KIMBELL ART
MUSEUM
LOUIS KAHN & RENZO PIANO
THEORIES OF MAGICAL
REALISM BY ERIK CAMAYD FREIXAS
The term “magical
realism” was coined by art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe German
post-expressionist painting. It was independently applied to literature for the
first time, with a diverging meaning, by Italian novelist Massimo Bontempelli
in 1927 to characterize modernist fiction. While soon the concept was virtually
forgotten in Europe, it was resurrected in Latin American literature, again
with varying meanings, starting in 1940. By the mid 1970s it had become very
popular in the context of the so-called “Boom” of the Latin American novel
(1967-1984). Thereafter, as magical realism declined in Latin American fiction,
it was picked up by many different national traditions of world literature, and
continues to enjoy a successful afterlife. This has further expanded the
already varied conceptions of the term, making its definition one of the most
challenging and interesting theoretical problems in contemporary literature.
Franz Roh published his
1925 book Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten
Europäischen Malerei (“Post-Expressionism, Magical Realism: Problems of the
latest European Painting”) at the height of the modernist avantgarde movement
in Europe and the beginning of a new tendency in German art, marked by a
post-WWI return to a rather blunt realism (Arnason 317-23). Roh coined the
oxymoron “magical realism” to describe this new style. Two years earlier,
another German art critic, Gustav Hartlaub, had proposed a competing term: “new
objectivity” (Neue Sachlichkeit). Roh sought to define post-expressionism as a
synthesis of two opposing tendencies: impressionism and expressionism. On the
one hand, the impressionism of Van Gogh and his contemporaries emphasized
external objects and the effect (or impression) they have on our senses. For
instance, an impressionist painting up close may look like a conglomerate of
dotted brush strokes, but as we retreat, realistic figures begin to take shape.
On the other hand, the expressionism of Emil Nolde, Ernst Kirchner, and the
followers of Edvard Munch established the predominance of the subject, or inner
self, over the object. The expressionists sought to project their emotions and
existential angst onto the objects they depicted, thereby deforming them. They
considered such distorted figures to be more “real” and humanly relevant than
our proportionate everyday perceptions, because they embodied the emotions that
the subject expressed upon the world. Franz Roh believed that this
tension between subject and object was a universal dichotomy in art. Today,
postmodern critics shun such broad “universalist” or “essentialist”
generalizations. Yet for Roh, this subject-object dialectics was finally
resolved in the synthesis of the new post-expressionist “verism” of his
contemporaries, such as painters Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz.
Roh’s rationale for
calling this new type of realism “magical,” as opposed to “mystical,” was
scarcely convincing, given the spiritual connotation of a “primitive” belief in
the supernatural, which the word “magic” had acquired with the rise of
ethnology and anthropology. In contrast, Roh meant the “wonder” that the
constant movement of atoms and molecules should generate the sensation of
concrete objects. He was drawing from Husserl’s phenomenology, introduced in 1913.
Edmund Husserl suspended in brackets the old impasse of whether the world is
fundamentally matter or spirit, noting that our perception of phenomena is the
only given fact from which to approach reality. This became the philosophical
foundation for Roh’s theory of post-expressionism. But the critic did not
persist in the use of the term magical realism; he occasionally employed “ideal
realism” instead, and later opted for Hartlaub’s competing term, “new
objectivity.” Meanwhile in European painting, as post-expressionism intersected
French surrealism as well as Russian and Italian futurism, leftist artists
became associated with “new objectivity,” while right-wing fascist sympathizers
were more closely identified with Bontempelli’s “magical realism.” The increasingly
negative overtone that fascism and fascist art accrued during the 1930s
contributed to the term’s waning popularity in Europe (Guenther 33-73).
In 1927, Roh’s work on
magical realism was translated into Spanish and published by the influential
Revista de Occidente, directed by José Ortega y Gasset. Given the diffusion of
Spain’s premiere cultural journal among the literary circles of Buenos Aires,
Mexico City, Havana, and other centers of culture in Latin America, it is
presumed that his concept of magical realism may have enjoyed a certain
currency across the Atlantic. Nevertheless, the first Latin American literati
to use the term in writing (Usigli 1940; Lins 1944; Uslar 1948; Portuondo 1955)
make no mention of Roh and use the term with totally different meanings, to
include poetic-lyrical-symbolic realism and psycho-existential realism. With
this first acceptation of the term in Latin America, writers sought to
transcend traditional realism, naturalism, and regionalism by internalizing the
narrative point of view through techniques such as the interior monologue and
the then popular “stream of consciousness.” They narrated from inside the
protagonist’s mind in order to express, either a poetic view of the world and
the self, or else a psychological and existential search for authenticity in a
lurid world, viewed through the distorting prism of an alienated individual,
who nevertheless succeeded in exposing disquieting existential truths.
Notwithstanding this literature’s vague affinity with post-expressionism, Enrique Anderson-Imbert (1956) and Luis Leal (1967) would be the first to point out Roh’s forgotten paternity, at a time when the term “realismo mágico” had already become, in its own right, a commonplace of Latin American letters. With few exceptions (e.g., Seymour Menton), the prevailing view among critics is that Roh’s concept, and German post-expressionism for that matter, have very little to do with Latin American literature (González Echevarría 25-27).
A more direct connection, however, may be found with Bontempelli’s original literary version of realismo magico. In 1926, Massimo Bontempelli founded the literary journal 900 (novecento), which circulated in Italy and France, bringing together modernist figures like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Rilke, Max Jacob, and Blaise Cendrars. Purportedly without any knowledge of Roh, Bontempelli proposed his own avant-garde literary formula: “precisione realistica e atmosfera magica.” This formula—normalizing a supernatural atmosphere by describing it or narrating it in precise realistic detail—remains to this day a core technique of magical realism. In addition, Bontempelli urged his fellow writers to become primitives with a past. “Adam and Eve had no past”—he contended, alluding to the surrealist ideal of a return to the primal. “We cannot be Adams again: Siamo dei primitivi con un passato” (188). Being “primitives with a past” meant returning to one’s national traditions, archetypes, and foundational myths—a very meaningful proposal for the young Latin American writers who were flocking to Europe at the time, and who would launch a few years later their own magic-realist proposals. Venezuelan essayist Arturo Uslar-Pietri, who had met Bontempelli in Paris and joined the debates of 900 in Italy, was a key contact. He would soon befriend Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias and Cuban Alejo Carpentier in Paris, where all three contributed to Asturias’s journal Ensayo and Carpentier’s journal Imán.
Significantly,
Bontempelli’s proposals had very different cultural and political implications
in Europe as opposed to Latin America. In a European hegemonic context, the
idea of evoking a pure national archetype, so dear to fascism, was eventually
hijacked by the Third Reich. By the end of the 1920s, Bontempelli, like other
Italian futurists, had become an active fascist, leading to a rupture with many
of his former literary friends. Yet in 1938, as political conditions
deteriorated and it became evident that fascism was going too far, Bontempelli
was expelled from the fascist party for refusing to take over a university post
that had belonged to a Jewish professor. In a Latin American post-colonial
context, on the contrary, that same search for national archetypes led to
reclaiming indigenous traditions (in the case of Asturias’s Latin American
highlands) and neo-African culture (in the case of Carpentier’s Caribbean
basin). After their European experience, both Asturias and Carpentier became
active Marxists. By 1949, Asturias had become the first Latin American novelist
to describe his own work as magic-realist, based on his surrealist
interpretation of the “primitive” Mayan psyche; whereas Carpentier had launched
his own concept of lo real maravilloso americano (“the American marvelous
real”), inspired by Cuban santería and Haitian vodou. Henceforth magical
realism has remained primarily a countercultural and counter-hegemonic literary
style.
According to
Carpentier (1949), the marvelous resides in the cultural reality of Latin
America itself, by virtue of the continuous clashes of disparate belief systems
(European, indigenous, African) over five centuries of tumultuous history, and
the hidden syncretism generated by such clashes. The task of the artist is not
to create the marvelous through any technical means, but rather to perceive and
bring forth the hidden cultural and historical marvels that have long been
waiting to be discovered. Due to this radical negation of artificiality,
Carpentier refuses to recognize any “-ism” or literary style other than the
(neo-) Baroque, precisely because of the Baroque’s capacity for accepting and
incorporating onto itself the most varied cultural elements. Following
Carpentier, and yet admitting the role of technique, Haitian novelist Jacques
Stephen Alexis (1956) opted instead for the term “réalisme merveilleux.”
A second moment in
the development of the term in Latin American literature came with the early
attempts at a more precise critical definition. Initially, this took the form
of a debate between critics Ángel Flores and Luis Leal. Flores (1955) took a
formalist approach, describing the term as an “amalgamation of realism and
fantasy” distinguished by its preoccupation with style, precision and
succinctness, a tight and logical plot, the transformation of everyday life
into the awesome and unreal, the intemporal fluidity of the narrative, the
rejection of sentimentality and lyrical effusions, and the predilection for the
new and the surprising (112). These traits, however, characterized modernist
fiction as a whole, and therefore were lacking in specificity. Flores cited as
early precursors a wide array of authors of non-realist fiction, such as Gogol,
Dostoyevsky, Hoffman, the Grimm brothers, the dramatist Strindberg, Poe,
Melville, and even Proust. But he held Kafka to be the purest literary exemplar
and Giorgio de Chirico to be his counterpart in painting, arguing that their
“cold and cerebral” style is what distinguished magical realism from the
earlier, more romantic flights of fantasy that were based on atmosphere rather
than technique (113). Indeed, with his reference to de Chirico and to
“atmosphere” Flores appears to be alluding to, and revising, Bontempelli’s
“precisione realistica e atmosfera magica.” In regard to Latin American
literature, Flores points to Borges as the initiator of magical realism,
followed by the Argentines Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo, Mallea, Sábato, and
Cortázar, the Uruguayan Onetti, the Chilean María Luisa Bombal, the Mexicans
Arreola and Rulfo, and the Cubans Novás Calvo and Labrador Ruiz. Meanwhile,
Borges, Bioy Casares, and Ocampo had famously edited their influential
collection Antología de la literatura fantástica (1940), including a sampling
of world literature since ancient times. Significantly, they defined their own
work, not as magical realism, but as “fantastic literature.”
Luis Leal (1967)
credits Flores with producing the first critical study of magical realism in
literature, but disagrees with his definition and with his catalogue of
magic-realist authors. He also recognizes Roh’s first use of the term, but
notes that in Latin America it is Carpentier who presents a more systematic and
coherent view based on his concept of lo real maravilloso. Leal concludes that
“magical realism cannot be identified either with fantastic literature or with
psychological literature . . . neither does it distort reality or create
imagined worlds. . . . The existence of the marvelous real is what started
magical realist literature, which some critics claim is the truly American
literature” (121-22). Thus, he sides with Carpentier’s thematic approach, and
not with Borges’s formalism. He agrees with some of the authors cited by Flores
and adds a few of his own, notably the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos and the Cuban
Félix Pita Rodríguez. The core difference between Flores and Leal, as well as
between Borges and Carpentier, ultimately hinges on their emphasis on form
(technique) versus content (the theme of the marvelous real).
A third moment in the development of the term, relevant not only to Latin America, but now also to world literature, arises in 1970 with the publication of Todorov’s systematic study, The Fantastic. Todorov defined the fantastic as the tension between the possibility of a rational explanation and the disquieting acceptance of the supernatural—the unsettling prospect that the “laws of nature” have been violated, thereby compromising the reader’s sense of certainty and understanding of the world. To promote this tension it is best if the narrator has a skeptical scientific mind, such as that of a detective, who is constantly engaging in deductive reasoning, and looking for clues that may lead to a rational explanation. Therefore, the fantastic is structurally related to detective fiction, as can be seen in the works of authors like Borges and Cortázar, whom critic Jaime Alazraki fittingly classified as “neo-fantastic”—as opposed to magic-realist (1990, 21-33). As long as this tension or doubt persists, the effect of the fantastic is maintained. On the other hand, if the characters and narrator do not care to look for a rational explanation but instead accept the events as normal, then the story belongs to the genre of the merveilleux (the marvelous), such as in the case of the fairy tale, which requires from the reader a suspension of disbelief. Todorov emphasizes that any poetical or allegorical meaning would serve to naturalize or normalize the story, eliminate the doubt, and therefore destroy the tension of the fantastic, which requires a strictly literal reading. Finally, if a rational explanation prevails in the end, then the story is neither fantastic nor marvelous, but simply strange or uncanny (unheimlich, to use the psychological term developed by Sigmund Freud for that which is taboo or uncomfortably strange).
Todorov’s systematic definition of the fantastic was supposed to lead, by elimination, to a more specific definition of magical realism, but that would not turn out to be such a straightforward result. By the mid 1970s, the popularity of the term had grown so much as to lead to numerous studies and almost as many competing definitions. At the landmark 1973 magical realism conference in Michigan, Yale critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal called the debate “a dialogue among the deaf” and suggested that the term be discarded altogether (Yates 1975). To begin with, one of the problems with Todorov’s theory is that it reduces fiction to only three types of narrated events: the natural, the supernatural, and the strange or preternatural. Following this simplification, Anderson-Imbert suggested that Franz Roh’s original dialectics (impressionism + expressionism = magical realism) could be transposed to literature as “a thesis: the category of the veridical, which produces ‘realism’; an antithesis: the category of the supernatural, which produces the literature of ‘the fantastic’; and a synthesis: the category of the strange, which produces ‘magical realism’” (1975, 9). This failed to resolve the problem because the delineation of the fantastic, while helping to narrow down the possibilities, ultimately could not establish what magical realism is, but only what it is not.
In O Realismo Maravilhoso
(”Marvelous Realism,” 1980), Brazilian critic Irlemar Chiampi revisits
Todorov’s opposition between the “fantastic” (based on doubt and sketicism) and
the “marvelous” (where the supernatural is unquestioningly accepted as normal).
Following both Leal and Monegal, she discards the term “magical realism” as
being too imprecise and problematic, and replaces it with “marvelous realism,”
which she argues is more amenable to definition because of its relation, not
only to Todorov’s theory, but also to Carpentier’s doctrine that the marvelous
real is a normal everyday occurrence in Latin America’s marginalized cultures.
Although Chiampi’s study, published in the heyday of structuralism, appears
excessively technical and abstract today, it does contribute the view that in
“marvelous realism” the natural and the supernatural appear as
non-contradictory, and that its core narrative technique is “the
denaturalization of the real and the naturalization of the marvelous” (157-58).
That is, the commonplace becomes defamiliarized when seen from a naïve
perspective, whereas the miraculous is rendered commonplace from the standpoint
of the believer. As Carpentier famously held in his prologue to The Kingdom of
This World, “the phenomenon of the marvelous presupposes faith” (86).
In a
different take on Todorov, Amaryll Chanady (1985) proposes three criteria for
defining magical realism in contrast to the fantastic. She notes that the
fantastic establishes an antinomy between the natural and the supernatural; it
affirms the natural as valid, such that the irruption of the supernatural
creates an ilogical situation; and it presents a narrator who is reluctant to
explain matters and resolve the antinomy. In contrast, magical realism presents
as an antinomy two coherent perspectives in conflict, one based on a rational
view of reality, and the other one on an acceptance of the supernatural as a
normal everyday occurrence. However, according to Chanady, this second,
coherent (but non-rational) perspective should not be unnecessarily restricted
to that of a marginalized ethnic culture, but could also be that of an
individual psyche (dreams, hallucinations, psychopathology, a child’s
perspective, etc.). The main difference vis-à-vis the fantastic would reside in
the natural attitude with which the narrator accepts the irrational, thereby
“resolving” the antinomy. Nevertheless, it may be objected that the narrator’s
natural attitude may be recognized as a necessary but not as a sufficient
condition for an accurate definition of magical realism. Accepting both a collective
(culturally bound) and an individual (sui generis) point of view as equally
conforming to magical realism, results in grouping together works of very
different styles, traditions, and periods under a single, all-inclusive rubric.
For instance, García Márquez admired Kafka’s penchant for narrating the absurd
(as opposed to the supernatural) “with a straight face” and even recognized
this as a major influence; yet both authors ultimately have very different
styles (30, 52). In consequence, despite some important advances, Chanady’s
definition remains vague in as much as it reduces magical realism to a “mode”
or technique that may be employed in very different types of fiction.
Notwithstanding the
limited results of such contrastive method, Todorov’s delineation of the
fantastic did lead most critics to associate modernist authors like Borges and
Cortázar with the (neo-) fantastic, while more regionalist authors like
Carpentier, Asturias, Rulfo, and García Márquez became the most often cited as
representatives of Latin American magical realism. This ushered a fourth moment
in the development of the term, marked by an ethnological approach. From such
anthropological perspective, the reader’s modern-Western-industrial culture is
confronted with the collective worldview of a pre-industrial-ethnic-rural
society of believers, for whom the natural and the supernatural coexist within
a single, culturally-bound belief system. Fernando Alegría (1960) was the first
critic to point out this contextual dependence of magical realism on the Latin
American hinterland, particularly what he called the “Afro-Indian” zone. Along
these lines, I contended that, contrary to Carpentier’s myth of the marvelous
real, subsequent magic-realist authors produced instead a sort of “narrative
primitivism” where Latin American authochthonous culture was technically and
therefore artificially constructed as a conventionalized pastiche or simulacrum
based on classical anthropology’s creation of a generic “primitive society”—a
composite of early ethnographic depictions of traditional non-Western cultures
across the globe, as popularized in twentieth-century ethnology, literature,
and film (2000, 112-31). These “primitive” conventions for what constitutes
habitual everyday reality (perceived as “magical thinking” by the modern
reader) came to replace the rational causality of traditional realism, and
became a given, an unquestionable norm in the magic-realist text. According to
this theory, Latin American magical realism is not a “mode” but a historically
specific style shared by particular works of contemporary authors who exhibit a
definite relation of literary influence, including: Carpentier’s El reino de
este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949), Asturias’s Hombres de maíz (Men
of Maize,1949), Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (Pedro Paramo, 1955), García Márquez’s
Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967), Isabel Allende’s La
casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits, 1982), Laura Esquivel’s Como
agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate, 1990), and Vargas Llosa’s El
hablador (The Storyteller, 1992). Their style is defined by three common
denominators: The adoption of a “primitive” or provincial narrative viewpoint
(production); the transculturation of reality norms from modern to archaic
(text); and the virtual reader’s dual role as believer and skeptic (reception),
resulting in an alternate, allegorical interpretation of Latin American
history, as opposed to the “official” version of history perpetuated by the
structures of power.
In the 1990s, as
magical realism declined in Latin American literature after having attained
international acclaim, it began to be applied globally to numerous authors in
the rest of the world (Moreiras 84). Formerly competing terms, such as “marvelous
realism,” “the marvelous real,” “fantastic realism,” and others became eclipsed
by magical realism’s sheer popularity. But also, as a term of international
literature, its earlier Latin American definition became too narrow and had to
be complemented by a broader, more inclusive scope. Meanwhile, the fantastic
was also experiencing an expansion of scope. Todorov’s delineation of the
traditional fantastic, applicable mostly to nineteenth-century literature, and
even the notion of a neo-fantastic modernist literature in the twentieth
century, developed into what Brian McHale defined as a postmodern fantastic.
Thus, in the actual practice of contemporary literature, even in Latin America,
as Morales and Sardiñas have shown, previously separate elements of the
fantastic and of magical realism have begun to coallesce within the same
literary works, requiring new and more flexible theoretical formulations of
both terms. This has led to a fifth moment in the development of the term:
magical realism as a global poetics.
A leading theorist
of international magical realism, Wendy Faris, has returned to Chanady’s
broader concept of magical realism as a literary “mode,” and has identified
five primary characteristics: an irreducible element of magic; a strong presence
of the phenomenal world; some unsettling doubts on the part of the reader in
the effort to reconcile two contradictory understandings of events; the
narrative’s merging of different realms; and the predilection for disturbing
received ideas about time, space, and identity (7). Faris observes that
“magical realism often originates in the peripheral and colonized regions of
the West: Latin America and the Caribbean, India, Eastern Europe, Africa. But
the mode is becoming less and less marginal” (29). She then adds, “Magical
realism is currently moving out of that primitivist phase” (36). Among the many
contemporary authors associated with this tendency are Günter Grass, Wilson
Harris, Milan Kundera, Kenzaburō Ōe, Salman Rushdie, D. M. Thomas, Toni Morrison,
Thomas Pynchon, José Saramago, Ben Okri, and Tahar Ben Jelloun. “The danger of
studying magical realism globally, from a broad, comparative perspective,’
warns Faris, “is to colonize diverse cultural traditions by considering them
under a general rubric” (40).
In conclusion,
there is a tradeoff in theorizing magical realism: the more precise and
rigorous the definition, the fewer the works that meet such strict criteria;
conversely, the more inclusive the term, the more vague the definition.
In order to arrive
at a suitable compromise, it is important to note that the single
characteristic on which critics agree is that magical realism makes the
extraordinary seem commonplace and vice versa. This is dependent on the
non-conventional point of view of the (“naïve” or “unreliable”) narrator, and
on naturalizing devices such as the extremely detailed and matter-of-fact
description and narration of a rationally implausible event. In any case, the
narrative point of view is key. In this regard, a further distinction may be
drawn as to whether the point of view should be collective and culturally bound
(that is, tied to a set of traditional beliefs shared by a particular cultural
group) or individual and psychologically bound (that is, relative to an individual
as a universal representative of the species, or of the human condition).
Aside from these
primary traits, a host of secondary characteristics may be found in some works
but not in others. Epistemologically, therefore, primary characteristics should
be considered common denominators, while secondary characteristics would be
best conceptualized in terms of Wittgenstein’s family resemblance—where a wide
number of works are linked together as sharing some, though not all, of a set
of overlapping traits, much like members of an extended family. By the same
token, a group of works within the same national or linguistic tradition may be
linked together by strict common denominators, forming a core or nucleus of
magical realism, while other works that share a family resemblance may be
placed in closer or farther proximity to this relational nucleus. Such is, for
example, the general relationship between the Latin American and the
international brands of magical realism.
HEAD OF MELEAGER, 50
B.C.–A.D. 100
PERIOD: LATE REPUBLICAN –
EARLY IMPERIAL
(1st cent. B.C.–2nd cent.
A.D.)
Marble
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 29.8 x
20.3 x 24.1 cm
This head is from a Roman
copy of a full-length statue by the famed fourth-century-B.C. Greek sculptor
Skopas. It showed the mythological hero Meleager with a hunting dog and the
head of the Kalydonian boar.
Along with Praxiteles and
Lysippos, Skopas was one of the great sculptors of his age, renowned especially
for his depictions of gods. His style was notable for its introduction of an
intense depiction of human emotion into the previously more reserved psychology
of Greek classicism. Typical of Skopas’s innovations are the slightly parted
lips, the low forehead that protrudes over the bridge of the nose and eyes, and
the heavy roll of flesh swelling over the outer corners of the eyes. These
elements—all of which would be further exaggerated in Hellenistic
sculpture—contribute to the quality of barely suppressed agitation.
According to Homer, the
Kalydonian boar was sent by Artemis to ravage the countryside after Oeneus,
king of Kalydon and Meleager’s father, failed to sacrifice to the goddess.
Meleager then led the hunt to kill the boar, but in its aftermath quarreled
with his mother’s two brothers and killed them. Learning of this, his mother,
Althaea, set in motion the dire prophecy that the Fates had decreed soon after
Meleager’s birth—that he would die when a brand, then on the fire, had burned
out. Althaea now took out the brand, which she had hidden for years in a chest,
and brought about her son’s death. Fourth-century-B.C. artists favored
narratives such as this, which humanized the gods and involved mythic heroes in
the sufferings and imperfections of man.
NICOLAS POUSSIN (1594 – 1665)
VENUS & ADONIS C. 1628–29
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
Early in his career
Poussin traveled to Italy and was introduced to a circle of important Roman
patrons including the antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo. Poussin’s classicism,
nurtured by his knowledge of antique literature and art, was warmed by his
study of Venetian painting. Venus and Adonis reveals the influence of
Titian in composition, coloration, and mood. The composition is built in a
series of opposing diagonals, highlighting Venus’s shapely limbs and soft belly
and casting the lovers into shadow, foreboding Adonis’s imminent doom.
According to Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
Venus and her mortal lover Adonis sought the shade of a poplar tree during an
interlude from the hunt. The goddess mingled kisses and words, telling Adonis
why she forbade him to pursue dangerous, wild animals—her mortal enemies. The
lovers are attended by a host of putti who prepare Venus’s golden chariot. A
pair of reclining putti, along with a couple of billing doves, mimic the
lovers’ postures. Lance in hand and helical horn and dog nearby, Adonis is
ready to disobey Venus and heed the call of the hunt. The tragic outcome––for
Adonis is killed by a wild boar––is foreshadowed in the sleeping putto,
unattended torch, and menacing clouds. Adonis wears a wreath of anemones, the
flower that Venus would create in his memory by sprinkling his blood with
nectar.
PORTRAIT OF JACOB
OBRECHT, 1496
PERIOD: 15th CENTURY
Tempera, Oil, and Gold on
Panel
Classification: Painting
Dimensions: 51.4 x 36.2 cm
G
The gilt Gothic
inscription on this masterpiece of Renaissance portraiture identifies the
sitter as Jacob Obrecht (1457/58-1505), a renowned choirmaster and one of the
greatest composers of his age. On the original attached frame is inscribed both
the date of the painting, 1496, and the sitter's age, 38. Born in Ghent, Obrecht
led a peripatetic career, taking posts in Bergen op Zoom, Cambrai, Bruges, and
Antwerp. Such was his international standing, he was invited to the court of
Ferrara by Duke Ercole I d'Este. He died from the plague, eulogized as "a
most learned musician, second in the art to no one, in respect to either voice
or cleverness of invention." The painting, possibly the left-hand side of
a diptych, would have faced a complementary panel of a religious subject.
Preserved in exceptional condition, it is remarkable for the virtuosity of
details such as the folds of Obrecht's lace-trimmed surplice and the soft gray
fur of the almuce (the badge of office of a canon, including the choral clergy)
draped over his arm.
The identity of the
artist has long remained a mystery. Recent study of the portrait in the
Museum's department of conservation has led to a new attribution: the painting
is the earliest dated work by the Netherlandish master Quinten Metsys. Just
thirty years old when the painting was completed, Metsys went on to become one
of the most successful painters residing in the city of Antwerp. The technical
refinement of the paint layers, from the finely hatched brushstrokes in the
hands to the smoothly blended flesh tones, suggests that the artist used a
mixed medium of egg tempera and oil. Metsys was skilled at the representation
of telling details of his sitters' appearance: the gentle textures of skin on
Obrecht's fingers or on his neck; his carefully delineated fingernails or the
shape of his mouth; the discreet stubble of his beard or his clear, bright eye.
JOSHUA REYNOLDS (1723 –
1792)
PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN,
POSSIBLY ELIZABETH WARREN, 1759
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
Having established a
portrait practice in London, in 1749 Joshua Reynolds embarked on a journey to
Italy, where during a two-year stay in Rome he studied the artistic canon of
the antique, Michelangelo, Raphael, and the great Venetian masters. Upon his
return he often cast his sitters in poses from these sources, creating a new
historical or grand style based on “the simplicity of the antique air and
attitude.” Reynolds’s position as the first president of the Royal Academy of
Arts enabled him to fulfill his goal of elevating the status of the painter in
his native Britain to that of a man of learning. Through the exposure of his
works at the annual exhibitions at the Academy, and the Discourses on
Art he delivered to its members and students, Reynolds became
the preeminent arbiter of style in his day and exerted tremendous influence on
the arts.
The sitter in the Kimbell
portrait may be identifiable as the “Miss Warren” who appears in Reynolds’s
records as sitting for the artist between January 1758 and May 1759. Often
incorrectly identified as Frances Warren, second wife of Sir George Warren, the
wealthy member of parliament for Lancaster, she is, in fact, more likely to be
his sister, Elizabeth Warren. This portrait is one of Reynolds’s earliest
essays in the grand manner, in which beauty and grandeur are achieved by
avoiding the particularities of local fashions. Miss Warren’s simple,
wrap-around morning gown displays the contours of her figure and lends the
portrait a timeless, classical effect. Her idealized form has something of the
quality and dignity of sculpture, with smooth, alabaster skin and graceful
drapery folds. The proportions of the figure above the high waist are
deliberately diminished, while her hips and thighs swell like the oversized urn
beside her, perhaps alluding to her female role as a fecund vessel.
GUSTAVE COURBET (1819 –
1877)
PORTRAIT OF J. VAN
WISSELINGH, 1846
Medium
Oil on Panel
Classification: Painting
Courbet was born at
Ornans, near the Swiss border of France. After he went to Paris in 1840, he
evolved a vigorous Realism with profound and influential philosophical and
political implications. Already in the Salon of 1846, Courbet’s work was
noticed by the Dutch art dealer H. J. van Wisselingh, who bought two paintings
and presumably commissioned this portrait. Van Wisselingh also invited Courbet
to visit Holland the following year so that he could study Rembrandt.
Rembrandt’s art was a
touchstone for Courbet—as is evident in this portrait, in which deep shadows
obscure physical fact and at the same time suggest poetic insights into the
melancholy of the sitter and his world. Courbet’s emulation of Rembrandt and
other seventeenth-century Dutch masters put him at odds with his most powerful
contemporaries in the French Academy, for whom the idealizing art of the
Italian Renaissance was paradigmatic.
Courbet’s relentless and
outspoken disregard for academic principles, and the example of paintings like
this Rembrandtesque portrait of a Dutch tradesman, quickly set the stage for a
sweeping revolution in mid-nineteenth-century art. In concert with his
extraordinary friend the poet Charles Baudelaire, Courbet advocated a popular
art based on modern life, its dark sides included, inspiring the Impressionists
and Post-Impressionists to find poetry in the prose of everyday activities and
locales—as Rembrandt had done before them.
EL GRECO (DOMENIKOS
THEOTOKOPOULOS) (1541 – 1614)
PORTRAIT OF DR. FRANCISCO
DE PISA, C. 1610–14
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
The painter known as El
Greco (“the Greek”) was born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in Crete, then a
territory of the Venetian Republic, where he trained as an icon painter.
Talented and ambitious, he left Crete around 1568 for Venice, and later Rome.
In Italy he studied the coloring and light of the Venetian masters, the figures
of Michelangelo, as well as the grace and dynamism of the Emilian artists, all
of which informed his own highly original style. In 1577, El Greco departed for
Spain and settled in the city of Toledo. He was patronized there by members of
the city’s wealthy and educated elite. This portrait, which dates from the last
period of El Greco’s career, attests to the artist’s profound gifts as a
portraitist, which were praised since his years in Italy and remained
undiminished in old age.
The sitter is Dr.
Francisco de Pisa (1534–1616), an important Toledan cleric and official
historian of the city, who in 1610 expressed the intention to endow the Convent
of the Purísima Concepción de Nuestra Señora, also known as the Convent of the
Benitas. A portrait of Pisa probably identifiable as the Kimbell painting was
bequeathed by him to the convent and recorded there in 1616 and 1623, along
with other paintings by El Greco.
THOMAS LAWRENCE (1769 –
1830)
PORTRAIT OF FREDERICK H.
HEMMING, C. 1824–25
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
After the death of Sir
Joshua Reynolds in 1792, Thomas Lawrence was appointed Painter in Ordinary to
King George III. Drawing inspiration from Reynolds’s style, with its allusions
to the old masters, Lawrence dominated society portraiture in England. He was
knighted in 1815 and elected president of the Royal Academy in 1820. His
accession to this office no doubt prompted his desire to own the original
design by Giovanni Cipriani for the diploma awarded to new Royal Academicians.
Cipriani’s drawing belonged to Richard Baker, who offered to give it to
Lawrence. In return Lawrence volunteered to paint a portrait of Baker’s
great-nephew, Frederick Hemming. Sittings for the portrait were underway when
Baker died and Hemming inherited his collection. Lawrence also coveted Baker’s
drawings by Raphael and offered Hemming a companion portrait of his fiancée,
Mary Anne Bloxam, in exchange for them. Bloxam was reputedly an accomplished
porcelain painter, and in her portrait holds a brush as if busy at work; she is
depicted in a modish white Grecian dress.
https://www.kimbellart.org/collection/acf-196301
CARAVAGGIO (MICHELANGELO
MERISI) (1571 – 1610)
THE CARDSHARPS, C. 1595
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
Dimensions: 94.2 x
130.9 cm
Caravaggio was one of the
pivotal figures in the history of Western art. In his short lifetime, he
created a theatrical style that was as shocking to some as it was new,
inspiring others to probe their subject matter for the drama of psychological
relationships.
Apprenticed in Milan,
Caravaggio came to Rome in the early 1590s. There his early masterpiece The
Cardsharps came to the attention of the influential Cardinal
Francesco Maria del Monte, who not only purchased it but also offered the
artist quarters in his palace. Caravaggio was thus introduced to the elite
stratum of Roman ecclesiastical society, which soon gave him his first
significant opportunity to work on a large scale and for a public forum.
In The
Cardsharps, the players are engaged in a game of primero, a
forerunner of poker. Engrossed in his cards at left is the dupe, unaware that
the older cardsharp signals his accomplice with a raised, gloved hand (the
fingertips exposed, better to feel marked cards). At right, the young cheat
looks expectantly toward the boy and reaches behind his back to pull a hidden
card from his breeches. Caravaggio has treated this subject not as a caricature
of vice but in a novelistic way, in which the interaction of gesture and glance
evokes the drama of deception and lost innocence in the most human of terms.
The
Cardsharps spawned
countless paintings on related themes by artists throughout Europe—not the
least of which was Georges de La Tour’s Cheat with the Ace of Clubs in
the Kimbell.
The
Cardsharps was
stamped on the back with the seal of Cardinal del Monte and inventoried among
his possessions after his death in 1627. Its location had been unknown for some
ninety years when it was rediscovered in 1987 in a European private collection.
JACQUES LOUIS DAVID (1748
– 1825)
THE ANGER OF ACHILLES,
1819
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
Jacques-Louis David, the
leading Neoclassical painter in Europe during the French Revolution and under
Napoleon, took exile in Brussels after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. There he
painted and exhibited The Anger of Achilles, which he
prized highly as the culmination of his career-long efforts to recapture the
perfection of ancient Greek art.
The complex episode,
which challenged David to render a spectrum of interacting emotions from stoic
courage and calm, heroic resolve to grief and anger, is drawn from Euripides’
tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis and Racine’s
seventeenth-century dramatic version of the same story. Agamemnon, king of the
Greeks, has just revealed to the youthful Achilles that his daughter Iphigenia
is not to be married to him but sacrificed in order to appease the goddess
Diana and so allow the Greek fleet to set sail for Troy. As Iphigenia’s mother,
Clytemnestra, looks on tearfully, Achilles angrily reaches for his sword. In
David’s treatment of the subject, Agamemnon’s magnetic gaze and authoritative
gesture appear to freeze Achilles’ outburst. Apparently dressed as a bride, the
angelic-looking Iphigenia clutches her heart, oblivious to the display of male
confrontation. Her mother’s reaction, composed of disappointment at Achilles’
inability to act as well as grief for her daughter, is apparently intended to
mirror the mixed reactions that any spectator must feel as filial, spousal, and
civic duties compete with one another.
CROUCHING APHRODITE, C.
50 B.C.–A.D. 140
PERIOD: LATE REPUBLICAN –
EARLY IMPERIAL
(1st cent. B.C.–2nd
cent. A.D.)
Marble
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 63.5 x
35.3 x 49.2 cm
According to the primal
Greek myth recounted in Hesiod’s Theogony (genealogy of the gods),
Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was born of the aphros, the foam created when
Kronos threw the genitals of his father, Uranos (Heaven), into the sea. The
impregnated foam floated first to Kythera, then across the Mediterranean to Cyprus,
where the goddess was born as she stepped ashore fully grown. Reflecting this
aqueous origin, Aphrodite is frequently depicted in relation to water—bathing,
or drying herself after her bath, sometimes accompanied by a seashell or
dolphin.
Aphrodite was a highly
popular subject in Greek art. The most famous sculptural representation—by
Praxiteles in the fourth century B.C., showing the goddess unrobing to
bathe—established the first ideal of nude female beauty that could stand
alongside the canon of the athletic male. The theme of Aphrodite crouching in
her bath also enjoyed great popularity and was the subject of numerous
sculptures known from ancient authors and Roman copies. The Kimbell version,
one of many variations on a famous Hellenistic original, embodies the qualities
of beauty and voluptuous sensuality that characterize the goddess of love. She
was shown crouching to bathe, her head turned sharply to the right, her left
arm brought across the body to touch the right thigh, her right arm held up to
near the left breast and shoulder. The somewhat spiral effect of her stance
appealed to the Hellenistic taste for animated poses that embrace and engage
with the space around them.
PRIESTESS OF THE IMPERIAL CULT, A.D. 170–180
PERIOD: 2 ND CENTURY A.D.
Marble
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 33.6 x 27 x 24.5 cm
This head of a young
woman was originally part of a full-length, draped statue. It was formerly
identified as a portrait of Faustina the Younger, wife of the emperor Marcus
Aurelius and daughter of Antoninus Pius. But it does not conform closely to any
of Faustina’s accepted numismatic or sculptural likenesses, and is more
plausibly identified as a priestess of the imperial cult. The work is datable
on stylistic grounds to the period A.D. 170–80, and the three now-headless
busts emerging from the headband represented Marcus Aurelius (reigned A.D.
161–80) and other members of the Antonine line—perhaps Hadrian and Antoninus
Pius.
FRANCOIS BOUCHER (1703 –
1770)
JUNO ASKING AEOLUS TO
RELEASE THE WINDS, 1769
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
As told by the Roman
author Virgil in the first book of The Aeneid, the goddess Juno,
consumed by jealousy toward Venus, schemed to prevent the fleet of her rival’s
son, Aeneas, from reaching shore and founding a Trojan colony in Italy. In
Boucher’s faithful depiction of this myth, Juno visits Aeolus, keeper of the
winds, and urges him to unleash their fury, thus provoking a violent storm that
would destroy Aeneas’s fleet. As enticement, Juno offers Aeolus her most
beautiful nymph, Deiopea, in marriage. She aims the torch directly at his heart
as love-struck Aeolus releases the winds, while a cupid unsheathes an arrow to
target the compliant nymph, her wrists bound with pearls. The presence of an
alluring sea nymph reclining in the foreground signals the outcome: mighty
Neptune, god of the sea, will prevail over the winds, and calm the insurgent
waters.
FRANCOIS BOUCHER (1703 –
1770)
VENUS AT VULCAN’S FORGE,
1769
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
In this canvas, Boucher
goes to the heart of Virgil’s narrative in the eighth book of The Aeneid,
in which Venus induces Vulcan to forge arms for her mortal son Aeneas, champion
of the Trojans against the Greeks. Vulcan strains forward, presenting the sword
toward Venus with a sense of urgency and yearning clearly visible on his face.
Seized by passion, he is totally under the sway of Venus, a fact Boucher
stresses by the doves and putto reclining on his lap and by the putto at
Venus’s side, who aims his arrow directly at Vulcan’s heart. Vulcan has
succumbed to love, a fire more subtle and more powerful than that with which he
forges steel.
FRANCOIS BOUCHER (1703 –
1770)
MERCURY CONFIDING THE
INFANT BACCHUS TO
THE NYMPHS OF NYSA, 1769
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
At the center of this
painting is the infant god Bacchus. Born of Jupiter’s illicit union with the
princess Semele, Bacchus was transported by Mercury to Nysa for safekeeping
from Juno’s jealous rage. Nestled in the clouds beside Mercury, the eagle
bearing a lightning shaft alludes to the circumstances of Bacchus’s fiery
birth. As recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Zeus had fallen in
love with Semele, daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia. To punish her wayward
consort, Juno tricked Semele into asking the god to appear to her in all his
majesty. Powerless to deny her wish, Jupiter came to Semele, who was consumed
by fire. However, the baby gestating in her womb was stitched into his father’s
thigh and spirited away to Nysa as soon as he was born. In Boucher’s painting,
the nymphs marvel at the miraculous infant, whose intoxicating powers as god of
the vine are displayed by putti bearing grapes and the leaf-entwined thyrsos
with which he will lead his band of followers.
FRANCISCO DE GOYA (1746 –
1828)
PORTRAIT OF THE MATADOR
PEDRO ROMERO, C. 1795–98
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
Francisco de Goya, the
most important Spanish painter after Velázquez, was, like his predecessor, a
master portraitist. This portrait depicts Pedro Romero (1754–1839), one of the
greatest toreadors of all time, idolized for his courage and control as well as
his handsome appearance. He was the foremost exponent of the classical school
of bullfighting established by his family in Ronda, Andalusia. Romero posed for
Goya shortly before he retired from the bullring in 1799, at age forty-five,
and several years after the artist had become completely deaf as a result of a
serious illness.
The finery of Romero’s
costume does not upstage his charismatic good looks. Goya’s study of Velázquez
is apparent in the deft brushwork defining the rich fabric of his black jacket
and the silver and pearl tones of his waistcoat, painted wet-in-wet, against
the bright white of his shirt. The composure of the figure is in keeping with
Romero’s style of bullfighting; in contrast to the recklessness of his
Sevillian rivals, Romero—who was said to have killed over five thousand bulls
without suffering injury to himself—relied on the skill and agility of his
maneuvers and his elegant use of the cape, killing the animal with a single
sword-thrust. He asserted that “the bullfighter should rely not on his feet but
on his hands, and in the ring when confronting the bulls he must kill or be
killed before running or showing fear.”
ELISABETH LOUISE VIGÉE LE
BRUN (1755 – 1842)
SELF PORTRAIT, C. 1781
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
This youthful
self-portrait depicts Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun at the age of about twenty-six,
several years after she painted the first of her many portraits of Queen
Marie-Antoinette. Here she presents herself not as an artist, with palette and
brushes, but as a charming and attractive lady of society––indistinguishable
from her own patrons, including the queen and aristocratic ladies, whom she
sometimes painted in similar informal attire. Largely self-taught, Vigée Le
Brun was recommended by the queen for membership in the Royal Academy in 1783
and soon acquired considerable fame and renown. When shown at the Salon her
paintings were “the most highly praised . . . the topics of conversation at
court and in Paris, in suppers, in literary circles."
Her radiant self-portrait
highlights Vigée Le Brun’s healthy good looks and creamy complexion, a
sparkling light catching her eyes and crystal earrings. Attentive to the latest
fashions, she outfitted her sitters in comfortable Grecian gowns and scarves.
Here her simple muslin gown and elegant scheme of white, black, and cherry,
along with her loose curls of hair, convey an appealingly glamorous persona.
THOMAS LAWRENCE (1769 –
1830)
PORTRAIT OF MARY ANNE
BLOXAM
(LATER MRS. FREDERICK H.
HEMMING), C. 1824–25
Oil on Panel
Classification: Painting
After the death of Sir
Joshua Reynolds in 1792, Thomas Lawrence was appointed Painter in Ordinary to
King George III. Drawing inspiration from Reynolds’s style, with its allusions
to the old masters, Lawrence dominated society portraiture in England. He was knighted
in 1815 and elected president of the Royal Academy in 1820. His accession to
this office no doubt prompted his desire to own the original design by Giovanni
Cipriani for the diploma awarded to new Royal Academicians. Cipriani’s drawing
belonged to Richard Baker, who offered to give it to Lawrence. In return
Lawrence volunteered to paint a portrait of Baker’s great-nephew, Frederick
Hemming. Sittings for the portrait were underway when Baker died and Hemming
inherited his collection. Lawrence also coveted Baker’s drawings by Raphael and
offered Hemming a companion portrait of his fiancée, Mary Anne Bloxam, in
exchange for them. Bloxam was reputedly an accomplished porcelain painter, and
in her portrait holds a brush as if busy at work; she is depicted in a modish
white Grecian dress.
JACOPO BASSANO (JACOPO DAL PONTE) (1510 – 1592)
PORTRAIR OF A FRANCISCAN FRIAR, C. 1540 - 1542
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
In
this imposing portrait, Jacopo Bassano applies a vigorous and sharply focused
naturalism to portray the distinctive features as well as the spiritual
temperament and preoccupations of an unidentified Franciscan friar.
The
skull, a reminder of the vanity of earthly life, supports the contemplative
aspect of the friar’s piety, and the pen holder that hangs from the rope at his
waist attests to his learning. A sensitive colorist, Jacopo creates a rich
tonal range, contrasting the cool gray of the wool habit with the warm flesh
areas, which derive luminosity from the reflection of the white ground through
the glazes.
Portraits
of Franciscans, who avow humility in a life devoted to prayer and penance, are
not common. This early work is datable to around the time that Jacopo painted
the Saint Anne altarpiece (1541, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, on deposit in
the Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa) for the church of the reformed
Franciscans in Asolo; possibly the sitter was one of its members.
Portrait of a Franciscan Friar,
which once belonged to the Marquess of Lansdowne, is one of three works in the
Kimbell from the Earl of Shelburne’s historic collection in Bowood House,
Wiltshire. The others are Domenichino’s Abraham Leading Isaac to Sacrifice and
Jacob van Ruisdael’s Rough Sea at a Jetty.
CANALETTO (GIOVANNI ANTONIO
CANALE) (1697 – 1768)
THE MOLO VENICE, C. 1735
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
Trained by his father as
a painter of theatrical scenery, Canaletto gained international renown painting
scenes of his native Venice. These vivid and compelling cityscapes were much
sought after by British aristocrats who traveled to Italy on the Grand Tour. In
this painting from the collection of the Earl of Rosebery, Mentmore, Canaletto
depicts one of his most popular views of Venice––the Molo, a wharf just west of
the Doge’s Palace. At the far right is the column of Saint Theodore, set before
the ornate library, which is next to the Zecca (the mint where the Republic’s
gold ducats, or zecchini, were coined) and the terracotta-colored public
granaries. Across the water at the far left, marking the opening of the Grand
Canal, is the church of Santa Maria della Salute. Canaletto imposes order and
balance on the busy scene, observed from an ideally high viewpoint, omitting or
adjusting architectural motifs and bringing them into alignment.
KIMBELL ART
MUSEUM
KAHN BUILDING IN DETAIL
KAHN BUILDING IN DETAIL
The building was
commissioned in 1966 by the Board of Directors of the Kimbell Art Foundation,
working closely with the Kimbell's first director, Richard F. (Ric) Brown, who
enthusiastically supported his appointment.
‘’ The museum has as many
moods as there are moments in time, and never… will there be a single day like the
other. ‘’
Louis I. Kahn
LIGHT:
Natural light enters
through narrow plexiglass skylights along the top of cycloid barrel vaults and
is diffused by wing-shaped pierced-aluminum reflectors that hang below, giving
a silvery gleam to the smooth concrete of the vault surfaces and providing a
perfect, subtly fluctuating illumination for the works of art.
The main (west) facade of
the building consists of three 100-foot bays, each fronted by an open,
barrel-vaulted portico, with the central, entrance bay recessed and glazed. The
porticos express on the exterior the light-filled vaulted spaces that are the
defining feature of the interior, which are five deep behind each of the side
porticos and three deep behind the central one. Additionally, three courtyards punctuate
the interior space. Though thoroughly modern in its lack of ornament or
revivalist detail, the building suggests the grand arches and vaults of Roman
architecture, a source of inspiration that Kahn himself acknowledged. The
principal materials are concrete, travertine, and white oak.
STRUCTURE:
One of the architect’s
fundamental tasks is formulating the structure, or arrangement of forms, that
the building will assume. Each architect has an individual approach to
developing that initial concept. Kahn is often quoted as first asking, “What
does this building want to be?” He believed that the essence of the structure
started with the room, and thinking about how that space would be used and how
it should feel. From that point, the building evolved as a “family of rooms”
with a simple plan based on classical proportion, repetition, and variation.
In the case of the
Kimbell, director Richard Brown provided an initial list of important
considerations for generating ideas for the structure. In that “Pre-Architectural
Program,” Brown specifically stated that “natural light should play a vital
part in illumination.” This stipulation, along with Kahn’s own strong interest
in the use of natural light, resulted in Kahn’s early concept of a room with a
vaulted ceiling that would allow natural light to enter the space from above.
The vault also appealed to Kahn’s admiration for ancient structures—from Roman
arches and storage warehouses to Egyptian granaries.
Kahn determined the exact
shape of the vault through his collaboration with a structural engineer, Dr.
August E. Komendant. As opposed to semicircular vaults, the cycloid vault has
gently rising sides that give the impression of monumentality without
overpowering the visitor. By mathematical definition, the cycloid is the curve
traced by a point on the circumference of a circle that rolls on a straight
line without slipping. This geometric form is capable of supporting its own
weight and has been likened to an eggshell for its ability to withstand heavy
pressure. At the Kimbell, the weight for each vault is directed through four
corner columns measuring two square feet. Unlike classical precedents, Kahn’s
vaults are interrupted at the top by skylights and require concrete struts that
connect the shells at ten-foot intervals. Additionally, Kahn and his engineers
placed long steel cables inside along the length of each vault. After the
concrete had hardened for a week, hydraulic jacks were used tighten the cables
to create a system of post-tensioning that distributes and supports the weight
of the roof—similar to a suspension bridge.
Like classical buildings
(such as the Parthenon), the Kimbell’s structure is based on a consistent
mathematical model. The basic plan is composed of sixteen cycloid vaults (100 x
20 feet) that are arranged in three parallel units of six, four, and six in the
Kimbell. Other elements are based on a ratio of 20 to 10. For example, on the
floor, wood sections measure 20 feet and travertine sections are 10 feet. The
building is based on these “rules” of logic, enabling the visitor to easily
follow and “read” the structure.
Although the structure is
based on a simple plan of unadorned, repeated forms, Kahn also introduced
variations on those basic forms and “themes.” The porticos at the Kimbell’s
entrance on the west side of the building first introduce the vault to the
approaching visitor and demonstrate the form’s versatility. Within the Museum,
visitors see that vaults cover the galleries, an auditorium, and the Buffet
Restaurant. Kahn also varied the size of the courtyards. The North courtyard is
40 square feet, while the South courtyard is 20 square feet.
The “rooms” were designed
to relate to the visitor on an intimate level to enhance their experience of
the artworks on view. The space, in fact, was designed to be as flexible as
possible within the confines of the vaulted spaces. Moveable walls can be
attached to the soffits (the underside joint between arches) in various
configurations to best suit the Museum’s display needs.
MATERIALS:
To make a structure that
will stand the test of time, architects choose materials that are strong and
durable, as well as pleasing to the eye. Kahn preferred simple forms and
natural materials. To achieve a sense of serenity and elegance in the Kimbell,
Kahn selected materials that complemented each other in tone and surface:
travertine, concrete, white oak, metal, and glass. Simple and unadorned, each
of these materials shows its innate character by its variation of texture.
Concrete, according to
Kahn, was “a noble material if used nobly.” Revolutionizing the modern use of
materials, Kahn viewed concrete as both an aesthetic and structural choice. In
the Kimbell’s galleries, concrete vaults shimmer with light to create a subtle
luminosity that Kahn compared to a “silvery powdered moth’s wing.” Reinforced
concrete also supports the weight of the structure in the form of vaults,
walls, and piers. Creating the right look to the concrete was a matter of
serious importance to Kahn, who went to great lengths to select the proper
color (soft gray with lavender tones) determined by the mixture of sand and
cement. Numerous wall tests were poured and allowed to cure in the Texas sun
until they found the right surface qualities and perfect match for the soft
tones of the travertine. Kahn believed that buildings should tell the story of
how they were made and that incidents of the construction process should be
left as a visual record. Accordingly, when they occurred, marks from plywood mold
forms, bits of rubber, and air pockets remain for all to see (although the
workmen practiced to attain perfection).
Travertine, on the other
hand, acts only as “in-fill” material. Kahn even called it wallpaper. (Glass
and wood are also non-weight-bearing materials in the museum.) The travertine
(a type of colored limestone) used for the Kimbell was imported from Tivoli,
near Rome, Italy. This material is riddled with irregularly shaped holes left
by gases and pieces of vegetation trapped in hardened layers of calcium
carbonate. Despite its “Swiss-cheese” texture, travertine is a durable material
and has been used since antiquity for countless buildings. Kahn was deeply
influenced by monuments and ancient ruins that he studied as a student and
sketched on his travels through Italy, Greece, and Egypt. In his own buildings,
Kahn used such materials as travertine to emulate the timeless and monolithic
qualities he so admired in those ancient structures. Over one million pounds of
travertine sheath much of the Kimbell’s interior and exterior walls, gallery
floors, porches, and stairs. These thin, rough-hewn pre-cut slabs (5/8 inches
thick) were shipped from Italy in 17 boatloads over nine months. Fissures and
openings were not filled. Every attempt was made to retain the material’s
natural appearance.
Lead was selected for the
roof cover for its color, dull sheen, and discreet, natural appearance. Because
this soft metal ages quickly, Kahn believed that it would look consistent with
the travertine and concrete. In keeping with his palette of warm and cool tonal
harmonies, Kahn also selected white oak for the gallery floors, doors, and
cabinetry; anodized aluminum (a light-weight metal noted for its high
reflectivity that has been covered with a protective oxide coating) for the
soffits and reflectors; and mill-finished steel for windows and door frames,
elevators, and handrails, as well as in the kitchen, conservation studio, and
darkroom. The Kimbell’s uniquely shaped handrails are made of folded metal,
because Kahn preferred emphasizing the sheet quality of the material instead of
pretending that it was worked like a solid material, such as wood.
https://www.kimbellart.org/content/kahn-building-detail
EDGAR DEGAS (1834 – 1917)
DANCER STRETCHING, C.
1882–85
Pastel on Pale Blue Gray
Paper
Classification: Drawing
By 1872 Degas had begun
to specialize in genre scenes of women at work, especially music-hall
performers and ballet dancers. In his paintings of these subjects he often
included background figures pausing from tedious labors to stretch or yawn, as
if to underline his goal of capturing unedited glimpses of daily life. It has
been suggested that the Kimbell drawing might have originated as a study for a
never-realized detail in one of these multifigured paintings.
Degas, who signed works
only when he sold or exhibited them (and rarely did either), never signed this
particular drawing. But the executors of his estate stamped imitation
signatures in red ink on all the works left in his studio, and Dancer
Stretching was among them. The status of its signature aside,
the drawing features many of the hallmarks of Degas’s influential style. As if
by oversight, he miscalculated the size of the figure to that of the sheet of
paper, with the result that there is no room in the composition for her feet
and the fingers of her left hand. Nor did he choose to erase the first lines
with which he searched to capture the figure’s form, even after he had
finalized his observations. The visibility of the preliminary drawings
underneath the final one seems intended to suggest how Degas needed to rush in
order to capture such a split-second subject. The smudges and leftover lines
also serve as “background” to the final figure, who inhabits not a recognizable
space, such as a ballet rehearsal room, but the sheet of drawing paper, evolving
from the marks on it as the result of an artistic process. Degas’s decision to
leave traces of this process visible—to represent not simply a dancer but the
act of drawing her—gives this work an expressly modern character.
https://www.kimbellart.org/collection/ap-196804
JOHN MIRÓ
WOMAN ADDRESSING THE
PUBLIC:
PROJECT FOR A MONUMENT
1980 - 1981
Bronze
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 372.1 x
243.8 cm
Kahn Building, East Entrance
G
With its peculiar
proportions and anatomy, Miró’s huge fantasy monument Woman Addressing the Public is
indebted to the artist’s lifelong study of the imaginative and expressive
powers of the art of children. He first realized its design in 1971 as a
twenty-inch plaster maquette painted white, with color accents for the eyes,
arms, and sexual organs. He then made a collage with a photograph of the
maquette pasted onto a photograph of the entrance to the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, intending the work as a monument of welcome and maternity.
Unable to realize the project in Los Angeles, Miró submitted it as a proposal
for Central Park, dedicated to the children of New York City, which did not
materialize. In 1978, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington,
expressed interest in commissioning the still unrealized Woman Addressing the Public,
but the project was once again abandoned. It would be nearly a quarter of a
century before his playful “monster” would finally have a place of honor
outside an important museum, the Kimbell. The final work, cast in an edition of
four when the artist was eighty-seven, weighs roughly three tons.
The art of children was
indeed a major source of inspiration for Miró, and whimsical creatures related
in appearance to Woman Addressing the Public began to appear in
his paintings and drawings in the 1920s. It was only after World War II,
however, that he began to fashion little statuettes of similar figures, perhaps
inspired by the surreal sculptures of his fellow countryman Picasso. Miró began
to develop his ideas as sculpture at full scale in the 1950s and 1960s, in
effect embarking on a second career as a sculptor expressly interested in art
for public spaces. The female creature with arms outspread was his favorite
sculptural subject, and Woman Addressing the Public is his grandest and
ultimate statement of the theme.
https://www.kimbellart.org/collection/ap-199601
AMEDEO MODIGLIANI (1884 –
1920)
HEAD C. 1913
Limestone
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 52.4 ×
24.8 × 37.5 cm, 51 kg
Credit: Given in Honor of Ted
and Lucile Weiner
by Their Daughter Gwendolyn, 2017
H
The Kimbell Art Museum is
honored to receive the gift of a masterpiece of modern sculpture, a carved
limestone Head by the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. This rare work is one
of about twenty-seven surviving sculptures by the artist. The Weiner Head is
distinguished from others by its complex balance of brutality and refinement,
as the delicate head emerges from the roughly hewn mass of the stone block. The
lively and varied surface celebrates the process of its creation: blunt gouges
and sensual striations of the sculptor’s chisels mark the tapered neck and
head, countered by the sharp incisions of the hair and more refined finish of
the oval face and cheeks. Its expressive sophistication reveals a sculptor at
the height of his talents.
Although renowned today
for his more numerous paintings, Modigliani considered himself foremost a
sculptor. Having left his hometown of Livorno in 1906 to join the Parisian
avant-garde and stimulated by the example of Constantin Brancusi, who became
his neighbor when he moved to a studio in the community of Montparnasse in
1909, Modigliani championed direct carving in stone, seeking to revitalize
sculpture by returning to its ancient methods. Scavenging limestone from
construction sites including the Paris subway, he created a series of elegantly
stylized, mostly elongated heads, with slender necks and geometric features
such as almond-shaped eyes and small round or smiling mouths.
Modigliani’s distinctive
aesthetic—born from the tension between figuration and abstraction—was inspired
by a range of works that he admired in Paris, including African, Egyptian,
ancient Greek, and Cambodian statuary. His powerful—even mystical—sculptures
invoke deities or timeless beings. Seven of the heads were displayed as a “decorative
ensemble” in the 1912 Salon d’Automne in a room with Cubist paintings. Paul
Guillaume, Modigliani’s dealer, later wrote that the artist envisioned his
heads as “columns of tenderness” in a “temple of beauty.” Around 1914, ill
health and poverty forced Modigliani to abandon sculpture and return to
painting portraits and nude figures. He died at age thirty-five of tubercular
meningitis.
Oilman Ted Weiner, with
his wife Lucile and their daughter Gwendolyn, acquired important modern
artworks, particularly sculpture, in the 1950s and 1960s. This major pioneering
private collection was displayed in their modernist home and garden in Fort
Worth.
PIET MONDRIAN (1872 –
1944)
COMPOSITION, 1914
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
Credit: Gift
of The Burnett Foundation of Fort Worth
in
Memory of Anne Burnett Tandy, 1983
From the age of fourteen,
when Mondrian decided to become a painter, he specialized in calm landscapes,
often with isolated buildings and shadowy twilight effects of dull gold and
silver. Starting around 1908, he was deeply influenced by the bright colors of
Fauvism, applied in rows of rectangular brushstrokes to indicate such textures
as stonework. But his exposure to the Cubism of Braque and Picasso in 1911
quickly converted him to ever deeper abstraction, and brought him back to the
coloration of the poetic works of his early career. The scumbled atmospheric
tones of ocher, blue gray, and pink in Composition are typical of this
development.
Mondrian moved to Paris
in 1912 and developed his own luminous style of Cubism with paintings of trees
and clusters of buildings. He based a series of compositions, including the
Kimbell painting, on the complicated geometry of the streetscape near his
studio in Montparnasse. He may have been inspired in part by Monet’s close-up
images of Rouen Cathedral from the early 1890s, each recording delicate golden,
pink, and blue tones of reflected daylight. In these Cubist-inspired works,
Mondrian “drew” his subject with a scaffold of black lines within, across, and
around which he delicately added color as if orchestrating atmospheric
effects.“The masses generally find my work rather vague,” he wrote in January
1914, around the time he painted Composition. “I construct lines and
color combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general
beauty with the utmost awareness.”
JOAN MIRÓ (1893 – 1983)
CONSTELLATION: AWAKENING
IN THE EARLY MORNING, 1941
Gouache and Oil Wash on
Paper
Classification: Painting
Credit:
Acquired With the Generous Assistance of
a Grant
From Mr. and Mrs. Perry R. Bass
© 2005
Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
This is one of a series
of twenty-three small gouache and oil wash paintings known as the Constellations.
The series evolved, surprisingly enough, from Miró’s aspirations in the late 1930s
to work on a mural scale. As he wrote to his dealer, Pierre Matisse early in
1940: “I feel that it is one of the most important things I have done, and even
though the formats are small, they give the impression of large frescoes.” By
July 1940 Miró and his family had fled Nazi-occupied France, where he began the
series, and were living in Majorca. It was there that the Kimbell Constellation was
finished. At this time, Miró later explained, “The night, music, and stars
began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings.”
The Constellations series
was smuggled to New York, where part of it was exhibited at the Pierre Matisse
Gallery in January 1945. Symbolic of the survival of great art in the face of
the ongoing war, these small works had important implications for American
painters such as Jackson Pollock as they created abstract compositions
permeated with free-floating lines and forms.
https://www.kimbellart.org/collection/apg-199305
PABLO PICASSO (1881 –
1973)
MAN WITH A PIPE, 1911
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
© 2019 Estate
of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In early July 1911,
Picasso left Paris for Céret, a small town in southwestern France, near the
Spanish border. Braque joined him there in August and the two painted their
ultimate “Analytical Cubist” works in intense dialogue. Analytical Cubist
painting is characterized by complex linear scaffolds—in this case long
vertical lines at roughly equal intervals and sets of isosceles triangles—and
by scores of small brush marks, interlocking and overlapping like pieces of a
jigsaw puzzle in progress. While most of the marks in Man with a
Pipe are baffling in terms of representation and serve
primarily to establish visual rhythms, a few fragments of graphic information
are legible. Easily spotted just above the middle of the painting, the white
clay pipe helps locate the man’s head, with its half-lightened, half-darkened
mustache, suggesting how one side of his face is turned toward some source of
light. The eye and nose can be discerned by extrapolating from the placement of
the mustache. A white rectangular shape at the bottom, a piece of paper,
indicates where to look for the man’s hands. Man with a
Pipe presumably represents the interior of a dimly lit,
smoke-filled café—hence the letters est detached from the word Restaurant and
the letters AL to suggest JOURNAL (“newspaper”
in French).
PAUL GAUGUIN (1848 –
1903)
SELF PORTRAIT, 1885
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
Gauguin assumed his role
as renegade artist in 1885. Rather than remain jobless in Copenhagen with his
Danish wife and their five children, the former stockbroker decided now to
return to Paris to follow his restless artistic conscience. Painted in Denmark
just before reaching this momentous decision in his life, this painting is both
somber and defiant in mood and is the first of the many self-portraits in which
Gauguin sought to explore his dark inner psyche.
Examination of the
Kimbell painting under infrared light and with radiographs has revealed that
Gauguin made important changes in his self-image as he developed it ever more
starkly. At first he portrayed himself in profile and included reproductions of
his own paintings on the background wall. Turned to confront the viewer in the
final work, he shows himself left-handed, like his image in a mirror, crowded
in an attic space with a slanted beam, and cold, with the lapels of his heavy
jacket wrapped together. Only his piercing eye escapes the bleak atmosphere.
When he made a self-portrait for his new friend Vincent van Gogh, in 1888, he
compared himself to Jean Valjean, the criminal hero of Victor Hugo’s Les
Miserables: “It is the face of an outlaw, ill-clad and powerful
like Jean Valjean—with an inner nobility and gentleness . . . . As for this
Jean Valjean, whom society has oppressed, cast out—for all his love and
vigor—is he not equally a symbol of the contemporary Impressionist painter? In
endowing him with my own features, I offer you—as well as an image of myself—a
portrait of all wretched victims of society who avenge us by doing good.”
GEORGES BRAQUE (1882 –
1963)
GIRL WITH A CROSS, 1911
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
© 2019
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Beginning in late 1907,
Braque and his new acquaintance Pablo Picasso began to paint objects as highly
simplified geometric forms, expressing solidarity with the most idiosyncratic
tendencies in the art of Cézanne—especially that of putting together unaligned
observations of adjacent parts. Matisse, whose own works at this time
emphasized rich color, is generally credited with coining the term “Cubism”—and
he used it to describe Braque’s overcast landscapes and shadowy still lifes. By
late 1909, however, Braque and Picasso had extended the Cubist premise to such
a degree of analysis by fragmentation that their somber gray and ocher
paintings appeared mostly abstract, except for scattered, geometric-shaped
vestiges of recognizable imagery—an eye, the bridge of a nose, a cascade of
hair in curls, or a necklace with a cross. The implication was that solid
matter and the space surrounding it had interpenetrated one another, resulting
in a new visual order.
In Girl with a
Cross, the head (or rather its disembodied details) emerges like an
apparition amid a rich interplay of highlighted and shaded facets, thinly
scumbled and atmospheric in mood. What appears to be a round white ceramic pot
at the right, more solidly painted than the woman, mysteriously occupies the
space where her shoulder should be. Orchestrating details in this way, Braque
creates an unprecedented visual impression of presence, absence, and movement,
all dissolved together into a single space-time diagram.
PIET MONDRIAN (1872 –
1944)
ABSTRACTION 1939- 1942
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
The austerely abstract style of Mondrian’s grid paintings restricts itself to straight horizontal and vertical lines, and the rectangular shapes resulting from their crossing; their palette is simply black, white, and the primaries: red, yellow, and blue. The artist’s intuitive arrangement of these elementary pictorial means in balance and harmony expressed his concept of “dynamic equilibrium.” He wrote: “Observing sea, sky, and stars, I sought to indicate their plastic function through a multiplicity of crossing verticals and horizontals. . . . The clarification of equilibrium through plastic art is of great importance for humanity. It reveals that although human life in time is doomed to disequilibrium, notwithstanding this, it is based on equilibrium. It demonstrates that equilibrium can become more and more living in us.”
Begun in 1939 in London,
where Mondrian had fled from Paris the year before, Abstraction was
completed in New York, where he arrived in 1940 to escape the quickly spreading
dangers of World War II. The Axis attack on Pearl Harbor, in December 1941,
took place just as he put the finishing touches to the work for a January 1942
exhibition. In most respects Abstraction is one of the
culminating paintings in a stark, hallmark mode that Mondrian had developed by
1921 in dialogue with his fellow Dutch artists of the De Stijl movement. But a
new sense of adventure, characteristic of Mondrian’s final New York works, is
expressed in such details as the absence of black bordering lines for the red rectangles
located along the right and bottom edges.
Abstraction retains its
vibrant, unvarnished surface and also its original frame. Mondrian himself
claimed, as far as he knew, to be the first artist to bring the painting
forward from the frame rather than setting it within; in so doing, he
eliminated the tendency of the traditional frame to lend an illusionistic depth
to the painting. The wide, recessed borders enhance the ease and safety of
handling his works and also harmonize with their spare aesthetic.
FERNARD LÉGER (1881 –
1955)
COMPOSITION C. 1920
Oil on canvas
Classification: Painting
Credit: ©2019
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Léger commonly painted
several different variations on each of his pictorial ideas, and many of the
same elements in this painting appear in four others, arranged in similar
interrelationships. Aside from what appear to be rods, wires, and the stenciled
letters P, U, and V (presumably taken from some poster or sign observed on the
street), it is impossible to identify specific objects. Judging from Léger’s
more explicitly representational works of the immediate post–World War I era,
however, the colorful fragmented and segmented forms, all geometrical in
outline, are most likely related to elements of modern machinery and
architecture. Already before the war, in a lecture presented in Paris, Léger
stressed that condensation, variety, and fragmentation were the essential
visual qualities of motorized, commercialized, twentieth-century experience and
hence of modern painting.
Léger gave the Kimbell
painting to his lifelong friend the poet and art critic Blaise Cendrars, who
favored the rhythms of just such fractured and fragmentary observations in his
influential writings. After the war, in which they both saw combat, Léger
provided illustrations for Cendrars’s book I Have Killed (1918).
Their close relationship is apparent in a poem entitled Construction,
which Cendrars wrote in 1919: “Color, color, and more colors . . . / Here’s
Léger who grows like the sun in the tertiary epoch. . . . Painting becomes this
great thing that moves / The wheel / Life / The machine / The human soul / A 75
mm breech / My portrait.”
The work remained in
Cendrars’s collection until acquired by the Kimbell in 1985. As a result, its
condition remains pristine; never varnished nor relined, it provides a
benchmark for understanding the delicate textures and matte surfaces essential
to Léger’s aesthetic.
EDGAR DEGAS (1834 – 1917)
AFTER THE BATH, WOMAN
DRYING HER HAIR, C. 1895
Charcoal on Yellow
Tracing Paper
Classification: Drawing
Dimensions: 62 x
69.3 cm
In 1855, the
twenty-year-old Degas visited the acclaimed Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who
was seventy-four at the time, to report that a family friend had agreed to lend
a painting of a nude by Ingres to an exhibition. At this meeting the elder
artist encouraged his young admirer to draw constantly, from memory as well as
from direct observation. Taking the advice to heart, Degas throughout his
career championed drawings on a par with paintings.
Although Degas seldom
dated or exhibited works after the last Impressionist group show of 1886, this
drawing of a nude’s back is among many closely related works generally dated to
the mid-1890s, when the artist’s longtime colleagues, including Renoir,
Cézanne, and Monet, were all producing variations on single pictorial themes.
Degas’s procedure was to make a drawing of the model in charcoal, then to lay a
sheet of tracing paper over this in order to make duplicates. In the case of
some images, such as After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Hair,
he repeated the process many times, creating a sequence of sheets with
identical-size figures on them, the sheets themselves varying in size, format,
and setting details.
HENRY MOORE (1898 – 1986)
FIGURE IN A SHALTER, CAST
1983
Bronze, Edition of 6
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 182.9 x
203.2 x 228.6 cm
Credit: Gift of The Burnett
Foundation
© 2019 The Henry Moore
Foundation
Henry Moore is one of the
most important sculptors of the twentieth century. Beginning as a carver in
wood and stone, Moore moved to modeling sculpture to be cast in bronze, taking
the human form as his constant theme. A major figure in British art, he
achieved greatest fame with large-scale commissions for public sculpture in
civic spaces and in gardens across the world.
Figure in a
Shelter is a
work from the artist’s last creative phase, produced just three years before
his death. Its forms, however, go back to sculptural ideas Moore first explored
in the 1930s. The “shelter” that surrounds the figure within has its origins in
a helmet-like head that Moore conceived about 1939–40, a shape in turn based on
ancient armor. Greatly expanded, the two halves of the “helmet” become an
enfolding architectural protection for the small, upright form, whose expanding
and contracting columnar shape suggests a human body.
Shelter and protection
are abiding themes in Moore’s art. Many of his best-known early sculptures show
mothers and fathers holding their children. During the air attacks on London
during the Second World War, Moore created hundreds of moving sketches and
finished drawings of figures sleeping and waiting in underground
shelters. Figure in a Shelter, a large-scale bronze that
is both ominous and comforting, takes the theme to its most abstract end.
https://www.kimbellart.org/collection/ag-201101
GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE (1848
– 1894)
ON THE PONT DE L’EUROPE,
1876 - 1877
Oil on Canvas
Classification: Painting
Although his closest
artist friends were Monet and Renoir, the key advocates for loose brushwork and
bright color, Caillebotte preferred the sort of conventional draftsmanship and
unaffected urban subjects dear to their fellow Impressionist Degas. Like Degas,
he limited himself to strictly subdued visual means, and On the Pont
de l’Europe is virtually monochromatic, the pervasive blue
tones corresponding in visual terms to the chilling cold in which the figures
stand. The man on the left with his collar turned up and the principal figure,
their backs turned toward each other, are dressed in identical fashion. The
implication, perhaps, is that modern urban society appears no less regularized
than modern engineering, with its mass-produced prefabricated parapets,
girders, and rivets. For his composition, Caillebotte has adopted the geometric
structure of the bridge, one pier of which bisects his picture vertically into
two arched bays, these each subdivided by diagonal cross-bracing struts. The
humanity of the figures resides in their freedom to escape the rigid symmetry.
The Pont de l’Europe
overlooks the Saint-Lazare train station, which was famously portrayed by Monet
in a dozen paintings made early in 1877 and included at the third Impressionist
exhibition that year. It is at least possible that Caillebotte (who soon
purchased three of Monet’s variations on the station theme) refrained from
showing his masterful On the Pont de l’Europe at the
same exhibition in order not to compete.
As well as being a
painter himsef, Caillebotte was the most important early patron of the
Impressionists. They invited him to be in their second group exhibition in
1876, and later that year he wrote a will promising his controversial
collection of works by the artists he championed to the French state. Today
these works form the nucleus of the collection at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
KIMBELL ART
MUSEUM
RENZO PIANO PAVILION
RENZO PIANO PAVILION
Surrounded by elms and
red oaks, Renzo Piano’s colonnaded pavilion stands as an expression of
simplicity and lightness—glass, concrete, and wood—some sixty-five yards to the
west of Louis I. Kahn’s signature cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972.
Piano’s low-slung,
colonnaded pavilion with overhanging eaves graciously acknowledges Kahn’s
museum building by way of its kindred height, emphasis on natural light, and
use of concrete as a primary material. The positioning of the pavilion on
the site focuses attention on the west facade of the Kahn Building, which Kahn
considered to be the main entrance.
The pavilion is made up of two sections connected by a glass passageway. The
front, or easternmost, section conveys an impression of weightlessness: a glass
roof system seems to float high above wooden beams and concrete posts. Sleek,
square concrete columns flank the central, recessed glass entrance and wrap
around three sides of the building. The tripartite facade articulates the
interior, with a spacious entrance lobby and large galleries to the north and
south.
Tucked under a green roof, the Piano Pavilion’s western section contains a
gallery for light-sensitive works of art, three education studios, a large
library with reading areas, and an auditorium with superior acoustics for
music. The latter, located below ground level, is a design centerpiece: its
raked seating faces the stage and the dramatic backdrop of a light well
animated by shifting patterns of natural light.
https://www.kimbellart.org/art-architecture/architecture/renzo-piano-pavilion
PIANO PAVILION IN DETAIL
MATERIALS
Walls made of soft, light
gray concrete unlike any concrete ever produced in the United States appear
throughout the Piano Pavilion’s exterior and interior. Tie holes appear in the
concrete walls at only 30-foot intervals, which is unusual for architectural
concrete. The resulting uninterrupted wall surfaces are ideal for the display
of works of art.
Twenty-nine pairs of wood
roof beams, weighing a total of 435 tons, span the interior and extend to the
exterior beneath the overhanging canopy. In addition to providing support for
the roof system, the 100-foot-long beams of laminated Douglas fir add visual
weight and warmth within largely continuous, changeable, and airy interiors.
Glass lends transparency
and lightness to the pavilion. In addition to the glass roof, natural light
fills the north and south galleries through glazed walls, offering passersby a
glimpse into the art-filled areas. From the pavilion’s entrance, five layers of
glass provide a view through the lobby and garden separating the two sections
of the pavilion, into the pavilion’s rear section with the auditorium, and out
onto the light well that spans the length of the west section of the building.
ROOF:
A defining feature of the
pavilion is one of Piano’s most elaborately engineered roof systems, which
appears to float above the massive, coupled wood beams. The roof includes a layer
of high-efficiency fritted glass supporting mechanical aluminum louvers with
built-in photovoltaic cells. The ceiling glows as sunlight filters through the
glass roof down through soft, silk-like scrims. Energy-efficient lighting with
incorporated LED technology enhances the natural light provided by the roof.
LIGHT:
As always in his museum
designs, Piano continues to experiment with ways to animate and direct natural
light, here primarily with the complex roof system. He also channels light and
provides unexpected sight lines by slanting some of the building’s walls, including
the wall of the deep concrete light well that provides a spectacular backdrop
to the stage in the 289-seat auditorium. Canted walls also channel light in two
sets of stairwells connecting the upper and lower levels: one leading from the
pavilion’s entrance to the underground garage, and the other descending from
the upper level to the lower auditorium entrance.
GALLERY FEATURES:
In the galleries, Piano
has developed what is referred to as a “breathing floor,” in which the entire
floor functions as a vent. The floorboards, made of white oak, have been laid
with small gaps, allowing low-velocity air to flow freely through the floor. A
subtle pattern in the arrangement of the floorboards echoes the wooden beams of
the roof above, and the floor’s warm color complements the cool concrete
walls.
The moveable gallery
walls are specially designed to maintain the tranquility of the space and a
feeling of weightlessness. They are unusually thin—10 ½ inches thick—and
secured only to the floor, yet they can carry a weight of up to 1200 pounds.
Light spills beneath them, making the innovative structures appear to float.
SUSTAINABILITY:
Using only half the
amount of energy per square foot required by the Kahn Building, the new Piano
Pavilion is highly energy efficient. Much of the structure is below ground
level; only a third is above ground and requires full cooling and heating
power. Even these spaces—comprised largely of the lobby and the north and south
galleries—will benefit from the overhanging glass roof, which supports a system
of photovoltaic panels that shade direct sun and generate enough power to
offset up to twenty percent of the carbon produced by the building’s
annual operations. In addition, 450-foot-deep geothermal wells—thirty-six in
all—help to air condition the building by taking advantage of the natural
heating and cooling provided by the earth. Other features, including lighting,
air-conditioning systems, and fixtures, also contribute to the building’s
energy efficiency.
FURNISHING:
Contemporary furniture in
neutral tones of tan and white are accompanied by cherry-red accents, all
designed by the Herman Miller Company, Geiger International, and Knoll. The
auditorium is outfitted with rich red seats by the Italian design firm Poltrona
Frau.
LANDSCAPE:
Placing the parking garage underground and creating a park-like green on top of the western section of the pavilion assisted in maintaining as much green space on the site as possible. On the three and a half acres of green recreation area, some 320 new trees have been planted, including forty-seven 30-foot-high elms between the two buildings that re-establish the previous planting. Louis I. Kahn’s conception for the site’s landscaping is retained as much as possible throughout the grounds, particularly in the iconic elements outside his building’s west entrance: the yaupon grove and the allée running between the two museum buildings.
RENZO PIANO BIOGRAPHY
Renowned architect Renzo
Piano has won many architecture awards, most notably the Pritzker Prize, the
AIA Gold Medal, and the Sonning Prize. The Renzo Piano Building Workshop
(RPBW), based in Genoa, Paris, and New York, employs more than a hundred
architects, engineers, and building specialists. Working with this exceptional
team, Piano has executed designs as city-defining as The Shard in
London—Europe’s tallest building—and as varied as department stores, churches,
factories, housing, university buildings, stadia, a winery, a bridge—and even a
Swatch watch.
Born into a family of
builders in the Italian port city of Genoa in 1937, Piano brings extraordinary
credentials and experience to the Kimbell. As a young man, he worked briefly in
the office of Louis I. Kahn before establishing the firm Piano & Rogers
with the dynamic young Anglo-Italian architect Richard Rogers. Soon afterward,
a brilliant young engineer, Peter Rice, invited the partners to join him in
entering an open competition to design the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
The Beaubourg, as it came to be known, was a new kind of cultural institution,
conceived for a dawning era of freewheeling multimedia aesthetics. Piano and
Rogers saw an opportunity to explore bold new architectural ideas, which Piano
described as “a rebellion against the mystification of culture.” There were 700
other entries in the competition, but they did win it—and built it.
In 1980, Piano, now a
principal of Atelier Piano & Rice, was approached by the Schlumberger
oil-equipment heiress Dominique de Menil to design a museum in Houston to house
her impressive collection of art. She and her husband John had previously
commissioned Louis I. Kahn, but after Mr. de Menil died in 1973, Dominique de
Menil abandoned the project. When she was ready to begin again, Kahn was no
longer alive: she turned to Piano for the assignment. The result is an exposed
steel and wood pavilion, minimalist in form, which was immediately hailed as a
new milestone in museum architecture.
Since then, the Renzo
Piano Building Workshop, established in 1981, has received a steady stream of
museum commissions, including two other much-loved spaces in Texas: the Cy
Twombly Gallery, also commissioned by the Menil Collection and located on its
campus, and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Piano also designed what is
often credited as being one of the most perfect small museums in the world, the
Fondation Beyeler outside Basel, Switzerland.
The California Academy of
Sciences in San Francisco (2008), the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of
Chicago (2009), and a new entrance to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in
Boston (2012), are among other major American museum projects realized by Renzo
Piano and RPBW.
https://www.kimbellart.org/content/renzo-piano-biography
RENZO PIANO BIOGRAPHY ….
Renzo Piano 1998 Laureate
Biography Renzo Piano is a man whose work is reinventing architecture in
projects scattered around the world—from a Mixed Use Tower in Sydney, Australia
to the mile-long Kansai Air Terminal on a man-made island in Osaka Bay, Japan
to the master plan for the reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin or the
Beyeler Foundation Museum in Basel, Switzerland. Even this skip around the
globe does not indicate the full range or enormous output of this prodigious
architect. Renzo Piano’s projects include not only buildings that range from
homes to apartments, offices to shopping centers, museums, factories, workshops
and studios, airline and railway terminals, expositions, theatres and churches;
but also bridges, ships, boats, and cars, as well as city planning projects,
major renovations and reconstructions, and even television star of a program on
architecture.
He was born into a
family of builders in Genoa, Italy in 1937. His grandfather, his father, four
uncles and a brother were all contractors, and he admits, he should have been
one too, but instead chose architecture. Piano declares his architecture has an
important legacy—a passion for construction, or more pointedly, a culture of
doing, resulting from growing up in a family of builders.
He was seventeen
when he approached his father with the idea of going to architecture school.
“Why do you want to be just an architect? You can be a builder,” was his
father’s response that has never been forgotten. Perhaps that is the reason for
the name Renzo Piano Building Workshop, rather than Piano Architects &
Associates. Explains Piano, “We not only design things there, but we also make
things, and test them. Keeping some of the action together with the conception
makes me feel a little less like a traitor to my family. The name is also a
deliberate expression of the sense of collaboration and teamwork that permeates
our work.” It was in 1980 that the Building Workshop was formed, and now has
offices in Paris, Genoa and Berlin employing approximately a hundred people in
the three locations.
Following his
graduation from Milan Polytechnic Architecture School in 1964, he worked in his
father’s construction company, designing under the guidance of Franco Albini.
In addition to his 15th century idol, Brunelleschi, Piano pays homage to Jean
Prouvé‚ of France with whom he formed a friendship during the time (1965-70)
that he worked in the offices of Louis Kahn in Philadelphia and Z. S. Makowsky
in London. Two other important influences he acknowledges were Buckminster
Fuller and Pier Luigi Nervi, albeit from afar.
While still
studying in Milan, he married a girl he had known from school days in Genoa,
Magda Arduino. Their first child, Carlo, was born in 1965. He is now a
journalist. Another son followed three years later, Matteo, who is an
independent industrial designer; and a third child, daughter Lia, now 25, is
pursuing a career in architecture.
His first important
commission was in 1969 to design the Italian Industry Pavilion at Expo ‘70 in
Osaka. His late brother, Ermanno, built and installed the pavilion and a number
of other projects before his premature death in 1993.
The Expo project
attracted much favorable attention, including that of another young architect
named Richard Rogers, who although born in Florence was English. The two
architects found that they had a great deal in common and when an engineering
firm suggested that they work together and enter the international competition
for the Georges Pompidou Center (also known as Beaubourg) in Paris; they did
and won.
The result was a
hundred thousand square meters (over a million square feet) in the heart of
Paris, devoted to the figurative arts, music, industrial design, and
literature. In the two decades since it opened, over a 150,000,000 people have
visited it, averaging more than 25,000 people per day—an overwhelming
success—both with the people of Paris and the international media. Both Rogers
and Piano became recognizable names throughout the world.
Described often as
“high tech,” Piano prefers other modifiers. In his own words, “Beaubourg was
intended to be a joyful urban machine, a creature that might have come from a
Jules Verne book, or an unlikely Renzo Piano, 1998 Laureate (continued) 2
looking ship in dry dock. Beaubourg is a provocation, an apt description of my
feelings, but has no negative connotations as far as the quality of the design
and the reasons behind it are concerned. Beaubourg is a double provocation: a
challenge to academicism, but also a parody of the technological imagery of our
time. To see it as high-tech is a misunderstanding.”
In the introduction
to the book, Renzo Piano, Buildings and Projects 1971-1989, Pulitzer Prize
winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote, “Like any artist who
produces a celebrated work early in his career, Renzo Piano has in many ways
been more confined than liberated by the Centre Beaubourg, known primarily as
the architect who installed this high-tech spoof at monumental scale into the
heart of Paris.” And then referring to more recent projects such as the Menil
Collection museum in Houston, Texas; the 60,000 seat football stadium in Bari,
Italy; and the multi-functional complex of the giant Fiat factory at Lingotto
near Turin, Italy, Goldberger continues: “(there is) the presence in all of
these projects of a light, tensile quality and an obvious love of technology.
But where the expression of technology at Beaubourg was broad and more than a
little satirical, in the buildings since Beaubourg, it has been straighter,
quieter, and vastly more inventive.”
One of the
casualties of the Beaubourg project, which required years of living in Paris,
however, was Piano’s marriage. His wife preferred to live in Genoa, and so they
separated. In 1989, he met Emilia (Milly) Rossato when she came to work for his
Renzo Piano Building Workshop. They were married in 1992 by Jacques Chirac,
then the Mayor of Paris who supported the construction of Beaubourg through
many crises. They live in Paris next door to their office there, just a few blocks
from Pompidou in the Marais district. In actual fact, they divide their time
between Paris and Genoa, with frequent trips to his many projects around the
world.
In 1995, Piano was
called upon to renovate the Centre Georges Pompidou. The popularity of the
place has taken its toll. The library and exhibition spaces are being expanded,
and the public spaces reorganized. Plans call for a reopening on the eve of the
new millennium, December 31, 1999, as Grand Beaubourg.
Two other projects
closely related to the Beaubourg are the IRCAM Extension and the Reconstruction
of the Atelier Brancusi, both on the same Centre Pompidou square. The former’s
initials in French stand for Pierre Boulez’s Institute of Musical Research
which is actually attached to the Pompidou. The need for the greatest possible
soundproofing originally led IRCAM to excavate a space underneath the square
for its various sound labs and studios. The only visible evidence that it was
there was a glass ceiling and a few elements of the ventilation system. The
need for more space, a desire to emphasize the institute’s role and image,
prompted the extension which consists of a tower six stories above ground and
three below. It fills an angle left between two existing buildings at the edge
of the square.
When Constantin
Brancusi died, his will left all his work - sculptures, drawing, paintings,
photographs—to the French state on the condition that they remain in his
studio. In the 1950’s the area occupied by his studio was demolished to make
way for other things. Piano was given the task of rebuilding Atelier Brancusi
on the square of Centre Pompidou. “What we did,” says Piano, “was reproduce the
sensation of being surrounded by an explosion of art made up of many pieces in
different stages of development.”
It was in 1982,
that the now late Dominique Schlumberger de Menil, widow of John, contacted
Piano to design a museum in Houston to house the 10,000 works of primitive and
modern art in the Menil Collection. Completed in1986, it has achieved universal
high praise, and is often cited as Piano’s finest work. Embodying the idea of a
“museum village,” i.e. it is made up of several buildings, the construction is
large, but not monumental, and rises no higher than its neighboring small
houses. The walls are built of planks of wood attached to a metal framework.
Perhaps the most
distinguishing aspect of the Menil Collection is the roof of the exhibition
spaces, made up of repeating modular elements described as “leaves.” Each leaf
is a very thin section of reinforced concrete integrated with a steel lattice
girder. They function as roof, ventilation and light Renzo Piano, 1998 Laureate
(continued) 3 control efficiently. In his book titled Logbook, Piano states,
“Paradoxically, the Menil Collection with its great serenity, its calm, and its
understatement, is far more ‘modern,’ scientifically speaking, than Beaubourg.
The technological appearance of Beaubourg is parody. The technology used for
the Menil Collection is even more advanced (in its structures, materials,
systems of climate control), but it is not flaunted.”
Some five years
later, Piano was called upon to make an addition to this museum village—a small
(approximately 11,000 square feet) gallery to house a permanent exhibition of
the pictures and sculptures of Cy Twombly. Built of modest materials, the Cy
Twombly Gallery has an outer facing of ochre-toned concrete, the building is
devoted entirely to exhibition space with floors of natural American oak. All
the galleries in the building are illuminated by natural light (except the one
in the center). The roof takes the form of a series of superimposed layers that
filter the light. The top layer is a metal grating, then comes a layer of solar
deflectors and a layer of fixed skylights. Immediately above the exhibition
space is a fabric layer. All the systems for controlling the deflectors are
electronic.
The year before he
began work on the Houston de Menil Collection, he was hired to transform the
Schlumberger industrial plant on the outskirts of Paris. The company made
measurement systems for fluids, and including a device to detect the presence
of oil underground. What were mechanical devices were being replaced by
electronic ones. Piano’s plan called for the demolition of part of the old
workshop, where a park was laid out over a parking facility with space for a
thousand cars. Some of the original buildings were retained but restructured as
offices and laboratories. Although the electronic plant in Paris and the
Houston museum were totally unrelated, it is interesting to note that Mrs.
Dominique de Menil was a member of the Schlumberger family of France before
marrying and moving to Texas.
“While working on
the Menil Collection in Texas,” Piano recalls, “we made a little machine—which
we called a bit pompously, ‘the solar machine’—that would allow us in Genoa to
find out the position of the sun in Houston. We also built one-to-ten scale
models, which we put in the garden to study the diffusion of light. All the
projects that come out of the Building Workshop have stories of similar
experiments.”
Piano went on to
relate that Brunelleschi, who is Piano’s favorite architect from history,
studied the mechanism of the clock so that he could apply it to a system of
great counterweights which in turn was used to raise the beams for the dome of
the Florence Cathedral.
“Knowing how to do things
not just with the head,” says Piano, “but with the hands as well: this might
seem a programmatic and ideological goal. It is not. It is a way of
safeguarding creative freedom. If you intend to use a material, a construction
technique, or an architectural element in an unusual way, there is always a
time when you hear yourself saying, ‘It can’t be done,’ simply because no one
has ever tried before. But if you have actually tried, then you can keep going
- and so you gain a degree of independence in design that you would not have
otherwise.”
Reflecting on the
building of the Centre Pompidou, Piano elaborated the point, “We had to make a
structure out of pieces of cast metal. The entire French steel industry rose up
in arms: it refused point-blank, saying that a structure like that wouldn’t
stay up. But we were sure of our facts, and passed the order on to the German
company Krupp. And so it was that the main structure of the Centre Pompidou was
made in Germany, even if the girders had to be delivered at night, almost in
secret. This was one case in which technique protected art. Our understanding
of structures set free our capacity for expression.”
In 1979, Habitat,
an educational television program was produced by RAI, the Italian government
television network, starring Piano, who says, “We set out to explain to the
non-specialist audience the principles of construction, a few simple
experiments on structures and materials. I tried to get Renzo Piano, 1998
Laureate (continued) 4 the message across not to be overawed by architecture,
explaining that this century has produced impressive structures because it has
developed fantastic machinery for building. But innovation in process does not
necessarily entail high technology in construction. There is very little today
that can bear comparison to the structural and formal research that went into a
15th century church.”
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You may read whole
biography from to click below link to reach pdf version of file …….
https://www.pritzkerprize.com/laureates/1998
http://www.rpbw.com/story/philosophy-of-rpbw
MALE FIGURE, C. 195
B.C.–A.D. 205
PERIOD: C. 500
B.C.–A.D. 500
Terracotta
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 49.5 x
22.2 x 16.8 cm
Nok terracottas are the
earliest known sculptures from ancient Nigeria. Sculptures of this kind were
first discovered in 1943 by Bernard Fagg near the northern Nigerian village of
Nok, after which the culture that produced them was named.
The highly skilled Nok
artisans created images of great power, beauty, and sophistication. This
commanding male figure represents the fully developed Nok style, characterized
here by the expressively modeled head with finely detailed features—especially
the lips, mouth, beard, and coiffure—and carefully defined costume. The complex
hairstyle, characteristic of Nok pieces, is composed of three rows of seven
conical buns, with larger hemispherical caps over the ears. The importance of
jewelry in Nok culture is illustrated by the elaborate costume, here
meticulously detailed and lavishly adorned with necklaces, jewelry, and beaded
chains. The appearance of a horn, slung around the back of the shoulders, may
identify the figure as a spiritual specialist (shaman). The figure is broken at
the waistline, but may have originally been kneeling. Animated and compelling,
this is one of the masterpieces of Nok sculptural art.
CENSER STAND WITH HEAD OF
A SUPERNATURAL
BEING WITH A KAN CROSS,
C. A.D. 690-720
PERIOD: LATE CLASSIC
(A.D. 600-900)
Ceramic With Traces of
Pigments
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 114 ×
54.6 × 29.2 cm
Monumental ceramic censer
stands are some of the finest and largest freestanding sculptures created by
Maya artists. The sophistication and craftsmanship demonstrated in this stand
are indicative of Palenque, an important Maya city-state located in current-day
Chiapas, Mexico, that flourished in the seventh century. Ceramic censers (incensarios)
were an important component of ritual paraphernalia and ceremonial life at
Palenque. They were used to represent and venerate divine beings, primarily the
deities of the Palenque triad (called GI, GII, and GIII). Censers were composed
of a stand and a brazier-bowl (now missing), which was placed on top and used
for burning copal incense. The stands were elaborately embellished with a
variety of iconographic elements, most often featuring the Jaguar God of the
Underworld (GIII). For the Maya, the center of the universe was the Axis Mundi,
or World Tree, which had roots growing deep in the sea under the earth and
branches that rose to support the heavens. Symbolically, the tubular bodies of
the censers formed cosmic trees that made the movement of deities through the
cosmos possible during ritual acts.
This censer stand is
sculpted with a vertical tier of five heads. The lowest head is an unidentified
reptilian, surmounted by a head that may be a human in the guise of a deity,
probably the Jaguar God of the Underworld. This head has an open mouth with a
cut-off jaw. The inside of the mouth is marked with a Kan Cross (X) and
resembles the entrance of a temple. This principal head is topped by Itzamye,
the serpent-bird, indicating a symbolic shift to the branches of the World Tree
(Axis Mundi) in the celestial realm. The two upper reptilian heads are versions
of the Jester God, who resided in the upper heavens. The side flanges of this
censer stand are decorated with a variety of motifs that include (from top to
bottom) jewels with bird-shaped heads and ribbons, stylized crocodile ears,
crossed and knotted bands, and ornamented ear spools. Traces of the original
blue, red, and white pigments are still present on the surface.
KNEELING MOTHER AND
CHILD, LATE 19 TH CENTURY
Wood
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 36.8 x
13.6 x 12 cm
Among the few East
African peoples who make sculptures in any quantity, the Makonde produce unusually
naturalistic figures. A strong sensuality in the representation of the body is
complemented by the attention given to intricate detailing, which often centers
on an elaborate coiffure or tribal markings. These designs are viewed by the
Makonde people as indications of rank, status, and identity, as well as
decoration—Makonde females are scarified as they pass to adulthood.
Most African
mother-and-child sculptures are intended to ensure fertility, but this piece is
concerned with the high status of the female in that matriarchal society. It is
thought to represent the primeval matriarch who founded the Makonde tribe.
Details of the vigorously carved sculpture are sensitively articulated,
including the mother’s hooded eyes and her fingers holding the sling in which
the baby straddles her back, its tiny feet and hands extended. The ears and
upper lip are pierced and hold ornaments, which are symbols of leadership in
this region of East Africa. Great care is given to the representation of facial
scarification, which is typical of Makonde figural sculptures and certain kinds
of masks. Also characteristic is the imaginatively cut hair: the design would
have been achieved by shaving away part of the hair and sculpting the rest into
a raised design.
HEAD, POSSIBLY A KING,
12th–14th CENTURY
Terracotta With Residue
of Red Pigment and Traces of Mica
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 26.7 x
14.5 x 18.7 cm
The art of Ife, which
flourished from the twelfth to the fifteenth century in southwestern Nigeria,
in the area occupied by the Yoruba people, is unique in Africa in representing
human beings with extraordinary naturalism. The subject matter of most Ife art
is centered around royal figures and their attendants, reflecting the political
structure of a city-state ruled over by a divine king, the Oni of Ife. Sculpted
heads were buried in the ground at the foot of giant trees and resurrected when
they were used ritually as offerings or sacrifices, sometimes on an annual
basis. Ife bronzes and terra-cottas have been recovered from groves containing
sacred shrines, from crossroads, and from older sections of the Ife palace
compound.
The physiognomy of this
head has been modeled with extraordinary subtlety, and the striations, which
may represent scarification patterns, are incised with great delicacy. The
square crown, formed of four rectangular aprons overlying a conical form and
embellished with a network of intersecting beads, is unparalleled in any other
known examples of Ife art. Like the vast majority of Ife heads in terra-cotta,
the Kimbell example seems to have been broken from a full-length figure. The
serene and dignified countenance, as well as the elaborate crown, suggests that
this head represents an Ife king (Oni).
DIVINER’S MASK, EARLY
20th CENTURY
Wood, organic materials
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 22.8 x
16.8 x 10.7 cm
Among the Yombe people,
masks were used in divination ceremonies, through which past or future events
were revealed. This example was worn by a nganga diphomba, a divination
specialist devoted primarily to the detection of members of the community
responsible for various crimes, accidents, and other disasters. The diphomba prosecuted
anti-social acts, and during a ritual trial functioned as the vehicle for the
verdict of the ancestral spirit. Yombe masks are generally regarded as
idealized representations of the diviners who wore them, but the closed eyes,
parted lips, and overall expression of intense concentration on the Kimbell
mask lend it a sense of heightened realism.
The mask’s crusted, black
surface is the result of its having been stored in the rafters of a building
where it was exposed to the oils and smokes of cooking. The black color of the
mask is also associated with judgment and divination. Had it been reused, it
would almost certainly have been cleaned and repainted as a part of its
preparation for receiving the spirit. Some masks have relatively blank
countenances and depend upon costume and context—dance, chant, and even
speech—to create personality. Others, such as this Yombe mask, seem aglow with
character.
MALE FACE, C. A.D. 700–900
PERIOD: LATE CLASSIC PERIOD (A.D. 600–900)
Stucco With Traces of Paint
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 26 x 22.7 x 16.5 cm
Modeled in high relief,
this stucco head was originally an architectural ornament for a state
ceremonial building. Probably the portrait of an important official, the face
has the high-bridged nose characteristic of the Maya, as well as shallow eye
sockets and irregular features. Traces of brown and red pigment indicate that
the rough stone was covered originally with a smooth plaster finish before
being painted.
HACHIMAN IN THE GUISE OF
A BUDDHIST PRIEST, 11th CENTURY
PERIOD: HEIAN
PERIOD (794–1185)
Polychromed Wood
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 48.9 x
41 x 32 cm
The Shinto god Hachiman
has enjoyed special prominence throughout Japanese history. He was originally a
local military guardian, protecting an agricultural and mining community in
Usa. Since his legendary birthplace in Japan was near south China, a possible
source of military threats, Japanese rulers came to rely upon him for
protection against that danger. In this role, Hachiman became known as the
Shinto god of war.
The Kimbell’s figure of
Hachiman reflects a complex theological transformation that occurred when the
Japanese sought to reconcile Buddhism, a foreign religion, with native Shinto
beliefs. Shinto gods could symbolically enter the Buddhist priesthood, thereby
acquiring a dual identity. In this image, Hachiman is dressed as a Buddhist
priest. Seated in a meditative position, wearing a monk’s robe, his head
shaven, and carrying a jewel in his left hand, he resembles representations of
the bodhisattva Kshitigarbha (in Japanese, Jizo), reflecting the fact that
Shinto images shared the same stylistic features as Buddhist sculpture of the
period. Carved from a solid block of wood, the figure’s generously proportioned
chest, shoulders, and legs impart a monumentality that belies the sculpture’s
relatively small size, while the slight tilt of the head imparts a touch of
naturalism.
HEAD OF JINA, 11th
CENTURY
PERIOD: MEDIEVAL
PERIOD (C. 600–1200)
Gray Pink Sandstone
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 77.1
x 66.7 x 53.3 cm
Credit: Gift of Ben
Heller, New York
Jainism,the most
passionately nonviolent of all religions,has been continuously practiced in
India for more than 2,500 years. Its name comes from the word jina, which means
“liberator” or “victor.” The twenty-four jinas of the Jain
pantheon provide spiritual role models for devout Jains, who aspire to achieve
nirvana, or moksha—a state of liberation from the karmic cycle of
rebirth—through a combination of meditation, devotional ritual, and religious
austerities.The historical founder of Jainism is Mahavira, the most recent of
the twenty-four jinas and a contemporary of the Buddha
Shakyamuni.
This massive head,
originally part of a colossal sculpture, represents one of the twenty-four
jinas. It was produced during the medieval period, when followers of the Jain
faith had grown into a large and f lourishing community, especially in
Rajasthan and Gujarat, where they built numerous mountaintop shrines and
temples.The petal- shaped eyes, curving brows, and full lips are typical of the
medieval sculptural tradition of northern India, which adhered to proportions
prescribed in iconographic texts.The snail-shell curls and elongated, pierced
earlobes are conventions shared by images of the Buddha, but the absence of a
cranial protuberance (ushnisha) and dot between the eyes (urna)
confirms that this is an image of a jina.
https://www.kimbellart.org/collection/ag-196801
SEATED NYOIRIN KANNON, C.
1230 - 1250
PERIOD: KAMAKURA
PERIOD (1185–1333)
Wood With Traces of Gilt
and Pigment
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 48.3 x
45.7 x 25.4 cm
Kannon is the Japanese
name for the Indian Buddhist deity Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of
compassion. Because of the boundless love he offered to all beings, this was
the most popular of all the Buddhist deities throughout Asia. The Nyoirin
Kannon, a prominent deity in the Japanese Esoteric Buddhist pantheon, is one of
the six “changed forms” of the bodhisattva Kannon especially associated with
the granting of desires. The word nyo-i refers to the cintamani,
the wish-granting jewel; the term rin, which means “wheel,” refers to the
turning of the wheel of the law. The Nyoirin Kannon was widely worshiped by
those who hoped to gain riches and see their requests fulfilled.
This gracious image shows
the deity seated in a pose of royal ease. Although drawings frequently depict
this god as a bodhisattva with two arms, the six-armed form was also popular in
Japan. As in this sculpture, one hand is often shown touching the cheek, with a
left arm braced against the lotus pedestal (now missing). Of the other four
arms, one of the right hands holds the jewel, and one of the left hands holds a
lotus. The raised left arm would originally have had a wheel balanced on the
upright finger, and the lowered right arm would have held a rosary.
FOUR ARMED GANESHA,
5th–6th CENTURY A.D.
PERIOD:
GUPTA (320–600)
Terracotta Relief
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 49.1 x
67.9 x 20.6 cm
Ganesha is the
elephant-headed son of Shiva, one of the three most important deities of the
Hindu pantheon, and his consort, the goddess Parvati. He is widely worshiped as
the remover of obstacles and the bestower of good fortune, prosperity, and
health. The origin of his hybrid body—consisting of an elephant’s head with one
tusk and an infant’s torso with distended belly—is related in Hindu legends.
Parvati is said to have created Ganesha in human form to act as her door
guardian. When he refused to admit Shiva to Parvati’s chamber, the god cut off
the child’s head. In order to placate the distressed Parvati, Shiva replaced
the head with that of the first living thing he could find—an elephant. Hindu
deities are often depicted with multiple heads and arms, a physical expression
of the multiplicity of their superhuman powers. Due to the damaged condition of
this superb terra-cotta relief, it is no longer possible to identify the
deity’s usual attributes—an axe, a rosary, and a bowl of sweetmeats—which would
have been held in his hands. The serpent hanging across his torso signifies his
relationship to Shiva, who also bears this attribute.
Many Hindu brick temples
were decorated with terracotta plaques such as this one. The plaques are
distinguished by their naturalistic modeling, well illustrated in the sensuous
and powerful sculpting of this image, which is unusually expressive, and
notable also for its large size and early date.
EDO PERIOD (1615–1868)
COURTESAN PLAYING THE
SAMISEN, C.1785
Hanging Scroll; Ink and
Gold on Silk
Classification: Hanging
scroll
Dimensions: 39.4 x
49.5 cm
This painting is a late
masterwork by Isoda Koryusai, who was an important and prolific ukiyo-e painter
and printmaker in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, a time when
Koryusai and other artists showed a keen fascination with the natural world. In
the Kimbell’s painting, the intimate scene of a courtesan and her attendant in
a teahouse overlooking a river subtly suggests the elegance and entertainment
of the pleasure quarters. The bamboo shade that is being rolled up by the young
attendant indicates that the weather is warm, while the chrysanthemums
decorating the kimono of the courtesan signal the end of summer and the
approach of autumn. The wind gently blows ripples across the water. Reflecting
the most current modes, the two women wear a popular hairstyle of the period,
in which the side locks billowed out, taking on the abstract form of a lantern
top or open fan. The richly patterned textiles and the strong diagonal formed
by the railing of the verandah make this monochromatic painting a work of
unusual sophistication and visual appeal.
URN IN THE FORM OF
COCIYO, GOD OF LIGHTNING AND RAIN, C. A.D. 400–500
PERIOD: EARLY
CLASSIC (A.D. 250–600)
Ceramic
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 72.4 x
53.3 x 45.7 cm
The primary capital of
Zapotec culture was the ceremonial site of Monte Albán (in the modern state of
Oaxaca), where the Zapotecs worshipped a complex pantheon of nature gods.
Zapotec culture is divided into four stages, each associated with the style of
gray-ware effigy urns they placed with their honored dead.
This urn represents
Cociyo, the Zapotec god of lightning and rain, identified by an amalgam of
facial elements forming a powerfully sculptural mask. The stepped, two-part
forms enclosing the eyes represent clouds and, by extension, the precious water
needed to grow crops. The doubly plugged nasal extension is a development from
earlier snouted deity elements that combine jaguar and snake allusions—the roar
of the jaguar with the reverberation of thunder. The three fangs that protrude
from this snout cover a bifurcated tongue, like the almost invisibly flashing
tongue of a snake; the snake’s tongue symbolizes the lightning bolt. The broad
mouth with drawn-back lips is derived from Olmec prototypes, among which would
have been images of the baby rain god. The rest of the dress is as much that of
a priest as of a deity, with the large disk-shaped earplugs and the knotted
collar of high rank. The striations of the cape may be intended to represent
feathers. The kilt is decorated with a wavelike pattern, with three attached
tassels at the bottom. The ensemble thus echoes the various natural phenomena
of a tropical mountain thunderstorm.
STELA A RULER, A.D. 692
PERIOD: LATE
CLASSIC (A.D. 600–900)
Limestone
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 272.7 x
173.7 cm
The Maya were prolific
makers of carved stone-slab monuments, or stelae, which were normally set up
within architectural complexes and most often portray specific, named
individuals who were members of the hereditary dynasties that ruled Maya
city-states. This imposing figure is identified by the accompanying
inscriptions as K’inich B’alam (Sun-Faced Jaguar), ruler of El Perú. The
Kimbell stela was once part of a sculptural ensemble of three stelae displayed
in a plaza at El Perú. The central monument, now in the Cleveland Museum of
Art, represents on the same scale an equally intimidating woman, who may
represent K’inich B’alam’s wife. The third stela still in situ portrays an
unidentified male figure. The principal event commemorated by the Kimbell and
Cleveland stelae is the ending in A.D. 692 of a k’atun, or twenty-year
period, a date of special importance in the structure of Maya rulership.
The primary elements of
K’inich B’alam’s costume were intended to situate the Maya ruler not just
locally and in his historic role but, more importantly, in his relation to the
gods and the cosmos. The main headdress element, repeated in the ruler’s anklets,
is the head of the Water-lily Snake, a deity symbolizing standing bodies of
water and the earth’s abundance, and patron god of the number thirteen. The
several representations of fish leaping toward water-lily blossoms—at the top
of the headdress and, less recognizably, at the back of the headdress and at
either knee––reinforce this symbolism. Through these devices the ruler is shown
as guarantor of agricultural success. The mosaic mask represents a jeweled
serpent, and the round shield he grasps in his left hand emphasizes the war
role of Maya rulers. Partly hidden by his left thigh is a deified perforator,
used by the ruler at important period endings, like this one, to shed blood
from his penis as an offering to the gods.
SEATED ARHAT, C.
1300–1450
PERIOD: LATE YUAN TO
EARLY MING DTNASTY (1279–1368/1368–1644)
Cast Iron, Traces of
Pigment
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 78 x
50.5 x 40.7 cm
This engaging portrait of
a monk represents an arhat (in Chinese, lohan), one of a group of
“perfected beings” who, in the Buddhist faith, were the original disciples of
Shakyamuni Buddha. Like bodhisattvas, arhats have attained perfection but have
delayed entering nirvana and becoming buddhas so that they may aid others in
seeking enlightenment. Arhats were regarded as having achieved extraordinary
spiritual levels that endowed them with superhuman capabilities. Usually
appearing in groups of four, sixteen, eighteen, or even as many as five hundred
or a thousand, the arhats were depicted as monks and ascetics, sometimes with
exaggerated features such as long eyebrows or domed heads, and some were
associated with particular attributes. Although lists identifying each arhat
exist, the descriptions are generally vague, and precise identifications of
individual figures are difficult.
The realism and humanity
in the Kimbell arhat’s face contrast with the simplified but rhythmical form of
the body to produce a portrait of great character and presence. An inscription
on the back of the statue names a large group of donors who commissioned and
paid for the work, and gives the name of the temple, Yuhua, in Shanxi province,
to which it was donated, and where it may have been installed as part of a
larger group of arhat portraits.
BODHISATTVA KHASARPANA
LOKSHVARA, C. 11th–12th CENTURY
PERIOD: PALA
PERIOD (750–1174)
Gray schist
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 124.9 x
80.3 x 35.9 cm
The increasing complexity
of imagery and iconographic detail in late Pala art paralleled the growing
popularity of Esoteric Buddhism in eastern India. Khasarpana Lokeshvara, the Esoteric
form of the immensely popular bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteshvara, was
created by the absorption of Hindu elements into Buddhism and appears
frequently in Pala art. In this stela, the youthful, bejeweled figure is seated
on a double-lotus throne, surrounded by lotus blossoms and the deity’s four
standard attendants: the goddesses Tara and Bhrikuti to the left and right of
the bodhisattva’s knees; and, on the base, the needle-nosed Sucimukha, who
imbibes the nectar of grace, at the left rear, and the plump, fearsome
Hayagriva at the right front. In addition, the princely Sudhanakumara, who
carries a book under his left arm, is shown at the front left of the base,
while two tiny figures of the donor couple are shown kneeling behind Hayagriva.
Due to damage to the upper part of the stela, only one remains from the figures
of the five jina Buddhas, the rulers of the Buddhist universe. The elegant
proportions, attenuated waistline, richly carved surface decoration, complex
iconography, and almost feminine poise of the bodhisattva are hallmarks of the
mature Pala style.
XIPE TOTEC, C. 900–1200
PERIOD: POSTCLASSIC
PERIOD (900–1521)
Ceramic
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 40 x
16.8 x 9.8 cm
Xipe Totec, the Aztec god
of spring and regeneration, appears in many Mesoamerican cults. A fertility
deity, Xipe Totec vividly conveys the concept of death and rebirth by wearing
the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim. Meaning literally “our lord, the flayed
one,” Xipe Totec is also associated with the arrival of spring, when the earth
covers itself with a new coat of vegetation and exchanges its dead skin for a
new one. During the corn-planting festival, Xipe Totec was worshipped by a
priest who, dressed in the skin of a flayed victim, ritually enacted the
death-and-renewal cycle of the earth. Xipe Totec was the divine embodiment of
life emerging from the dead land and of the new plant sprouting from the seed.
In this sculpture, the
face of a living being is seen behind the mouth and eye openings of the
sacrificial victim, whose skin is laced together by cords at the back of the
wearer’s skull. Similar lacing is also seen on the chest, amid the vigorously
articulated body covering. This clay sculpture of Xipe closely resembles Aztec
stone figures in the smooth modeling, sturdy body, and rounded lips and eyes.
WREATHED MALE HEAD, C.
500–475 B.C.
PERIOD:
ARCHAIC (700–475 B.C.)
Sandstone
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 16 x
12.5 cm
Crowned with a laurel
wreath symbolic of victory, this small head was carved during the most creative
period of Cypriot art, when the island of Cyprus was a mercantile crossroads
between East and West. The sculpture reflects this confluence: the idealized
facial structure and enigmatic smile resemble contemporary Greek sculpture,
while the wide, almond-shaped eyes and tightly knotted curls bespeak a Near
Eastern influence.
STANDING BUDDHA
SHAKYAMUNI, 7th CENTURY
PERIOD:
LICCHAVI (400-750)
Gilded Copper
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 50.2 x
20.3 x 8.6 cm
This slim, richly gilded
figure represents the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, Sage of the Shakya clan.
He displays a number of the physical signs that had come to represent the
Buddha’s divinity—the cranial protuberance (ushnisha), elongated earlobes,
three parallel folds in the neck, webbed fingers and toes, and palms marked by
a wheel. He stands in a graceful pose with the weight on the right leg and the
hip thrust gently out. The smooth, fleshy contours of the body are revealed by
a thin, clinging garment with cascading pleats delineated into a threadlike
surface design. The upper end of the robe is gathered in the left hand, the
right bestowing the gesture of charity (varadamudra).
Lichchhavi Buddha images
were directly inspired by Indian Gupta-period (A.D. 320–600) images. This
sculpture reveals the mannered elegance, introspective expression, and taut but
smooth modeling characteristic of Gupta Buddhas. The “snail-shell” pattern of
curled hair, the half-closed eyes, and the lack of an urna between
the eyebrows are also typical Gupta features. The Nepalese origin of the
sculpture is most evident in the expression of the face. The important
inscription on the base is in a script derived from Gupta India that was in use
in Nepal during the Lichchhavi period.
PRESENTATION OF CAPTIVES
TO A MAYA RULER, C. A.D. 785
PERIOD: LATE CLASSIC
PERIOD (A.D. 600–900)
Limestone With Traces of
Paint
Classification: Sculpture
Dimensions: 115.3 x
88.9 cm
This carved relief
probably served as a wall panel inside a Maya building or as a lintel over an
entrance. It depicts the presentation of captives in a palace throne room,
indicated by swag curtains at the top of the panel. The five figures are the
Yaxchilan king, seated at top left, his sahal (a military chief) on
the right, and three bound captives in the lower left. The glyphic text, which
gives a date of 23 August 783, records the capture of a lord and a sacrificial
bloodletting three days later under the auspices of the king. The three
prisoners may be scribes; the one in front holds a “stick-bundle” associated
with Maya scribes, and all three wear headdresses with hun (book)
knots. All figures but the leftmost captive are identified by name. The inscription
on the throne front, of special interest, is carved with the king’s name and
titles; the glyphs are inscribed in reverse order, from right to left.
The name of the artist
responsible for sculpting the relief appears on the vertical panel of four glyphs
under the sahal’s outstretched arm. Signed works of Maya art are
rare, and the signature on this relief suggests that it was considered of great
value in its time.
MINIATURE CASKET, C. 1250–1300
PERIOD: 13th CENTURY
Champlevé Enamel on Copper
Classification: Metalwork
Dimensions: 9 x 7.7 x 4.2 cm
The enameled decoration
of this fine casket, produced in Limoges, features scrolling vines with
fleurons on all four sides and lozenge patterns on the pitched roof. The
enameled copper plaques of reliquaries are normally nailed to a wooden core;
the absence of such a wooden carcass, along with the miniature scale of this
casket, makes it difficult to ascertain its original function.
RELIQUARY CASKET, C.
1200–1220
PERIOD: 13th CENTURY
Champlevé Enamel on
Copper, Wood Core
Classification: Metalwork
Dimensions: 22.6 x
24.2 x 10.5 cm
A major center of the
manufacture and export of exquisitely crafted reliquaries in the Middle Ages
was Limoges, located in southwestern France along several ecclesiastical and
pilgrimage routes. Limoges workshops producing liturgical objects employed the
technique of champlevé enamel, whereby brilliantly colored, powdered glass was
placed in cavities gouged into a copper plaque that was then fired at high
temperatures.
This Reliquary
Casket (châsse), which probably contained the relics of several saints,
features eight half-length, raised, and gilded figures of saints against a
richly enameled ground decorated with halos, scrolling floral motifs, and wavy
cloudbanks. These figures are portrayed with various liturgical gestures, such
as upraised palms. The full-length saints holding books on the gabled end
panels are engraved in reserve on the enamel ground. The casket, with its
gabled roof and cresting, recalls not only a tomb enshrining the relics, but
also a cathedral representing the church and hence the Heavenly Jerusalem,
where the saints eternally abide.
SINGING PRIEST OR GOD, C.
A.D. 400–600
PERIOD: EARLY
CLASSIC (A.D. 250–600)
Fresco
Classification: Painting
Dimensions: 60.2 x
110.5 cm
The city of Teotihuacán,
located about thirty miles northeast of Mexico City,was the capital of the
first classical civilization of Mesoamerica, dating from around the first to
the seventh century A.D. Teotihuacán was an urban and ritual complex eight miles
long with a number of buildings on the main avenue, including the second
largest pyramid in Mesoamerica. Both the residential and ceremonial structures
were characterized by “slope-and-panel” profiles on their platforms and
terraces, and were decorated with elaborate polychrome wall frescoes. The
frescoes were arranged in orderly sequences depicting ritual images that appear
to represent ceremonies in which specific favors were sought from the gods.
In this richly symbolic
mural fragment from Teotihuacán, a priest or god costumed in an elaborately
plumed headdress performs a ceremony involving the scattering of incense while
singing. The object of the ceremony seems to center on the glyphlike symbol to
the left, depicting five maguey spines thrust into a stack of reeds. In all
likelihood this is a place name. The officiating figure holds an incense bag in
his left hand, while flower-decorated water streams from his right. Proceeding
from his mouth is a large speech scroll edged with vegetation (probably meaning
“flowery song”); the hearts, jade, and other symbols in the scroll may stand
for the song’s content.
THE VISION OF THE
FOUNDERS
The Kimbell Art Museum
officially opened on October 4, 1972. The Kimbell Art Foundation, which owns
and operates the Museum, had been established in 1936 by Kay and Velma Kimbell,
together with Kay’s sister and her husband, Dr. and Mrs. Coleman Carter. Early
on, the Foundation collected mostly British and French portraits of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the time Mr. Kimbell died in April
1964, the collection had grown to 260 paintings and 86 other works of art,
including such singular paintings as Hals’s Rommel-Pot Player,
Gainsborough’s Portrait of a Woman, Vigée Le Brun’s Self-Portrait,
and Leighton’s Portrait of May Sartoris. Motivated by his wish “to
encourage art in Fort Worth and Texas,” Mr. Kimbell left his estate to the
Foundation, charging it with the creation of a museum. Mr. Kimbell had made
clear his desire that the future museum be “of the first class,” and to further
that aim, within a week of his death, his widow, Velma, contributed her share
of the community property to the Foundation.
With the
appointment in 1965 of Richard F. Brown, then director of the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, as the Museum’s first director, the Foundation began
planning for the future museum and development of the collection, both of which
would fulfill the aspirations of Mr. Kimbell. To that end, under the leadership
of its President, Mr. A. L. Scott, and in consultation with Ric Brown, the
nine-member Board of Directors of the Foundation—consisting of Mrs. Kimbell;
Dr. Carter; his daughter and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Ben J. Fortson; Mr. C.
Binkley Smith; Mr. P. A. Norris, Jr.; Mr. J. C. Pace, Jr.; and attorney Mr.
Benjamin L. Bird—adopted a policy statement for the future museum in June 1966,
outlining its purpose, scope, and program, among other things. That statement
remains to this day the operative guide for the Museum. In accordance with that
policy, the Foundation acquires and retains works of so-called “definitive
excellence”—works that may be said to define an artist or type regardless of
medium, period, or school of origin. The aim of the Kimbell is not historical
completeness but the acquisition of individual objects of “the highest possible
aesthetic quality” as determined by condition, rarity, importance, suitability,
and communicative powers. The rationale is that a single work of outstanding
merit and significance is more effective as an educational tool than a larger
number of representative example
Two aspects of the 1966
policy in particular would have the greatest impact on changing the Kimbell
collection: an expansion of vision to encompass world history and a new focus
on building through acquisition and refinement a small collection of key
objects of surpassing quality. The Kimbell collection today consists of about
350 works that not only epitomize their periods and movements but also touch
individual high points of aesthetic beauty and historical importance.
