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Kimbell Art Museum announces The Age of Picasso and Matisse. Modern Masters from The Art Institute of Chicago

Kimbell Art Museum presents The Age of Picasso and Matisse. Modern Masters from The Art Institute of Chicago, an exhibition on view October 6, 2013 through February 16, 2014.


View of a modern gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago with Matisse’s Bathers by a River. Photograph by Paul Warchol.

Some of the most celebrated works of modern art are coming to the Kimbell Art Museum in the fall of 2013. The Art Institute of Chicago holds one of the greatest collections of modern European art in the world. In the largest loan of its kind from the Art Institute, nearly 100 works from this collection will be traveling to the Kimbell Art Museum.

Among the works in the exhibition—which spans the first five decades of the 20th century—are 10 by Picasso and 10 by Matisse, the friends and rivals whose paintings revolutionized Parisian art at the turn of the century. Bold and brightly colored canvases by Matisse and his Fauve colleagues Maurice de Vlaminck and Georges Braque open the exhibition, followed by the complicated and subtly toned Cubist images of Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris.

The major movements of European modernism are represented by superb examples. Vibrant paintings by German and Russian artists—notably Max Beckmann, Vasily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall—will contrast with the reductive purity of abstractions by the sculptor Constantin Brâncusi and the painters Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. Chicago’s famous collection of Surrealist painting and sculpture will be shown in strength, including pieces by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Paul Delvaux, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Paul Klee, Alberto Giacometti and Picasso. A concluding gallery will feature works from the years around World War II by Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Balthus and Fernand Léger.

The Kimbell Art Museum, owned and operated by the Kimbell Art Foundation, is internationally renowned for both its collections and for its architecture. The Kimbell’s collections range in period from antiquity to the 20th century and include European masterpieces by artists such as Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Poussin, Velázquez, Monet, Picasso and Matisse; important collections of Egyptian and classical antiquities; and Asian, Mesoamerican and African art.

The Museum’s building, designed by the American architect Louis I. Kahn, is widely regarded as one of the outstanding architectural achievements of the modern era. A second building, designed by world-renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano, is scheduled to open in 2013 and will provide space for special exhibitions, allowing the Kahn building to showcase the permanent collection.

For general information, call 817-332-8451 or visit www.kimbellart.org