Exhibition

Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea
Opening August 29, 2010 - January 2, 2011

Surrounded by the sea in all directions, the ancient Maya viewed their world as inextricably tied to water. More than a necessity to sustain life, water was the vital medium from which the world emerged, gods arose and ancestors communicated. Over 90 works, many never before seen, offer exciting new insights into Maya culture that focus on the sea as a defining feature of the spiritual realm and the inspiration for the finest works of art. Fiery Pool was organized by Daniel Finamore, The Russell W. Knight Curator of Maritime Art and History at the Peabody Essex Museum and Stephen D. Houston, The Dupee Family Professor of Social Science and Professor of Archaeology at Brown University. 


Current Installations

European Art
North Gallery

The displays in the east gallery comprise European paintings from the 14th century to the mid-20th century. The broadly chronological arrangement follows the development of painting in Europe through successive phases and movements, from the Renaissance to the modern era.

Asian Art
East Gallery

The Kimbell collection of Asian art consists of sculptures, objects, and paintings from China, Korea, Japan, India, the Himalayas, and Southeast Asia. The works span a period of nearly two thousand years, beginning with a Chinese bronze bell of the tenth century B.C. and extending to scroll paintings from nineteenth-century Japan. The galleries are arranged by culture and religious or secular affiliations. The center gallery features Buddhist and Hindu art from India, the Himalayas, Southeast Asia, and China. Other groups include Japanese Buddhist sculpture and painting; Japanese secular art, consisting of ink hanging scrolls, ukiyo-e painting (pictures of the “floating world”), ornamental screens, and ceramics and lacquer; Chinese tomb furnishings, decorative porcelains and lacquer; and Chinese scroll paintings ranging from Buddhist and Taoist works to court and literati (scholar) subjects.

* Ancient
* European
* Asian
* Precolumbian
* African
* Oceanic

* Current Installation
* Provenance Research

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Michelangelo’s First Painting:
The Torment of Saint Anthony
Currently On View

Beginning September 26, 2009, Michelangelo’s first known painting, The Torment of Saint Anthony, will be on view among the permanent collection of the Kimbell Art Museum. The Kimbell Art Museum acquired the painting in May 2009. The work is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through September 7, 2009. It will be featured in a focus exhibition including a facsimile of the Schongauer engraving on which it is based and the recent technical examinations and scholarly analyses that identify it as the painting described by Michelangelo’s biographers.

Eric M. Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum, commented, “I am delighted with the reception that The Torment of Saint Anthony received in New York and look forward to welcoming Michelangelo’s painting to its new home at the Kimbell Art Museum. I can hardly wait to see the painting hanging in the galleries of Louis Kahn’s landmark building.”

This work was executed in oil and tempera on a wooden panel in 1487–88, when the artist was only 12 to 13 years old. It is the first painting by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) to enter an American collection, and one of only four known easel paintings generally believed to come from his hand. The others are the Doni Tondo in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery and two unfinished paintings in London’s National Gallery, The Manchester Madonna and The Entombment.

The painting was offered at Sotheby’s in 2008 as “workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio.” The Sotheby’s entry noted that Everett Fahy, curator emeritus of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, who had known the work since 1960, believed it to be by Michelangelo. Purchased by Adam Williams Fine Art, New York, the panel was brought to the Metropolitan, where it underwent conservation and technical research.

The recent cleaning of Michelangelo’s Torment of Saint Anthony at the Metropolitan has revealed the quality of the small panel. Michael Gallagher, conservator in charge of paintings conservation, removed the layers of yellowed varnish and clumsy, discolored overpaint that obscured the artist’s distinctive palette and compromised the illusion of depth and sculptural form. The technical study accompanying the cleaning has provided evidence of artist’s changes, signifying that the painting is an original work of art and not a copy after another painting.

Giorgio Vasari, in his Lives of the Artists (1550, second edition 1568), and Ascanio Condivi—Michelangelo’s former student whose information for his biography of the artist (1553) came directly from the master—both recount how the young Michelangelo painted a copy of the engraving Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons by the 15th-century German master Martin Schongauer. Vasari relates that Michelangelo bought fish with bizarrely colorful scales so that he could render the strange forms of the devils. Condivi also wrote that in order to give the demonic creatures veracity, Michelangelo went to the fish market to study the shape and color of the fins, eyes, and other parts of the fish. The spiny, long-snouted demon with brilliantly colored scales (the scales are absent from the engraving) particularly associates the Kimbell panel with these descriptions. The work probably dates from the time Michelangelo was informally associated with Ghirlandaio’s workshop, just before he began his brief apprenticeship with this important master.

The rare subject is found in the life of Saint Anthony the Great, written by Athanasius of Alexandria in the 4th century, which describes how the Egyptian hermit saint levitated into the air and was attacked by demons, whose torments he resisted. According to Condivi, it was the artist Francesco Granacci, Michelangelo’s older friend, who gave him access to some of the prints and drawings in the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio. In an effort to try his hand at painting, Michelangelo reportedly took Schongauer’s print and produced a mesmerizing rendition of it on a wooden panel that earned him great repute and fame.

Michelangelo
Born in 1475 near Florence, Michelangelo is universally acknowledged as one of the towering geniuses of the Renaissance. Already by his teenage years, he had proven himself a superlative sculptor and painter. Best known for his mature works such as the ceiling frescoes in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, he evolved a forceful, muscular style that gripped the imaginations of artists for decades to come. First and foremost, Michelangelo thought himself a sculptor, and many of his works in marble are icons of Western art: his Vatican Pietà, his vigorous David in Florence, and his tragic, unfinished Rondanini Pietà in Milan. As a painter, Michelangelo was equally influential. As The Torment of Saint Anthony proves, he was drawn to painting at an early age, and by the time of his later masterpiece, The Last Judgment, also in the Sistine Chapel, he had presided over a vast revolution in Italian painting.

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Rare Painting by Guercino,
Italian Master of the 17th Century,
Acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri),
Christ and the Woman of Samaria, c. 1619–20.
Oil on canvas, 38 1/4 x 49 1/8 in. (97.2 x 124.8 cm).
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, acquired in 2010 in memory of Edmund P. Pillsbury, director of the Kimbell Art Museum, 1980–1998

The Kimbell Art Museum has acquired the painting Christ and the Woman of Samaria, c. 1619–20, by the Italian artist Guercino, one of the foremost painters of his time. The purchase was announced today by the Museum’s director, Eric M. Lee. The painting dates from Guercino’s early, rarest, and most desirable period, when the artist achieved acclaim for the emotional power of his compositions. The painting is now on view.

“I am thrilled that the Kimbell has found an outstanding painting, such as this, from Guercino’s coveted early period,” commented Mr. Lee. “It has been a long-standing wish of the Museum to find a Guercino of this quality to enhance its exceptional collection of Baroque art. Christ and the Woman of Samaria now takes its place alongside the Kimbell’s masterpieces by Caravaggio, Georges de La Tour, and Bernini.”

The painting presents a close-up view of the Samaritan woman, who rests her water bucket on the well where she has come to draw water, grappling to understand Christ’s message that he is the living water, the source of eternal life. Guercino tells the story as a moment of revelation. Christ gestures to the well, his serene face turned towards the woman, who is entranced by what she hears. But she has not yet understood, and her face is one of rapt fascination. The viewer is an eavesdropper of a private moment, and this confers on the work a particularly mesmerizing quality.

In memory of Edmund P. Pillsbury,
director, Kimbell Art Museum, 1980–1998

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Permanent Collection

In its short history of 36 years, the Kimbell Art Museum has come to occupy a distinctive place in the international community of museums. Leaving to older and larger institutions the role of collecting broadly and in depth, the Kimbell has chosen as its primary collecting aspiration the pursuit of quality over quantity. Particularly in its holdings of European painting and sculpture, the Kimbell possesses a core of works that not only epitomize their eras and styles, but also touch individual high points of aesthetic beauty and historical importance.

In the years leading up to the Grand Opening in 1972, members of the Kimbell Art Foundation and the first director, Richard F. Brown, laid out broad parameters for the Museum’s collecting. Over time, the strategy has become more focused. Today the Museum does not collect American art, nor works created after 1950, in order to more effectively complement the offerings of its neighbors, the Amon Carter Museum, which is devoted to American art, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which focuses on art since World War II.

Visitors to the Kimbell during the inaugural year were greeted by more than 125 new acquisitions, extending back as far as early antiquity and medieval times and as late in history as the early 20th century, as well as a generous representation of British 18th and 19th-century portraits that reflected Kay and Velma Kimbell’s legacy and taste. Goya’s Portrait of the Matador Pedro Romero, executed at the height of the artist’s career as a court painter; Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Bruns’s immensely confident self-portrait at 26 years of age; and Monet’s La Pointe de la Héve at Low Tide, one of the painter’s first large showpieces: these were among the paintings that thousands of Americans encountered for the first time in the natural light of Louis I. Kahn’s barrel-vaulted galleries. Visitors to the smaller non-Western collections encountered works collected according to the highest connoisseurial standards, ranging from a rare Cycladic female figure to important Greek and Roman statuary to Buddhist deities crafted of stone or bronze. In the years directly following the Grand Opening, the Museum added still more masterworks, including Duccio di Buoninsegna’s emotionally expressive panel painting The Raising of Lazarus, and El Greco’s magisterial Portrait of Dr. Francisco de Pisa.

In 1980, several months after the Board of Directors acquired Cézanne’s Man in a Blue Smock in memory of Brown, who had died the previous year, Edmund P. Pillsbury, previously director of the Yale Center for British Art (another Kahn building), was appointed Brown’s successor and initiated a second very active period of acquisitions. Guided by Pillsbury, the Board’s purchase of La Tour’s Cheat with the Ace of Clubs in 1981 set the stage for an inspired pairing when, six years later, Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps entered the collection. Nowadays these two masterpieces—which warn of the dangers of indulgence in wine, women and gambling, while evoking those activities in seductive color and form—often hang in close proximity to Murillo’s Four Figures on a Step, also thought to encode a morality tale. Fra Angelico’s minutely limned The Apostle Saint James the Greater Freeing the Magician Hermogenes, Velázquez’s imposing Don Pedro de Barberana, and Caillebotte’s pivotal On the Pont de l’Europe are among other noted works acquired during Pillsbury’s tenure. These acquisitions were supported partly by selective deaccessioning of works, including all of the Museum’s drawings and prints.

Pillsbury also extended the Museum’s coverage of Impressionist and modern art with paintings by Gauguin, Monet, Miró, Matisse, and Mondrian. Overall, by the end of his directorship in 1998, the collection had been reduced in size but enhanced in quality.

During the tenure of Timothy Potts (1998–2007), the Museum particularly sought out important examples of European sculpture, until then still a relatively small category within the collections. A number of these works are now highlights of the permanent collection, among them Gianlorenzo Bernini’s 1653 presentation model (modello) for the Fountain of the Moor in Piazza Navona, Rome—which the Museum acquired in 2004, shortly after its dramatic rediscovery—and a rare and important portrait bust of a woman, probably Isabella d’Este, c. 1500, attributed to Gian Cristoforo Romano. The Moor is probably the finest surviving terracotta by Bernini’s hand, and the Romano, the finest terracotta female portrait of the period in this country. Other major sculptures to enter the collections during this period represent the art of ancient Greece (Head of an Athlete), Renaissance Italy (Michelozzo, Saint John the Baptist), and Late Gothic Germany. The German work is a Virgin and Child crafted of silver, gilt, and precious stones, and, as such, a rare survivor of the Reformation.

In 2006 a rare terracotta relief by the early Renaissance master Donatello entered the permanent collections. The Borromeo Madonna, dating to about 1450, is a tender depiction of one of the most popular subjects of the Renaissance, and one that Donatello did more than any other artist to develop—the Madonna and Child. Although long known to scholars, the relief had been hidden beneath as many as ten layers of stucco and paint applied over the last 500 years, obscuring its beauty and history. A significant cleaning allowed the attribution to Donatello to be made. The Borromeo Madonna forms a new historical starting point and context for such other recent acquisitions as the Saint John the Baptist mentioned above. Michelozzo, its creator, was Donatello’s contemporary and collaborator.

The Museum never ceased to value the grand British portraiture that was Mr. Kimbell’s original enthusiasm. In 2003 it was able to identify and purchase a remarkable double portrait from the early 1790s by Sir Henry Raeburn. The Allen Brothers is a large canvas upon which the Scottish artist conjures an endearingly playful, informal scene of two boys of the upper class with confident, free brushwork. Malcolm Warner, acting director of the Kimbell since September 2007 and senior curator since 2002, brings his particular expertise in British art to acquisitions and exhibitions in this area.

A year after the Raeburn purchase, the Kimbell acquired the German painter Lucas Cranach’s The Judgment of Paris, c. 1512–14, the first of his several versions of this tale from classical mythology (one of the later depictions may usually be found in the Northern European painting galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Remarkably for a painting of this age, the Kimbell’s Cranach has never suffered from overzealous cleaning. All the glazes, modeling, and fine details are intact, preserving the rich colors and enamel-like surface that are synonymous with Northern Renaissance oils.

The Kimbell continues to collect. This summer it placed its latest acquisition on view. Vase of Flowers with a Curtain, created by Jacques de Gheyn II in 1615, is a landmark in the history of flower painting, even though it was a “lost” work, kept in a British private collection since 1924, never exhibited in public, and known only in the form of old, black-and-white reproductions. Its acquisition by the Kimbell is a significant event in the study of Dutch art.

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