The Kimbell Art Museum also announces JPMorgan Chase as the Renzo Piano Pavilion Inaugural Season presenting sponsor.
Photos by Robert LaPrelle and Robert Polidori and Provided by The Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth
There are now two museum buildings, not one, at the Kimbell Art Museum (www.kimbellart.org, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth, TX 76107) in Fort Worth, Texas. A light-filled concrete and glass pavilion designed by world-renowned architect Renzo Piano opens Wednesday, November 27, across the lawn from the Museum’s original home, Louis I. Kahn’s modernist icon of 1972.
South view, Renzo Piano Pavilion and Louis Kahn Building, October 2013. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Photo by Robert LaPrelle
Designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) and Kendall/Heaton Associates, the Piano Pavilion is located 65 yards to the west of Kahn’s signature cycloid-vaulted museum. The two museum landmarks in turn occupy the heart of the Culture District of Fort Worth, whose seven museums are visited by more than two million people a year and include the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, and the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame.
Renzo Piano is the acclaimed designer of Europe’s tallest building, The Shard in London, and a number of other of the world’s most beloved buildings and museums in such cities as Paris, Amsterdam, Bern, New Caledonia, Venice, Oslo, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, San Francisco and Boston.
The new building consists of two connected structures. The first and more prominent is a pavilion that faces and to some degree mirrors the Kahn building. Here, on a tripartite facade, robust concrete walls flank a recessed entrance bay of glass. The pavilion houses a large lobby in the center, with exhibition galleries to either side, all naturally lit from an elaborately engineered roof. In the galleries, Renzo Piano has striven for an even more exquisite light quality than he has achieved before: the roof system incorporates aluminum louvers, glass, solar cells, wood beams, and stretched fabric scrims. The north and south walls of the pavilion are glass, with colonnades outside to support the beams and roof, which overhang generously for shade.
From the lobby, visitors may enter either of the galleries to the sides or go straight ahead, through a glass passageway, into the building’s second structure. In contrast to the front structure, this half of the building is self-effacing from the outside, covered by a grassy roof open to the public for recreational activities. It contains a third gallery that is not top-lit and is therefore suitable for especially light-sensitive works, as well as the auditorium, library, and education center. The double-height auditorium is on axis with the entrance, permitting a view through various spaces and layers of glass—from the front door to the glass wall and light well behind the auditorium stage. Visible from the lobby of the Kahn building, this becomes the main axis of the new Kimbell Art Museum complex, emphasizing Piano’s themes of transparency and openness.
The Kimbell Art Foundation, which owns and operates the Kimbell Art Museum, was established in 1936 by Kay and Velma Kimbell, together with Kay’s sister and her husband, Dr. and Mrs. Coleman Carter. Early on, the Foundation collected mostly British and French portraits of the 18th and 19th centuries. By the time Mr. Kimbell died in April 1964, the collection had grown to 260 paintings and 86 other works of art, including such singular paintings as Hals’s Rommel-Pot Player, Gainsborough’s Portrait of a Woman, Vigée Le Brun’s Self-Portrait, and Leighton’s Portrait of May Sartoris. Motivated by his wish “to encourage art in Fort Worth and Texas,” Mr. Kimbell left his estate to the Foundation, charging it with the creation of a museum. Mr. Kimbell had made clear his desire that the future museum be “of the first class,” and to further that aim, within a week of his death, his widow, Velma, contributed her share of the community property to the Foundation.
View from lobby looking east toward Kahn Building, Renzo Piano Pavilion, October 2013. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Photo by Robert Polidori
THE PAST MEETS THE FUTURE…
In October 1966, Louis I. Kahn (born 1901) received the commission to design the Kimbell Art Museum. From the moment it opened in October 1972, it was deemed not only the apotheosis of Kahn’s ever-evolving ideas about the architectural union of light and structure, but also one of the finest art museums ever built. It was the last work the architect would see to completion before his death in March 1974.
Although Mrs. Kimbell had expressed a wish that the Museum be “of classical design,” the Kimbell Art Foundation imposed no stylistic conditions on Kahn. The Foundation made it clear, however, that it wanted architecture that would succeed not only on aesthetic grounds, but also from a functional standpoint. It was a conviction shared by Kahn, who distinguished himself by a deep sense of the practical as well as the spiritual.
The Museum’s then director, Ric Brown, advised that the Kimbell should have an inward orientation and imaginative garden treatments. But what was most important to him was that the art be experienced with natural light and outdoor views—an opinion that went against the prevailing trend of the day, which was to illumine and control lighting conditions in museums through artificial means. Such a museum would offer a different experience on every visit, as the light would vary according to the time of day, the season, and the weather. These programmatic parameters were essential to Kahn’s creative process, as he famously needed to understand the “nature of a building” before he could determine what it “wanted to be.”
From his earliest sketches and models, Kahn conceived the Museum as a series of long, narrow galleries, each with its sources of light—both natural and artificial—and conditioned air. Kahn’s plan is classical: an axis passing west to east through the front to rear entries is crossed by a longer north-south axis, along which the galleries are positioned in harmony with the site. The north and south sides of the Museum’s three-section pavilion are composed of six parallel, 100-by-20-foot, lead-roofed, post-stressed concrete vaults, while the center section is made of four. Due to its structural strength, each vault only requires the support of four square columns. The building is composed of three levels: the upper floor, housing most of the galleries and the auditorium, library, bookstore, café, and two garden courtyards; the lower floor, encompassing the lower-level entry gallery, conservation labs, offices, and shipping and receiving areas; and a sub-floor basement.
Kahn envisioned a museum with “the luminosity of silver,” illuminated by “natural light, the only acceptable light for a work of art, [with] all the moods of an individual day.” He achieved this through a design with “narrow slits to the sky” to admit daylight and pierced metal reflectors hanging beneath them to diffuse and spread the light from its hidden source onto the underside of the cycloid-shaped vaults and down the walls. Courtyards, lunettes, and light slots introduce more light, varying quality and intensity. Architectural space and light are further unified by the choice of materials: deftly handled structural concrete is juxtaposed with Italian travertine, fine-grained white oak, dull-finished metal, and clear glass. Kahn characterized the Museum building as inspired by “Roman greatness.” The classical appearance of its porticos, arches, and vaults is often cited.
The resulting Museum building would be acclaimed a modern classic from the moment of its opening. Brown proudly declared, in a dictum worthy of Kahn, that the Kimbell was “what every museum has been looking for ever since museums came into existence.” Brown was referring especially to the open, flexible plan, describing it as “a floor uninterrupted by piers, columns, or windows and perfect lighting, giving total freedom and flexibility to use the space and install the art exactly the way you want.” Indeed, the natural glow of its galleries, so compelling and transcendent, inspired architects and museum professionals, in subsequent decades, to bring natural light into museum structures. The Foundation Board of Directors also seemed to understand the building’s significance and potential for future inspiration. On behalf of the full Board, Mr. A. L. Scott, its President, declared: “This design will still be new and fresh 50 years from now, we think . . . What we have is magnificent.”
Detail of roof and beam system, Renzo Piano Pavilion, September 2013. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Photo by Robert Polidori
In the fall of 2010 the Kimbell broke ground on a new museum building located to the west of the landmark Kahn Building. Designed by celebrated architect Renzo Piano, this building will provide much-needed space for the Kimbell, whose exhibition and education programs have grown far beyond those envisioned when the Kahn building opened in 1972. During the major special exhibitions that the Kimbell presents on a regular basis, the gallery space available for the display of its distinguished permanent collection is severely restricted; for periods each year, much of the collection has to be kept in storage.
The main purpose of the new building is to provide galleries to be used primarily for exhibitions, allowing the Kahn building to be devoted to the permanent collection. The Piano building will also provide the classrooms and studios that are essential to a full-scale museum education department, as well as an auditorium considerably larger than the one in the Kahn building, an expanded library, and generous underground parking.
View of facade looking south, Renzo Piano Pavilion, September 2013. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Photo by Robert Polidori
Piano’s building acknowledges its older companion in its respectful scale and general plan, while at the same time asserting its own more open, transparent character. It is physically quite separate from the Kahn building, at what Piano calls “the right distance for a conversation, not too close and not too far away.” The parklike area between the two buildings will enhance the serene sound and cool sensation of the fountains that parallel the north and south porticos of the Kahn building. The siting of the new building and its parking garage will correct the tendency of most visitors to enter Kahn’s building by what he considered the secondary entrance, directing them naturally to his main entrance in the west facade.
THE COLLECTION
Selected masterworks from the Kimbell’s permanent collection, including old master paintings by artists such as Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Rembrandt, and superb examples of Asian, Precolumbian and African art, will inaugurate the Renzo Piano Pavilion. The European works will remain on view through only January 12, 2014, before returning to the galleries of the Louis Kahn Building. Admission to the permanent collection is free.
At the same time, the Kahn Building will showcase other works from the Museum’s collection, including paintings and sculpture by such masters as Monet, Degas and Cézanne, and The Age of Picasso and Matisse: Modern Masters from the Art Institute of Chicago, an exhibition presenting many of the nation’s most renowned modern European paintings outside their customary setting in Chicago. Kahn’s icon of modernist architecture will itself is in top form, having undergone a thorough restoration over the course of the last year.
View from the south at night, Renzo Piano Pavilion, October 2013, Photo by Robert LaPrelle
KIMBELL ART MUSEUM HOSTS UNPRECEDENTED LOAN OF 20TH-CENTURY MASTERPIECES FROM THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
The Age of Picasso and Matisse: Modern Masters from the Art Institute of Chicago opened in early October at the Kimbell Art Museum and is the only venue for this first-ever loan of its kind from the Art Institute. The presentation of nearly 100 works—including both paintings and sculptures from the Art Institute’s superb collection—features some of the greatest modern European masterpieces of the 20th century. The exhibition will coincide with the opening of the new Renzo Piano Pavilion at the Kimbell and continue through February 16, 2014.
“The modern holdings at the Art Institute are among the greatest in the world, and we are honored and thrilled to be the chosen venue for this exhibition,” commented Eric M. Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum. “Chicago’s collection of works by the great masters of early 20th-century art is renowned—particularly for such painters as Picasso and Matisse, but also Léger, Kandinsky and Miró. This will be a landmark exhibition during a momentous time in the Kimbell’s history.”
Following upon the success of the Kimbell’s 2008 exhibition of Impressionist masterworks from the Art Institute, The Age of Picasso and Matisse tells the story of European art in the first half of the 20th century through the holdings of one of the world’s foremost encyclopedic museums. Including the works of artists from France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Russia, Spain and Switzerland, the exhibition will survey the significant art movements that shaped the history of modern art.
“Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse are the critical figures of early modern art,” said George T. M. Shackelford, the Kimbell’s deputy director. “We are pleased to be able to show ten works by each of these men, who were friends and rivals for decades.”
Picasso’s Old Guitarist of 1901, one of the painter’s most beloved icons, begins the visitor’s journey; his monumental Nude under a Pine Tree of 1959 is its conclusion. The Art Institute’s signature Bathers by a River, one of Matisse’s most important large-scale paintings, is shown with works from virtually every stage of his career. Bathers by a River represents Matisse’s most important response to the language of Cubism invented by Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris in the years around 1910.
An important selection of Cubist paintings is presented, including works that extend Cubism’s language—works by Robert Delaunay and Gino Severini, for example, who applied the aesthetic to images of Paris. At another extreme, Expressionist painters in Germany—Lyonel Feininger, Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and others—rejected tradition and sought out profound spiritual meaning in art, painting subjects laden with personal evocations of nature and its powers.
Their colleague, the Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky, tried to reject figurative art altogether; his nonobjective paintings, groundbreaking expressions of abstraction, often took their inspiration from music. His Romanian contemporary Constantin Brâncusi, working in Paris, was preoccupied with a limited range of forms—the human head, a torso, a majestic bird—and spent decades exploring their essence. Brâncusi’s inspired Golden Bird is one of three sculptures by him in the exhibition.
The Catalan artist Joan Miró is represented by six paintings, including the large Policeman of 1925. Miró’s sophisticated “dream paintings” are among the most important works of his career, influencing the course of abstraction in the art of a later generation. Miró’s paintings are among a large group of Surrealist paintings and sculpture in Chicago, richly represented in the exhibition with works by Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti and the best known of the Surrealists—Salvador Dali, another Catalan painter who became an art-world celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s.
The richly illustrated 132-page catalogue that accompanies The Age of Picasso and Matisse: Modern Masters from the Art Institute of Chicago is written by Stephanie D’Alessandro, Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator of Modern Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, with contributions from Renée DeVoe Mertz, research associate in the Department of Medieval to Modern European Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. Published by the Art Institute of Chicago, it is available for purchase in the Kimbell’s Museum Shop and online at www.kimbellart.org.
This exhibition is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth. Presenting sponsorship for the exhibition is provided by the Leo Potishman Foundation and J.P. Morgan. It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Promotional support is provided by American Airlines, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and NBC 5.
Admission to The Age of Picasso and Matisse: Modern Masters from the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition is $18 for adults; $16 for seniors age 60 and over and for students with an ID; $14 for children ages 6–11; and FREE for children under 6 and for Museum members. Admission is half-price on Tuesdays and after 5 p.m. on Fridays.
The Kimbell Art Museum is pleased to announce JPMorgan Chase as the Renzo Piano Pavilion Inaugural Season presenting sponsor.
J.P. Morgan will be the exclusive sponsor of the season, which includes the events surrounding the November opening of the highly anticipated new building, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, and support for the exhibition The Age of Picasso and Matisse: Modern Masters from the Art Institute of Chicago, on view October 6, 2013, through February 16, 2014.
Chase Bank will be the presenting sponsor of many Kimbell education programs through July 2014. Through the Museum’s Field Trip Reimbursement Program, twenty schools, or approximately 1,200 students, will visit the exhibition courtesy of Chase, with transportation and chaperone fees reimbursed to schools that apply. Chase will also provide scholarships for four qualifying students to the Kimbell’s summer camp in July and support the Kimbell’s Family Festivals, free days for families to visit the exhibition, enjoy musical performances and participate in art-making activities.
“I am truly grateful to our friends and partners at JPMorgan Chase for their ongoing support and patronage of the Kimbell,” commented Eric M. Lee. “They recognize the gravity of this historic moment and are as excited as I am to present this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition and celebrate the inauguration of Piano’s new, light-filled building constructed of concrete, wood and glass.”
“Because this is a great moment in the history of our city, JPMorgan Chase takes tremendous pride in sponsoring both the opening of the Piano Pavilion and the blockbuster Age of Picasso and Matisse exhibit,” said David Nolet, president of JPMorgan Chase in Fort Worth. “Our bank is a long-time supporter of the Kimbell, one of the world’s most beautiful museums. Our ongoing collaboration reflects a mutual commitment to preserving artistic masterworks, fostering new contributions to the world of art and architecture and promoting Fort Worth as a great place to live, work and visit.”
The Grand Opening Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony will be held, Wednesday, November 27, at 10 AM on the Kimbell Green (located between the two Kimbell buildings). To celebrate the Grand Opening, the Kimbell will give the first 1,000 guests to the Renzo Piano Pavilion free gifts, which will include collector lapel pins and more. Join board members of the Kimbell Art Foundation, Museum director Eric M. Lee, and other luminaries for the official ribbon-cutting event, marking the public opening of the new Renzo Piano Pavilion.
Musical Performances in the Renzo Piano Pavilion Auditorium
11 AM, Fei-Fei Dong, Piano: 2013 Cliburn competition finalist Fei-Fei Dong, will perform a 30-minute recital including works by Chopin and Liebermann. Presented in partnership with the Van Cliburn Foundation.
1 PM, Fort Worth Opera Studio: Young artists will perform Three Little Pigs as part of the Children’s Opera Theatre educational outreach tour.
3 PM, Christopher McGuire, guitar: Presented with Fort Worth Classic Guitar Society
During your visit, save time for drop-in learning programs available in the new education studios or take a self-guided Cultural District architectural walking tour. Brochures are available at the Pavilion’s Information Desk. As a special thank you, opening day guests will enjoy complimentary lemon-infused water and cookies from Blue Bonnet Bakery.
Additionally, The Kimbell would like to thank the Van Cliburn Foundation, Fort Worth Children’s Opera Theatre, Fort Worth Classic Guitar Society, and the Blue Bonnet Bakery for their generous support of the MEmber Previews and Grand Opening events.
The Kimbell Art Museum (www.kimbellart.org) is internationally renowned for both its collections and for its architecture. The Kimbell’s collections range in period from antiquity to the 20th century and include European masterpieces by artists such as Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Poussin, Velázquez, Monet, Picasso and Matisse; important collections of Egyptian and classical antiquities; and Asian, Mesoamerican and African art. Admission to view the Museum’s permanent collection is always FREE.
Kimbell Art Museum hours: Tuesday–Thursday and Saturday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; Friday, noon–8 p.m.; Sunday, noon–5 p.m.; closed Monday. For general information, call 817-332-8451. Website: kimbellart.org. Address: 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth, TX 76107.
Filed under: Arts & Culture, Museums & Exhibitions Tagged: Amon Carter Museum of American Art, e Renzo Piano Pavilion, Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator of Modern Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, J.P. Morgan, JPMorgan Chase, Kay and Velma Kimbell, Kimbell Art Museum, Leo Potishman Foundation, Louis I. Kahn, Louis Kahn Building, National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, Renée DeVoe Mertz, Renzo Piano, Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW), Robert LaPrelle, Robert Polidori, Stephanie D’Alessandro, The Age of Picasso and Matisse: Modern Masters from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, The Kimbell Art Foundation, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth