Christ and the Woman of Samaria by Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri), c. 1619–20

The Kimbell Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, has acquired the painting Christ and the Woman of Samaria, dated to 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.

“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. I look forward to seeing Christ and the Woman of Samaria hanging alongside the Kimbell’s masterpieces by Caravaggio, Georges de La Tour, and Bernini.”

Christ and the Woman of Samaria (38 1/4 x 49 1/8 inches) 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. The painting has never been published or exhibited, and prior to its purchase by a European private collector had been known only through copies and an old photograph of the work that was shown to Guercino expert Sir Denis Mahon many decades ago.

“Christ and the Woman of Samaria is, I believe, the finest painting by the artist to appear on the international market in years,” said Keith Christiansen, the John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He noted that the work is among the handful of paintings, including the Metropolitan Museum’s Samson Captured by the Philistines, “that are generally considered to mark the culmination of his early phase, in which he achieves a quality of dramatic movement through the use of gesture, pose, and brilliant, theatrical lighting. But there is another side to this aspect of Guercino, as beautifully exemplified in the Christ and the Woman of Samaria, and that is an interest in psychological characterization; the story is told not as an unfolding drama but as a moment of revelation, in which the viewer is less an observer than an eavesdropper of a private moment, and this confers on the work a particularly mesmerizing quality.”

Keith Christiansen commented further on the painting’s subject matter and importance: “In the Gospel of John (4:5–42) we read of Jesus coming to Samaria and, wearied, sitting near Jacob’s well. A woman comes to draw water. He asks her for a drink. She is surprised that a Jew would even speak to a Samaritan, upon which Jesus responds, ‘If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink, thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.’ She does not understand, as he has nothing with which to draw water. Is he greater than Jacob, who gave them the well? ‘Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again,’ explains Jesus. ‘But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst.’ This is the moment Guercino depicts. 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 bit of landscape behind them—the tree—serves to set the scene and offer a counterpoint to their closeness to the picture plane. We seem to overhear this conversation and are situated just the other side of the well—perhaps hidden by some tree or shrub, since the two figures are unaware of our presence. But we hear their words and we too are enraptured by this momentous encounter.”

Mr. Christiansen concluded: “This is the brilliance of the picture, which unfolds before us and engages us in the same way as the description of an encounter and dialogue in a great novel. For we have moved from a staged drama to a narrative of psychological penetration.”

Guercino

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591–1666)—known by his nickname Guercino (literally “squinter”) because he was cross-eyed—was born in the northern Italian town of Cento, near Bologna and Ferrara. Although he received his early training with local artists, he was largely self-taught. His early work was marked by an astonishing naturalism and ability to convey the expressive power of the human figure. He admired the Bolognese painter Ludovico Carracci, who in 1617 wrote a letter praising the young man from Cento “who paints with remarkable invenzione. He is a great draftsman and a terrific colorist: he is a phenomenon of nature and a true miracle who dumbfounds everyone who sees his works. . . even the top painters are awestruck.” The following year Guercino visited Venice, honing his talent as a colorist by studying the works of Titian and other Venetian painters.

Guercino won the attention of several important patrons, among them Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi, archbishop of Bologna, and Cardinal Jacopo Serra, the papal legate to Ferrara. In 1619, Guercino informed Ferdinando Gonzaga, duke of Mantua, that he could not accept a commission from him without the permission of Serra, for whom he was occupied producing a number of paintings, including the Metropolitan Museum’s Samson Captured by the Philistines and The Return of the Prodigal Son (in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). The Kimbell’s Christ and the Woman of Samaria was painted during the same remarkably creative and productive period, perhaps for Ludovisi (later Pope Gregory XV, whom Guercino followed to Rome) or for Serra. In Rome, where he remained from 1621 until 1623, Guercino painted influential works that would have great impact on the development of Roman Baroque painting. On his return to Cento, he developed a classicizing style with a lighter, clearer palette and more lucid and restrained compositions.

Guercino moved to Bologna in 1642, becoming the leading painter of that city following the death of Guido Reni. Although he turned down invitations to the courts of England and France, he maintained a prolific career, producing paintings for an international clientele including King Charles I of England. Guercino died in 1666 in Bologna. He left an impressive legacy of nearly 400 paintings and well over 1,000 drawings that demonstrate his extraordinary powers of invention.

In Memory

This painting was acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum in memory of Edmund (Ted) P. Pillsbury, former director of the Kimbell Art Museum (1980–1998), who died in March of 2010.

Kimbell Art Museum

The Kimbell Art Museum, owned and operated by the Kimbell Art Foundation, is as renowned for its collections as for its architecture. The Kimbell’s collections range in period from antiquity to the 20th century, including European masterpieces from Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio to Cézanne and Matisse, and important collections of Egyptian, Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman antiquities, as well as Asian, Mesoamerican, and African arts. The Museum 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 that assure them a place among the masterpieces of world art.

Christ and the Woman of Samaria by Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri), c. 1619–20

Triptych by Francis Bacon, 1977

New Arrivals: Works from the Collection
New Mexico Museum of Art
Opens February 12, 2010

New Arrivals: Works from the Collection is an exhibition of recent acquisitions to the New Mexico Museum of Art’s permanent collection. New Arrivals highlights the important role the art patron plays in developing a Museum’s collection-either through an outright donation or partnering with the Museum in a purchase.

The works in New Arrivals: Works from the Collection will be on view for the first time featuring favorite New Mexico artists such as Susan Rothenberg and Gunnar Plake, among others, to the internationally recognized Francis Bacon and Roy Lichtenstein.

Approximately twenty-five works will be exhibited in nearly all media (including a skateboard by Artemio Rodriguez).

New Arrivals: Works from the Collection opens at the New Mexico Museum of Art, Friday, February 12, 2010 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. A reception will be hosted by the Women’s Board of the Museum of New Mexico.

Exhibition curator Katherine Ware, curator of photography at the Museum, said; “The permanent collection is at the core of everything we do here at the Museum. It is especially wonderful, through the generosity of our community of donors, to share these treasures with the public for whom we hold these works in trust.”

The focus of New Arrivals: Works from the Collection will be contemporary works donated to the permanent collection. Work from other eras will be shown, such as Milton Rogovin’s photographs of New York City’s Lower East Side and a William Lumpkins landscape, Untitled (Red Butte), 1933.

Museums rely primarily on donations of artwork from various sources as acquisition funds are always limited. A highlight of this exhibition and these donations is that these works deepen the Museum’s collection of art of the Southwest and more specifically art by New Mexico artists while broadening the permanent collection with works by artists such as Francis Bacon.

Triptych by Francis Bacon, 1977

The Potter by George de Forest Brush, 1889

On view starting January 29, 2010

The Amon Carter Museum has acquired a rediscovered painting by American artist George de Forest Brush. The Potter, painted in 1889, had been in private hands since 1946, when it was sold from the collection of the Galveston financier William L. Moody III.

“The acquisition of one of Brush’s ‘lost’ Indian pictures is a major addition to our collection of material relating to the American West,” says Dr. Ron Tyler, director of the Amon Carter Museum. “Now, our visitors will have the opportunity to view Brush’s exacting but highly nuanced depiction of an Indian within the context of other representations of indigenous people, such as those presented by painters George Catlin and Frederic Remington and photographer Edward S. Curtis, whose entire multivolume portfolio, The North American Indian, was also recently acquired by the museum.”

The Carter’s newly acquired painting is among the final works in Brush’s Indian series and exemplifies the artist’s rigorous academic training. Exceedingly spare, the painting depicts a single, isolated figure within an indeterminate darkened interior. Unlike earlier works in the series, which center on themes of conflict, native customs or engagement with the natural world, The Potter portrays the seated figure of a native artisan intently focused on the task of glazing a hand-crafted vessel. The meticulous precision with which Brush drew and painted the human body is matched by his pictorial mastery of color and texture in the few carefully placed decorative elements within the composition.

“Brush’s academic training was grounded in the French tradition, which focused on the idealized human body and prized paintings with allusions to classical art,” says Dr. Rick Stewart, the Carter’s senior curator of western painting and sculpture. “By using the Indian theme, Brush could apply his technical expertise and extensive knowledge of ancient art and Old Master painting to a thoroughly American subject with its own tradition of pictorial representation.”

Brush began the series of paintings of Indian subjects in 1882, while living first in Wyoming at Fort Washakie and later in Montana at the Crow Agency, sketching members of the Arapahoe, Shoshone and Crow peoples. He continued to work on the series throughout the 1880s, traveling widely to study native cultures in eastern Canada and Mexico and along coastal northeastern Florida. Along the way he assembled a collection of indigenous artifacts for use as studio props. The Indian paintings, though initially based on the artist’s firsthand experiences among native people, have little basis in the reality of contemporary American Indian life.

“One of the more intriguing aspects of the Indian paintings is that, despite the high degree of realism Brush brought to these pictures, he was not concerned with a cogent narrative or with historical or ethnographic accuracy,” says Stewart. “Regardless, and interestingly also because of this, the paintings brought the artist both critical and commercial success.”

The Indian pictures evolved from compositions with multi-figured narratives set within the landscape to compositions that feature a solitary individual engaged in the manual creation of art, as seen in The Potter. The paintings present a carefully calibrated, fictitious, pre-industrial world where idealized Indians lived in a timeless environment undisturbed by the advent of modernism. For Brush, the Indian became a metaphor, a way to express personal concerns, including his skepticism over industrialization and the mechanization of labor. Ultimately, Brush conceived the Indian series as a progressive meditation on the theme of human creativity.

“It’s always thrilling when notable works of art resurface in pristine condition and are able to be shared with the public,” says Tyler, who also notes that The Potter was exhibited in 1889 at the National Academy of Design, along with Frederic Remington’s Dash for the Timber, one of Amon G. Carter’s most important acquisitions.

The Potter is on view in the museum’s upstairs painting and sculpture galleries beginning January 29, 2010.

About George de Forest Brush

Born in Shelbyville, Tenn., in 1854 or 1855, George de Forest Brush was raised in Danbury, Conn. After studying art in New York City at the National Academy of Design from 1870 to 1873, Brush continued his education in Paris, enrolling in classes at the highly competitive École des Beaux-Arts. There, his skills in depicting the human figure were measured against an international cadre of young art students. He also gained admittance, as Thomas Eakins had before him, into the atelier of Jean-Léon Gérôme, one of the school’s foremost teachers. Brush taught at The Cooper Union and at The Art Students League, and he exhibited and was a member of the National Academy of Design. After completing his series of paintings of Indians, Brush turned to the theme of the “mother and child” for which he is best known. He was elected to the Society of American Artists, National Academy of Design, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Brush died in Hanover, N.H. in 1941.

The Potter by George de Forest Brush, 1889

The Grand Canal, Venice, Looking Toward the Rialto by Richard Parks Bonington, 1826

The Kimbell Art Museum has added to its collection an exquisite oil sketch by the British artist Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–1828), The Grand Canal, Venice, Looking Toward the Rialto, painted on the spot in 1826. Its purchase was announced today by the Kimbell’s director, Dr. Eric M. Lee.

Dr. Lee commented: “The opportunity to acquire one of Bonington’s beautiful oil sketches of Venice is extremely rare. Only eight are known, four of which were already in museum collections before the present one was acquired by the Kimbell. This is an exciting acquisition for us, from both aesthetic and art-historical points of view, and we know it will give great pleasure to our visitors.”

The painting, which is now on view, was offered to the Museum earlier this year by the New York art dealer Richard Feigen, acting on behalf of its then-owners. The sketch is painted in oil on a piece of millboard measuring 13 7/8 x 17 7/8 inches (35.2 x 45.4 centimeters).

Like the best of Bonington’s oil sketches of Venice, the work shows him bringing to oil painting the subtle effects of light and atmosphere that he had mastered as a watercolorist. The view is from the Riva del Carbone, looking along the Grand Canal, Venice’s busy main thoroughfare, toward the famous Rialto Bridge. This was to become a popular view of the city, probably the most frequently painted in the nineteenth century.

Most scholars and admirers of Bonington consider his Venetian oil sketches to be among the high points of his short but brilliant career, combining his remarkable powers of observation with a seductive technique. As much as any of his works, they bear out the remark of his friend Eugène Delacroix, the great French Romantic painter, that he possessed “a lightness of touch . . . that makes his works a type of diamond that flatters and ravishes the eye.”

After returning to Paris, the artist apparently used his sketch as the basis for a slightly smaller studio-executed version, datable to 1826–27 [oil on canvas, 9 x 13 inches (23 x 33 centimeters), National Gallery of Art, Washington]. The later version differs in the details of the river traffic and cloud formations, and in the addition of some boys bathing on the right.

Within the Kimbell’s collection, the work relates to Canaletto’s The Molo, Venice (c. 1735) and Francesco Guardi’s Venice Viewed from the Bacino (c. 1780), inviting interesting comparisons between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ways of seeing Venice, the native response as against that of the foreigner. Perhaps more significantly, it joins Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s View of Olevano (1827) and Caspar David Friedrich’s Mountain Peak with Drifting Clouds (c. 1835) to form a powerful group of landscapes from around 1830, when the Romantic movement in European art was at its height. The similarities and differences among these three works would say much about Romantic painters’ various responses to place and to nature.

This work joins Michelangelo’s The Torment of Saint Anthony (c. 1487–88) as one of two paintings acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum in 2009. Both paintings are currently on display in the Museum galleries. Admission is always free to view works in the Museum’s permanent collection.

Patrick Noon, the leading authority on Bonington, will lecture on the new acquisition on April 30 at 6:00 p.m. as part of the Kimbell’s Friday evening lecture series.

Richard Parkes Bonington

Bonington was one of the most supremely gifted landscape painters Britain has produced, comparable in artistic stature to J. M. W. Turner and John Constable but less familiar because he died young and left a comparatively small body of works, most on a modest scale. He was a remarkable figure, not least in bridging the very separate artistic worlds of Britain and France, enjoying considerable success in both despite his youth.

He was born in the town of Arnold, near Nottingham, but from 1817 he and his family lived in France; his father was in the lace business. He showed a natural facility for art as a boy and began to train for a professional career, first learning the technique of watercolor. In Paris he became close friends with the young Delacroix, who is represented in the Kimbell’s collection by the painting Selim and Zuleika (1857), and studied under the Neoclassical history-painter Baron Antoine-Jean Gros. Like all of Gros’s students, he engaged in outdoor (plein-air) sketching, a practice that would be the basis for his best work as a landscapist.

From the time he left Gros’s studio in 1822 until his untimely death from tuberculosis six years later, aged only 25, Bonington would be constantly on the move. His sketching tours in northern France resulted in some topographical lithographs, many astonishingly fresh and subtle watercolors, and some equally accomplished landscapes in oil, mostly showing scenes along the coast. In 1825 he visited London with Delacroix, after which the two men briefly shared a studio in Paris, painting subjects from medieval and Renaissance history—some taken from the novels of Sir Walter Scott—and fantasies of oriental life. Throughout his mature career Bonington painted such Romantic costume-pieces—in the so-called style troubadour—in parallel with his work as a landscapist.

Bonington and Venice

Bonington visited Venice in the company of his patron Charles Rivet, a French aristocrat who was also an amateur artist. They stayed for about four weeks in April–May 1826. “Since the cold has become even more disagreeable in Venice over the last three or four days,” wrote Rivet in a letter to his parents, “we have managed only a modest tranquil existence . . . We eat early, I with my chocolate and my companion with his favorite tea. Then we go out with our color boxes, and sketchbooks. When time allows, we make sketches after nature, on the Grand Canal, at the Rialto . . .” Most of the “sketches after nature” that Bonington made in Venice would have taken the form of graphite (pencil) drawing, although clearly he also worked en plein air (outdoors) in watercolor and oil. He is likely to have elaborated upon some or all of the watercolors and oils later, after returning to his studio in Paris, and certainly used his various kinds of on-the-spot sketch as the basis for oils that were entirely studio productions, some on a fairly large scale. Beyond the graphite drawings, his known Venetian views consist of 15 watercolors, 8 on-the-spot oil sketches, and 7 studio oils.

At this date Venice was not the popular attraction for artists from other parts of Europe that it was to become. Indeed, Bonington played a leading role in the creation of a modern, Romantic vision of its beauties—an atmospheric, even ethereal vision quite distinct from that of the earlier Venetian vedutisti (view painters), most notably Canaletto and Francesco Guardi. In this he led the way for Turner, who had visited Venice some years before but would not produce the first of his spectacular Venetian oil paintings until 1833.

The poignant Romantic idea of Venice as a fragile, evanescent creation—a ghost of its former self, its glories all in the past—had already taken shape in literature, notably the poems of Lord Byron, and this is the Venice that contemporaries were primed to see in the work of Bonington. As the travel writer Antoine Valéry wrote in his Voyages historiques et littéraires en Italie, pendant les années 1826, 1827 et 1828, published in 1831: “The paintings of Canaletto have so familiarized us with the harbor, squares, and monuments of Venice that when we penetrate into the city itself, it appears as if already known to us. Bonington, an English artist of melancholy cast, has painted some new views of Venice, in which is most perfectly sketched its present state of desolation; these, compared with those of the Venetian painter [i.e., Canaletto], resemble the picture of a woman still beautiful, but worn down by age and misfortune.”

About the Kimbell Art Museum

The Kimbell Art Museum’s collections range in period from antiquity to the 20th century, including signature examples by European masters from Duccio, Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt to Cézanne and Matisse, and selected holdings of Egyptian, Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman antiquities, as well as Asian, Mesoamerican, and African arts. The Museum 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 that assure them a place among the masterpieces of world art.

The Kimbell’s internationally renowned building, designed by Louis Kahn, is widely regarded as one of the supreme architectural achievements of the modern era. Newsweek magazine called it “. . . arguably the most beautiful museum in America . . .” In November 2008, the Museum unveiled preliminary designs for a major addition, a new building designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano, that will provide galleries for special exhibitions and designated education facilities, expand the library area, and offer a second, larger auditorium. The Museum will announce final designs following further refinement over the coming months.

The Grand Canal, Venice, Looking Toward the Rialto by Richard Parks Bonington, 1826

Canyon by Diego Rivera, 1934

Each year The El Paso Museum of Art hosts the Members’ Choice event during the month of December where Museum Members gather to vote on a selection of art works, choosing one to add to the permanent collection. Each year art work from a different genre (European, Mexican, or American) is selected for consideration. It is an event that the membership looks forward to each year.

This year nearly 100 Members gathered at the Museum the night of Friday, December 4, 2009. Up for selection were three works of Mexican Art from the late 19th – early 20th centuries:

Guillermo Gomez Mayorga (1887 – 1962)
View of Xochimilco
Oil on canvas, 35 x 50 cm
Courtesy of Gallerias Cristobal

Joaquin Clausell (1866 – 1935)
Landscape with River
Oil on canvas, 25 x 30 cm
Courtesy of Gallerias Cristobal

Diego Rivera (1886 – 1957)
Canyon
Watercolor on rice paper, 38.7 x 27.9 cm
Signed and dated ‘34
Courtesy of Mary-Anne Martin Fine Art

By majority vote, the Membership selected Diego Rivera’s Canyon for purchase to add to the Museum’s permanent collection. It will be paid for with funds from the Mabel O. Lipscomb Fund, a Foundation that supports the purchase of art work each year for Members’ Choice. The Museum received from the Mabel O. Lipscomb Foundation $37,500 toward the purchase of works of art that was then applied to this project.

Following the voting, nearly 60 Members stayed and attended a public Holiday Dinner Party Fundraiser which raised $2,700 for the Museum.

Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera (December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957) was born in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico. He was a world-famous Mexican painter, and husband of Frida Kahlo, 1929–1939 and 1940–1954 (her death). Rivera’s large wall works in fresco helped establish the Mexican Mural Renaissance. Between 1922 and 1953, Rivera painted murals in Mexico City, Chapingo, Cuernavaca, San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City.

Canyon by Diego Rivera, 1934

The Eye by David Altmejd, 2008 (Photo by Tom Powell)

Major New Acquisition Immerses Viewers in a Dramatic Mirrored Environment; Currently on View at the DMA in Performance/Art Exhibition

The Dallas Museum of Art today announced the acquisition of a major large-scale sculpture, The Eye, by the celebrated Canadian artist David Altmejd. Among the artist’s most ambitious works to date, The Eye measures approximately 11 by 18 feet and is an imposing and mesmerizing structure of mirrored glass and wooden support that engulfs the viewer in a spectacular environment of fractured light and reflection. Acquired by the DMA through the DMA/amfAR Benefit Auction Fund made possible by Two by Two for AIDS and Art, the work is currently on view in the DMA’s exhibition Performance/Art through March 21, 2010.

“It’s a pleasure to offer visitors the chance to explore David Altmejd’s work, which overwhelms and entices the viewer with dazzling visual effect,” said Bonnie Pitman, The Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art. “This beautiful and dramatic sculpture is an important addition to our collections, and a fascinating component of our Performance/Art exhibition, which explores connections between visual and performing arts. Altmejd’s work energizes the DMA’s collections, which are recognized among the most important museum holdings in the country, and reinforces our city’s standing as a major center for contemporary art.”

Created in 2008, The Eye draws inspiration from the 2005 John Adams opera Doctor Atomic, which recounts the events leading up to the first nuclear bomb test under the supervision of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1945. The installation’s dazzling mirrored facades give the piece a theatrical quality, as well as a sense of movement, drawing possible parallels to an explosion that has been suspended or frozen in time, or a spaceship that has just landed, or to any number of possible references dealing with science and science fiction, as well as the history of sculpture. Altmejd made The Eye for the art gallery at The Metropolitan Opera in New York, which presents the work of visual artists who have been asked to respond to an opera performed during the Met’s season.

“The Eye is one of Altmejd’s most abstract and amazing achievements,” said Charles Wylie, the DMA’s Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art. “The work confounds us with its beauty while challenging our sense of scale, creating an immersive experience. Altmejd’s exuberant and complex vision makes his work truly extraordinary, and it is extremely exciting to have been able to bring this work to Dallas and have it stay here.”

Almejd’s work joins other large-scale sculptures and installations in the DMA’s contemporary art collection by artists such as Chris Burden, Mona Hatoum, Tatsuo Miyajima, Doug Aitken and Olafur Eliasson, among many others. Its acquisition is made possible through the DMA/amfAR Benefit Auction Fund, which is supported by the annual fundraising event Two by Two for AIDS and Art and which has allowed the Museum to acquire approximately 100 works of contemporary art since its founding in 1999.

About David Altmejd

In October 2009, David Altmejd was awarded the 2009 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s preeminent prize for contemporary art. Born in 1974 in Montreal, Quebec, Altmejd has received significant international attention in recent years for his visually rich and complex sculptures. He was selected to represent Canada at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and his work was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Other recent important exhibitions of Altmejd’s work have included the 2008 Liverpool Biennial at the Tate-Liverpool, UK, and the 2008 Triennial of Québec Art at the Musée D’Art Contemporain de Montréal. He received his BFA from the University of Quebec, Montreal in 1998, and his MFA from Columbia University in 2001.

About the Dallas Museum of Art

Located in the vibrant Arts District of downtown Dallas, Texas, the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) ranks among the leading art institutions in the country and is distinguished by its innovative exhibitions and groundbreaking educational programs. At the heart of the Museum and its programs are its encyclopedic collections, which encompass more than 24,000 works and span 7,000 years of history, representing a full range of world cultures. Established in 1903, the Museum today welcomes more than 600,000 visitors annually and acts as a catalyst for community creativity, engaging people of all ages and backgrounds with a diverse spectrum of programming, from exhibitions and lectures to concerts, literary readings and dramatic and dance presentations.

The Dallas Museum of Art is supported in part by the generosity of Museum members and donors and by the citizens of Dallas through the City of Dallas/Office of Cultural Affairs and the Texas Commission on the Arts.

The Eye by David Altmejd, 2008 (Photo by Tom Powell)

The chair is a gift to the Museum from the American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation in honor of Joseph Cunningham. Dr. Cunningham is the Curator at the American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation and curator of The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs.

“We are grateful to the American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation for their gift, for it supports so beautifully the DMA’s ongoing dedication to enhancing its decorative art and design collection and more specifically its holdings of works from the turn of the twentieth century, including the American Arts and Crafts movement,” said Bonnie Pitman, The Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art. “Until now, the Museum owned one work by Charles Rohlfs, the exceptional Rotating Desk, which visitors can also see as part of the Rohlfs exhibition.”

“We are pleased to contribute this extraordinary example of Rohlfs’ design genius to the Dallas Museum of Art, which has shown exceptional commitment to American decorative arts and design,” said Bruce Barnes, President and Founder of American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation. “The gift is made in honor of Joseph Cunningham, whose vision and tireless efforts have been essential to establishing ADA1900 and building its relationships with museums and scholars across the country.”

Since the rediscovery of Rohlfs’ work in the 1972 Princeton exhibition The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1876-1916, scholars have characterized his furniture among the most original produced at the turn of the twentieth century. Though obliquely considered a participant within the American Arts and Crafts movement by the nature of his independent studio, dark oak furniture, and self-taught approach, Rohlfs often eschewed the rigid lines and “honest joinery” of Gustav Stickley, the Roycrofters, and other furniture makers of this period. Instead, his works exhibit fanciful forms, undulating carving, and a particular delicacy that deny easy stylistic association with most furniture of the period.

“We are deeply honored that the Museum has received this gift from the American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation in honor of Joseph Cunningham, who was responsible for the organization of The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs and authoring its award-winning catalogue,” said Kevin W. Tucker, The Margot B. Perot Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the Dallas Museum of Art. “This exquisite chair, one of two known surviving examples, is a superlative companion to the exceptional Rotating Desk (Model No. 500), a work by Rohlfs already in the Museum’s collections.”

Corner Chair by Charles Rohlfs

In 1898 or 1899 Charles Rohlfs created an intriguing and intricately pierced boxlike table and four-chair set. The table’s legs, placed at the mid points of each side of the table rather than at the four corners, are joined by cruciform cross stretchers pierced with a repeating fretwork pattern leaving the four corners empty for the four Corner Chairs, which, thus, fit entirely under the table top. The other two chairs and the table have never been located.

Charles Rohlfs

Born in Brooklyn, Rohlfs was educated at the Cooper Union “School of Science” before securing a position as a designer of cast iron stoves. During the 1870s and 1880s, Rohlfs pursued a career as an actor while maintaining contracts with various foundries for his design work. During the late 1880s, he began experimenting with furniture making at first to furnish his new home in Buffalo, but then by the end of the 1890s he was promoting himself as a professional maker of “artistic furniture.” Rohlfs’ rapid ascendance in the field of furniture design was marked by the acclaim his work received at the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 and the Turin International Exposition of Modern Art in 1902. With his flair for the eccentric and his refusal to be categorized as an adherent of any particular style or school, international critics singled out his work as among the most innovative and “artistic” produced in America. Changing tastes and declining sales prompted Rohlfs to all but abandon his cabinetmaking interests by 1908.

After the Dallas presentation of The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs ends on January 3, 2010, the exhibition continues its five-city national tour to the Carnegie Museum of Art (January 30–April 25, 2010); the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens (May 22–September 6, 2010); and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (October 19, 2010–January 23, 2011).

The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs is organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Chipstone Foundation, and American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation. The exhibition is curated by Joseph Cunningham of American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation. The Dallas Museum of Art acknowledges generous support from American Airlines.

About the Dallas Museum of Art

Located in the vibrant Arts District of downtown Dallas, Texas, the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) ranks among the leading art institutions in the country and is distinguished by its innovative exhibitions and groundbreaking educational programs. At the heart of the Museum and its programs are its encyclopedic collections, which encompass more than 24,000 works and span 5,000 years of history, representing a full range of world cultures. Established in 1903, the Museum today welcomes more than 800,000 visitors annually and acts as a catalyst for community creativity, engaging people of all ages and backgrounds with a diverse spectrum of programming, from exhibitions and lectures to concerts, literary readings and dramatic and dance presentations.

The Dallas Museum of Art is supported in part by the generosity of Museum members and donors and by the citizens of Dallas through the City of Dallas/Office of Cultural Affairs and the Texas Commission on the Arts.

About American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation

ADA1900 works independently and in collaboration with museums to foster knowledge and appreciation of American decorative art (furniture, lighting, ceramics, metalwork and glass) from the period 1876-1940, with a focus on the American Arts & Crafts and Prairie School movements and American art pottery. It supports collection development at museums around the country through judicious gifts and loans of art, as well as strategic advisement on acquisitions. ADA1900 works closely with curators at more than twenty museums, as well as with independent scholars, on scholarship, exhibitions, and object research, conservation and installation.

Conversation - Sky & Earth by Charles Sheeler, 1940

The Amon Carter Museum announces that it has acquired a major American painting by the artist Charles Sheeler: Conversation—Sky and Earth, painted in 1940.

“This superb example of Sheeler’s work is a vital addition to our holdings of this important and versatile artist, who until now has been represented in our collection by one drawing, five prints, and six photographs,” says Dr. Ron Tyler, director.

Sheeler, long recognized as a founder of American modernism, was inspired and influenced by the country’s changing industrialism in the first half of the 20th century, nowhere more notably than in the Carter’s new acquisition. With its crisp rendering and cropping and its absence of any allusion to movement, the painting juxtaposes transmission towers and wires against the backdrop of the Hoover Dam, which had been completed only four years before and was both the world’s largest hydroelectric power plant and tallest concrete structure. A crystalline sky looms over two-thirds of the painting, which is rendered with extraordinarily controlled brushwork.

“The acquisition of this famous landmark painting strengthens the museum’s collection in important ways,” says Rebecca Lawton, curator of paintings and sculpture. “It is beautifully executed, daring in its conception, and highly provocative in its evocation of a photographic source.”

It was prior to completing Conversation—Sky and Earth that the artist made a professional shift from photography to painting. His highly successful works, including a commissioned series of photographs of Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant (1927), served as the foundation for a series of later paintings.

In 1938, Fortune magazine commissioned Sheeler to produce a pictorial essay that celebrated America’s industrial power. To prepare for the series, Sheeler photographed power stations across the nation and chose subjects to reflect the power theme—a water wheel (Primitive Power, 1939), a steam turbine (Steam Turbine, 1939), the railroad (Rolling Power, 1939), a hydroelectric turbine (Suspended Power, 1939), an airplane (Yankee Clipper, 1939) and a dam (Conversation—Sky and Earth). These paintings, collectively known as “Power,” were reproduced in color in a portfolio supplement to the December 1940 issue of Fortune. They now reside in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art (Suspended Power); Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (Yankee Clipper); The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio (Steam Turbine); Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis (Primitive Power); and Smith College Museum of Art, Northhampton, Mass. (Rolling Power).

According to Lawton, the Carter’s Sheeler epitomizes the aesthetics of Precisionism, a style that until now had been under-represented in the museum’s paintings collection. Sheeler effectively invented this crisp, clean and hard-edged style. Lawton notes that Conversation—Sky and Earth will resonate well with the museum’s Chimney and Water Tower, 1931, by Charles Demuth. Both are on view in the upstairs paintings and sculpture galleries.

About Charles Sheeler

Born in Philadelphia on July 16, 1883, Charles Sheeler studied at the School of Industrial Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he was a pupil of painter William Merritt Chase. Sheeler became friends with a fellow student, Morton Schamberg, and toured Europe with Schamberg in the early 1900s. In Paris, Sheeler was introduced to the then-new Cubist style of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, and it would strongly influence his work.

Sheeler established a studio in Philadelphia, where he supported himself as a commercial photographer. Though he felt that his paintings were more aesthetically important, Sheeler’s photography was highly regarded. The clean lines of light and shadow in his photos would carry over into his paintings, which are known for their precise, geometric quality.

Sheeler was part of the early 20th-century New York avant-garde art world that included Demuth, Louis Lozowick and Joseph Stella. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he focused on American subjects and not European subjects. Sheeler’s favorite subjects tended to be urban or industrial structures, rural architecture or aspects of nature. His paintings and photographs are not emotional or sentimental, and his paintings rarely involved people.

He died in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., in 1965.

Conversation - Sky & Earth by Charles Sheeler, 1940

The Torment of Saint Anthony by Michelangelo, c. 1487–88

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 (1551, 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.

Sho by Jaume Plensa (b. 1955), 2007

From Press Release

The Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University announced today that it has acquired Sho, a monumental sculpture by contemporary Spanish artist Jaume Plensa (b. 1955). Completed in 2007, the work represents a female head and is formed by white-painted stainless steel openwork mesh. It stands approximately 13 feet tall and 10 feet wide (157 ½ x 157 ½ x 118 -1/8 inches) and weighs 660 pounds. This sculpture acquisition from the Richard Gray Gallery was made possible with the generous support of The Pollock Foundation, the Family of Mr. and Mrs. Richard R. Pollock, and the Family of Mr. Lawrence S. Pollock, III, in honor of Mrs. Shirley Pollock, and will be matched with a 1:1 challenge grant for museum acquisitions from The Meadows Foundation.

Plensa is known for his monumental figural sculptures that often incorporate film, light, letters and unusual materials in order to present familiar objects (such as the human body) in unfamiliar ways. Sho is an excellent example of Plensa’s mastery of his medium. It is a portrait of a young Chinese girl, Sho, whom the artist met in Barcelona where his studio is located. The undulating curves of the girl’s facial features and braided hair are emphasized, especially in profile, demonstrating the artist’s characteristic experiments with the interplay of large scale and intimacy in three-dimensional representations of the human form.

A native of Barcelona, Plensa had his first solo exhibition in 1980 and has since achieved international acclaim. Although his primary studio is in his native city, Plensa has also lived and worked in Berlin, Brussels, England (at the invitation of the Henry Moore Foundation), and France (at the invitation of the Atelier Alexander Calder). His numerous awards and honors include the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French Minister of Culture, the National Art Award of Catalonia, Spain, and an honorary doctorate from the Art Institute of Chicago. Plensa has exhibited in major museums and galleries worldwide, including the Galérie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris; the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust in Halifax, England; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum der Modernen Kunst, Vienna, and in New York, Chicago and Tokyo. Outdoor and public sculpture is an equally important aspect of Plensa’s output, with numerous installations in North America, Europe and Asia. One of his most notable works is Crown Fountain (2000-04) in Chicago’s Millennium Park, arguably one of the most successful public art projects of the past decade. Plensa’s works are also found in the collections of such notable museums as the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others.

Sho was first exhibited at the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) in Valencia, Spain, in the winter of 2007. It was the centerpiece of a mid-career retrospective exhibition of Plensa’s work and served as the cover illustration for the accompanying catalogue. The work then traveled to Chicago, where it was exhibited along the riverfront in the heart of downtown, and to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where it was included in a major exhibition of the artist’s latest work at the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park through early January 2009.

“Sho marks the most important acquisition of a work by a living artist into the Meadows collection since the commissioning of Calatrava’s Wave in 2001,” said Dr. Mark Roglán, museum director. “Plensa is among the most dynamic and talented artistic minds in Spain today, and we are honored to have him represented at the Meadows with such a unique and monumental sculpture. This one-of-a-kind masterpiece will welcome visitors to the museum from its prominent position in the center of our new entrance plaza, due to open this fall. The acquisition, made possible by the Pollocks and The Meadows Foundation, further represents a beautiful way to honor in perpetuity the memory of the late Shirley Pollock, who was such a great friend of this institution.”

The Museum will present a public lecture about Plensa by art historian and critic Barbara Rose on November 12, and additional public programming is planned throughout the year.

Sho will go on permanent display outdoors on the museum’s newly renovated entry plaza as part of the exhibition “Face and Form: Modern and Contemporary Sculpture in the Meadows Collection,” opening October 7, 2009. The exhibition will highlight the Meadows Museum’s distinguished collection of modern and contemporary sculpture from the 19th to the 21st centuries, which includes works by such artists as Auguste Rodin, Aristide Maillol, Jacques Lipchitz, Marino Marini, Henry Moore, Claes Oldenburg and David Smith. The sculpture collection will be featured both outdoors on the plaza and indoors in the Jake and Nancy Hamon Galleries.

About the Meadows Museum

The Meadows Museum, a division of SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts, houses one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Spanish art outside of Spain, with works dating from the 10th to the 21st centuries. It includes masterpieces by some of the world’s greatest painters: El Greco, Velázquez, Ribera, Murillo, Goya, Miró and Picasso.

The museum is located at 5900 Bishop Blvd. on the campus of SMU, three blocks west of the DART light rail Mockingbird Station. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday; and 12-5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $8 per person, $6 for seniors, free on Thursday evenings after 5 p.m., and free for children under 12, museum members, and SMU faculty, staff and students. Ample free parking is available in the museum garage. For information, call 214.768.2516 or visit www.meadowsmuseumdallas.org.

Sho by Jaume Plensa (b. 1955), 2007

The Torment of Saint Anthony (1487-88) by Michelangelo was recently acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. The Torment is an oil and tempera on wooden panel and is presumed to be the earliest work by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564). It is the first Michelangelo to enter an American collection and one of only four know easel paintings. The painting measures 18.5 x 13.25 inches.

Michelangelo is believe to have painted The Torment when he was 12 or 13 years old. The painting will go on view this fall at the Kimbell Art Museum.

The Torment of Saint Anthony by Michelangelo, c. 1487–88