Displaying items by tag: meadows museum

Midway through “Treasures From the House of Alba: 500 Years of Art and Collecting,” you encounter Francisco de Goya’s mysterious full-length, life-size masterpiece “The Duchess of Alba in White” (1795). The official portrait of the duchess, she’s also the unofficial centerpiece of this stunning exhibition of more than 140 artworks. It’s like your hostess coming late to the party. You don’t mind because you’re already giddy—drunk on art—and she’s absolutely ravishing.

They arrive in crates and boxes and date back centuries. They carry secrets and stories of a bygone era. They’re here for a while, and then they’re gone.

Such is the case with the recent flurry of shipments to the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University, where the institution founded by Algur Meadows and dedicated to Spanish art celebrates its 50th anniversary at the same time the school is turning 100.

On this, her first visit to Texas, Almudena Ros de Barbero is fully prepared for the state’s tendency to do things in a very big way.

But in this case, she’s the conduit to big by curating the first of two anniversary blockbusters at the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University. Say hello to “The Abelló Collection: A Modern Taste for European Masters,” which opened this weekend.

Ros is official curator of the private collection of Juan Abelló and his wife, Anna Gamazo, whom Meadows director Mark Roglán describes as two of the top collectors in the world.

Seventy paintings that span the 15th to the 20th centuries from the collection of the Spanish investor Juan Abelló and his wife Ana Gamazo, including works by El Greco, Francisco Goya, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, are due to go on show in the US for the first time. “The Abelló Collection: A Modern Taste for European Masters” will open at the Meadows Museum at the Southern Methodist University in Texas next year, 18 April-2 August.

A key work in the show is Francis Bacon’s "Triptych," 1983, one of the artist’s final works in the format, which Abelló acquired in 2008 through a private sale.

The Meadows Museum of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas has acquired a major work by Francisco Goya. Portrait of Mariano Goya (1827), which was acquired thanks to the Meadows Foundation and a gift from Mrs. Eugene McDermott, has not been on display in over 40 years. Completed just months before Goya’s death, the painting, which features the artist’s grandson, is one of less than a dozen portraits painted by the artist between 1820 and 1828. The masterpiece is currently on view at the museum.

Mark A. Roglán, the Linda P. and William A. Custard Director of the Meadows Museum and Centennial Chair in the Meadows School of the Arts, SMU, said, “The Meadows Museum will celebrate its 50^th anniversary in 2015, and the acquisition of this extraordinary work by Goya is a wonderful way to begin that celebration…The work stands as the pivotal linchpin in our growing collection. Indeed the acquisition of the Goya caps off many notable additions to our collection this year and marks a new phase in achieving Algur H. Meadows’ dream to create a ‘small Prado in Texas.’”

Spanning from the 10^th century through the 21^st, the Meadows has one of the foremost collections of Spanish art in the world. In addition to Portrait of Mariano Goya, the museum has five other Goya paintings and complete, first edition sets of all of his major print series.

The Meadows Museum at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas has acquired an album of drawings, photographs and letters amassed by the sugar tycoon and art collector William Hood Stewart. Stewart was an avid collector of European art and the Modern Spanish School and his holdings include correspondence with artists such as Jean-August-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) and Jéan-Léon Gerôme as well as with fellow collectors. The Meadows Museum acquired the album from New York’s Spanierman Gallery for an undisclosed amount.

The collection will be presented at the Meadows Museum in the exhibition The Stewart Album: Art, Letters and Souvenirs to an American Patron in Paris from August 25 through November 10, 2013. While Stewart had a sizable estate in his hometown of Philadelphia, he spent much of time in Paris, socializing with the artists he so admired. Stewart’s unique collection provides a glimpse into the careers, personal lives and artistic developments of a number of important European artists.

In 1898, Seven years after Stewart’s death, his collection was broken up at an auction and paintings were dispersed among the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and a handful of other institutions. The Meadows Museum is planning to organize an exhibition that will reunite parts of Stewart’s collection that were separated over 100 years ago.

“Diego Velazquez: The Early Court Portraits” opened at Dallas’ Meadows Museum this past Sunday and in preparing for the exhibition, researchers may have uncovered the artist’s first portrait of his life-long subject, King Philip IV of Spain. Named the king’s court painting in 1623 at the age of 24, Velazquez upheld this position until his death in 1660, forming one of the most significant relationships in art history.

In order to make the Velazquez exhibition possible, the Meadows Museum teamed up with Spain’s national art museum, Museo del Prado. The show includes a portrait of the poet Gongora y Argote from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, a portrait of a court jester painted in the early 1630s that is on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art, and a never-before-seen portrait of Philip IV from a private Spanish collection.

The Meadows Museum is proud to bring together two of Velazquez’s early portraits of the king for the first time in four centuries. One is the Prado’s full-length portrait painted in the 1620s of the king dressed entirely in black and the other is the Meadows’ own bust-length portrait. Before the show opened, both portraits underwent analysis at the Prado and X-rays revealed hesitant brush strokes on the Meadows portrait indicating that this was Velazquez’s first attempt at drawing the king.

“The Early Court Portraits” will be on view through January 13, 2013.