Impressionists: the End is Near! (For Now)

Chai Lee of the Art Institute recently sent us an email reminding us that this is the last week to view the museum's incomparable collection of Impressionist masterworks in the setting to which we've grown accustomed to seeing them for the past thirty years. After this Sunday, May 4th, a more benign local version of Colonel von Waldheim will be crating up all the canvasses and shipping them to Texas, where they'll be on display in the Kimball Museum's blockbuster exhibition, The Impressionists: Master Paintings From the Art Institute of Chicago, which will run from June 29th through November 2nd. A few old favorites, such as Seurat's La Grande Jette and Cezanne's Chiens Jouer au Poker will continue to hold down the fort awaiting their companions' return.

Other gallery renovations are already nearing completion. Some time in June, we'll see the new galleries for the museum's Department of Prints and Drawings, designed by wHY's Kulapat Yantrasast. (Check out the strange animation, which depicts what must be an architect's wet dream: perfect, white-walled galleries almost entirely unsullied by actual art.) Then in July, Renzo Piano's revamp of Gunsaulus Hall, aka "the bridge to the other side", is scheduled to be unveiled. Windows along the north side which had been bricked over since the 1930's will once again bring natural light into the galleries and provide "stunning views of Millennium Park", and of the urban theater of the Metra trainings passing below.

The AIC promises that all our old friends will be home for Christmas, - December 22nd, to be exact - but stop in by Sunday to wish them a bon voyage for their excursion into the realm of Louis Kahn.