Displaying items by tag: Texas

The Art Institute of Chicago is sending almost 100 European modern art masterpieces to the Kimbell Art Museum in For Worth, Texas. Part of a four-month traveling exhibition, the show at the Kimbell is slated to open on October 6, 2013 and run through February 16, 2014.

Renowned for its collection of modern European art, the Art Institute of Chicago will loan its works to the Kimbell while their own galleries undergo renovations. The Kimbell is the only museum to host the Art Institute’s traveling exhibition.

The show will include sculptures and paintings by Juan Gris (1887-1927), Georges Braque (1882-1963), Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), Paul Klee (1879-1940), Joan Miró (1893-1983), and Marc Chagall (1887-1985). Two major highlights of the show are Henri Matisse’s (1869-1954) Bathers by a River (1909-10) and Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) Old Guitarist (1903).

The Kimbell hosted an exhibition of Impressionist works from the Art Institute of Chicago back in 2008. The show was one of the best regarded in the Kimbell’s history.

Starting January 7, 2013, Antiques Roadshow will kick-off its 17^th season with three episodes filmed in Corpus Christi, Texas. While the series has a reputation for revealing hidden treasures to unassuming owners, the lost Diego Rivera painting that appears in the upcoming season is truly a rare find.

Earlier this year, Rue Ferguson inherited a painting bought by his great-grandparents in Mexico in 1920. He assumed it was worth some money, but when he took the piece to Antiques Roadshow during their stay in Corpus Christi, he was dumbfounded when he heard the painting was valued at $800,000 to $1 million.

Created by Rivera, one of the foremost Mexican painters of the 20^th century, in 1904 when he was only a teenager, El Albani spent decades out of the public eye. While it is recorded in Rivera’s personal archive, the artist’s family could never locate the painting as it was hanging in Ferguson’s great-grandparents home. For nearly 30 years after Ferguson’s parents inherited the painting, they believed it to be a fake and kept it in storage. It wasn’t until the early 1980s that Ferguson’s father discovered the painting to be authentic and took it to be restored. The family donated the work to the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX but Ferguson asked for the painting back when he learned it was no longer on public display.

After visiting Antiques Roadshow and learning just how important a work El Abani is, Ferguson decided to look for a museum that specializes in Rivera’s work and/or Latin American art to house the historic painting.

The gaze of Steven Austin (1793–1836), known as the “Father of Texas” for his role in the colonization of the Lone Star State, is fixed on a wall of Texiana diagonally across the room from where his portrait hangs in this rural farmhouse. Among the ephemera on display is a discharge signed by Samuel Houston (1793–1863), who, as commander-in-chief of the Texas armies, secured the state’s independence in 1836, one of many distinguished accomplishments. Documents and maps that chronicle Texas history, from the pre-republic period of the 1820s and 1830s to when it gained statehood in 1845, cover the wall; documents in another room relate to the Spanish exploration period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The couple who brought this historic material together has been collecting for four decades and, like most people who live in the state, are proud of what it means to be a Texan.