Pop art icon Andy Warhol has made his way to Chicago in the form a new permanent exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago called The New Contemporary. An entire room is dedicated to works of Warhol including Four Mona Lisas, Liz #3, and Little Race Riot among others. Warhol, whose paintings have fetched as much $105 million at auctions is joined by other great artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, and Jeff Koons. Speaking of Koons, his Balloon Dog (Orange) recently sold for $58.4 million, the highest price ever for a work by a living artist.
One artist that was surprisingly missing from The New Contemporary collection was Warhol’s protégé, Jean Michel Basquiat. Maybe Basquiat’s superstar class of Neo Expressionists including artists like Keith Haring and Julian Schnabel will make a grand entrance to the collection at a later date. In the same of wing of The New Contemporary exhibit, you can head right upstairs to check out Picasso’s classic work The Old Guitarist from his Blue Period, and surrealist icons Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, and Max Ernst among others.
There’s so much to see that you could easily spend a day perusing the works of iconic figures such as Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and Edgar Degas, so pack a lunch and wear a comfortable pair of shoes.
