a decade. He’d long been arranging other boxes in tidy rows, but it wasn’t until he installed these silvery waist-high structures—each identical in their dimensions but unique in their construction—that Judd achieved a legacy-affirming feat: “He totally changed the relationship of humans and art in the third dimension,” says Thomas Kellein, the director of the Chinati Foundation, the 340-acre complex dedicated to Judd’s work. Typically, he says, “you walk around an object once, and you have seen it.” Not so with Judd’s mirrorlike boxes. As the sun floods in through the enormous windows, the cubes essentially become multidimensional landscape paintings, reflecting not only the peculiar light of the Chihuahuan Desert but also its golden grasses, scrubby trees, and limitless horizon. “As you walk among them, they don’t end to surprise you,” says Kellein, who moved to Texas from Germany. “Every day I see them again, and I am overwhelmed.”
MODERN ART MUSEUM OF FORT WORTH
Vortex (2002)
RICHARD SERRA
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