Kimbell Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection

This comprehensive and up-to-date Handbook of the Museum's collection presents over 240 works, including old master and modern paintings from Fra Angelico and Caravaggio to Cezanne and Matisse. Also included are important collections of Egyptian, Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman antiquities as well as the arts of Asia, Precolumbian America, and Africa. Each work is illustrated in full color and accompanied by an informative text written by the curatorial staff of the Museum and other leading scholars.

Arts & Photography

Kimbell Art Museum

A versatile genius whose oeuvre includes paintings, engravings, and detailed anatomical studies, George Stubbs (17241806) was fascinated by horses. This handsome book presents for the first time the wide range of his equine imagery, from refined portraits of racehorses to violent scenes of horses attacked by lions in the wild.
Taking full account of the associations and status of the noble horse” in eighteenth-century Britain and the colorful world of its devoteesboth high and lowthe authors examine Stubbs’s work from different points of view and offer many fresh interpretations. Malcolm Warner discusses how horses were regarded in Britain in Stubbs’s time, the unexpected connection between his horse-and-lion compositions and the creation of the English thoroughbred, and his classicism. Robin Blake examines the young Whig noblemen who were Stubbs’s first patrons, the grooms, jockeys, trainers, and other attendants who appear in his horse portraits, and his curious dealings with the Prince of Wales. The book also includes an essay by conservators Lance Mayer and Gay Myers on Stubbs’s experiments with wax and enamel.
For admirers of Stubbs’s art, eighteenth-century English painting, and horses, this book is an essential addition to their bookshelves.

Stubbs & the Horse

Warner, Malcolm

Blake, Robin

Individual Artists

Announcing the new Kimbell Masterpiece Series. These beautifully illustrated books by leading experts focus on major paintings, sculptures, and objects from the Kimbell’s outstanding permanent collection. Each volume presents the latest advances in scholarship and new insights of interest both to specialists and to the wider public. Virtually unknown until recently, the Kimbell Virgin and Child (1486) is arguably the finest surviving example of the silver religious statuary so prized in pre-Reformation Germany, where patrons valued the art of the goldsmith even above painting and sculpture. Made for Wilhelm von Reichenau, a powerful Franconian bishop of Eichstätt, the statuette came onto the market when church property was secularized in the early 19th century and was long owned by the Rothschild family. This handsome book is the first to examine this exquisite object and its fascinating history. Distinguished scholar Jeffrey Chipps Smith looks at the creation of the statuette in Augsburg, its place in the context of other works of art in Eichstätt, and the compelling story of Bishop Reichenau and his intense devotion to the Virgin Mary.

The Art of the Goldsmith in Late Fifteenth-Century Germany: The Kimbell Virgin and Her Bishop (Kimbell Masterpiece Series)

Smith, Jeffrey Chipps

Religion & Spirituality

Previously announcedThis original and eloquent study brings Frederic Leighton’s portrait of May Sartoris to life as an expression of the artist’s remarkable friendship with May’s mother, celebrated opera singer Adelaide Sartoris. The young Leighton frequented Adelaide’s artistic and literary salon in Rome in the early 1850s, and was on intimate terms with her by the time he painted her daughter’s likeness in England around 1860. Malcolm Warner places the work both within the tradition of British child portraiture since Joshua Reynolds and within its immediate biographical setting. Bringing together much new research into the circumstances of its creation, he suggests that its wistful mood and intimations of mortality reflect Adelaide Sartoris’s melancholy temperament as well as Victorian views of childhood.

Friendship and Loss in the Victorian Portrait: "May Sartoris" by Frederic Leighton (Kimbell Masterpiece Series)

History & Criticism

Saint James Freeing Hermogenes, an important painting by one of the world’s most beloved Renaissance artists, was privately owned and rarely seen until two decades ago, when it was acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum. Now an eminent authority reviews previous studies on this beautiful Fra Angelico painting and draws on new technical and archival research to provide a more precise reconstruction of its original format and context. In analyzing this painting, Laurence Kanter reexamines and confirms Fra Angelico’s status as a pioneer of the new representational style championed in Florence in the early fifteenth century by Brunelleschi, Masaccio, and Donatello, and he shows why he was one of the great artistic minds of his age. Kanter presents both detailed information for students and an introduction for the general reader to the methods and procedures of reconstructing and interpreting history when little contemporary written testimony survives.

Reconstructing the Renaissance: "Saint James Freeing Hermogenes" by Fra Angelico (Kimbell Masterpiece Series)

Kanter, Laurence

The Lone Star State is home to a dazzling array of world-class artworks, many in private collections and rarely exhibited. Reflecting the Kimbell Art Museum’s own collecting strengths, this book focuses on the art of Europe and the ancient Mediterranean from about 700 B.C. to around 1950. Over 40 prominent collections are featured along with works that have been given to museums in Texas or have left the state through gift or sale. Among the artists included are Thomas Gainsborough, Paul Gauguin, Guercino, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Vincent van Gogh. The distinguished scholar Richard R. Brettell contributes a comprehensive essay on the importance of private collecting in Texas.

From the Private Collections of Texas: European Art, Ancient to Modern

Brettell, Richard R.

Dickerson III, C. D.

Born in Bologna, Annibale Carracci (1564–1609) was one of the most revolutionary artists of the late Renaissance. Even before turning twenty, he rebelled against convention by investing his art with a sense of naturalism uncommon to paintings of the period. His early painting The Butcher’s Shop, a cherished work in the Kimbell Art Museum’s collection, marks the beginning of Carracci’s artistic journey and remains one of his most powerfully naturalistic works. This fascinating study explores the origins and significance of The Butcher’s Shop, placing it within the artist’s own career as well as the broader context of Italian painting. Detailing the uniqueness and vitality of Carracci’s style, C. D. Dickerson emphasizes the remarkable plein-air quality of the painting and explains how Carracci may have achieved this utterly novel effect, though in fact executing the work indoors in his studio.  He also sets Carracci’s work in the tradition of butcher’s shop paintings in Renaissance Italy, analyzes the painting in relation to the reality of the occupation at the time, and investigates where in Bologna such a butcher’s shop might have stood.

Raw Painting: "The Butcher's Shop" by Annibale Carracci (Kimbell Masterpiece Series)

Picasso and Braque offers an intimate look at one of the most pivotal exchanges in the history of Western art: the culminating two years (1910-12) of Analytic Cubism. While the Cubist experiment has long been a requisite chapter in the history of modernism, this is the first publication to delve deeply into these two intense years of productivity, revealing the intriguing pictorial game being played out between these two great masters. 
Essays by prominent curators and historians offer sustained readings of paintings, drawings, and prints in terms of their engagement with issues of genre, format, medium, and artistic process. In addition, the new technology of spectral imaging provides reproductions of astounding color and textural fidelity, making this an essential publication for those seeking to understand better the complexity of Picasso's and Braque's mark-making, which typically evades conventional photography.

Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912

Palermo, Charles

Bourneuf, Annie

Poggi, Christine

Cooper, Harry

Barry, Claire M.

Kahng, Eik

Devolder, Bart

Originally published in 1975 as a memorial to the Kimbell Art Museum's architect, Louis I. Kahn, Light Is the Theme provides an extended expression of the major themes articulated in his design for the museum. The text consists solely of Kahn's own words and explores his innovative use of natural light and playful employment of materials, which achieve their most refined state in the Kimbell, widely regarded as the architect's crowning achievement and admired as one of the greatest museum buildings of the 20th century.
Marking the 40th anniversary of the Kimbell Art Museum, this is the first time this classic book, updated with a new bibliography and a foreword by director Eric M. Lee, has been available outside of the museum.

Light Is the Theme: Louis I. Kahn and the Kimbell Art Museum

Kahn, Louis

Johnson, Nell E.

Architecture

The Cardsharps, one of the paintings that launched Caravaggio's spectacular career in Rome, captured the turbulent social reality of the city in the 1590s. This early masterpiece not only documented one of the everyday activities of Rome's citizens, but its vivid, lifelike style also opened the door to a revolutionary naturalism that would spread throughout Europe.
Helen Langdon, the scholar whose illuminating Caravaggio: A Life became a best-seller, returns to her subject and his milieu in this new, richly illustrated volume. She sets Caravaggio's Cardsharps within the context of contemporaneous literature, art theory, and theater and incorporates new archival research to enliven our understanding of the painter's time, place, and contemporaries. By fully analyzing one of Caravaggio's most daringly novel works, Langdon demonstrates the significant influence he had on the future of European art.

Caravaggio's Cardsharps: Trickery and Illusion (Kimbell Masterpiece Series)

Langdon, Helen

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Books by Kimbell Art Museum