Our last day in Chicago, was centered around visiting the Art Institute. We had already been here in 2018, but from my perspective, when you see beautiful art, it takes a couple of visits to really appreciate it, and the Art Institute has some unbelievable pieces. I have been unbelievably lucky to have Joani as a travel companion, and together we have managed to see some of the greatest Galleries and Museums in the world, but my favourite art piece hangs here in Chicago, and I have to say, that it is hard for me to admit that it is not a Van Gogh piece! Georges Seurat takes that title, with.
A Sunday On La Grande Jatte
This is truly an amazing piece of art for several reasons. There is a moral story woven into this painting. I'm not going to drone on about that, but I am going to talk about Pointillism. Seurat was lumped into the impressionists because of the time he painted but he was actually a pointillist, a term derived from the way he applied paint to the canvas when he worked. He used the tip of his brush to apply dots of paint in primary colours rather than mixing the colours on his pallette. His concept was basically that he could fool the human eye into seeing mixed pastel colours when what was actually on the canvas was primary colours, placed in patterns on the canvas.
On a Seurat canvas, you never see brush strokes, or mixed/blended colours. He basically used primary colours applied in patterns with little dots to trick the optic nerve into believing it was seeing all the colours under the rainbow. Taking the moral story and the technical aspect of this piece into account. It is a masterpiece of epic proportions.
This painting is just one of many fine works of art in this building. They have a terrific collection of Monet's haystacks to show you how hard he worked on mastering the way light plays off a subject.
When you look at the same subject painted over and over.. Haystacks in the morning, in the evening, in the summer, in the fall, winter, spring, etc. etc.. you get the concept of how obsessed he was with the way that light plays over an object. He did the same thing with Lilies, Cathedrals and other subjects but if you go back again, and look at, Madame Monet Embroidering, You can see how all his studies resulted in his mastery of light on a subject!
A couple of my favourite Van Gogh's. ( A ridiculous statement, as I love so many Van Gogh's)
There are three different copies of Van Gogh's bedroom in Arles and I have been lucky enough to see all three in their permanent homes.
A couple of Toulouse Lautrec's works done in what I like to think of as his cariacaturist style.
These are both scenes from the Moulin Rouge and when I'm bragging up Toulouse Lautrec to people, I like to say that without Toulouse Lautrec, people might have never heard of The Moulin Rouge . Whether or not that is a true statement, he definitely helped make it famous.
I'll end this post with another of my top ten paintings.
Firstly I'd like to say that I am not a Picasso fan. I am sure there are a lot of art historians who would say I was being sacrilegious, when I say this, but I feel that Picasso was a genius who mostly wasted his talent. Upon having said that, anything that he did during his blue period, I love and this painting below is, and will always be one of my favourite pieces of art.
I could talk about this piece for hours, but instead I'll just say that this piece evokes more emotion in me than any other piece of art I know.
I thoroughly enjoyed my Art and Architecture Tour, and hope you did as well. See you on our next trip.
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