disciplines. Heavily based on works by architects including
Frank Lloyd Wright
(1867-1959) of the first Chicago
School of architecture, the French modernist Le
Corbusier (1887-1965), and the dynamic Mies
van der Rohe (1886-1969) - leader of the Second
Chicago School - the Museum's huge design collection also features
contemporary objects by contemporary architects, including Elizabeth Diller,
Hernan Diaz Alonso, Lindy Roy, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample. The
collection also exhibits examples of furniture, tableware, industrial
and graphic designs by the likes of Konstantin Grcic, Hella Jongerius,
Joris Laarman, and Stefan Sagmeister.
Arms, Armor, Medieval and Renaissance
Art
The Art Institute has an encyclopedic collection of medieval
art produced by European artists over a period of 500 years. It includes
religious works as well as objects of daily use, in a variety of media,
including painting and sculpture, jewellery
art, precious metalwork, stained
glass art, manuscript illumination and tapestry.
The department also includes the George F. Harding collection of arms
and armour reflecting armaments across the Medieval and Renaissance eras
in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.
Asian Art
The AIC's collection of Asian art
contains works from almost five millennia from Japan, China, Korea, India,
southwest Asia, and the Middle East. Comprising 35,000 objects of exceptional
archeological and artistic significance, it includes Chinese bronzes,
Chinese pottery, porcelain,
celadon ware and antique jades; east Asian textiles; Japanese screens
and paintings; Indian and Persian miniature
painting; and sculptures from India and Southeast Asian. Also in the
collection of Japanese art,
is the Museum's world-renowned collection of Japanese woodblock prints.
See also: Korean Art (3000
BCE on).
European Decorative Arts
The Chicago Art Institute's huge European decorative
art collection of 25,000 objects includes ceramics, metalwork, glass,
enamels, furniture and ivory dating from 1100 to the present. Highlights
include Venetian glass; English, French, and German porcelains; English
18th-century silver and French 19th-century silver; and fine furniture
from the early 17th century to the present. The Decorative Arts department
also includes 1,544 items in the Arthur Rubloff Paperweight Collection.
European Painting and Sculpture
One of the real highlights of the Art Institute of Chicago, this world
famous collection comprises over 3,500 works spanning eight centuries
from c.1150 to 1950. It features a rare group of 15th-century Spanish,
Italian and Northern Renaissance paintings, masterpieces of European sculpture,
and an important display of 17th- and 18th-century paintings.
19th Century Painting
Part of the European Painting and Sculpture department, the Museum's collection
of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism ranks alongside any museum in
the world. It includes 33 masterpieces by Claude Monet, as well as the
seminal Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges
Seurat, several high-class works from Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin, and
one of Toulouse-Lautrec's finest works.
Indian Art of the Americas
The Pre-Columbian art collection focuses mainly on Mesoamerican and Andean
sculpture, ancient pottery, textiles, and
metalwork. The museum's collection of American
Indian art include artifacts produced by the Plains Indians, as well
as native Americans from the Southwest, and California, are also on display.
Modern Art
Regarded as one of the finest collections in the world, comparable only
with those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou Centre
in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago's unique assembly of modern
art contains almost 1,000 works of art by artists from Europe and
the Americas. Highlights include Pablo Picasso's Old Guitarist,
Henri Matisse's Bathers by a River, Gaston Lachaise's Woman
(Elevation), Constantin Brancusi's Golden Bird, Georgia O'Keeffe's
Black Cross, New Mexico, Jose Clemente Orozco's Zapata,
American Gothic by Grant
Wood, Rene Magritte's Time Transfixed, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks,
and Ivan Albright's Picture of Dorian Gray.
Photography
Spanning the entire history of the photographic medium from its beginning
in 1839 to the present day, the Art Institute's collection of lens-based
art features works by many of the world's greatest fine art photographers.
All genres are covered, including cityscape, documentary, figurative,
landscape, portrait and still life. The collection was started in 1949,
following Georgia O'Keeffe's donation of the Alfred Stieglitz Collection.
Subsequent acquisitions - of the Julien Levy Collection, of 200 photographs
by Edward Weston, and works
by Paul Strand, Andre Kertesz
and Eugene Atget - have
turned the Museum's holding of modern masters into one of the finest in
the world.
Prints and Drawings
The Museum's holding of works on paper numbers roughly 11,500 drawings
and 60,000 prints, dating from the 15th century to the present. Its particular
strengths include French 19th-century prints and drawings; British, French,
and Italian drawings; Old Master prints; and an extensive collection of
20th-century and contemporary works on paper.
Textile Art
This section has more than 13,000 textiles and 66,000 sample swatches
dating from 300 BCE to the present. The collection is particularly strong
in Pre-Columbian fabrics, European vestments, woven silks and velvets,
tapestries, printed fabrics, needlework, and lace. Other styles and periods
on display include 16th- and 17th-century English needlework, as well
as printed and woven materials of the 18th and 19th centuries. Also represented
are American quilts and coverlets, and 20th-century fiber art.
Contemporary Art
The Museum's collection of contemporary
art consists of almost 1,000 works. It embraces nearly every significant
art movement from 1950 to the present and features painting, sculpture,
installation art, and new-media
work. Among its most notable holdings are works by David Hockney, Jasper
Johns, Eva Hesse, Ellsworth Kelly, Bruce Nauman, and Gerhard Richter.
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