Change of Art
Just over forty years ago, Texas was the kind of place dismissed as hopelessly provincial and culturally mediocre. But then came the Kimbell Art Museum.
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The international praise lavished almost immediately upon the Kimbell and its contents didn’t just elevate the architectural profile of the cultural district, it transformed the psyche of the entire state. For generations the culturally aspiring among us had labored under accusations of “provincialism,” the widely held notion that Texans, far removed from the centers of real culture, would have to be eternally content with mediocre samplings or pale imitations of the art produced in places like New York and Paris. Fearful of being labeled provincial, Texas patrons had traditionally shopped so frantically for designer-label art and architecture that they’d settled for second-rate work by big-name talents; by the time the Kimbell opened, some of the worst examples of Impressionism or Abstract Expressionism could be found in some of Texas’s best homes. Similarly, the taint of provincialism had led Texas artists to believe they could achieve nothing important unless they were recognized by, and eventually escaped to, the cultural capitals. Yet here was Cowtown’s own little museum, and its architecture and collection weren’t just “world-class,” a term that had already become a much-ridiculed cliché of Texas’s passive-aggressive cultural ambitions. The Kimbell was in a class of its own, a world-beater.
The implications soon rippled outward. As much as the Kimbell raised the bar for Texas collectors and arts institutions, the excitement and sense of self-empowerment it ignited also encouraged Texas artists to reconsider what they could achieve by staying at home. By the late seventies, Houston in particular had become a hotbed for many of Texas’s most talented artists, who were organizing exhibitions in their own alternative galleries and pushing the city’s established institutions to show more Texas art. The opening of the Kimbell also threw down the gauntlet of cultural competition to the oligarchs of Fort Worth’s more populous civic competitors, most notably Dallas. Despite the two cities’ federally enforced collaboration on the DFW Airport, which opened in 1974, Dallas–Fort Worth was far less a modern civic marriage than a historic Hatfield-McCoy feud. Long accustomed to regarding its neighbor with everything from smug indifference to overt contempt, Dallas, with its Depression-era art museum tucked away on the state fairgrounds, suddenly developed a clinical case of museum envy—a condition the city would not begin to remedy for another quarter century.
At the same time, the Kimbell’s unqualified triumph also sent an equally important message to the world’s cultural capitals. Kahn had gone to Texas as a gifted enigma and had emerged as one of the twentieth century’s anointed geniuses; when he died, in 1974, the Kimbell became his artistic testament, the work that both culminated and transcended his career. This dynamic did not go unobserved by other talented, if as yet unfulfilled, architects; Johnson in particular, who was from New York, realized that Texas was a place where an architect could innovate in ways he couldn’t in fussier locales. It was in Houston, in fact, where by the mid-seventies he had designed and proselytized for more than twenty years in the orthodox modernist vein, that Johnson dared to separate the twin towers of his 1976 Pennzoil Place with a slit of space only ten feet wide—a feature strikingly similar to the light-admitting slits that bisected Kahn’s barrel vaults—and for good measure tilted the tops at a rakish angle. This breaking out of the modernist box sparked the entire postmodern movement in architecture, and over the next several years Johnson gave Houston the world’s first postmodern skyline—as well as the look of a city that could set fashions rather than simply struggle to ape them.
A decade after Pennzoil Place, another architect came to Houston with Kahn’s museum very much on his mind. Genoa native Renzo Piano, who had launched his career by co-designing Paris’s machinelike Centre Pompidou in the early seventies and had since struggled to establish his own identity, was faced with a daunting assignment: to build an intimate, naturally lit modernist repository for the treasure trove of Houston art collector Dominique de Menil, an edifice that would also somehow mesh with the surrounding neighborhood of clapboard houses. (Menil had originally wanted Kahn and was also a Johnson client.) Not only did Piano’s Menil museum almost single-handedly prove that modernism could respect, rather than bulldoze, existing neighborhoods, but its louver-like roof of light-modulating cement “leaves”—which were similar to the Kimbell’s ceiling-mounted aluminum light diffusers—also advanced Kahn’s revolution in museum lighting and led Piano to inaugurate an era of openness and transparency for civic buildings of all sorts.
Post-Menil, Piano became the designer most coveted by museums and cities worldwide—including, not surprisingly, Dallas. Among his highly admired works would be the nearly see-through Nasher Sculpture Center, in the city’s arts district, which had for decades remained little more than an enormous parking lot. When the Nasher opened, in 2003, it received sufficient accolades to finally cure Dallas’s museum envy. Of course, just a year earlier, Fort Worth had already upped its ante with Tadao Ando’s Modern Art Museum, kitty-corner to the Kimbell, a more rectilinear but equally sublime essay in meticulously crafted cast concrete—and so far, one of this century’s best buildings, anywhere. But with the Nasher as a catalyst, Dallas fired again, filling in its arts district in 2009 with a classy yet user-friendly performing arts center designed by Pritzker Prize winners Norman Foster and Rem Koolhaas. And Dallas hasn’t stopped there: just months ago it debuted an innovative urban park decked over a freeway, along with the edgiest major museum ever built in Texas, the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, designed by another Pritzker Prize winner, Thom Mayne. The cube-shaped building features a distressed-looking, crinkly concrete “skin” and a glass-walled escalator that is seemingly slapped onto one side, reminiscent of the Centre Pompidou’s external escalators.
Fort Worth’s answer will be Piano’s Kimbell addition, its opening certain to be an international event—if only to hold the architect to account for daring to amend, even at a respectful distance, a building regarded as nearly perfect. As if taking pains not to compete, Piano’s freestanding, glassed-in, concrete-piered pavilion will hug the ground, its low, flat roof a characteristically high-tech affair of aluminum louvers and solar cells. With classrooms, studios, a much larger auditorium, and room for touring exhibitions, the transparent building will invite the public in while extending the Kimbell Museum’s community outreach.
Nevertheless, this civic competition is rapidly giving way to a challenge far more complicated than building ever-more-spectacular museums and opera halls and filling them with tourists and day-trippers. The future that the Kimbell Art Museum propelled us toward isn’t one in which a handful of cultural monuments will stand as aspirational glimpses of a higher civilization. Instead it’s the sort of urban village growing up around the Kimbell—or around Dallas’s arts district and Houston’s museum district—with the arts and their institutions as the nodes of diverse, mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods where visitors can shop, dine, and live. Forty years ago, when the revolution sparked by the Kimbell began, the cosmopolitanism of today’s Texas cities was scarcely imaginable; almost certainly it was unforeseen by the civic-minded miller’s son from Whitewright, whose food companies and English portraits set the wheels in motion. It took the Kimbell to open our eyes, but now we can see entire cities as works of art, their futures limited only by our imaginations.
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