KIMBELL ART MUSEUM
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo
Two Women at a Window
c. 1655–60
Oil on canvas
Private collection.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Widener
Collection, 1942.9.46
Kimbell Art Museum - Murillo: From Heaven to Earth,
Exhibition on Display: September 18, 2022 - January 29, 2023
The Kimbell Art Museum presents Murillo: From Heaven to Earth, a comprehensive exhibition
of works by Spanish Golden Age painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682). The leading
religious painter of Seville during his time, Murillo is primarily known for his depictions
of the life of Christ, Christian saints, and other Biblical scenes, including monumental
paintings of the Virgin in celestial glory. While Murillo: From Heaven to Earth includes
a number of these religious paintings, its focus is instead on his earthly pictures of
secular subjects and representations of everyday life in the 17th century, which constitute
some of the artist’s most iconic pictures. Guillaume Kientz, director of the Hispanic
Society Museum and Library in New York and former curator of European art at the Kimbell,
serves as curator for the exhibition, which will be seen only at the Kimbell. On view from
September 18 through January 29, 2023, the show will feature 50 paintings organized around
concepts of youth and age, comedy, romance and seduction, compassion, narrative, and modern
realism.
Murillo: From Heaven to Earth is the largest gathering of paintings in the United States
by the artist since the Kimbell’s 2002 exhibition, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, 1617–1682:
Paintings from American Collections, and expands the scope of the focused exhibitions on
the artist’s portraits (Frick Collection, 2017) and the New Testament narrative of the
Prodigal Son (Meadows Museum, 2022). The show is inspired by the Murillo masterpiece Four
Figures on a Step, which was acquired by the Kimbell in 1984 and is one of the museum’s
most compelling and enigmatic paintings. A rare work in Murillo’s oeuvre, the image depicts
street life in Seville with an unsettling cast of characters. In contrast to his iconogr
aphic works, Murillo’s intimate depictions of the poor and narratives of charity embody a
culture—both visual and literary, stretching from Northern Europe to Spain—that would, for
the first time in modern history, make the lower classes the main subjects of its pictorial
narratives and written tales.
“Murillo’s depictions of everyday scenes are especially remarkable because they have no
real precedent in Spain,” said Eric M. Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum. “The show
hopes to shed new light on these paintings’ complex meanings, revealing their importance
in their own time and suggesting their relevance in our own.”
This exhibition brings together some of Murillo’s most exceptional and unusual genre scenes
from collections worldwide, including San Diego de Alcala and the Poor from the Real Academia
in Madrid, the National Gallery of Art’s Two Women at a Window, and the Young Beggar, on
loan from the Musée du Louvre, Paris. A number of religious scenes in which emphatic realism
advances the Biblical narrative are included, among them the Marriage Feast at Cana from
the Barber Institute, Birmingham, England. The exhibition will also feature another aspect
of Murillo’s engagement with contemporary reality—the magnificent, and very worldly,
portraits of Spanish clergymen, merchants, and aristocrats who went to the painter for a
commemoration of their earthly success and power.
“While his predecessors achieved a revolution in grounding their art into reality via
faithful observation and rendering, Murillo blurs the lines and challenges the boundaries
between sacred and secular, earthly and heavenly,” says Guillaume Kientz.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue with essays and
commentaries by leading scholars of Spanish art and culture: Guillaume Kientz, director
of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library; Ronni Baer, Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967,
Distinguished Curator and Lecturer in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton
University; Madeleine Haddon, teaching fellow at Edinburgh University; Fernando Loffredo,
assistant professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook U
niversity; and Xavier F. Salomon, deputy director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at the
Frick Collection, New York. The Kimbell is pleased to offer free admission to Murillo: From
Heaven to Earth during its 50th anniversary week, from October 4 through October 9.
About the Collection
The Kimbell's permanent collection is small in size, comprising fewer than 350
works of art, and is distinguished by an extraordinary level of artistic quality
and importance. The idea of building a choice collection of representative
masterpieces was established by the Board of Directors of the Kimbell Art
Foundation in consultation with Museum's first director, Richard F. (Ric)
Brown, in a Policy Statement of June 1, 1966:
The dominating principle involved in the acquisition process is that the
stature of the Museum depends more upon the quality of the definitive objects
that it contains than on the historical completeness of its collections. A
prospective addition to the collections, therefore, is to be judged from the
standpoint of aesthetic quality and typicality, and whether it defines a master,
period, school, style, or area. The goal shall be definitive excellence, not
size of collection.
Leaving to older and larger institutions the role of collecting broadly and in
depth, the Kimbell has continued to pursue quality over quantity. Its holdings
range from the third millennium B.C. to the mid-20th century and include major
works by Duccio, Fra Angelico, Caravaggio, Poussin, Velázquez, Bernini, Rembrandt,
Goya, Monet, Cézanne, Picasso, Mondrian, and Matisse. The collection comprises
Asian and non-Western as well as European art, and extends only to the mid-20th
century in recognition that this is where the collection of the Modern Art Museum
of Fort Worth begins, and omits American art since this is the focus of another
neighboring institution, the Amon Carter Museum.
Antiquities
The Kimbell's select holdings of antiquities range from the Egyptian Old Kingdom
of the third millennium B.C. through ancient Assyria, Greece, and Rome, and to
the Early Christian Church in the fifth century.
European Art
The collection of European paintings and sculpture is remarkably rich in works
of the Italian Renaissance, although its fullest and most celebrated holdings
are in Italian, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Flemish works of the 17th century.
Asian Art
The Asian collection comprises sculptures, paintings, bronzes, ceramics, and
works of decorative art from China, Korea, Japan, India, Nepal, Tibet, Cambodia,
and Thailand.
Precolumbian Art
Precolumbian art is represented by Maya works in ceramic, stone, shell, and
jade; Olmec, Zapotec, and Aztec sculpture; and pieces from the Conte and Wari
cultures.
African and Oceanic Art
The African collection consists primarily of bronze, wood, and terracotta
sculpture from West and Central Africa, including examples from Nigeria, Angola,
and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Oceanic art is represented by a
Maori figure.
About The Kimbell Art Museum
The Kimbell Art Museum, owned and operated by the Kimbell Art Foundation, is
internationally renowned for both its collections and for its architecture.
The Kimbell's collections range in period from antiquity to the 20th century
and include European masterpieces by artists such as Fra Angelico, Michelangelo,
Caravaggio, Poussin, Velázquez, Monet, Picasso and Matisse; important
collections of Egyptian and classical antiquities; and Asian, Mesoamerican
and African art.
The Museum's building, designed by the American architect Louis I. Kahn, is
widely regarded as one of the outstanding architectural achievements of the
modern era. A second building, designed by world-renowned Italian architect
Renzo Piano, is scheduled to open November 27, 2013, and will provide space
for special exhibitions, allowing the Kahn building to showcase the permanent collection.
For additional information please contact:
Jessica Brandrup, Head of Marketing and Public Relations
jbrandrup@kimbellmuseum.org or
Barbara Smith, Public Relations Coordinator
bsmith@kimbellmuseum.org or
call: (817-332-8451) ext. 248 or
log on to http://www.kimbellart.org
Kimbell Art Museum hours
Tuesdays through Thursdays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.;
Fridays, noon - 8 p.m.; Sundays, noon - 5 p.m.; closed Mondays.
For general information, call 817 - 332-8451. Web site:
www.kimbellart.org
|
