The Kimbell Art Museum Features Carravaggio and His Followers

Written by Conrad Blackstone Tuesday, 15 November 2011 20:55

Forth Worth, TX.- The Kimbell Art Museum is proud to present "Carravaggio ajnd His Followers in Rome" on view at the museum through January 8th 2012. This ambitious exhibition explores the profound influence that Caravaggio had on painters from all over Europe who traveled to the papal city of Rome to profit from its vitality as a cultural capital. Not since Michelangelo or Raphael had one artist affected so many of his contemporaries and so irrevocably changed the course of European painting.  Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome brings together approximately 60 paintings by Caravaggio and the artists who were first to respond to his revolutionary new style. The 400th anniversary of the artist's death was celebrated in 2010 with several significant exhibitions in Italy that reconfirmed his legacy and the remarkable power of his paintings.

The present exhibition, organized by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Kimbell Art Museum, provides an unprecedented occasion for a North American audience to examine his work and its impact on a whole generation of artists of Italian, French, Dutch, Flemish, and Spanish origin who resided in Rome during his lifetime and immediately afterwards. A core of paintings by Caravaggio will be matched with major works by such diverse figures as Orazio Gentileschi, Jusepe de Ribera, Simon Vouet, and Gerrit van Honthorst––artists whose imaginations were indelibly impressed by the master's sense of drama, monumentality, and humanity.


Trained in the realistic traditions and culture of religious reform of his native Lombardy in the north of Italy, the young Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) settled in Rome in 1592. After a few years of struggle and poverty, he attracted the attention of some of the most prominent patrons in the city, securing prestigious commissions that quickly earned him fame. Artists and connoisseurs alike were drawn to his distinctive style and the highly original way he approached his subject matter. He remained in Rome until 1606, when he was forced to flee after killing a young man in a dispute over a tennis match. It was but the most extreme manifestation of his volatile and violent personality. Moving between Naples, Malta, and Sicily, he continued to paint profoundly moving canvases until his tragic early death in 1610, at the age of 39. The exhibition will show how artists working in Rome in the first three decades of the 17th century adopted various aspects of Caravaggio's style. Like him, they often painted figures at close vantage point with strong lights and deep shadows in a dark, indeterminate setting to create a poetic or dramatic mood. Many artists emulated his working method alla prima, painting directly on the canvas rather than working out the composition beforehand in a series of drawings. They responded to the new kind of genre subjects that Caravaggio developed in his early career, as well as his highly original interpretation of religious subjects.

Some of the "Caravaggisti" were attracted to Caravaggio for a relatively brief period before they developed their own distinctive styles; others may be considered followers in the more traditional sense.  In a dynamic, challenging, and stimulating display, the exhibition will focus on particular themes, revealing how Caravaggio's example inspired other artists both to reinterpret standard subjects and to tackle unusual ones. In a section devoted to representations of music, Caravaggio's Musicians (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) will be seen with a carefully selected group of paintings that are variations on the same theme––from a vigorously realistic work by the Flemish artist Theodoor Rombouts to a seductively lyrical canvas by Bartolomeo Cavarozzi. Another section of the exhibition is centered on Caravaggio's Cardsharps in the Kimbell's own collection, which will be seen with his Fortune Teller (Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome). Both of these seminal works were owned by Caravaggio's patron Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte and were displayed together in his palace. They inspired a number of paintings of game players and fortune tellers by such artists as Valentin de Boulogne and Simon Vouet. Caravaggio's paintings of saints and other religious subjects in the exhibition will include Martha and Mary Magdalen (Detroit Institute of Arts), Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City), and Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Conn.), and these too will appear in company with some of the major Caravaggio-inspired treatments of the same themes.


The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, hosts a small but excellent art collection as well as traveling art exhibitions, educational programs and an extensive research library. Its initial artwork came from the private collection of Kay and Velma Kimbell, who also provided funds for a new building to house it. The building was designed by renowned architect Louis I. Kahn and is widely recognized as one of the most significant works of architecture of recent times. It is especially noted for the wash of silvery natural light across its vaulted gallery ceilings. Kay Kimbell was a wealthy Fort Worth businessman who built an empire of over 70 companies in a variety of industries. He married Velma Fuller, who kindled his interest in art collecting by taking him to an art show in Fort Worth in 1931, where he bought a British painting. They set up the Kimbell Art Foundation in 1935 to establish an art institute, and by the time of his death in 1964, the couple had amassed what was considered to be the best selection of old masters in the Southwest. Kay left much of his estate to the Kimbell Art Foundation, and Velma bequeathed her share of the estate to the foundation as well, with the key directive to "build a museum of the first class." The Foundation's board of trustees hired Richard Fargo Brown, then director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as the founding director of the museum with the task of constructing a building to house the Kimbell's art collection. Upon accepting the post, Brown declared that the new building should itself be a work of art, "as much a gem as one of the Rembrandts or Van Dycks housed within it." The proposed museum was given space in a 9.5 acre (3.8 hectare) site in Fort Worth's Cultural District, which was already home to three other museums, including the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Amon Carter Museum, specializing in art of the American West. Brown discussed the goals of the institution and its new building with the trustees and summarized them in a four-page "Policy Statement" and a nineteen-page "Pre-Architectural Program" in June 1966. Construction for the Kimbell Art Museum began in the summer of 1969. The new building opened in October 1972 and quickly achieved an international reputation for architectural excellence. Brown also expanded the Kimbell collection by acquiring several works of significant quality by artists like Duccio, El Greco, Rubens, and Rembrandt. After Brown's death in 1979, Edmund "Ted" Pillsbury was appointed director of the museum. Previously he had been the founding director of the Yale Center for British Art, which, coincidentally, had also been designed by Louis Kahn. Pillsbury continued the art acquisition program in an aggressive but disciplined fashion. Richard Brettell, director of the Dallas Museum of Art, said, "He was, in some ways, single-handedly responsible for turning the Kimbell from an institution with a great building into one whose collection matched its architecture in quality". In 1989 Pillsbury announced plans to expand the museum's building to accommodate its enlarged collection, but he was forced to drop the plan because of strong opposition to any major alteration of the original Louis Kahn structure. In 2007 the Kimbell solved that problem by announcing plans to construct an additional, separate building across the lawn from the original building. Designed by Renzo Piano, the new structure is expected to be completed in 2013. In 1966, before the museum even had a building, founding director Brown included this directive in his Policy Statement: "The goal shall be definitive excellence, not size of collection." Accordingly, the museum's collection today consists of only about 350 works of art, but they are of notably high quality. The European collection is the most extensive in the museum and includes Michelangelo's first known work, "The Torment of Saint Anthony", the only painting by Michelangelo on exhibit in the Americas. It also includes works by Duccio, Fra Angelico, Mantegna, El Greco, Carracci, Caravaggio, Rubens, Guercino, La Tour, Poussin, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Boucher, Gainsborough, Vigée-Lebrun, Friedrich (the first painting by the artist acquired by a public collection outside of Europe), Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Gutave Caillebotte, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian and Pablo Picasso. Works from the classical period include antiquities from Egypt, Assyria, Greece and Rome. The Asian collection comprises sculptures, paintings, bronzes, ceramics, and works of decorative art from China, Korea, Japan, India, Nepal, Tibet, Cambodia, and Thailand. Precolumbian art is represented by Maya works in ceramic, stone, shell, and jade, Olmec, Zapotec, and Aztec sculpture, as well as pieces from the Conte and Huari cultures. The African collection consists primarily of bronze, wood, and terracotta sculpture from West and Central Africa, including examples from Nigeria, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Oceanic art is represented by a Maori figure. The museum does not own any pieces created after the mid-20th century (believing that era to be the province of its neighbor, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) or any American art (believing that to be the province of its other neighbor, the Amon Carter Museum). The museum also houses a substantial library with over 59,000 books, periodicals and auction catalogs that is available as a resource to art historians and to faculty and graduate students from surrounding universities. Visit the museum's website at ... https://www.kimbellart.org

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