Woman Standing, Holding a Fan by Mary Cassatt, 1878-78

“A great Cassatt painting has eluded us until now,” says Andrew Walker, director of the Amon Carter. “With her contemporaries John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler, Cassatt was one of the most influential American artists living and working abroad in the 19^th century; so naturally, we are thrilled to have one of her paintings in our collection. It is particularly rewarding that the work is unique in scale and breathtaking in its execution.”

Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) created the painting during a period of intense collaboration with French artist Edgar Degas (1834–1917) who invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists at the group’s fourth exhibition in 1879. Cassatt was the only American in the group, and with Marie Bracquemond (1841–1916) and Berthe Morisot (1841–1895), she became known as one of the “trois grandes dames” of Impressionism. In recognition of her contributions to the arts, France awarded her the Légion d’honneur in 1904.

While she is known primarily for portraiture, Cassatt explored radical new styles and techniques to represent the modern world while working with Degas. Both artists were fascinated with natural and artificial illumination, along with the profound foreshortening and cropping of silhouetted figures. They also shared an interest in matte surfaces and the sketchy use of dry, chalky pigments, such as pastel and distemper, a medium in which pigments are mixed with water and glue.

“Cassatt’s alliance with Degas, grounded in mutual admiration, produced some of the most closely linked and innovative art of the late 19th century,” says Rebecca Lawton, curator of paintings and sculpture at the Amon Carter. “Woman Standing is a perfect example of this. Cassatt, like many of her contemporaries, was fascinated by Japanese art. She devised compositional strategies by studying Japanese prints, learning how to depict character through posture and gesture and how to evoke an entire world using an economy of means.

“Her palette in this work is especially striking with the wonderfully harmonious arrangement of subtle tones for the rug contrasted with the almost acid-green accents in the dress. You get an immediate and palpable sense of the artist’s hand by examining the rapid brushwork. You see Cassatt experimenting with distemper, a challenging, quick-drying, hard-to-maneuver medium.”

Not only is the painting important to the study of American art, but it also opens avenues for conservation research, according to Claire Barry, director of conservation.

“The work reveals Cassatt’s innovative spirit as a painter,” says Barry. “It’s compelling to delve into her rare use of distemper. Research into her work with this aqueous medium, by itself or in combination with other chalky mediums, such as pastel on canvas, is of great interest to conservators. It promises to reveal fascinating new insights into the diversity of Cassatt’s painting techniques.”

There are intriguing elements of mystery surrounding Woman Standing. Its first known owner was the celebrated art dealer and collector Ambroise Vollard. After leaving Vollard’s hands, the painting remained unknown to scholars until 1996, when it surfaced on the art market after residing for many years in a private French collection. Since then, the painting has been exhibited and published three times, but its place within Cassatt’s career and studio practice is not thoroughly understood. Its panel-like format suggests that it may have been conceived as a decorative scheme and thus belongs to a broader program of decorative ideas that were being discussed by the Impressionists in the late 1870s.

“I’ve been fascinated by this painting since it appeared in the 1998 Cassatt retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago,” says Walker, who worked on the exhibition. “When I became director of the Amon Carter earlier this year, it was quite clear to me that this was the right painting to acquire in commemoration of the museum’s 50^th Anniversary and to honor board president Ruth Carter Stevenson who has long admired Cassatt’s work.”

Woman Standing, Holding a Fan is currently on view in the second-floor paintings and sculpture galleries.

About Mary Cassatt (1844–1926)

Born in Pittsburgh into an old, prosperous Pennsylvania family, Mary Cassatt received her primary artistic education at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, which she entered in 1860. When she was 22, Cassatt went abroad, studying in Paris with renowned French masters that included Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Thomas Couture (1815–1879); by the mid-1870s she had settled in France permanently. Her friendships with Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) coincided with a transition in her work toward the dynamic brushwork and high-keyed colors of Impressionism.

Cassatt devoted herself to portraiture—most frequently depicting women and children who were family and friends. The French Impressionists invited her to participate in their 1879 exhibition; thereafter, she moved comfortably within their circle, actively exhibiting and selling her paintings, pastels and prints. Around this time she also began producing etchings and drypoints, which would ultimately number more than 200. The Amon Carter also houses four of Cassatt’s prints.

Although the vigorous modernist movement emerged well before her death, Cassatt never approved of abstract art, which lacked the finish and careful methodology that she herself practiced. Failing eyesight plagued her in her later years, and she died in France at age 82.

About Ruth Carter Stevenson (b. 1923)

Daughter of museum founder Amon G. Carter (1879–1955), Ruth Carter Stevenson is the guiding force behind the development of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. She has been president of the board of trustees since the museum was established in 1961, and it was she who engaged Philip Johnson (1906–2005) to design the original building, two subsequent additions and the 2001 expansion. She has personally helped in the formation of the museum’s collection with direct donations and energetic support of acquisitions through the Amon G. Carter Foundation; since 1982, she has also served as president of the foundation.

Woman Standing, Holding a Fan by Mary Cassatt, 1878-78

Palmito Ranch by Frank Stella, 1961

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has acquired Frank Stella’s Palmito Ranch (1961) from the artist’s landmark “Benjamin Moore” series, which ushered in a new current of Minimalism in American art. The acquisition is a combination museum purchase from the Caroline Wiess Law Accession Endowment and gift from the artist, who made the donation in memory of the late MFAH director, Peter C. Marzio (1943-2010).

“Peter Marzio was everything you would want from the director of a great museum,” Stella commented about his gift. “I got to know Peter when the MFAH invited me to create murals for the 1982 Stella by Starlight gala; from then on I counted him a friend.”

“Palmito Ranch builds on the MFAH‘s longstanding commitment to the work of Frank Stella,” said Gwendolyn H. Goffe, interim director. “It was among the last works of art that Dr. Marzio had the opportunity to propose to the museum‘s board, and we are profoundly grateful to both the board and to Stella for their support in making this acquisition possible. Now on view in the American galleries of the Audrey Jones Beck Building, Palmito Ranch is a truly radiant presence.”

“We had the privilege of working closely with Stella on this project,‖ commented Alison de Lima Greene, curator of contemporary art and special projects. “He was the first to point out to me how the title has a special resonance for Texans and he has recalled that it was one of Robert Rauschenberg’s favorite examples of his work. But more important, as the artist himself has stated: ‘Palmito Ranch is as special and as beautiful as a painting can be.’”

About Palmito Ranch

Palmito Ranch is among Stella’s most reductive compositions. It is part of the artist‘s 1961 “Benjamin Moore” series, so named for the Benjamin Moore paints that Stella chose for their intense colors and flat, matte surfaces. Individual titles within the series were taken from Civil War Battles; the Houston painting takes its title from the Battle of Palmito Ranch, the last Civil War Battle, fought on Texas soil on May 12–13, 1865.

However, it is formal rather than thematic concerns that Stella engages in Palmito Ranch. The other paintings in this series play with maze-like patterns or simple diagonals; Palmito Ranch is unique in its understated, stacked composition, where painted line and raw canvas create an even, horizontal rhythm. Its saturated palette, measured proportions, and glowing presence are at once immediately vibrant and classically timeless. Interviewed by William S. Rubin regarding the “Benjamin Moore” series, Stella stated: “They were certainly the clearest statement to me, or to anyone else, as to what my pictures were about—what kind of goal they had.”

About the Artist

Frank Stella was born on May 12, 1936, in Malden, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton were among his classmates. In 1954 he entered Princeton University, where he studied painting with Stephen Greene and majored in history, writing his thesis on Hiberno-Saxon manuscripts. Shortly before his graduation in 1958, he saw Jasper Johns’ “Target” paintings at Leo Castelli Gallery, an encounter that prompted his first foray into striped compositions. Moving to New York City, he supported himself as a house painter, and launched into the celebrated “Black Paintings” during the winter of 1958-59. His work was introduced in the landmark Sixteen Americans exhibition curated by Dorothy Miller for the Museum of Modern Art in 1959.

In the 1960s Stella’s explorations of saturated color and reductive compositions became icons of the decade as he tested the limits of painting through shaped canvases and an ever-increasing use of scale. In the 1970s and 1980s he opened up his work to fresh frames of reference, embracing new industrial materials, exuberantly three-dimensional forms, and architectural space. At the same time, he began to delve into a new range of sources across the history of art and architecture. In particular, his work responded to the architecture of sacred spaces, from Poland‘s rustic wooden synagogues to the dynamic edifices of Baroque Rome.

Celebrated by two major retrospective exhibitions organized by the Museum of Modern Art (1970 and 1987), Stella maintains an international presence today. His early paintings were the subject of a 2006 exhibition organized by the Harvard Museums that traveled to The Menil Collection, Houston; his explorations of sculpture and architecture were shown by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007; the Irregular Polygons of the mid-1960s have been examined afresh by the Hood Museum of Art and the Toledo Museum of Art in 2010 – 11; and his collaboration with Santiago Calatrava is the focus of a major installation currently on view at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

Frank Stella in Houston

Frank Stella has enjoyed a long history with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The museum first acquired one of his shaped canvases in 1973 through the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. S. M. McAshan, Jr.; in 1982 the MFAH commissioned the artist to fill its Mies van der Rohe galleries with a series of temporary murals for the Stella by Starlight gala (the 15 maquettes for these murals have been preserved in the museum‘s collection); in 1987 Stella‘s first out-of-doors sculpture, Decanter, was installed in the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden through the generosity of the Alice Pratt Brown Museum Fund; and in 2005 The Joseph and Sylvia Slifka Collection donated Stella’s Lunna Wola I, 1972. The monumental Damascus Gate (Stretch Variation III), 1970, was acquired in 2009 as a gift of Alice Pratt Brown. It was the highlight of the MFAH‘s 2010 gala celebration of American Art, which Stella attended. Outside the MFAH, Stella is also represented in The Menil Collection, and in 1997 he completed a major mural cycle for the Moores Opera House on the campus of the University of Houston.

Related acquisition

Complementing the acquisition of Palmito Ranch, the MFAH has received an important related gift, Stella’s 1967 Black Series II. Among the artist‘s first explorations of lithography, this suite of eight prints, 15 x 22 inches each, was published by Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles. They are now recognized as among Stella‘s most iconic graphic statements.

Black Series II comes to the MFAH as a gift from Marc, Judy, and Hayley Herzstein, and Brooke, Dan, and Lily Feather, in loving memory of Max Herzstein, Houston entrepreneur and arts patron. While the MFAH has exceptional examples of the artist‘s later graphic production, the gift of The Black Series II addresses a major gap in the Prints Department and importantly expands on the museum‘s representation of the revolution that galvanized American printmaking in the 1960s.

About the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Established in 1900, the MFAH is the largest cultural institution in the region. The majority of the museum‘s presentations take place on its main campus, located in the heart of Houston‘s museum district, which comprises the Caroline Wiess Law Building, the Audrey Jones Beck Building, the Glassell School of Art and the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden. The Beck and Law buildings are connected underground by The Wilson Tunnel, which features James Turrell‘s iconic installation The Light Inside (1999). Additional resources include a repertory cinema, two significant libraries, public archives and a state-of-the-art conservation and storage facility. Nearby, two remarkable house museums—Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens and Rienzi—present collections of American and European decorative arts. The encyclopedic collections of the MFAH are especially strong in pre-Columbian and African gold; Renaissance and Baroque painting and sculpture; 19th- and 20th-century art; photography; and Latin American art.

The MFAH is also home to a leading research institute for 20th-century Latin American and Latino art, the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA).

Lady Godiva (detail) by Anne Whitney, c. 1861-64 (photo courtesy the DMA)

Today the Dallas Museum of Art announced the acquisition of the first life-sized marble figure executed by Anne Whitney, one of America’s premiere women sculptors working during the second half of the 19th century. This is the first work by Whitney to enter the DMA’s collection, and it is currently on view in the DMA’s fourth level Arts of the Americas gallery.

In addition to her critical success as a woman sculptor, Whitney is notable for expressing her abolitionist and feminist views through her sculpture. She sculpted bust length and full figure portraits of leading protesters and suffragist leaders, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Lloyd Garrison, and Lucy Stone. She also created allegorical figures that addressed slavery and other prevalent social issues, with the most notable being Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch out Her Hands to God. Whitney was also interested in social justice, which is reflected in the DMA’s sculpture Lady Godiva.

“Lady Godiva greatly enhances the DMA’s collection of mid-19th-century American sculpture,” said Olivier Meslay, the DMA’s Interim Director as well as its Senior Curator of European and American Art and The Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art. “With its narrative subject, neoclassical style, and socially conscious allusions, the piece typifies the formal and contextual qualities that characterize 19th-century American sculpture. This work is a wonderful addition to our collection as it is rare to have such an important work from this time period and from a female sculptor.”

Lady Godiva by Anne Whitney, c. 1861-64 (photo courtesy the DMA)

Lady Godiva was an 11th-century noblewoman of Coventry who protested her husband’s excessive taxation of his subjects. In order to alleviate the taxation policy, Godiva agreed to ride through the streets of Coventry naked, provocatively demonstrating the poverty and vulnerability of her subjects. Whereas most visual representations depict Godiva’s nude ride, Whitney has chosen to represent the moment when she accepts her husband’s challenge. Still fully clothed, she has only just started to remove her girdle, alluding to the narrative’s dramatic climax. The sculpture is significant for anticipating the interest in social justice that would be more overtly expressed in Whitney’s later work.

The sculpture was a part of the collection of Alessandra Comini and the late Eleanor Tufts. As both art historians and art collectors, Comini and Tufts focused on women artists, and Dr. Comini’s interests in the area have remained strong since Dr. Tufts’ death nearly twenty years ago. In 2001 Dr. Comini gave a drawing by Egon Schiele to the DMA collection.

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 is its global collection, which encompasses more than 24,000 works and spans 5,000 years of history, representing a full range of world cultures. Established in 1903, the Museum welcomes approximately 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 Museum will host on Thursday, January 27, 2011, at 7:30 p.m. the seventh annual Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture with Dr. Kathleen Nicholson, Professor of Art History at the University of Oregon. She will speak on the fascination with “allegorical portraits” in 18th-century France by investigating Nicolas de Largillière’s Portrait of the Comtesse de Montsoreau and Sister as Diana and an Attendant, an important double portrait of 1714 on loan from the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation on view in the new second-floor galleries.

“The opening of these new European galleries is transformative for the Dallas Museum of Art and for the visitor experience in our galleries,” said Bonnie Pitman, The Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art. “The re-imagined spaces and the installation design will excite visitors and enrich their understanding of European art across a multitude of genres.”

The significant reconfiguration of the galleries, overseen by Olivier Meslay, Senior Curator of European and American Art and The Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art, provides a series of small spaces that make the collections more accessible. “The new design of the gallery, achieved by moving some walls and extending others, invites visitors to examine various works on view in intimate gallery spaces without being visually distracted by others, allowing for a heightened museum experience,” said Meslay.

The new European art galleries showcase more than 150 works from the DMA’s strong collection of European art spanning over 400 years of art history, including works of art by Jacques-Louis David, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, and Henry Moore. Selections from the decorative arts and design collection are displayed alongside painting and sculpture of the same time period and style to provide a comparison between subject matter, material and movements. Highlighted works include:

• Yellow Roses in a Vase by Gustave Caillebotte, 1882 — The first work by the artist to enter the DMA collection, it was created during Caillebotte’s most intense and fertile engagement with the still-life genre. This painting was purchased by Edgar Degas and kept in his collection until his death.
• Four Wooden Sculptures (Recto) / Ice Skater (Verso) by Ernest Ludwig Kirchner, 1912 and 1929–1930 — A double-sided canvas that features images from two diverse periods in Kirchner’s career and representing the first work by an artist from the Brücke Group in the DMA collection.
• Comblat-le-Château, the Meadow (Opus 161) by Paul Signac, 1887 — This masterpiece is from an important series of landscape paintings completed by the artist during the first crucial years of the neo-impressionist movement. This painting has not been on view since 1930.
• Chestnut Trees by Edouard Vuillard, 1894–1895 — A unique and early work, this painting became the cartoon for a stained-glass window produced by the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company.
• Young Man with Flute by George Romney, late 1760s – This portrait entered the DMA collection in 1987 as part of a bequest of Mrs. Sheridan Thompson. The artist was unknown but thought to be American colonial-era portrait painter Ralph Earl. In 2010 it was reattributed to George Romney, a key figure in 18th-century British art and a contemporary of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough.
• Huntingdon Wine Cistern by Abraham Portal, 1761–1762 — Weighing close to eighty pounds, this monumental cistern was made for Frances Hastings, the 10th Earl of Huntingdon. The size of this cistern and the likelihood that such a large piece would have been melted down as tastes changed make this a particularly rare object.

On Wednesday, January 26, at 12:15 p.m., Heather MacDonald, The Lillian and James H. Clark Associate Curator of European Art, will talk in the European galleries on The Rococo and the Birth of Modern Art: Looking at Early Eighteenth-Century French Paintings.

Please visit DallasMuseumofArt.org for updated information on additional programming related to the works on view in the European galleries.

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 welcomes approximately 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.

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)