Chicago: Thursday: Downtown Chicago, The Art Institute, and an Indian Neighborhood

Thursday was mostly devoted to exploring the Art Institute of Chicago, but we also manage to discover a pretty cool Indian neighborhood. In the morning, we walked down the magnificent mile (Michigan Avenue) and through Millennium Park, taking pictures all the way. I took many pictures, especially of the art institute, and Di Yin also took many as well, including of our food, but practically none of the institute. When you see a picture of Di Yin meeting someone for lunch, you've finished her pictures for this day.

After a morning of sightseeing, we had a tasty lunch at Russian Tea Time restaurant. I'd certainly be happy to return.

We allocated the afternoon for the Art Institute of Chicago. It's a first-rate museum with an extensive collection. I must've spent at least four hours there and that was barely enough. Although I did get to see everything, I had to hurry near the end more than I would've liked. (Well, actually I consciously skipped the children's section--a shame, as I was told later it had some displays worthy of adult visitors.)

The institute's wide-ranging collections contain exhibits from all over the planet and from a variety of time periods. And it's not just paintings; exhibits also include ancient artifacts, sculpture, pottery, jewelry, furniture, and functional art, as examples. As I walked through the Indian galleries, I recognized the stuff in a display and realized they were items (mostly weapons) native to Rajasthan that I'd seen in museums there.

Of course, the bulk of the museum was devoted to European art. In terms of impressionism, it had at least a couple of paintings from every major artist (e.g., van Gogh, Gaugain, Seurat, Manet, Corot, Renoir, Pisarro). It even had a room full of Monets.

In the newer American galleries, I found surrealists and modernists, and many O'Keeffes. In the older one, I was happy to find Cole and Bierstadt, and, in the process, discovered Sanford Robinson Gifford and learned in general that I like an offshoot of the Hudson River school called luminism.

Although my pictures generally document what I liked in the museum, I didn't feel comfortable taking pictures of the exhibit that impressed me the most: the exhibit of portrait photographs by Yousuf Karsh. Karsh's photographs are striking. They're crisp black-and-white noir-esque prints of famous people, with the focus on the person's face. You really feel their presence. He photographed many people from a variety of different public roles, including Queen Elizabeth, Eisenhower, Churchill, H. G. Wells, Fitzgerald, George Bernard Shaw, Martin Luther King Jr., Bogart (complete with smoke wisping out of a cigarette), Clark Gable, Robert Frost, Einstein, Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Norman Rockwell, Walt Disney, Edward R. Murrow, Vonnegut, Muhammad Ali. You can tell Karsh is an excellent portraitist because both politicians and well-respected other artists--people with taste--asked him to take their pictures. From this exhibit alone, I could name twice as many people as I did that Karsh photographed and you'd still recognize the names. The uniformly high level of quality is extraordinary.

For dinner, we followed up on a tip that there are some good Indian restaurants on Devon Avenue near Western Avenue. As we planned our route, which involved a train then a bus, we realized how far from downtown this neighborhood is. Nevertheless, we followed through, arriving at our destination something like 45 minutes later. It was worth the trip. The area is the biggest Indian neighborhood I've seen in North America. We spotted lots of Indian clothing stores and assorted restaurants. We looked around one of the markets, by far the biggest Indian grocery store I've ever run into. I bought dessert (for later) from a sweet shop. And, after a bit of online and on-foot research, we decided to eat at Sabri Nihari. It was quite good.