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Hermann Park |
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On the afternoon when we visited the Law Pavilion of the MFA, Ron and Karl went back across Main Street to the Hotel ZaZa while Fred and I and the girls went the other way across Bissonnet Street to the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden. We also found the Glassell School of Art and its neat sloped rooftop garden.
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The Cullen Sculpture Garden
The Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden is just across Bissonnet from the Law Pavilion of the MFA. The garden displays about 25 works from the MFAH collection, including sculptures by Henri Matisse, Alexander Calder, David Smith, Frank Stella, and Louise Bourgeois. There are also sculptures created specifically for the site, including Ellsworth Kelly's Houston Triptych and Tony Cragg's New Forms. The garden also features works by local Texas artists, including Joseph Havel's Exhaling Pearls, Jim Love's Can Johnny Come Out and Play?, and Linda Ridgway's The Dance.
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Just inside the garden we found The Back Series- four bas-relief sculptures by Henri Matisse. They are Matisse's largest and most monumental sculptures. The plaster originals are housed in the Musée Matisse in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France. The sculptures were modeled between 1909 and 1930. In 1950, I, III, and IV were cast in bronze; II, which had been lost, was rediscovered in 1955, a year after the artist’s death, and then cast. The series has been cast in a bronze edition of twelve, including one for the artist's family. Nine complete sets are housed in nine major museums around the world; of course, one of them is here.
(Click on each cast for a larger image) |
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Antoine Bourdelle (1861 – 1929), was an influential and prolific French sculptor and teacher. He was a student of Auguste Rodin, a teacher of Giacometti and Henri Matisse, and an important figure in the transition from the Beaux-Arts style to modern sculpture. His studio became the Musée Bourdelle, an art museum dedicated to his work, located at 18, rue Antoine Bourdelle, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, France.
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The Walking Man is a bronze sculpture- the best example of Rodin’s "sketchy" impressionist sculpture and his most well-known "incomplete" figure. This work personifies the latter part of Rodin's career: the dynamic pose of a partial figure. Deriving much from Rodin's earlier work St. John the Baptist Preaching, including the powerful stance, Rodin had stripped all academic associations from his figure, and instead focused on what he considered essential: the dynamic pose.
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Roland David Smith (1906 – 1965) was an American abstract expressionist sculptor and painter, best known for creating large steel abstract geometric sculptures.
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Joan Miró i Ferrà (1893 – 1983) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona. Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and declared an "assassination of painting" in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.
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Sir Anish Kapoor (b. 1954) is a British sculptor specializing in installation art and conceptual art. Born in Bombay, Kapoor has lived and worked in London since the early 1970s. His notable public sculptures include Cloud Gate (colloquially known as "the Bean") in Chicago's Millennium Park and this similar work (known locally as "El Frijole", for obvious reasons).
Those are some of the art pieces that we saw, but there are some other good pictures that we took as we were walking around, and I want to let you look at some of these as well:
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Finally, here is a nice panoramic view of the Cullen Sculpture Garden:
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The Glassell School of Art
In May 2018, the Glassell School of Art opened in its new home: a 93,000-square-foot building designed by Steven Holl Architects. The new L-shaped building is constructed from a series of sandblasted, pre-cast concrete panels, alternating with panes of glass, in a rhythm of verticals and slight angles. It replaces the building that still appears on Google Earth, the source of the aerial views at the top of this page.
This is the sloping roof of the building and you can see the roof garden on top of it. |
Behind us is the sloping roof of the Glassell School. |
The BBVA Roof Garden extends The Brown Foundation, Inc. Plaza up the slope of the walkable roof of the Steven Holl Architects-designed Glassell School of Art building. The BBVA Roof Garden is accessible to the public from steps along the sloped roof. Visitors with limited mobility can use an elevator inside the Glassell School of Art building.
(Incidentally, I was curious what BBVA stood for, so I "googled" it and found that it stands for Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria. Better known by its initialis, it is a multinational Spanish banking group based in Madrid and Bilbao, Spain. It is one of the largest financial institutions in the world, and is present mainly in Spain, North America, South America and Turkey. I guess they gave money to the Glassell School.)
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Fred went back down the steps to the bottom to meet up with Prudence and Nancy. I saw that there was a way down into the building itself, and headed over to it, taking this picture of the nearby First Presbyterian Church on the way. The entrance led to to a stairway down into the building, where I found that the interior design was centered on this multi-story atrium. I continued down the stairs to the ground floor to exit the building in the direction of the sculpture garden. There, I met up with Fred, Prudence, and Nancy, and together we walked back to the Hotel ZaZa.
You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.
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Hermann Park |
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