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The Art Institute is full of treasures (including Grant Wood’s American Gothic and Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks) but small enough to manage in an afternoon. Particularly impressive is its collection of more than 2,000 European paintings and sculptures, among them Impressionist and Postimpressionist works by such artists as Monet, Degas, van Gogh and Seurat. There are also American and European decorative arts spanning several centuries, ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Etruscan works and, appropriately, a smattering of interesting 19th- and 20th-century architectural details, such as ironwork fragments and stained-glass windows. The big news is the 264,000-square-foot glass, steel and limestone Modern Wing, designed by Renzo Piano, which is scheduled to open in 2009.

Short on time? Here are art historian Rolf Achilles’s picks for the must-sees. Start on the second floor, to the right of the Grand Staircase:

1) Gallery 205: “Helen and Frederic Bartlett’s collection—basically their living room—is a lesson in how to collect: get edgy stuff. There’s Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, from 1884, and a couple of killer Toulouse-Lautrecs, including At the Moulin Rouge. It’s amazing to think these were all in their house in Hyde Park.”

2) Gallery 206: “In what other city can you see five Monet haystack paintings in a row?”

3) Gallery 234A: “I adore Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, from his ‘blue period.’”

4) Gallery 240: “You can also see the first two Kandinskys in the United States: Improvisation No. 30 and Painting with Troika.”

5) Gallery 244: “The museum has one of the finest collections of surrealist art in the world, including Magritte’s Time Transfixed, from 1938.”

6) Allerton Touch Gallery (basement): “The Joseph Cornell boxes are simply fascinating.”

7) Asian Ceramics: “This 1990s installation of Japanese screens is Pritzker prize winner Tadao Ando’s first architectural project outside Japan.”