Kimbell Art Museum's New Pavilion and Linnie Baird at our Library

The new Piano Pavilion on the left resonates, in a rectangular staccato way,
with the rounded galloping visual rhythms of the original Kahn Building.

Just after I posted my last blog about the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, the Museum started advertising on TV that it has just opened its new building. I've been wondering how any architect's work could sit gracefully beside the beautifully understated grand-ness of Louis Kahn's original building. The Kahn building is one of the greats of 20th century architecture and one of my favorites. Apparently the Kimbell's Board of Directors of the Kimbell felt similarly, because they hired esteemed Italian architect Renzo Piano to build what is now called the Piano Pavillion.

Renzo Piano has designed many art museums, two of which you might know. The Menil Collection building here in Houston is one of them, and the famous Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris is another. But it will be up to you to decide if this building is a worthy addition to the Texas art landscape. 

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Many thanks to all of you who have offered to show your paintings at OUR museum--or at least, our exhibition space--in the library. Room L-129 exhibition space is now booked until June, but we still have room for the paintings in the second half of the year. Linnie Baird hung her paintings today ahead of the Christmas rush; hers will grace the room all through January. 

Linnie works in oils and pen and ink. She's been painting for seven years, keeping up a legacy her father began. Originally from Alabama, she moved to Texas in her twenties and has been here since. You can feel the love in her Texas landscapes! Come and view Linnie's paintings. 

The Kimbell Museum has great art blurbs!

While traipsing along a random link-trail inside the Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum website, I came across a list of the artists whose work they have in their collection. If you click here, you'll find what I'm talking about:  https://www.kimbellart.org/collections/list-artists

Clicking on “C”, and then “Caravaggio”, I discovered that the Kimbell owns Caravaggio’s famous early painting, The Cardsharps. Fair enough. What followed was dazzling. First it had what you’d expect: the date Caravaggio painted it, the medium and support and size of the painting, and that this piece is currently on show. 

What followed however, in the "Conservation" section, was a marvelous description that put Caravaggio’s style in its historical context, explained how he’d originally painted the figures and where he'd made changes, his quirks of painting technique that were helpful to know, and the painting’s provenance. It had none of that esoteric art jargon that numbs my brain and did have loads of useful, interesting information that educated me; information that I think is useful to artists. Check this out:

“Perhaps in lieu of underdrawing, Caravaggio used incisions to place elements on the canvas. In The Cardsharps there are only a few incisions in the wet ground, such as in the dupe’s fingertips and the edges of the cards, but this technique was greatly expanded in later works. Other innovative painting techniques in the Kimbell’s painting include the artist’s manipulation of the wet paint to enhance the realism of surface textures. When Caravaggio painted the silk brocade of the central cheat, he blotted the wet paint with his fingers or thumb. He also used the butt end of the brush to describe the black embroidery on the collar of the dupe.”

Have I mentioned lately how much I LOVE the internet?

If you're ever in Fort Worth with some time to spare, the Kimbell Art Museum is a wonderful museum to explore. Their permanent collection is delightful and they have marvelous revolving collections. The current one is The Age of Picasso and Matisse: Modern Masters from the Art Institute of Chicago. It will be there until February 16, 2014. Go to  https://www.kimbellart.org/exhibitions

The image above: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Cardsharps, c. 1595, oil on canvas. Kimbell Art Museum. Used with permission

Google Art Project

Warning: This website may devour hours of your life.

Opportunity: This website is a glorious passtime.

If you’ve used Google Maps or Google Earth, you’ll be familiar with that lovely feature that lets you tour down a street and see 360 degree views as you turn around.  In the Google Art Project, you will use the same technology to tour the inside of seventeen famous art museums.

You can walk along the halls of the Museo Reine Sofia in Madrid and notice the Juan Gris paintings on the walls. You can amble virtually from gallery to gallery in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia . You can stop to look at a ultra-high resolution image of Birth of Venus in the Uffizi Museum in Florence or zoom in to check out Van Gogh’s brushstrokes on Starry Night in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The website even lets you create your own art collection. Capture full-size images of paintings or close-up details, add your own notes to your image, and come back to them over and over. 

But you might set an alarm before you begin, if you have anything else you need to do!