Displaying items by tag: Kimbell Art Museum

After 15 months without a director, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will appoint Colin B. Bailey, a deputy director at the Frick Collection in New York, the head of the consortium. Bailey, 57, is a renowned specialist in 18^th and 19^th century French art and has been at the Frick since 2000.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which includes the modern-leaning M.H. de Young Memorial Museum and the neoclassical California Palace of the Legion of Honor, was left leader-less after the death of its previous director, John Buchanan, in 2011. The city of San Francisco and a private board of trustees oversee the museums, which collectively are the largest public arts institution in San Francisco and one of the largest art museums in the state of California.

The announcement, which was made by the museum board on Wednesday, March 27, 2013, comes after a considerable period of tumult among the museums; the past year has included tense labor negotiations, firings of senior staff members, and scathing criticism of the board’s president, Diane Wilsey. Wilsey, an art collector, philanthropist, and prominent San Francisco socialite, has been accused of using the museums’ resources for her own benefit and of nepotism.

The museums’ recent troubles have not deterred Bailey’s excitement to join the Fine Arts Museums. His abundance of museum experience includes stints at the National Gallery of Canada, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, 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.

By all accounts, Nicolas Poussin’s “Sacrament of Ordination (Christ Presenting the Keys to Saint Peter)” should have been a winner. Executed between 1636 and 1642, the painting is part of the artist’s groundbreaking series depicting the seven sacraments. It is in perfect condition and has a pristine provenance. So why was there not a single bidder interested in the painting at a Christie’s auction in London last December?

Some experts said its estimate of $24.3 million to $31 million was too high. Others said that such a specialized painting should not have gone to auction in the first place but should have been sold privately. The trustees of Belvoir Castle had put it on the market to raise money for the restoration of the castle and grounds, some 120 miles north of London.

What few people realized was that the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth was quietly keeping tabs on the painting. “We were watching it closely,” said Eric M. Lee, the Kimbell’s director. “But December was not the right time for us to buy it.”

When it didn’t sell, he added, he “felt it was too important a painting to pass up.” So Mr. Lee approached the museum’s trustees “to see if we could afford it.”

This summer the institution finally made a deal, paying $24.3 million — Christie’s low estimate — without the auction house’s steep buyer’s premium. Robert Holden, a fine-art agent based in London, and George Wachter, head of Sotheby’s old master painting department worldwide, represented the Kimbell.

The painting has a particularly rich past. It is from the first set of “Seven Sacraments,” which was commissioned by the Roman collector Cassiano dal Pozzo. (A second set, painted between 1644 and 1648, was commissioned by the French collector Paul Fréart de Chantelou and belongs to the Duke of Sutherland, who has lent the paintings to the National Galleries of Scotland.)

The first series was well known among connoisseurs throughout Europe. When Sir Robert Walpole tried to buy it for his collection at Houghton Hall in England, the sale was blocked by the pope, who refused to let the paintings out of the country. But in 1785, the fourth Duke of Rutland stepped in and was able to buy them from descendants of dal Pozzo. He is said to have made copies of the paintings so the originals could be sneaked out of Italy.