My Birthday with Seurat

Today, I visited the Art Institute of Chicago for the first time. Four hours wasn't enough to do the museum justice, though my eyes and brain were overwhelmed by the time the museum closed.  Following my tradition of taking notes of things I see in new museums, I traversed the galleries with my pencil and small notebook, recording significant works and making comments.

The AIC is home to one of my favorite paintings, which, surprisingly for me, is an impressionist work.  Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte - 1884, painted from 1884-1886, is...all day I've struggled to find the perfect adjectives for it.  Large, magnetic, magical.  None of the combinations I've tried so far have done it justice.  Ever since first seeing a picture of this painting, I have wanted to see it in person.  Today, I did.  Below are the notes I scrawled in my notebook while in gallery 240.

Georges Seurat

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte - 1884

1884-86

Has red & blue & orange border -- Seurat restretched painting in 1889 to add border.  Provides visual transition between interior of painting and his specially designed white frame (reproduction here).

This one keeps making me tear up.  It has always been a goal of mine to see this.  It's beautiful, intricate, engrossing, magical.  I want to be able to step through the frame and spend the day there.

Listening to 'Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want' by Elefant. (Remake of song playing in Ferris Bueller when they show Cameron viewing the work.)  Once the song was followed [in shuffle mode on my ipod] by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' 'Hysteric.'  "You suddenly complete me."  Good lyric for this experience for me.

The gallery room is strangely noisy.  Thankful I had already been listening to music.  I can still hear sounds of the din through my playlist.  Thursdays from 5-8p are free.  I knew immediately when it was 5, due to the suddenly higher # of visitors.  Checked my phone clock and sure enough: 5:03 pm.

I'm enjoying watching people's faces as they view it [the painting].  Or as they enter the gallery and initially see it.  It commands one wall, with doorways on either side.

I lent my pencil to a lovely, smiley old couple with European (German? Belgian?) accents.

Spent 30-40 min. in gallery 240.  Time to move on so I don't regret not seeing others.  In the hallway 4 steps up from gallery level, the painting's astoundingness still chokes me up as I turn and view it.