kimbell art museum

Texas Foundation To Sell Matisse Bronze Sculptures

The Kimbell Art Museum will be losing the bronze Matisse sculptures it has had on display for over ten years. The Burnett Foundation in Fort Worth, Texas, which owns the series of four Henri Matisse sculptures Backs I – IV, bought the works in 1982 but they have been at the Kimbell since 2000. The Star-Telegram reports that the Burnett Foundation decided to sell the sculptures partly because of the sale of another version of Back IV which sold at Christie's for $48 million in November. The sale set a record price for a Matisse work. The Burnett is a philanthropic foundation which seeks to benefit the community and has spent $420 million over the past 30 years in support of health, education, human services and arts initiatives in the Fort Worth area.

As a bit of a consolation prize the Kimbell will receive two other sculptures from the Burnett Foundation, Henry Moore's Figure in Shelter, and Fernand Leger's La Fleur qui Marche. Both of these used to be on the Kimbell lawn and are now in storage while the museum begins preparation for the construction of its new building. The new structure designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop will allow the Kimbell for the first time to exhibit most of its permanent collection while also hosting major special exhibitions and will also add studios, classrooms and an auditorium. That building is set to open in 2013.

Sotheby's will sell the Matisse Backs as a group but a date has not been announced yet. Some speculate that the pieces will go as a group to another museum, perhaps one with deep pockets like the Getty or an omnivorous collector like Roman Abramovich or Eli Broad.

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Art Museum Picks Up Michelangelo's First Painting

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art

At 12 or 13 years old most of us were in basic art classes but Michelangelo was already making masterpieces. The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas has acquired the earliest known Michelangelo painting, "The Torment of Saint Anthony." The museum will be the only U.S. museum to have a Michelangelo painting on display.

The 15th-century oil and tempera painting on a wood panel is one of just four of these types of paintings because most of Michelangelo's paintings. The painting has been kept out of the limelight for years due to questions over its authenticity. It was in a private collection for years but last summer an art dealer bought it for nearly $2 million at a Sotheby's auction and then took it to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where experts in the Met's paintings conservation department cleaned it. When the painting was examined using X-rays and infrared technology, the Met's experts decided that it was done by Michelangelo and represented his earliest work. The painting will be displayed at the Kimbell starting this fall after a summer exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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Tags: art, kimbell art museum, KimbellArtMuseum, maserpiece, michelangelo, museum