Cezanne at the Kimbell Art Museum

The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth TX is a relatively small museum with a relatively small collection. Yet it has great quality examples from Old Masters through Modern art painting. I remember that I posted one of each, a Fra Angelico 1429-1430 small painting The Apostle Saint James the Greater Freeing the Magician Hermogenes, and a late Henri Matisse from 1946, titled Asia. Both were featured in my post of December 31, 2008.

Today I'm going with one of two Paul Cezanne paintings I particularly enjoyed at the Kimbell. This Cezanne painting from 1895, Maison Maria With A View of the Chateau Noir, seems much like many of his others, yet the colors were brighter and the brushwork more impressionistic than his prototypical landscapes with their squarish blocks of color. See how you like it. https://www.kimbellart.org/Collections/Collections-Detail.aspx?prov=false&cons=false&cid=8645

You can see some of my 3-D paintings on my website at www.jayrolfe.com/.

Kimbell Art Museum

In reviewing some of the paintings I saw on my around the USA trip last summer, I was struck this morning by the similarity of Gerhard Richter's seascape which I posted yesterday, Sea Piece-Wave, on display at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, with Jacob Van Ruisdael's Rough Sea At A Jetty painted in the 1650's which I saw at the Kimbell Art Museum across the street and also in Fort Worth. Van Ruisdael is known chiefly for his landscapes. This painting shows his skill with a seascape. Here is the link to the Kimbell's website, https://www.kimbellart.org/Collections/SearchCollections.aspx?P=1&Focus=0#, and the image they display, and below is the photo I took. In real life, the painting doesn't look as yellow as my photo, and doesn't look as dark as their image, it's somewhere in between. I'm sure you get the idea.

Last summer was my first trip to Fort Worth TX. I had long wanted to see the collection at the Kimbell Art Museum, and it was all I had hoped for and more. The Kimbell was also showing a visiting exhibit called "The Impressionists: Master Paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago." Even though I had seen all of them at the Art Institute of Chicago several times, I was glad to see them again.

You can view images of some of my paintings at www.jayrolfe.com/.

Richard Serra at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

When I took an around the country driving trip with my wife Randy Rolfe last summer, we planned to visit about a dozen art museums. We ended up visiting even more art museums on our 25 day, 9000 mile trip through 22 states, plus 6 other museums, a zoo, 11 national parks, several national monuments, and many other sights.

The first art museum we visited was not one I planned to visit because I'd never even heard of it. We were heading for the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth TX on the afternoon of July 18, 2008 and had just parked the car in the Kimbell parking lot when I saw an enormous sculpture across the street. We went to investigate and found Richard Serra's 67 feet 10 inch high cor-ten steel sculpture titled Vortex and made in 2002. The base is a little over 20 feet wide, and one can walk inside. It was sitting in front of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth which I didn't know about. Here are 3 photos I took of it, two of them from inside. And here's a link to the Vortex page on museum's website. http://www.themodern.org/f_html/serra2.html#top

Then we went inside the museum and found a great collection of contemporary art nicely displayed in a stunning building. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth certainly deserves more press then it gets.

You can view images of some of my 3-D paintings on my website at www.jayrolfe.com/.