Visitors to the Art Institute hoping to see Picasso and Matisse masterworks in the Modern Wing must wait until spring. That’s when the third floor galleries of European modern art reopen.

If you really want to see The Old Guitarist or Bathers by the River, book a flight to Dallas, Texas, where the Kimbell Art Museum last month opened The Age of Picasso and Matisse: Modern Masters from the Art Institute of Chicago. It consists of 98 works from the Chicago institution, and it’s open until February 16, 2014.  The Art Institute organized the show with support from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Loans of artworks among museums are common, but this one is of unprecedented depth. That’s because the Art Institute is currently renovating the third floor galleries.

But why would a $290 million, four-year-old building need renovation? We posed the question to Erin Hogan, Director of Public Affairs for the Art Institute.

“There are a lot of things we wanted to get done all at once. Reconfiguring doorways and entranceways, which affects the floors, which affects the walls," she said. "The biggest thing is fine-tuning our light harvesting system. Those are the motion sensors that brighten or dim the galleries as you walk through.”

Was this unexpected? Is there a problem with the building?

“Not at all,” said Hogan. “This was planned for and budgeted for.” She said that there have been rumors of mold or water damage, but she stated that those are absolutely not true. “There’s no water, no mold, no lawsuit with the builders. There is no smoking gun.”

Years ago, I took an out-of-town friend to the Art Institute to see Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. We were sorely disappointed to discover that it had been loaned to another museum. If you have a particular painting you’d like to see, it’s a good idea to check the Art Institute’s website for Collection Updates. A quick scan revealed that, along with the Modern Wing’s galleries of European modern art, the Egyptian collection is also currently not on view, as well as individual canvases by Vincent van Gogh, Lucian Freud, Marsden Hartley, and Rene Magritte.

For a tasty preview of a show that is currently on view at the Art Institute -- the just-opened Art and Appetite -- tune in to Chicago Tonight tomorrow, Tuesday, November 19 at 7:00 pm.