It rained all day in Chicago, so we spent all day in the art museum. We’re pretty tired tonight from doing the museum shuffle all day. I’ve included eight works from our DK Eyewitness guide-book’s top ten list. One other work was not on display and the last one I want to save. When the boys were growing up, I was always buying DK books for them. The guys devoured them, but Anne hated them when they picked them for their bedtime stories. She called them factoid books. I guess that it is natural then that after years of buying DK books for the kids that I bought one as our guide-book to Chicago. Like the rest of this publisher’s product line, our guide-book is chock full of photos and each section’s main narrative is peppered with plenty of asides, just like the boys’ factoid books of old. The DK tour books are probably aimed at my sons’ age demographic now that they are old enough now to travel, but since I was the one that always bought the books, I guess that they work for me too.
The marquee museum exhibit featured a young and unknown Spaniard named Pablo Picasso. At least he was young and unknown a hundred years ago when his works were first exhibited in an American art museum here in Chicago. Picasso’s show had debuted in NYC, but no museum there deigned his work worthy of their walls. Consequently, his show was displayed in the NYC armory and it is still know here as the Armory show. Chicago is still crowing about this coup over their eastern betters. The Art Institute of Chicago had the foresight to recognize Picasso’s importance, when others did not.