Art Institute of Chicago: What to See, Building by Building

The Art Institute of Chicago sits in Grant Park on Michigan Avenue, and the first thing to know is that nobody sees all of it. How long does it take to go through? Plan two hours for the highlights. A full day still would not cover it, so the useful question is not how to finish the museum but which rooms to walk.

A museum that grew across the tracks

The oldest part was built for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and designed in the Beaux-Arts style by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge of Boston. Its Michigan Avenue entrance is guarded by two bronze lions by Edward Kemeys. From there the museum grew east. It straddles open railroad tracks, with two floors of galleries bridging the trains below. Beyond the bridge sit the buildings around McKinlock Court and the Rice Building, and on the far side the Modern Wing, designed by Renzo Piano and opened on May 16, 2009.

The practical lesson is in the museum's own floor plans. All the buildings connect on the first level, and some do not connect on the others. The Rice Building's Level 2, for example, is reached from Level 1. If a room looks close on the map but you cannot walk to it, go down to Level 1, cross, and come back up.

How the floors are laid out

• Lower Level: the Thorne Miniature Rooms, and ancient Egypt beside McKinlock Court.
• Level 1: the Michigan Avenue lobby, Chinese, Japanese and Korean art, South and Southeast Asian sculpture on the bridge, Greek, Roman and Byzantine galleries, the reconstructed Stock Exchange Trading Room and Chagall's windows, with photography and the long Griffin Court in the Modern Wing.
• Level 2: paintings. Europe from 1400 to 1880 and the Impressionists in the Michigan Avenue building, then Seurat, Van Gogh, Monet and Cezanne on the bridge, American art in the Rice Building, and architecture, design and contemporary art in the Modern Wing.
• Level 3: modern art at the top of the Modern Wing, from Matisse and Picasso to abstraction and Surrealism.

What to see in about two hours

This route goes one floor at a time and stops only for works with a story you can use in front of the glass.

Level 2, the bridge. Start in Gallery 201 with Gustave Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day, about nine feet wide, where two strollers seem to walk out of the frame and the cobblestones shine though no rain is painted. Then cross the bridge to Gallery 240 for Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884: stand a step away to find the dots, then walk back until the park on the Seine locks into place. Next door in Gallery 241 is Van Gogh's The Bedroom, the second of three versions of his room in the Yellow House in Arles. He listed the colors in a letter to his brother Theo: pale lilac walls, a chrome yellow bed, a blood-red bedspread. In Gallery 243 are Monet's Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer). The haystacks stood just outside his farmhouse at Giverny, and in May 1891 he hung fifteen of the canvases together in one small Paris room. At the end of the bridge, in Gallery 249, Georgia O'Keeffe's Sky above Clouds IV is eight feet high and twenty-four feet wide, painted in an unheated garage in Abiquiu, New Mexico.

Level 2, the Rice Building. Go down to Level 1, across, and up again. Gallery 263 holds Grant Wood's American Gothic: find the pitchfork stitched into the man's overalls, echoed in the window and in the lines of his face. In Gallery 262 Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, finished in January 1942, shows a diner with no visible door and an empty street. The museum bought it that year for three thousand dollars.

Level 1. Walk to the Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room, reconstructed in the museum in 1976 and 1977. The original Adler and Sullivan building came down in 1972, and the museum rebuilt the room from stencils, molded capitals and art glass that were saved. Nearby, Marc Chagall's America Windows and the small steel model for the Picasso in the Loop share a gallery.

Level 3. Take the Modern Wing lift up to Gallery 391 for Henri Matisse's Bathers by a River. It began in 1909 as a commission from the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, who bought two other panels but not this one, and Matisse kept working on it until 1917. Look for the black stripe where the river once was.

Lower Level, if you have time. End with the Thorne Miniature Rooms, each built at one inch to the foot. The Tennessee Entrance Hall has a spiral staircase and a desk chair copied from pieces at the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson's home.

Ready-made plans

The Roamer guide groups the museum into four short threads, each a plan on its own.

The Paintings Everyone Knows. Eight paintings in about 75 minutes: Paris Street; Rainy Day, La Grande Jatte, The Bedroom, Stacks of Wheat, Sky above Clouds IV, American Gothic, Nighthawks and Bathers by a River.

The Art Institute in an Hour. Five paintings for the short visit: Paris Street; Rainy Day, La Grande Jatte, The Bedroom, American Gothic and Nighthawks. If your question is what to see in an hour, this is the answer.

Chicago in the Collection. About 45 minutes of pieces that belong to this city: a balcony railing from the Mecca apartment building, a drawing from the 1909 Plan of Chicago, the Trading Room, the America Windows and the model for the Daley Center sculpture.

Small Worlds. About 40 minutes of things built small or made for a tomb: a Thorne room, a Shaker living room, a Tang dynasty rider in clay, a model river boat for the afterlife and a Byzantine mosaic of a man leading a giraffe. See also the Thorne Miniature Rooms article.

How this fits the Roamer guide

Roamer has a museum audio guide for the Art Institute that works room by room: open any gallery and play its story, or follow one of the threads above. Because the buildings connect differently on each level, the guide's routes tell you when to drop to Level 1 and cross. You can find it here: the Art Institute of Chicago guide.

Cover photo: Chait Goli, via Pexels.