Kimbell Art Musem to Showcase Art From the Private Collections of Texas
Fort Worth, Texas – Texas is a place full of ambitions, and one of these ambitions is the subject of an exhibition opening at the Kimbell on November 22nd: the desire on the part of a wide range of Texans to collect major works of European painting and sculpture for display in their homes. The exhibition surveys the history of private collecting in Texas from the oil boom days of Spindletop to the present day, telling the stories of the men and women in the state who, through private means, and for private purposes, have formed significant collections of European paintings and sculpture of the highest discernment—collections that might seem more at home in Paris, France, than Houston, Texas, or on an English country estate than a West Texas cattle ranch. On view through 21 March, 2010 at the Kimbell art Museum.
The exhibition draws from the very best of these collections and totals over 100 works. Reflecting the Kimbell’s own collecting areas, the exhibition will focus on the art of Europe and the ancient Mediterranean from about 700 b.c. to around 1950. More than 40 collectors will be represented, and among the artists to be featured are Guido Reni, Guercino, Rembrandt van Rijn, Thomas Gainsborough, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Piet Mondrian.
Roughly half the works in the exhibition currently hang in private residences and are unknown to the public—and even very little known to specialists. Among the more exciting “rediscoveries” are an important painting of the Madonna and Child with Saints by the Renaissance artist Domenico Beccafumi and an exquisite landscape on copper by Paul Bril, a Flemish artist who worked in Rome around 1600. The other half of the exhibition is comprised of works that were collected privately in Texas and later donated to museums. These works are much better known, although they are rarely contemplated in the context of private collecting. Who was the person who brought them to Texas, and how did this person originally display them? The exhibition (along with the accompanying catalogue) will lift a curtain on these private lives, providing historic photographs of house interiors.
One of the more enchanting is of John and Dominique de Menil’s living room in their Philip Johnson home in Houston, where their painting of Hector and Andromache, by Giorgio de Chirico, hangs above the fireplace with a commanding view of a lush bear rug.
In Texas, as elsewhere in the world, collectors come in many different stripes. The Menils were highly eclectic in their tastes and acquired works of art in considerable depth in many different fields—from old master to early modern to Surrealism to the art of Africa. They felt no obligation to conform to traditional patterns of collecting and found that Texas (and especially Houston) offered a conducive atmosphere to be bold and experimental. The majority of collectors in the state have preferred a more focused path. Michael L. Rosenberg of Dallas bought only 18th-century French painting, such as his glorious Bather by François Lemoyne. The collector of the most important Renoir in the state, A Woman Combing Her Hair, prefers French painting of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Clarks introduce a crucial subtheme of the exhibition: not only do Texans collect ambitiously, but also they give ambitiously. The Clarks made regular gifts of art to the Dallas Museum of Art during their lives, and the museum remains almost entirely indebted to them for its strong holdings in early 20th-century abstract art. To go from museum to museum in the state is to find many other collector-donors like the Clarks, although there is one type of collector-donor who stands in a different league: those whose philanthropic ambitions and discernment as collectors yielded world-class museums bearing their names. These are Kay and Velma Kimbell of the Kimbell; John and Dominque de Menil of the Menil Collection in Houston; Raymond and Patsy Nasher of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas; and Marion Koogler McNay of the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio. The exhibition will pay tribute to these collectors by displaying selections from their original collections.
A more unexpected example is the Barrett Collection of Dallas, which is the most important collection of Swiss painting outside of Switzerland. All the major masters of the early 20th century are represented, including Ferdinand Hodler, three of whose paintings are in the exhibition. Beyond the Swiss, another pocket of concentration in Texas is Piet Mondrian. The exhibition features six of his paintings, three formerly in the collection of James and Lillian Clark of Dallas.
The exhibition is co-curated by Richard R. Brettell, the Margaret McDermott Distinguished Chair of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Texas, Dallas, and C. D. Dickerson, associate curator of European art at the Kimbell. The catalogue will feature an essay by Professor Brettell on collecting in Texas, as well as scholarly entries on all the works included.
Visit the Kimbell Art Museum at : www.kimbellmuseum.org
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