100 Masterpieces to See at the Art Institute of Chicago

Artworks have come and gone at the Art Institute, but this one has stood in the same place ever since the museum opened to the public on December 8, 1893. (At more than two tons, it is simply too heavy to go most anywhere else.) Edward Kemeys, its maker, was known as an animalier—an artist who specializes in depicting animals—and he was by some estimates even the first of his kind in the United States. Though he did not attend art school, he was trained in the iron business, and after the Civil War he applied his close study of buffaloes, lions, wolves, and other creatures seen at zoos to produce highly detailed sculptures such as this one. With a flowy mane and a slender chest, this lion—one of two on hand at the Michigan Avenue entrance—is now an Art Institute icon.

Where to see it: Museum Grounds

Some of the museum’s greatest gems are tucked away in a hard-to-find basement gallery. That gallery is host to 68 intricate miniature scenes by Narcissa Niblack Thorne, who produced around 100 works like these. With a painstaking level of detail, Thorne recreated interiors evocative of rooms in France, Japan, the United States, and elsewhere, filling them with teeny chairs, rugs, chandeliers, wardrobes, and more. While it is fun to see Thorne’s abundantly furnished spaces, it’s equally pleasurable to observe her work in a sparer aesthetic, as with this miniature resembling a Shaker living room, whose floorboards are even dented to make them appear worn.

Where to see it: Applied Arts Galleries

The Art Institute of Chicago’s galleries technically contain a dead body: the corpse of Pa-ankh-en-Amun, an Egyptian man who lived sometime around 900 BCE and was mummified upon his passing. His remains now lie in this painted coffin, a star of the museum’s modestly scaled but treasure-laden galleries for Egyptian art. As was common for ancient Egyptian coffins, this one was painted with images showing its owner’s passage into the afterlife, with Pa-ankh-en-Amun seen walking hand in hand with Horus, the falcon-headed god of the sun and sky. Since acquiring the coffin more than a century ago, the Art Institute has repeatedly studied it; in 2014, curators sent it off to a nearby hospital whose scanning machines revealed that Pa-ankh-en-Amun was middle-aged when he died.

Where to see it: Egyptian Galleries

The scarab at the center of this shroud refers to Khepri, the ancient Egyptian god of rebirth. This object would have been placed atop a mummy set for burial, with the beaded face slipping neatly over the human visage beneath the bandages. The hope, perhaps, was that the shroud’s wearer would pass through the afterlife and return again. Though it is some 2,500 years old, the shroud’s faience beads retain their glow, their rich blues rivaling those of a beloved Alma Thomas painting from the 20th century in the galleries for contemporary art (more on that below). Care to know how the shroud’s maker meticulously sewed the beads into place? The museum has an in-depth guide explaining it all.

Where to see it: Egyptian Galleries

Not many works regularly on view at the Art Institute of Chicago are older than this little statue, which dates to the Early Bronze Age. A prime example of the spare aesthetic that defined art of Greece’s Cyclades islands during that era, the marble statuette depicts a figure with its arms wrapped across its chest, its pudgy stomach perhaps indicating that the person depicted is a pregnant woman. Other details, including eyes and hair, may have once been painted on, but those features and any other adornments have been lost to time. Still, even in its minimalist form, the statuette retains its beauty—and even hints at modernist sculpture of the 20th century.

Where to see it: Greek and Roman Galleries

Orpheus presides over this ornately painted vessel known as a krater, his head appearing to float amid corkscrewing flowers of all sorts. Beneath him are a young soldier and another male figure whom the Art Institute has identified as either his tutor or his philosopher. Set in a naiksos, or a tomb, these two men converse amid others figures who may represent people who have already passed. The name of the ancient Greek maker of this krater, done in a style known as red figure painting, is not known, though scholars have identified the artist as Painter of Copenhagen 4223, who also applied his talents to elegant vessels held by the British Museum, the Wadsworth, and other institutions.

Where to see it: Greek and Roman Galleries

Outside academia, Etruscan art may lack the public visibility enjoyed by Greek and Roman art. This architectural relief demonstrates why Etruscan art merits due attention. Done in terracotta, a medium at which Etruscan artisans were particularly adept, it depicts a giant locked in battle with a god and goddess whose robes ripple as they fight. Reliefs like this one adorned buildings—likely a temple, in this case, according to the museum—and were once painted. Though some of that color is now gone, there is still some reddish pigment left behind.

Where to see it: Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Galleries

There may be no weirder work at the Art Institute than this sculpture of a young satyr pushing a hand through the theater mask of an older one. What exactly does it mean? Chicago magazine posed the question to Karen Manchester, head of the museum’s department of ancient and Byzantine art, who said that similar ancient Roman statues represent a “mischievous” follower of Dionysus who “playfully frightens another little satyr standing opposite him.” (One such companion may initially have accompanied this statue.) Beyond that, Manchester was short on answers, though she did note that the work is intriguing for another reason besides its strangeness: It was restored by Alessandro Algardi, a renowned Baroque sculptor, during the 17th century. Since it went on loan to the museum in 2014, the statue has developed a cult following.

Where to see it: Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Galleries

Ancient Roman sculptors were known for copying Greek marbles with a stunning degree of accuracy. Indeed, this exquisite Roman fragment is essentially a remake of Kallimachos’s statue of Aphrodite, which likewise features a translucent drape falling across the torso of a buxom body. Here, that ancient Greek goddess, recast as the Roman deity Venus, makes visible her belly button and stomach, emphasizing her role as a mother. Julius Caesar claimed to have been descended from Venus; he adorned his temples dedicated to her with statues similar to this one.

Where to see it: Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Galleries

Much like other ancient Roman sculptures, this one is a remake of a Greek work, now lost, by Praxiteles, the most important sculptor of that culture. The Roman version even emphasizes some of Praxiteles’s innovations, including the way he depicted contrapposto, a pose in which more weight is placed on one leg than the other. But according to the museum, this one differs from Praxiteles’s in one key regard: The original was a divine representation of Aphrodite that was meant for a hallowed setting on the island of Knidos, while the Roman copy was merely placed in the garden of its elite owner. Tough luck for the Roman marble, whose surface was pocked and wrinkled over time as a result.

Where to see it: Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Galleries

Compared with all the Greek and Roman sculptures on view, the Byzantine offerings at this museum are relatively sparse. Still, this Byzantine mosaic manages to hold its own. Likely made for the home of a wealthy family in Syria or Lebanon, the mosaic shows a man leading a giraffe using a leash wrapped around its head. Giraffes were the subject of widespread fascination in Byzantium, where they were brought from Africa by emperors and trotted out for the public. This mosaic is hardly the only Byzantine one to portray a giraffe, but it’s a notable one for its economy of representation. The man’s eyes, for example, are depicted using just a few whitish tesserae.

Where to see it: Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Galleries

What we are seeing here is essentially a very elegant toilet. In this Han dynasty sculpture, several pigs are positioned near a staircase leading to a latrine; in real life, waste would flow via pipes to the pigs, who could then consume it. The subject may not sound like something that could be rendered beautiful, but the sculpture’s maker has done just that, individualizing each pig in such a way that it is possible to tell their age and even their frame of mind. The sculpture would have been buried in a tomb—ancient Chinese graves commonly held representations of structures seen in everyday life—and likely came from what is now the Henan Province.

Where to see it: Asian Art Galleries

At just over 11 feet tall, this stele towers over its neighbors in the galleries for Chinese art. Commissioned by a religious family seeking to curry favor with the Buddha, the stele features various representations of the wandering ascetic, including depictions in which he is shown dying and then being prepared for cremation. All around these scenes are dazzling arrays of figures: worshipers, monks, musicians, and more. A tablet like this one was originally meant for a temple courtyard or a public space, but even in the Art Institute, it continues to demand admiration.

Where to see it: Asian Art Galleries

Hachiman, god of warriors, is a syncretic deity, merging aspects of Shinto and Buddhist lore. A shapeshifter in more sense than one, Hachiman is here shown as a monk, with his head shaved and a wrap known as a kesa drawn around his chest. Likely made for use in processionals, the sculpture is elegantly crafted from wood, the folds of the robe appearing to undulate. It attests to the rich cross-pollination of cultures taking place in Japan, where Buddhism had taken root just a few centuries prior to the sculpture’s making.

Where to see it: Asian Art Galleries

In this bronze sculpture, Shiva is depicted dancing, spinning around and sending his locks flying in all directions. Surrounded by a ring of fire, he has one foot atop Ganga, the Hindu goddess of the rivers. Crafted in Chola-dynasty India, during a period when temple architecture was reaching new heights, this sculpture would have been carried around during religious events. Ever since the mid 1960s, it has been a fixture of a long gallery at the Art Institute devoted primarily to Indian art.

Where to see it: Asian Art Galleries

In Buddhism, bodhisattvas, or enlightened beings, are often associated with specific qualities; Guanyin is commonly linked to compassion and mercy. This sculpture features the bodhisattva seated in a pose known as “Guanyin of the Southern Seas,” wherein he props one arm on a bent knee. Similar sculptures recur throughout Chinese history, but this one is emblematic of a sensibility distinct to the Song dynasty, a time when artists sought to imbue their creations with increased naturalism. Crafted from paulownia wood, the sculpture was repainted centuries later, during the Ming dynasty, and gilded in parts. The gold leaf has been largely lost to time, so it no longer sparkles as it used to.

Where to see it: Asian Arts Galleries

With the fall of the Pala empire during the 12th century, Buddhism began to die out in in most parts of India. The town of Nagapattinam, however, remained an exception during the Chola period because the Srivijaya empire, from what is now Indonesia, had firmly installed itself there. This seated Buddha hails from that town. Sculpted from a granite, the pared-down work is not exactly lifelike, but it is not trying to be. It measures a little over five feet tall; if this Buddha were to stand up, he would tower over the viewer standing before him.

Where to see it: Asian Art Galleries

Karttikeya, the Hindu god of war, has six heads and 12 arms in this sculpture carved from heavy basalt. Dating back to Ganga period India, the sculpture shows Karttikeya seated atop a peacock. The bird’s voluminous plumage seems to mirror Karttikeya’s array of arms, which fan out just like the peacock’s feathers. A treasure of the airy hall for Indian art at the Art Institute, the work may have originated in what is now the city of Madanapalle, in the state of Andra Pradesh, according to the museum.

Where to see it: Asian Art Galleries

It is hard to resist this ewer’s form: a Daoist priest standing atop a smiling, unnaturally large duck. Though it is notable primarily for being one of the most fanciful objects in the museum, the vessel is interesting, too, in its function. In its original usage, wine would have been poured into an opening in the top, in the priest’s bowl, and then would have flowed out from the duck’s mouth. The ewer was produced in Goryeo dynasty Korea in a pottery style known as celadon, which is prized for its clean, arcing shapes and its signature greenish hue.

Where to see it: Asian Art Galleries

Gallery 109, unofficially known as the Tadao Ando Gallery for the starchitect who designed it, is among the most beloved parts of the Art Institute, prized as both a haven from the crowds that inhabit adjacent areas and a good space for hushed contemplation. Devoted to Japanese art, the spare gallery features just a handful of large-scale works; the star is this Edo period folding screen. A bridge arcs across its two segments, which also portray willows with cascading foliage and gnarled roots. Hasegawa Sôya, the screen’s maker, eschewed naturalism for something more expressive, painting much of his surface with gold that casts an unearthly shimmer. French Impressionists—including those featured in the Art Institute’s hallowed galleries for European art of the 19th century—drew their inspiration from Japanese artworks similar to this one.

Where to see it: Asian Art Galleries

One of the more recent changes to the Art Institute came in 2024 with the formation of a new set of galleries for Korean art—a reflection, perhaps, of a fascination with creations from that nation that took hold in the United States in the years prior. These galleries brought to light great artworks that had not previously gotten much attention, including this Joseon dynasty moon jar. Porcelain vessels such as these are considered highly valuable today and are beloved for their bulbous form. Though most moon jars are fully white, this one has pink splotches on its surface. These are most likely stains, according to the Art Institute, but they are not exactly blemishes, since they only enhance the jar’s beauty.

Where to see it: Asian Art Galleries

During the Ming dynasty, Chinese artisans painted pottery using the doucai technique, wherein an outline of blue underglaze remains visible surrounding the objects represented. Doucai pottery was most popular during the 15th century. It eventually fell out of favor, only to return later on, with a revival taking place in the 18th century during the Qing dynasty. This porcelain jar dates to that resurgence and evinces a distinctly Ming dynasty–inspired aesthetic: The stems and petals of its billowy narcissus flower are all marked out in signature blue on the edges. A set of reddish lingzhi mushrooms sprout beneath them, suggesting a harmonious environment hosting multiple biological kingdoms.

Where to see it: Asian Art Galleries

Utagawa Hiroshige was one of the foremost printmakers associated with the ukiyo-e genre, which offered views of cosmopolitan Japan during the Edo period. He remains most famous for “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo”; the Art Institute owns dozens of works from that series of woodblock prints and periodically exhibits them. This one is less quaint than it may first appear: It depicts the interior of a brothel in Tokyo’s Yoshiwara district, with a courtesan’s garment draped across a windowsill. While the print’s title may refer to a festival, that event goes largely undepicted. Instead, the focus is the cat that looks on from inside, presumably relishing the ability to see everything from a high angle.

Where to see it: Asian Art Galleries

This work is not currently on view.

While the Art Institute may not have the deepest collection of medieval and Byzantine art, it does offer some gems, such as this one. The diptych depicts familiar subject matter: the Virgin Mary seated on her throne with the Christ Child, alongside the Crucifixion, a pairing that acts as a quick recap of Christ’s life prior to the Resurrection. But the two panels—which are hinged together, and could be opened for private worship in one’s home—are notable for their gold-leaf details. See the delicate patterning on the haloes surrounding the Virgin Mary and the angels nearby—a web of lines so intricate that it recalls calligraphy.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

There are many paintings of Saint George, a soldier who earned his place in Christian lore for slaying a dragon that terrorized the town of Silene, but few are quite so vibrant as this one by Bernat Martorell, a painter who worked in what is now Barcelona. Here, Saint George swoops past the princess who warned him to leave and bears down on the beast, shown baring its sharp teeth, while a crowd far in the distance looks on. Martorell and his colleagues hadn’t quite worked out the rules of perspective, which is why this picture feels so skewed; those innovations were still being honed by Renaissance painters in Italy. But no matter: Saint George and the Dragon succeeds in spite of its awkwardness, regularly drawing admirers today.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

You’d have to head to Italy to see the world’s finest Botticellis, but there aren’t many museums in the United States that can say they own a work by the Renaissance painter, and that in itself is something worth boasting about. In this painting, Botticelli returns to a frequently depicted biblical subject: the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus. But whereas most artists before Botticelli set this image in a divine realm centuries in the past, he positions the mother-son duo before a grassy field abutting a river—a setting that could have been found in Botticelli’s Italy. In so doing, he situates this religious scene in an everyday milieu familiar to his viewers. To further pull his material down to earth, Botticelli humanizes his subjects, with Mary displaying a furtive, matronly gaze that doesn’t always appear in medieval art.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

Dieric Bouts, a northern Renaissance painter based in Flemish Brabant, appears not to have personally painted this work, instead providing designs to be executed by members of his workshop. But what execution! Working in oil, a medium that afforded northern Renaissance artists the ability to render details impossible to obtain through the tempera used in Italy, the workshop’s members intricately painted out every swollen tear shed by this Virgin Mary, whose image may have once faced a panel of Christ wearing a crown of thorns. Bouts’s drawings call for heightened naturalism: This Mary does not cry in a way that is elegant. She has grieved so much, in fact, that her eyes have gone bloodshot.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

While Giovanni Battista Moroni was much loved in 16th-century Lombardy for his austere, minimalist portraits, his reputation has taken a lashing in the centuries since; the art historian Bernard Berenson once quipped that Moroni’s subjects were “too uninterestingly themselves.” The plainness of Moroni’s style is what animates a painting like this one, however. It features Gian Ludovico Madruzzo, a Catholic cardinal who was involved in the Council of Trent, which responded to the Protestant Reformation by making changes to the Catholic Church. Moroni’s portrait fittingly pictures Madruzzo as a man immune to the excess that once characterized the Church—and as a fearsome figure worth heeding. At more than 16 feet tall, the painting towers over the viewer, who may feel small in the face of it, just like the obedient dog at Madruzzo’s side.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

The Art Institute is lucky enough to have not one but four great paintings by El Greco, a defining figure of the Mannerist movement. The most striking of the bunch is this work depicting the Virgin Mary’s ascension to heaven. Once meant for a funerary chapel owned by a Spanish widow, the painting demonstrates El Greco’s flair for emotional drama and compositional extravagance, with robes flowing in the wind and figures moving every which way. Even the subject matter is over the top: The Virgin Mary does not simply pass; she floats out of her stone coffin and rises upward while resting her feet on a crescent moon. Appropriately, El Greco executed the painting on a larger-than-life canvas that measures more than 33 feet tall.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

Were this painting focused only on its fruit basket spilling over with grapes, apples, and pears, it would offer plenty to look at. But this gorgeous feast offers quite a bit more to take in: several dangling birds speared together, dead rabbits lying in a heap, an upended deer, a bleeding boar’s head. Flemish painter Frans Snyders specialized in still lifes overflowing with food like this one. Here he seemed to fear that such a bountiful accumulation might blind its viewer to the darker realities of life. To avoid that, he also painted in a pickpocket preparing to commit robbery and a cat hiding under a table, ready to leap from the darkness.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

This haunting crucifixion scene demonstrates what Francisco de Zurbarán did best: painting inky darkness that threatens to subsume the subjects unnaturally lit in front of it. That the Spanish painter here situated Jesus before a void, and not in the world, was intentional. Whereas Renaissance artists innovatively placed Christian subject matter in real-world locations, Baroque artists went in the opposite direction, in keeping with the Catholic Church’s belief that religious subjects existed on higher plane than the one inhabited by the rest of us. Here, Zurbarán strips away any sense that Jesus ever resided on earth, save for one striking detail toward the bottom: a crinkled paper that bears the artist’s name.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

This is the most beguiling work in the Art Institute’s European painting and sculpture galleries. Still, it’s a little weird—but it may have been less weird in its original setting. Eustache Le Sueur produced Meekness for a patron’s Paris home, where it was one of a set of eight paintings depicting the beatitudes and shown alongside an altarpiece depicting the Annunciation. Seen in isolation, Meekness still holds its own. Le Sueur shows a lamb gently nibbling at the hand of an elegantly robed woman, an act that here functions as a personification of submission and restraint. Yet this is not your average allegory, because Le Sueur situates it against a gleaming gold background that threatens to draw the work into abstraction. It’s a stylistic flourish that feels edgy, even by today’s standards.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

This collaborative work married the strengths of its individual makers: Adriaen van der Spelt painted the floral arrangement, while Frans van Mieris rendered the trompe l’oeil curtain that appears before it. That kind of sleight-of-hand is enacted frequently by artists these days, but there is a difference between Van der Spelt and Van Mieris and, say, Jasper Johns. Whereas the American has long thought through painting’s material properties using contemporary theory, the two Dutchmen were more concerned with antiquity—in particular, the story of the ancient Greek painter Zeuxis, who was bested in an art competition by his rival Parrhasius, who added a curtain to his still life depicting grapes.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

The tendrils of Christianity’s influence had reached many corners of the world by the time of the Renaissance, far beyond the Middle East and Europe—as evidenced by this icon, which originated in what is now Ethiopia. Its depictions of the lives of the Virgin Mary and Jesus differ in one key regard from similar paintings that flowed out of Europe: All the people here are olive-skinned rather than white and have almond-shaped eyes. Stylistically, the work is dissimilar, too, with its characters depicted in a rich color palette. The icon thus suggests cultural hybridity, and so it is fitting that as of early 2026, with the Art Institute’s African art section closed for renovations, the museum was featuring this work in its galleries for Renaissance art, where the icon rubbed shoulders with paintings by Italians such as Fra Angelico and Matteo di Giovanni.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

This monumental painting is one of four eight-foot-tall canvases commissioned from Hubert Robert by a wealthy Frenchman; the Art Institute impressively owns the full quartet. The Old Temple, the finest of the bunch, shows off Robert’s flair for painting the ruins of antiquity. Unlike many of his neoclassical colleagues, who painted prettified tableaux clearly set within ancient Greece and Rome, Robert was more interested in representing columns and statues grown dirty with age. His temples often existed out of time and out of place—the people seen here wear outfits that variously feel centuries-old and contemporary. For that reason, Robert’s paintings are less didactic statements about the greatness of the past than an evocation of a nostalgia for it felt among the ancien régime in the years leading up to the French Revolution.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

While many painters often learn by working from life, Jean Louis André Théodore Géricault furthered his craft by cultivating relationships with Parisian morgues and looking closely at the dead bodies he saw there. He painted many images of severed body parts, like this one, whose unflinching view of blood pooling below the neck attached to a decapitated head is enough to stop anyone in their tracks. (But believe it or not, this is not the most gruesome one Géricault ever made. Head to France to see his gnarly study of a lopped-off arm embracing two feet.) Mercifully, this Head shares space with more palatable examples of Romantic painting, including two roiling landscapes by J. M. W. Turner.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

While this painting is now rightfully recognized as a classic, it was not always that way: The Art Institute became the first institution to publicly exhibit it in 180 years when the work entered the museum’s collection in 2008. In the nearly two decades since, The Captive Slave has been cited as a core document of abolitionist sentiment in England during the early 19th century. John Simpson mounted his plea for an end to enslavement by painting Ira Aldridge, an American-born actor who is commonly considered the first Black man to play Othello, shackled to a bench, his eyes wet with tears as he stares upward. When Simpson debuted the work in 1827, he reproduced part of a William Cowper poem in an accompanying catalog: “But ah! what wish can prosper, or what prayer / For merchants rich in cargoes of despair.” Enslavement was abolished in England six years after the exhibition.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

The vast majority of the works in the Art Institute’s galleries of European painting and sculpture are by men, as is common in museums across the globe. Gradually, the Art Institute has begun rectifying the severe gender imbalance by acquiring works by female Old Masters. Purchased in 2023, this painting is by Mélanie de Comoléra, a Frenchwoman who learned her craft from the still life painter Cornelis van Spaendonck. Just like her teacher, she displayed a taste for fruits and flowers arranged along sharp diagonals, so that unruly stems and vines run this way and that across her compositions. In this one, sweet and savory combine: A bunch of grapes dangles above two jalapeño peppers balanced against each other.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

In the Western tradition, most personifications of beauty depict white women. This one, however, represents a Black woman, earning it the name La Vénus Africaine when it was first produced. (Many institutions own casts of the work and still call it by that name, though the Art Institute has opted instead for the title featured here.) A companion piece to a bust of Saïd Abdullah, a formerly enslaved Sudanese man, this sculpture was originally featured in a Parisian anthropological museum. Now exhibited in a less explicitly fraught context, the sculpture stands out as one of the few representations of a Black woman in the Art Institute’s galleries for European painting and sculpture.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

No French painter of the 19th century pushed the envelope with more élan than Édouard Manet, who took up tired artistic genres—odalisques, history paintings, and the like—and twisted their conventions so that they felt new again. By the time Manet painted The Races at Longchamp, there were already many other works out there depicting racetracks, but in those pieces the perspective was always from the point of view of the audience looking on. Here, Manet drops us into the middle of the action by positioning his viewers right in front of the charging horses. The entire painting feels dynamized, perhaps even a little out of control, which might be why Manet leaves areas blurry, as though his painting were a photograph of a subject that would not stay still.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

Beata Beatrix is one of the defining works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters active in Victorian era England who revived medieval and Renaissance styles in an attempt to “go beyond nature,” as poet John Ruskin put it. Dante Gabriel Rossetti accomplished just that by taking his cues from a poem by Dante Alighieri for Alighieri’s dead muse, Beatrice. As a stand-in for her, Rossetti used artist Elizabeth Siddal, whom he married not long before her death by suicide in 1862. Rossetti’s portrayal of her is unabashedly emotional, filled with crimson and evergreen hues that heighten the drama and fulfill Ruskin’s edict. Technically, this is the second version of the painting, with the first residing at Tate Britain. But the Art Institute piece has something the Tate work does not: a second painting at the bottom that depicts Dante’s reunion with Beatrice in heaven, hinting that Rossetti still hoped he might one day meet his own lost love once more.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

The Art Institute’s galleries for 19th-century painting function as a parade of Impressionist masterpieces. First up is this painting by Berthe Morisot, who until relatively recently played second fiddle in the art history books to her husband, Édouard Manet. Like Manet, Morisot had a predilection for loose brushwork and chunky paint that lent her work an abstract quality—and flouted the artistic norms of her day. Here, an image of a woman fixing her hair before a mirror dissolves the boundary between its central figure and the bluish room in which she is set. Morisot does not provide a clear picture, depicting a blurry essence of the scene rather than a defined image of her model. All that comes into focus is one glimmering earring.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

This work is not currently on view.

While most tourists come to the Art Institute’s 19th-century painting galleries seeking Impressionist art, it’s worth spending time with great works from other, contemporaneous movements in France. This one is representative of Symbolism, a movement that sought not to represent reality—as Realism before it did—but to evoke its inner meaning through fantastical imagery. This does not mean Symbolism was entirely untethered from our world; indeed, to make this painting, Gustave Moreau worked closely from animals he studied in a Paris zoo. Those sketches resulted in this painting’s multiheaded serpent, which stares down a nearly naked Hercules. Rather than spooling out an earthbound allegory about serenity in the face of danger, Moreau gleefully goes for something more grotesque, setting his scene on a seaside cliff strewn with bones.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

Among the Impressionists, Gustave Caillebotte always stood out: His color palette was often cooler than that of his peers, and the edges of his forms were always more defined. Paris Street; Rainy Day, one of his greatest works, looks quite unlike the Monet and Renoir paintings in its vicinity, but it is related to them by Caillebotte’s interest in a rapidly modernizing Paris. Haussmann-style architecture, freshly cobbled streets, and a new electric lamppost are the stars of this painting, in which people walk around a plaza while a gentle rain comes down. The painting attests to a changing Paris—and hints at yet more shifts still to come, with a scaffold attached to one building far in the distance.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

As in Manet’s painting The Races at Longchamps (see above), Claude Monet’s Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare puts the viewer right at the center of the action: Were a barrier not set at the end of the track seen here, the train might barrel right into us. In the literal sense, Monet’s subject is a locomotive, but his true topic is modernity. Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris’s main train station, was built just 40 years before Monet made this work; its glass roofing and electric lampposts were still new at the time. Monet is showing us how the city Parisians knew well was being remade, and he pays close mind to how nature was also being reshaped in the process. Here, trains belch steam into the air, where it hangs like clouds floating across the overcast sky of the background.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

This may not be the most famous Renoir owned by the Art Institute—that would be Two Sisters (On the Terrace), from 1881—but it is the best work on hand by this Impressionist artist, whose work famously charms the public while also rankling some contemporary critics. The painting shows off Renoir’s skill at expressive brushwork and coloration, with the bouquet of flowers and the cobalt background rendered using an array of feathery strokes. In one astonishing flourish, the model’s hair even contains highlights of yellow, as though the bouquet beside her were glowing.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

Though best known for his paintings of ballerinas, Edgar Degas rendered other subjects with similar flair. In this pastel, he shows us a woman in a hat store, though it is unclear whether she is a customer or a shopkeeper because Degas offers so little visual information. The Millinery Shop is classic Degas, with its composition skewed so that the decked-out hats occupy far more of the picture’s space than his human model. This type of composition bucked traditional wisdom about how paintings ought to be made, and so it became a common device used by Degas and his fellow Impressionists, who rewrote art-historical conventions endorsed by the Paris Salon.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

If you know one work from the Art Institute’s collection, chances are it is this one. Yet the painting is more than a tourist destination—it’s also an art-historical milestone. Georges Seurat’s Sunday on La Grande Jatte is a shining example of Pointillism, wherein an artist makes an image through specks or strokes of paint. Up close, those marks may appear diffuse or disparate, but when viewed from afar, they cohere to form people and landscapes. Using a method whose rigor has rarely been equaled, Seurat showed that color structures how we see—an observation that broke new ground during his time, even though it may now seem simple. La Grande Jatte has resided at this museum ever since its acquisition in 1923, with one exception in 1958, when it traveled to New York’s Museum of Modern Art and narrowly avoided the flames of a destructive fire.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

Compared with other 19th-century French artists on this list, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes is tough to categorize. Unlike the Impressionists, who painted contemporary France, Puvis dealt with the past. And while he created allegories that theoretically could have aligned him with the Symbolists, his approach was more mannered than anything associated with that movement. Yet modernists of the 20th century could not resist Puvis’s art, whose flatness inspired experimentation. Here, in his signature ashen color palette, Puvis uses women in togalike wraps as personifications of the arts; a soaring figure and a singing woman stand in for the beauty of music.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

French painting remains the main reason to visit the museum’s galleries for art of the 19th century, but there are treasures here by artists of other European nations as well. Antonio Mancini did spend time in Paris, but he had already returned to his native Italy by the time he painted Resting, in which a shirtless woman lies in bed. Though the title suggests relaxation, the picture is hardly serene: The woman looks nervously around the room, and Mancini’s chunky paint is as roiled as his subject. His model holds a rose in one hand, though it is nearly impossible to take in the flower’s beauty because it is subsumed by white strokes depicting rumpled sheets all around it.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

Vincent van Gogh’s canvases are often characterized by thick swirls of paint that are often interpreted as reflections of his own disturbed mental space. But when Van Gogh moved into a new house in Arles, France, in 1889, he told his brother Theo that he had found serenity. The paintings that resulted, this one among them, were his way of representing his newfound inner peace. But rather than depicting the world as it normally looks, Van Gogh did it using raucous colors that contrast with each other—note the rich strokes of turquoise running along the gray floorboards. This tendency toward unnatural hues, as well as the skewed perspective utilized by Van Gogh, are staples of the Post-Impressionist movement, which sought to represent the world not as it appears but as it is felt. These features also have made the painting a staple of the Art Institute collection, with reproductions of this work now printed on tchotchkes of all kinds, available in the gift shop.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

The French art scene of the late 19th century was crowded with painters who turned their attention to everyday Parisian life, from Gustave Caillebotte to Georges Seurat (see above). But Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec stood apart from the rest because his depictions of bars and brothels in the French capital were so expressive. In the foreground of this painting of the Moulin Rouge, the boîte that Toulouse-Lautrec himself patronized, the face of the singer Mary Milton is a queasy shade of green, one that recalls the tint of the absinthe often consumed in her presence. Meanwhile, the perspective of the scene around her seems to warp, as though viewed through drunk goggles. This kind of perspectival shift is commonly associated with Post-Impressionism, the movement with which Toulouse-Lautrec was affiliated.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

Paul Cézanne painted images of fruit strewn around tables over and over, though no two of these works are quite alike. This was intentional: Cézanne was showing that there are many perspectives on a single subject, as becomes obvious through close viewing of this painting, in which a quotidian still life reveals itself as something stranger. Cézanne’s table, for example, is notably askew, with one portion of its surface positioned lower than the rest. The crumpled tablecloth, meanwhile, appears to extend off the table in an unnatural way. It’s all rendered as if Cézanne had shifted his own position as he worked, then melded together a range of viewpoints to form a single image. This unusual way of working was innovative in its time—and went on to inspire the Cubists in the 20th century.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela cut his teeth in Paris during the 1880s, then returned the following decade to his homeland, where he embarked on a stranger phase of his career that aligned him with the Symbolists but resisted easy classification. Ad Astra is among the odder works he produced, in part because it looks not like a traditional oil on canvas but like a golden altarpiece, opened to reveal an image of a nude girl with her arms spread. Partly submerged in a crimson sea, this woman stands before a large golden moon and appears to levitate, with her hair streaming out every which way. Acquired in 2017 by the Art Institute, Gallen-Kalela’s painting is a relative newcomer to these galleries.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

Camille Pissarro was the elder statesman of the Impressionists. A generation older than most of his colleagues tied to the movement, he acted as a guiding light to artists such as Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne while also developing his own signature style, which is demarcated by the rough texture of his paint. Having worked alongside artists such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in the late 19th century, Pissarro adopted a warmer, more expressive color palette, as seen in this work showing a woman washing her feet. Flecks of bright green stand in for grass while dabs of brown depict tree leaves in the sunlight. The brook below is a mix of these hues and others, as though its contents were drawn from the water used by Pissarro himself to clean his brushes.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

Consider many of the still lifes in the Art Institute’s galleries for European art, and they look comparatively staid when stacked against this James Ensor painting, which takes an old genre and gives it a fresh spin. Shells, dead sea creatures, and ornate vessels—all things that appeared in Dutch Old Master paintings—recur here, but the way Ensor paints them is noticeably different, as he leaves his background a grayish abstraction that recalls the least figurative work produced by J. M. W. Turner. In the 20th century, Ensor would go on to create bizarre paintings of people with skulls for faces. In light of those works, this still life’s fascination with mortality seems especially noteworthy.

Where to see it: European Painting and Sculpture Galleries

The European painting galleries at this museum understandably hog the spotlight, but the nearby spaces for European decorative art merit attention too, for they contain such great works as this multitiered grotto festooned with shells. Produced in the French city of Nevers, the diorama was made by fusing painted glass onto metal to form a variety of oddball elements: a person playing a woodwind before some lambs, a woman singing before a gilded balcony, a man whose robes threaten to fall off his body, fruit-bearing trees, crystal-encrusted walls. Though it stands just 19 inches tall, the diorama is likely to loom large in one’s memory.

Where to see it: European Applied Arts Galleries

There are good porcelain objects produced by the Meissen Manufactory in the German city of Dresden, and then there are great ones, like this centerpiece, which astonish by way of their extravagance. Intended to be used by the Saxon court at a banquet table, this centerpiece features a basket with four roosters and two containers meant to hold sugar, both featuring kissing Chinese couples. (Stereotyped depictions of Chinese people proliferate across Meissen porcelains of the 18th century; to modern eyes these figures will appear off-color, if not outright racist.) Decked out in ornate gilt bronze, the centerpiece is European decorative art at its most brilliant.

Where to see it: European Applied Arts Galleries

This room very nearly didn’t make it to the Art Institute at all. Designed by architects Dankmar Adler and Louis H. Sullivan, the Chicago Stock Exchange building was completed in 1894, then targeted for demolition in the 1960s. As plans for the building’s deconstruction moved closer to reality in 1972, photographer and activist Richard Nickel led a campaign to save its storied trading room; it ended up finding a home at the Art Institute, where it has been installed since 1977. Though parts of the room have been reconstructed, it retains its original glass ceiling and columns as well as portions of the stenciling that appeared on the walls. Now used as an event space by the museum, the 5,700-square-foot room may once again be in danger. In 2026 the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ reported that the room could be impacted by an ambitious plan to expand the museum, leaving its fate in question.

Where to see it: Stock Exchange Room

The shells of spondylus mollusks were the unusual material used to make this mask, a gem of the galleries for art of the Americas. Found at the ruins of Teotihuacan, a pre-Hispanic metropolis not far from what is now Mexico City, the mask would likely have been displayed in a home or a temple. Though masks were not rare in Teotihuacan, this one is a little different from most: According to the museum, its carefully delineated features—its furrowed brow and its raised lip—do not appear in similar masks, leading some to wonder if it may represent a specific person as opposed to a generic character. Whomever, or whatever, it depicts, the mask now manages to upstage fine paintings by Stuart Davis, Rufino Tamayo, and Joshua Johnson exhibited in the same airy gallery.

Where to see it: Galleries for Arts of the Americas

While other American painters turned up their noses at still life painting, Raphaelle Peale devoted himself fully to the genre: Most of his oeuvre consists of pictures of assorted fruits posed before a brown background cast partly in moody darkness. The formula owed something to Spanish Baroque painting of the 17th century, but Peale’s take was singular and—insofar as American art history goes, at least—quietly revolutionary. Here, a glass urn is filled with ripe strawberries alongside unshelled nuts in a nearby plate. The redness of Peale’s berries stands in sharp contrast to the pallid hues seen throughout much of the rest of the painting; one gets the sense that they are delectable.

Where to see it: Galleries for Arts of the Americas

Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole specialized in painting vast American vistas untarnished by industrialization and colonialism. This view of Niagara Falls, a frequent subject for the Hudson River School painters, thus features nary a building in sight. The only sign of humanity in this autumnal landscape is two Native Americans, a man and a woman who gaze at a waterfall cascading into a lake. But rather than making them the main characters of this painting, Cole renders them small, literally minimizing their role in stewarding their land. His main goal is to provide an attractive—and sanitized—vision of all the beauty America has to offer, dusky skies and all.

Where to see it: Galleries for Arts of the Americas

Winslow Homer was one of the great observers of post–Civil War America, with a keen awareness of how the nation’s social mores had changed following the conflict. Whereas other paintings by him are seeded with trenchant political commentary, this famed one is comparatively subdued. In it, Homer depicts a game of croquet, which had arrived on American shores from England and become a hit. The sport may have intrigued Homer because it could be played by both men and women, which was unusual for the time. Here, the women are the active participants, standing tall in vibrantly colored dresses while a male companion in a gray suit adjusts a ball for one of them.

Where to see it: Galleries for Arts of the Americas

The American-born Mary Cassatt spent most of her career in France, where she drew on the Impressionist art flowing out of Paris for her own depictions of everyday life. Unlike many of her male colleagues, however, Cassatt focused on domesticity—specifically the relationships between female caregivers and the children they look after. With psychological acuity, Cassatt here depicts a mother washing a little girl’s feet. Inspired by ukiyo-e prints, Cassatt collapses space, causing her background to go hazy and appear flat. The focus, instead, is on woman and child, whose closeness is evident not just from their proximity but also from their poses, with the girl gently propping one hand on her mom’s bent knee.

Where to see it: Galleries for Art of the Americas

Working in the small Pueblo town of Santa Clara, New Mexico, Tewa ceramicist Sara Fina Tafoya made a lasting impression with earthenware vessels such as this one. To create jars like it, Tafoya worked according to knowledge not gained in art school but passed down to her across the generations. Her creations are characterized by their inky shade of black and their lack of adornment. Despite their understated quality, they had a clear influence on her descendants, among them her daughter Margaret Tafoya and her grandson Joseph Lonewolf, both of whom became artists in their own right.

Where to see it: Galleries for Arts of the Americas

Working in France during the late 19th century, the American painter John Singer Sargent cultivated a reputation as a portraitist who seemed little interested in the accepted traditions of his genre. Ever the provocateur, he broke the rules all over again by going in an entirely different direction in 1907, when he abandoned indoor portraiture for plein air painting. Working outdoors, he produced this famed painting, which features the married artists Wilfrid and Jane Emmet de Glehn. Sargent’s brushwork is deliberately vague and thick—another convention defied—and he seems less interested in his subjects themselves than in the garments they wear, with the blues and whites of water gushing from a fountain mirroring the tones of Wilfrid’s shirt. Notably, Sargent depicts these artists working outdoors as well, as if to show that he was not alone in wanting to test artistic taboos.

Where to see it: Galleries for Arts of the Americas

This grand stained-glass window is a relatively recent addition to the Art Institute collection, and a truly transformative one it is. Until 2018, it was held at the Community Church of Providence in Rhode Island, where it was not necessarily perceived as the great artwork that it is. “Art enthusiasts did not overrun the church,” reported the Providence Journal in 2020, the year it was readied for relocation to the Art Institute. There are few Tiffany windows like it anywhere in the world. Designed by Agnes F. Northrop, the 25-foot-tall window is composed of 48 intricate panels that combine to offer a shining vision of Mount Chocorua, New Hampshire, in all its glory. The window now appears in a sunlit atrium outside the American art galleries, its brilliant blue waterfall looming high above first-class sculptures by Auguste Rodin.

Where to see it: Galleries for Arts of the Americas

If there is one quintessential Art Institute artwork, American Gothic may be it. Like many others by Grant Wood, this painting helped establish a distinctly American aesthetic defined by folksiness, primness, and off-kilter humor. The couple seen here was not actually an item: The woman in the painting is Nan Wood Graham, the artist’s sister; the man is Byron McKeeby, a dentist to multiple members of the Wood clan. But the facts of the picture matter little, because what Wood was trying to capture was an impression of rural America that he knew well, having been born and raised in Iowa. A touchstone of the Regionalist movement, the painting was submitted by Wood to a 1930 competition held by the Art Institute. Though Wood won only a $300 bronze medal, the museum ended up acquiring the painting anyhow, and the rest is history.

Where to see it: Galleries for Arts of the Americas

During the period between world wars, Edward Hopper shot to fame for paintings that often featured people lost in thought. Hopper described these paintings as studies in light, but that hasn’t stopped many viewers from interpreting them as explorations of loneliness and solitude—which helps explain why, during the 2020 Covid lockdown, Nighthawks went viral. Hopper admitted that he may have been “unconsciously” thinking about those topics when he made the painting, one of his masterpieces. Here, a man and a woman—seemingly a couple—sit at a diner alongside another man while a server waits on them. No one appears much interested in anyone else, and the city outside the eatery is eerily devoid of people, heightening the sense of alienation.

Where to see it: Galleries for Arts of the Americas

In 1962, while Georgia O’Keeffe was flying back to her home in New Mexico, she looked out the plane window and was astonished by the clouds she saw. “It looked so secure that I thought I could walk right out on it to the horizon if the door opened,” she once recalled. This memorable sight birthed an entire series of pieces; this one is the largest painting in that body of work. In it, O’Keeffe offers a landscape that looks less like a sky than an arctic ocean filled with ice floes. Looking at this work, it can be hard to tell which way is up, which was O’Keeffe’s point—she wanted to create a painting that inverted how we see the world around us. Hung above an iconic staircase, the 24-foot-wide painting came to Chicago during a touring O’Keeffe retrospective in 1971 and remained there afterward because it was too big to get through the doors of its next stop, in San Francisco. After a decade-long loan, the Art Institute secured the painting for its collection with O’Keeffe’s help.

Where to see it: Galleries for Arts of the Americas

If you wanted a chair like this one during the 19th century, there were few places to get it; they were produced primarily in Mombasa and three islands off Kenya’s [EM1] east coast. The rarefied nature of the chairs’ making contributed to their majesty; it’s no surprise that their Swahili name, kiti cha enzi, translates to “chair of power.” Likely used by a member of the Swahili elite and inlaid with ivory, the chair is defined by the high level of craft in its caning. According to the Art Institute, the chair evinces a distinct European influence, resembling similar objects made in Spain and Portugal in the centuries before.
Where to see it: Galleries for Arts of Africa
 
This object is not currently on view.

 [EM1]Can we say Kenya’s? “Africa” is pretty unspecific.

One Kuba proverb goes like this: “An animal, even if it is large, does not surpass the elephant. A man, even if he has authority, does not surpass the king.” That’s why this helmet mask takes the form of an elephant, with a long, arcing trunk and two tusks formed from thread. Produced in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, this mask would have conferred power upon its wearer, who might have donned it during funeral rites. Replete with tufted raffia and the feathers of an African gray parrot, the mask is one of the most elaborate objects in the Art Institute’s African art galleries, which are currently undergoing renovation.

Where to see it: Galleries for Arts of Africa

This object is not currently on view.

Yoruba beadwork is typically colorful, extravagant, and elaborate—so much so, in fact, that it is often hard to remember that the objects decorated with it were not necessarily meant as artworks. Instead, they were intended for everyday use by a powerful few, as was the case with this crown, known as an ade. Once worn by the king of Idowa, in what is now Nigeria, this crown features bulging eyes, birdlike extrusions, and colorful tasseling—all done in glass beads that appear almost like threads from a distance.

Where to see it: Galleries for Arts of Africa

This object is not currently on view.

This type of figure was known among the Kota people, of what is now Gabon, as a mbulu ngulu, and it would have initially stood atop a reliquary. With flattened faces and two crooked lines signifying bent limbs, and in some cases bulging eyes as well, mbulu ngulu figures denoted power latent in the relics in their proximity. Figures such as these proliferated until the early 20th century, when French colonizers rendered them illegal in their quest to make Christianity the dominant religion in Gabon. Thereafter, Western museums began displaying the figures; European modernists saw them there and drew inspiration from their formal qualities, seemingly without regard for the objects’ original purpose.

Where to see it: Galleries for Arts of Africa

This object is not currently on view.

Mwana pwo masks were typically worn during rituals by Chokwe men, even though they commonly represent women. In summoning female ancestors or invoking members of their community of the opposite sex, these men were upholding the status of women as child-bearers and marriage partners. This mask, fashioned largely out of wood and likely produced in modern-day Angola, appears to be individualized and may have been based on a specific woman’s likeness.

Where to see it: Galleries for Arts of Africa

This object is not currently on view.

The Art Institute’s modern art collection is distinguished by its wealth of great Picassos; this painting is just one of the major works by him that are typically on view. An iconic work of the Spanish modernist’s Blue Period, the painting features an emaciated guitarist who cradles his instrument. If his strumming has gained any listeners, Picasso does not picture them in this claustrophobic canvas, which hems the old man in, as if he were physically trapped by the circumstances of his apparent poverty. Drawing heavily on the paintings of El Greco, a Spanish painter of the Mannerist era, Picasso communicates psychic torment through an expressive color palette that deliberately diverges from reality.

Where to see it: Modern Art Galleries

To choose one Matisse painting for this list feels like a cruel exercise—the Art Institute owns quite a few great canvases by him. But Bathers by a River earns its place here because Matisse himself held it in such high esteem, calling it “one of his five key . . . no, pivotal works,” per the curator Katherine Kuh, who helped acquire it for the museum in 1953. Initially begun on commission for the influential Russian collector Sergei Shchukin in 1909, the painting depicts a group of bathers, something that Matisse revisited many times for works that rendered this subject—by then one associated with academic conservatism—using a decidedly modern aesthetic. The commission for the work fell through, but Matisse returned to the canvas in the years afterward. The result is a work that is so spare as to look unfinished: All his bathers have blank ovals for heads; at least one lacks feet, and yet another seems to stand atop, rather than in front of, a tree.

Where to see it: Modern Art Galleries

While this monumentally scaled painting may seem completely abstract, it was in fact based on someone specific: the actress Stacia Napierkowska, whom Francis Picabia saw perform live on an ocean liner taking him from France to the United States. Rather than depict Napierkowska herself, Picabia used a cascade of forms recalling metal gears to summon her choreography. The painting emblematizes a machinelike aesthetic that was in vogue in the Paris art scene at the time and presages the absurdity associated with the Dada movement, whose artists responded to the horrors of World War I with art that refused to make sense. Picabia’s canvas is notably accompanied by a gibberish title that scrambles the French words for star and dance (étoile and danse, respectively) while also managing to omit letters from both terms. He subtitled his painting Ecclesiastic, as if to underline the fact that his abstraction was majestic, even if it looked like the gnashing innards of something you might see in a factory.

Where to see it: Modern Art Galleries

Franz Marc’s paintings are almost always distinguished by colors that are warm and loud. The German painter was not alone in using such a heightened palette; he and his Blaue Reiter colleagues were interested in using bold color to achieve harmony, often by abstracting the world in the process. Here, Marc pictures a mill, with its red wheel and white water fading into a background populated by smiling birds, an orange fox, and indigo buildings. The natural world and the world built by humans seamlessly blur, creating a space in which everything seems to be part of one big system—a pleasant thought during a time when industry and modernity were reshaping many Germans’ lives. Naive though that sentiment may now appear, Marc’s hues live up to the painting’s title, for they remain every bit as bewitching today as they were when first painted.

Where to see it: Modern Art Galleries

To a degree that can appear shocking to contemporary eyes, Kazimir Malevich laid the groundwork for Minimalism with paintings composed of spare shapes set against white backgrounds. Produced in Russia during the 1910s, these works made him one of the stars of the Suprematist movement, whose artists viewed the “objective world” as “meaningless,” as Malevich wrote, and instead sought to portray the essence of visual facts, often by capturing a feeling rather than describing it optically. Accordingly, this painting does not so much depict its titular soccer player as it evokes his path on a playing field. Black and red rectangles are set at uneven distances atop a green circle that may stand in for a ball. As one’s eye traverses the painting from top to bottom, it becomes possible to imagine an athlete drawing back a leg and preparing to set up a goal.

Where to see it: Modern Art Galleries

A painting by Suzanne Duchamp hangs in the Art Institute galleries alongside Readymades by her brother, the Dada artist Marcel Duchamp. Suzanne may lack the mainstream attention had by Marcel, but her day may soon come, given that she recently had a traveling retrospective in which this painting was a star. Broken and Restored Multiplication features her signature combinations of machinelike forms with words whose meaning is slippery and unstable. “The mirror would shatter, the scaffolding would totter, the balloons would fly away, the stars would dim, etc.,” reads the French-language text surrounding her Eiffel Tower, whose inverted form mirrors the upside-down logic of a post–World War I Europe still reeling from destruction and carnage. The use of restored in her title suggests an attempt to discover a way of imposing order anew amid the chaos.

Where to see it: Modern Art Galleries

If a painting really is a window on the world, as Western artists have proposed since the Italian Renaissance, then there is surely much that exists beyond a canvas’s view. That line of thinking animated the abstractions painted by Piet Mondrian, an affiliate of the Dutch art movement De Stijl. Often he responded by painting gridlike patterns with thick black lines, with the occasional swatch of red, yellow, or blue. In this painting, Mondrian deliberately allows the edges of his canvas to cut through his yellow and blue squares, creating the illusion that they continue beyond the painting’s borders. Done on a square canvas that is rotated 90 degrees, the painting aspires toward the aesthetic purity held in such high regard by Mondrian, who said his form of abstraction was “completely emancipated, free of naturalistic appearances.”

Where to see it: Modern Art Galleries

While Marc Chagall flirted throughout his career with the aesthetics of modernist avant-gardes such as Cubism and Expressionism, his primary focus was his Jewish identity and the folklore associated with it. In part, this was because of his upbringing toward the end of the 19th century in Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus, where he witnessed the impact of pogroms that targeted the local Jewish population. Seeking to keep traditions alive, he repeatedly painted images such as this one, in which a man can be seen with tefillin—a leather box containing Torah passages—wrapped around one arm. As was common for Chagall, he painted this work so that it appears to float between reality and a dream world, with the background fading into abstraction.

Where to see it: Modern Art Galleries

While Diego Rivera is best known for his murals, he also produced smaller-scale paintings such as this one in his quest to uphold his version of Mexico, whose history he sought to disentangle from centuries of Spanish colonialism. In Weaving, he pictures Luz Jiménez, who worked tirelessly to preserve the Nahuatl language during the first half of the 20th century. Rivera shows Jiménez at her loom, creating a weaving using Indigenous techniques at risk of being lost. She appears so absorbed in her work that she does not even acknowledge her viewer, who is invited to admire the difficulty of her labor and all the knowledge it required.

Where to see it: Modern Art Galleries

The Art Institute is not alone in having a set of modern art galleries dominated overwhelmingly by men. And it is not alone, either, in trying in recent years to rectify the gender imbalance by shining a light on female modernists who are lesser known in the United States. One is Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, a Portuguese-born painter who worked in France, where she was known for dizzying abstractions that appeared to warp space and time. In this one, Vieira da Silva shows a coiled form composed of tiled squares inspired by the azulejo ceramics of Hispano-Arabic architecture. Vieira da Silva often claimed paintings like this one represented spaces with open portals. Enter them, and they reorient your perception of the world.

Where to see it: Modern Art Galleries

This Salvador Dalí painting is just one of the many world-famous Surrealist artworks on hand at the Art Institute. In it, Dalí represents a dreamy landscape populated by a burning giraffe, a person in a cat mask admiring a horse-headed figure with its breast bared, and bent-over humanoids that seem to be undergoing a transformation of some kind. It is horrifying, beautiful, and even a little humorous (if you think it’s funny that the artist included himself and his wife, Gala, in such a haunted space). Here’s how Dalí explained the picture, which is about that which resists rational analysis: “Flaming giraffe equals masculine apocalyptic monster. Cat angel equals divine heterosexual monster. Hourglass equals metaphysical monster. Gala and Dalí equal sentimental monster. The little blue dog is not a true monster.”

Where to see it: Modern Art Galleries

In this beloved painting, a locomotive belches steam as it emerges from a fireplace’s stone wall. Where this train is coming from and where it is headed—and how it is moving at all—go unexplained by René Magritte, one of the core artists of the Surrealist movement. Like those in his cohort, Magritte was fascinated by psychologically fraught states of being and hallucinatory imagery that defied reason. Unlike others in his circle, however, Magritte’s provocations were of a more understated variety. In this picture, the strangest detail is one that could easily go overlooked: The tall mirror above the fireplace reflects back a gray void, rendering it impossible to get one’s bearings within this vacant room, whose mysterious geography seems to stretch on infinitely.

Where to see it: Modern Art Galleries

Chilean-born artist Roberto Matta was among the Surrealists who sought to paint according to the logic of automatism, wherein one cedes all control to the impulses of one’s mind. Using thinned-down oil that he wiped and brushed onto his canvas, Matta often created blooms of color that appear smoky and semi-translucent, as though they were just as fleeting as his thoughts. Here, taking his inspiration from a screenplay Matta wrote about Federico García Lorca, a poet killed by the Franco regime in Spain, the artist envisions a gleaming sun that hangs over a landscape dominated by two big blazes. The work seems to summon an otherworldly energy; no surprise, then, that it was influenced by a real volcanic eruption that Matta saw in Mexico in 1941.

Where to see it: Modern Art Galleries

One of the more recent entrants to the Art Institute’s hallowed galleries is Remedios Varo, whose paintings often sought to envision worlds beyond our own. Born in Spain and based in Mexico, Varo is among the female Surrealists who have risen dramatically in prominence in recent years; the Art Institute had never owned a work by her prior to 2024, when it acquired this painting, her last and her largest. In it, a lit candle appears to emit mysterious energy, causing fruit to float off a table and orbit it. The entire painting seems animated by an invisible force belonging to a realm beyond our own. Its setting, the apse of a church, only adds further intrigue.

Where to see it: Modern Art Galleries

Not unlike Varo (above), Tatsuo Ikeda is a relatively new addition to Surrealist art history, in part because he didn’t work in Europe. Based in Japan, Ikeda responded to the chaos of the postwar era with paintings and drawings that featured morphing bodies and alien creatures. In this sculpture, Ikeda translates those beings into the third dimension, setting a wax eyeball within a stone. The piece meets its viewer’s gaze, making for an uneasy encounter. It appears at the Art Institute alongside touted works by René Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico, Yves Tanguy, and other famous Surrealists, suggesting that Ikeda, once an obscure artist within the United States, is officially making his way into the canon.

Where to see it: Modern Art Galleries

Irish-born painter Francis Bacon once said, “We are meat, we are potential carcasses.” He made that notion literal in this painting, in which a man is shown seated before a big, bloody carcass. The figure is posed in a manner that deliberately recalls Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X (ca. 1650), a portrayal of a pope that is dominated by reds and intended to instill a holy figure with authority. By contrast, Bacon’s figure is anonymous and seemingly at risk of disappearing altogether—his face, mouth agape, melting into a blur. Like so many other works by Bacon, this one hints at a tormenting psychological state, and it is all the more distressing because the artist leaves the work ambiguous, without much commentary within the painting on the carnage it displays.

Where to see it: Contemporary Art Galleries

Contrary to its title, this painting doesn’t represent a metropolis. Instead, using a tangle of colorful strokes set against a grayish background, it conjures the feeling of one. “I carry my landscapes around with me,” Mitchell said in a famed 1957 ARTnews profile that cemented her reputation as one of the core artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York. Often labeled a second-generation Abstract Expressionist because she rose to fame shortly after Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and others represented at the Art Institute alongside her, Mitchell was known for works that contained piles of strokes. Rather than smoothing out her paint, Mitchell left it rough and textured, so that her materials occasionally took on a sculptural quality.

Where to see it: Contemporary Art Galleries

By the time Andy Warhol made this screen print, the actress Elizabeth Taylor had gone through not one but three failed marriages (four more would follow). Her lurid lifestyle made her a fixture of tabloids and may also explain the Pop artist’s gaudy color palette, which remakes the sex symbol in clashing shades of red, turquoise, and green. In working from a photograph of Taylor, Warhol seemed less interested in the actress herself than in her image and all that it signified to the public. Notably, at just over three feet square, this painting is only a little larger than the average TV at the time—and much smaller than a screen at a movie house where a Taylor film might be expected to play. Liz #3 is one of many paintings at the Art Institute from the collection of Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, whose gift of 42 artworks worth $500 million in 2015 was touted as the biggest one ever received by the museum.

Where to see it: Contemporary Art Galleries

During the mid 1960s, Minimalist sculptors like Donald Judd and Dan Flavin repurposed industrial materials that often appeared spotless, as though they had never been touched by a human. The Post-Minimalists who came after them responded with works that also used metal, wire, and the like, but did so in a way that was more unruly and increasingly corporeal. This sculpture, one of the crowning achievements of Eva Hesse’s too-short career, features a cord that extends from an empty frame wrapped in cloth. Its pun of a title could refer to an obsession resulting from a vexed mental state, or to the fact that paintings are often hung from walls. Both readings underscore that this work is about a failure to keep it together: There is no painting within the frame, suggesting an artistic misfire, and the cord inelegantly juts out into the gallery space, forcing viewers to walk around it.

Where to see it: Contemporary Art Galleries

In 1969, Alma Thomas was among the Americans who watched with awe as NASA astronauts landed on the moon, a first that was broadcast live on television. Thomas was so strongly affected that it changed her entire artistic practice, moving her to paint images of planets and outer space using dashes of warm color. Working in Washington, D.C., a city that produced a wealth of abstract painters during the postwar era, Thomas painted works such as this one, which conjures the night sky via wreaths of deep blue strokes interrupted by a blaze of red, orange, and yellow. Though the painting does not represent space travel, it conjures the transcendence of it, evoking a small ship moving through seemingly infinite darkness.

Where to see it: Contemporary Art Galleries

In the late 1970s, Cindy Sherman set photography in a new direction with her “Untitled Film Stills,” a black-and-white series in which she pictured herself in noirish situations that appeared to belong to movies, even though none of these shots had any actual cinematic counterparts. Those photographs were about the narratives we project onto still images, in particular pictures of women. Sherman would follow up that body of work with her 1981 “Centerfolds” series, of which this photograph is a part. Produced for an issue of Artforum, though never actually published by that magazine, these photographs came with a name that evoked images of porn stars meant to be ogled. Yet Sherman, once again performing for her own camera, offers little in the way of sensuality with Untitled #92, in which the artist wears what appears to be a girl’s school uniform and dons an expression that suggests distress. Works such as this one made Sherman one of the core artists of the Pictures Generation, a group of American artists who meditated on the ceaseless flow of images during the 1970s and ’80s.

Where to see it: Contemporary Art Galleries

During the 1990s, Charles Ray emerged as one of the great observers of a distinctly American anxiety about the nuclear family under social pressure. Boy, one of his sculptures from this era, looks like a kid from a simpler time—the 1950s, perhaps, when the cohesive family unit was integral to this nation’s culture. But the sculpture stands just under six feet tall, much larger than a boy of this age ought to be, and Ray’s creation is unsettlingly inorganic, with little life behind its eyes. In presenting such a disturbing image of a boy with nary a blemish on him, Ray’s sculpture asks whether the innocence associated with postwar America was ever really there at all.

Where to see it: Contemporary Art Galleries

Chicagoans are lucky to call Kerry James Marshall, one of the great painters working today, a hometown hero—he went to art school there and has been based in the city since 1987. In this work from the 1990s, when Marshall’s work was still on the ascent, the artist continued his project of working to “reclaim the images of blackness as an emblem of power, instead of an image of derision,” here painting three dark Black men. Using a triangular composition drawn from Renaissance painting, Marshall shows these men tending to a green area in Stateway Gardens, a Chicago public housing project. Marshall fills the picture with bright flowers and two bluebirds bearing a ribbon. Atop the painting is a quotation about spiritual security from the Book of John, with one small but noticeable difference: Marshall, who often places an emphasis on women in his art, switched out the word father for mother.

Where to see it: Contemporary Art Galleries

This work is not currently on view.

Simone Leigh won the Golden Lion for her participation in the main exhibition of the 2022 Venice Biennale, where she also represented the United States, becoming the first Black woman to do so. Sharifa was one of the unforgettable works she debuted at the pavilion, centering Black women’s experiences across time vis-à-vis histories of colonialism and subjugation. The sculpture’s subject is the scholar Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, who, as Art Institute curator Giampaolo Bianconi has reported, was initially asked by Leigh to pose as she did while giving birth. According to Bianconi, Rhodes-Pitts subsequently stood against a wall while thinking about the prompt, and Leigh ended up sculpting that pose instead. At more than nine feet tall, Sharifa exerts a dominating presence, formally fulfilling Leigh’s project of elevating the labor of Black women.

Where to see it: North Garden

During the 1960s, Gladys Nilsson emerged as one of Chicago’s art stars, taking part in the Hairy Who collective, whose absurdist paintings drew on comic book imagery and Surrealist thought. She has continued working in that vein, and with her 85th birthday in mind, the Art Institute asked her to paint an extravagant mural for one of its eateries. The biggest work by Nilsson to date, the painting is a celebration attended by saggy-breasted women and lanky men who twist through space together and dine on carrot cake (which happens to be one of the artist’s favorite desserts). If you’ve somehow managed to see every work on this list, stop by the on-site cafe and plop down for a pastry beneath this mural. You deserve the treat.

Where to see it: The Modern Bar