Straight From the Art
From Fort Worth’s Kimbell to Houston’s Menil, Texas’s museums are home to a diverse and exquisite collection of masterpieces. To devise a list of our ten greatest works on view, we asked more than sixty curators, gallery owners, critics, and other insiders for their favorites. So come along on the ultimate art tour of Texas.
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The monolithic sculpture that sits outside the Modern is made of seven sheets of oxidizing Cor-ten steel, measures 67 feet tall (that’s 27 feet higher than the museum), and weighs 233 tons. Despite its extraordinary heft, the structure is remarkably graceful. The Modern’s chief curator, Michael Auping, has described the commissioned piece as the “vertical yang for the horizontal yin” of the museum’s elegant Tadao Ando building. But to merely gaze at the gently curving rust-colored tower is to fail to realize Richard Serra’s objective: Vortex is as much a physical experience as it is an art object. You can slip into the 20-by-21-foot space at its base via two openings, and as you look up at the sky through the 10-foot-wide aperture, you feel as if you’re at the bottom of a very deep well. And since every sound reverberates off the metal with astounding force, you won’t be able to resist talking, clapping, singing, stomping, and banging on the walls to create your own sonic symphony. “The person who is navigating the space, his or her experience becomes the content,” Serra has said of his work. “The content is you.”
MODERN ART MUSEUM OF FORT WORTH
Ladder for Booker T. Washington (1996)
MARTIN PURYEAR
Inspired by homemade ladders he saw in the French countryside while working at Alexander Calder’s studio, sculptor Martin Puryear—whose geometric pieces often feature natural materials such as rattan, rawhide, and dried mud—returned to his Hudson Valley home and cut down a long ash sapling. With a simple drawknife, he began to shape the knobby stem into this 36-foot-long ladder, which narrows rapidly; its top rung is little more than an inch wide. The ladder now hangs, suspended, in its own double-height concrete gallery, which has a translucent ceiling that seems to glow with light. If you didn’t know better, you’d think the spindly form stretches to infinity, a visual trick that doesn’t lose its potency even if you’ve been staring at it for hours. “One time we had to remove the piece because it was on tour with a retrospective of Martin’s work, and people got upset,” says Andrea Karnes, a curator at the Modern. “It’s one of the most sought-after works in our collection.”
AMON CARTER MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, FORT WORTH
Swimming (1885)
THOMAS EAKINS
In 1925 this oil-on-canvas was purchased for the Fort Worth Art Association (which would become the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) from Thomas Eakins’s widow for $700. Called a “pictorial manifesto,” Swimming had been famously returned by the patron who commissioned it. In the bucolic scene, five bathers are identifiable as Eakins’ students—with the artist himself at bottom right, watching them. It was this penchant for graphic realism—ironically, the very trait that would turn him into an icon—that led Eakins to resign as director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where his use of nude models stirred up controversy. In 1990 Swimming incited passions again when the Modern put it up for auction to raise money to buy more-contemporary art. The citizens of Fort Worth protested so loudly that the Modern found a buyer close to home, selling Swimming to the Amon Carter Museum for $10 million on two conditions: that Eakins’s once rejected work never be sold and that it remain on permanent view.
KIMBELL ART MUSEUM, FORT WORTH
The Cardsharps (c. 1594)
MICHELANGELO MERISI DA CARAVAGGIO
Likely bored with the fruit and flowers he’d been sketching as a pupil of a Milanese master, young Michelangelo Merisi (better known as Caravaggio, after his hometown) shocked the art world when he started painting novelistic scenes ripped from everyday life. His richly hued portrayal of a duplicitous game of primero, in which a well-dressed boy becomes the mark for a pair of sketchy cheats, was audacious in its bracing realism and earned Caravaggio his first important patron. (A slew of religious commissions followed, and he didn’t spare biblical heroes either: The Calling of St. Matthew, for example, has the future disciple mingling with lowlifes in a tavern.) With its stark lighting and taut psychological drama, Caravaggio’s first bona fide masterpiece in many ways presaged a modern-day voyeuristic fixation: reality TV. And it’s a wonder the rascally revolutionary’s own life story—overnight celebrity prone to drunkenness kills a tennis opponent, is disfigured by an enemy, and dies prematurely from a fever, at age 39, while walking on a beach in Tuscany—hasn’t inspired a movie of the week. Even The Cardsharps itself has had its share of drama: the painting went missing for ninety years, until it was rediscovered in 1987 in a private European collection.
MENIL COLLECTION, HOUSTON
Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) (1994)
CY TWOMBLY
When you walk into the Cy Twombly Gallery, an eight-room building on the Menil campus, you can start your tour chronologically by heading to the left to see the artist’s earliest paintings, from 1959. Or, as is more likely, you may catch a glimpse of this monumental, late-career canvas off to the right and be powerless to resist its pull. Inspired by Robert Burton’s seventeeth-century book Anatomy of Melancholy, it measures more than 13 feet high and 53 feet wide and displays many of the hallmarks of Twombly’s genius, including his graffiti-like scrawlings, his appreciation for epic literature (he quotes Keats), and his uncanny ability to convey space and ephemerality. “Its appeal is that it takes you out of your moment of time,” says Josef Helfenstein, the director of the Menil Collection. “It doesn’t represent anything, but there are strong elements of destruction, very powerful moments of physical presence, and poetry.” Since Twombly’s death in July, at the age of 83, there has been renewed interest in the famously divisive (and press-shy) legend, who was born in Virginia but moved to Rome in 1957 (“a symbolic act” of his outsider status, says Helfenstein). The Renzo Piano–designed gallery, which Twombly provided the initial sketches for, feels even more sacrosanct now, as does its meditative crown jewel. “Say Goodbye is vast in its layers of meaning, and it triggers different reactions,” says Helfenstein. “We’ve had visitors who have literally danced in front of it.”
HOUSTON
Rothko Chapel (1971)
MARK ROTHKO
In 1964 Houston philanthropists John and Dominique de Menil commissioned Mark Rothko to create a series of murals for a Catholic chapel that was to be designed by architect Philip Johnson and built on the University of St. Thomas campus. But that’s not exactly how things turned out. Johnson withdrew from the project after clashing with Rothko on the plans. The de Menils decided to build the sanctuary, which they intended to use as an interfaith gathering space, on property they owned in Montrose. And Rothko, who wrote to the couple that the project “exceeds all of my preconceptions,” never saw the chapel: he committed suicide a year before it was completed. Despite this inauspicious beginning, the sanctuary has since become one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in the state. Though the brick building’s exterior is as humdrum as a DMV office’s, the interior is a different story. Standing in an intimate octagonal cocoon, you are surrounded by Rothko’s fourteen gigantic rectangles of black pigment. As you stare into the nearly monochromatic canvases, subtleties of color rise to the surface, and your eye begins to pick up on underlying purples, maroons, and deep browns. Though the paintings are devoid of images or symbols—or perhaps because of this—they’re like Rorschach tests: everyone sees something different in the inky surfaces, a fact that matches up with the de Menils’ ecumenical vision. As Dominique said to the crowd who gathered forty years ago for the chapel’s dedication, “We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine.”
NASHER SCULPTURE CENTER, DALLAS
Tending, (Blue) (2003)
JAMES TURRELL
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