Art Institute El Greco Exhibit online
While the museum is temporarily closed the Art Institute has created a few different ways to experience the exhibition El Greco: Ambition and Defiance online.
Video Tour
Take a quick tour of the exhibition with curator Rebecca Long and research associate Jen Carvana as they share some of the reasons El Greco and his work continue to fascinate.
Audio Tour
Hear from the experts as they take you through highlights of this major retrospective. Simply download the museum’s free app, available for Apple and Android devices.
Articles
In the coming weeks, we’ll be adding more and more blog posts focused on themes explored in the exhibition—from El Greco’s development as an artist to his most thrilling accomplishments.
Interactive Feature
Learn about one of the most important paintings of El Greco’s career—The Assumption of the Virgin. This image-rich tool chronicles its origins, its journey to the museum, and its recent conservation.
Timeline
Trace the artist’s complex life and career from his birth and training in Crete to his artistic development in Italy to his successes and challenges in Spain.
El Greco: Ambition and Defiance (More info here)
Over 57 works trace the development of El Greco’s distinctive style and his overwhelming ambition to succeed. Learn about the different stages of El Greco’s career as he searched for commissions and success taking him from Crete to Venice, Rome and Spain. Eventually building a private clientele, among the local intelligentsia, he flourished as a portraitist. Alongside paintings of theologians, writers, and attorneys, he was commissioned to decorate a series of private altars and family chapels. Through large-scale canvases and more intimate panel paintings and sculptures also learn about his evolving style.
Hours of fun on Art Institute of Chicago website
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Art Institute El Greco and Monet admission deal
Where: Art Institute of Chicago, 111 N. Michigan Galleries 211–15 (El Greco) and Regenstein Hall (Monet and Chicago).
When: May 10–June 21, 2020 $10 combination ticket for El Greco and Monet and Chicago. Each Exhibit ticket would cost $7 each. Go on Museum Free evening day to save an additional $20-25. For the El Greco exhibit I used the free audio tour located in the free AIC app. The paid audio tour, which I’m sure is more extensive, is $7.
Monet and Chicago (More info here)
When Monet’s paintings first appeared in a Chicago gallery in 1888and again in the Inter-State Industrial Exposition in Chicago (also known as the “American Salon”) in 1890, they captured the eye of local collectors and ignited a collective passion. From that point until the artist’s death in 1926, collectors in Chicago, more than in any other American city, aggressively acquired works of art by Claude Monet.
Martin A. Ryerson, who served as an Art Institute trustee and would become the board’s honorary president, bought his first of many paintings by Monet in 1891 and in 1920 made a special pilgrimage to the artist’s home in Giverny with the hope of acquiring more. Also in 1891, Bertha and Potter Palmer acquired 20 of Monet’s canvases, a fraction of the 90 they would come to own, including several of the Stacks of Wheat series,
