CHICAGO — I’d heard the Art Institute of Chicago was a world-class museum, and the people who told me so were correct. I can’t say any U.S. art museum outside New York City has anything to rival it.
What earns an art museum its reputation is its collection.
Take the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As I strolled through its galleries, I was stopped cold when I ran across Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” the most famous image of the American Revolution.
At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, its signature piece might be Paul Cézanne’s “The Large Bathers.” But museums like it and the Met have so many must-see works. I can’t pin down just one.
Yet I would argue that neither of those museums, nor the splendid Cleveland Museum of Art, have three pieces that reflect great art the way the Art Institute does. Not a single one of its Big Three is foreign to dilettantes.
For who hasn’t seen images of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” Vincent van Gogh’s “Self Portrait” and Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.”
Each is a treasure any museum would cherish, but for one museum to house all three is embarrass de la richesse. I didn’t know the Chicago museum had them.
On a visit there, I spent considerable time gawking at “American Gothic,” a piece that is omnipresent in contemporary culture. Wood’s artwork salutes the rugged individualism of our agrarian society.
Hopper’s “Nighthawks” needs no explanation. I won’t give one. Nor does the van Gogh self-portrait.
The Art Institute of Chicago wasn’t without other heralded works. The museum can brag about its collection of Georgia O’Keeffe’s artwork. The exhibition on display explored the artist’s time in New York City.
O’Keeffe, doubtless the most celebrated artist with American roots, gave people who didn’t know New York — and perhaps those who did know New York — a side of the Big Apple few bother to notice.
A handful of pieces doesn’t make a museum world class. It’s the breath of its collections that put a museum in the front of people’s minds.
Now, no museum in the United States or abroad has a collection as vast or as diverse as The Louvre, which is blessed to house the most famous work in the world of art: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
You can’t visit The Louvre and not stop to see Mona Lisa, a portrait I don’t think is worth seeing twice.
“American Gothic” is worth it, though; so is “Nighthawks”; and, in its peculiar way, van Gogh’s self-portrait is worth it too. All offer an experience that warrants people’s time.
I wish I could have spent more hours in the Art Institute. Four hours weren’t enough. I left feeling as if I’d browsed the museum rather than explored it. I could have used an additional four hours.
I would have spent them in front of “American Gothic,” if the crush of onlookers didn’t shoo me away. The piece has the same hold on my attention as sculptor Jean Baptiste Carpeaux’s “Why Born Enslaved!” does each afternoon I spend inside our Wade Oval museum.
I wish it owned “American Gothic.” It doesn’t. Chicago isn’t so far away I can’t revisit it. I’d stand in front of Wood’s magnum opus and appreciate it in the way that I couldn’t do with Mona Lisa.
