December 10, 2019: A Visit to the Amon Carter Museum
	December 7, 2019: A Walking Tour of Buenos Aires
	Return to the Index for 2019

As for today, Sunday, we won't have much chance to rest. We have time enough to unpack and time for a short nap, but we are meeting Prudence and Nancy and Karl in Fort Worth this afternoon. We will have much to tell them.

Getting to the Renoir Exhibit at the Kimbell

You have probably seen our route to the Kimbell numerous times before (if you've been to other pages in my photoalbum that involve trips there, including the Monet Exhibition earlier this year). It is really pretty straightforward.

Sometimes when we go meet Prudence and Nancy in Fort Worth, they are staying downtown at the Worthington, and when we meet them there we take a little different route (using TX 183, the Airport Freeway) to get over to Fort Worth. But to go directly to the museum district west of downtown, it's easier to take I-30, the old toll road, west to Fort Worth.

Just west of Fort Worth, we get off I-30 to head north on University Drive:

The Museum District consists of the three art museums (the Modern Art Museum, the Kimbell, and the Amon Carter) plus the Natural History and Science Museums that are just west of the Will Rogers Convention Center.

A couple of years ago, a large parking area was built just south of the Modern Art Museum and so it is now a lot easier to find a spot. We parked there and as we were walking over to the Kimbell, we passed an advertisement for the show currently ongoing at the Museum of Modern Art. Fred wanted his picture taken with it- for obvious reasons.

We continued over to the Kimbell, entry to which is free. We were to meet the San Antonio folks over in the Piano Pavilion, the new exhibit hall built to the west of the original building a few years back. So we walked through the main building and then across the courtyard to the west and into the large lobby of the Piano Pavilion.

Renoir: The Body, The Senses is the first major exhibition of Renoir's work to focus on the human form. The Kimbell did not originate the exhibit, but was the host for it in the DFW area. The exhibit includes approximately sixty paintings, drawings, pastels, and sculptures by the artist as well as works by his predecessors, contemporaries, and followers. An international roster of exceptional loans including Boy with a Cat (1868, Musée d’Orsay), Study: Torso, Effect of Sun (c. 1876, Musée d’Orsay), Seated Bather (c. 1883–84, Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums), and The Bathers (1918–19, Musée d’Orsay), as well as major contributions from the Clark’s renowned collection of the artist’s work, survey the breadth of Renoir’s career.

Entrance to the Renoir Exhibit

The Pavilion houses a small cafe, a gift shop, display halls for the permanent collection, and also the space devoted to the various special exhibits that the Museum hosts. Only these special exhibits require an entry fee, but that is waived for Museum members. Since we got the girls a membership a while back, we didn't need to buy admissions (although we did have to get some extra audio tours).

Renoir’s respect for tradition will be demonstrated by comparison with such paintings as The Three Graces (Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1636, Dulwich Picture Gallery), Andromeda (Eugène Delacroix, 1852, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) and The Repose (Camille Corot, 1860, reworked c. 1865/70, National Gallery of Art). His distinct approach to the subject of bathers will be underscored in a comparison of works such as his Bathers Playing with a Crab (c. 1897, Cleveland Art Museum) and The Bathers (Edgar Degas, c.1895, Art Institute of Chicago). Renoir’s profound influence on future generations will be seen in Pablo Picasso’s Nude Combing Her Hair (1906, Kimbell Art Museum), among others.

The exhibition investigates a number of themes central to today’s consideration of Renoir’s art, chief among them his engagement with the long tradition of the female nude as depicted in antique sculpture, in painting since the Renaissance and as espoused in his time by the École des Beaux-Arts. Further themes include the concept of the female body and the male gaze in the nineteenth century, Impressionist figure painting and the effects of light on flesh, Renoir’s talent as a draftsman, the relationship between Renoir’s treatment of the body and that of such contemporaries as Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, and Paul Cézanne, and Renoir’s late—still much debated—paintings and sculpture, works that inspired the next generation of modern artists.

Ron had decided to stay in San Antonio to look after Jax and the house while Prudence and her sister came up for their family meeting on Monday; Karl did accompany them, and that's why there were just the five of us. I probably should have collared a docent to take a picture of all of us, so Fred wouldn't have been out of the picture.

The artist’s critical reception—then and now—is explored in the exhibition and in the accompanying catalogue. During his lifetime, Renoir was idolized by artists including Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, and Henri Matisse, as well as by renowned collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein, Josse and Gaston Bernheim-Jeune, Albert Barnes, and Sterling and Francine Clark. But he also experienced brutal criticism. In 1876, critic Albert Wolff wrote in Le Figaro, “Would someone kindly explain to M. Renoir that a woman’s torso is not a mass of decomposing flesh with the green and purplish blotches that indicate a state of complete putrefaction in a corpse”—referring to Study: Torso, Effect of Sun, now regarded as one of the high points of Impressionism. Today, Renoir remains a polarizing figure worthy of scholarly investigation, unabashed contemplation and reconsideration by contemporary audiences.

With that general information out of the way (all of it was taken from the brochure we were given along with our admission tickets), let's head into the exhibition. We all had audio units, and the commentary really added a great deal to our enjoyment of the exhibit- much enhancing the posted information; of course each picture had a short description, but there were also various more general informative postings throughout.

An Orientation to My Photographs

While I enjoy museums, I find it tiring to take the time to read all the information that is usually posted, so I have a habit of photographing everything (assuming I have my camera or a phone with me) so that I can peruse it later at my leisure. What this means for this album page is that I can supplement my photos of the artwork with that additional information. I will apologize ahead of time that some of the photos were a bit fuzzy; flash was not allowed, and since I am not as steady with the camera as I would sometimes like, some of the pictures were less than sharp.

Unlike the other pages in this album devoted to art exhibits, I have another resource to help me- a complete transcript of the audiotour- and I am going to add that narration to the various pictures to which the audio applied (not every picture was a "stop" on the audio tour). I hope that this narration enhances your enjoyment of the artworks that we saw.

The Renoir Exhibit

So, to walk through the exhibit with us, all you have to do is to watch the slideshow below. Each slide will either be a picture with its accompanying information from the little plaque beside it, or one of the more general informational plaques that introduced sections of the exhibit.

Click on the Image Above to View the Slideshow

As always, you can move from one slide to another by clicking on the little arrows in the lower corners of each one. Also, you can tell which slide you are on by referring to the index number in the upper left corner.

But this slideshow will offer you an additional option- the only time in this photo album (so far) where I've done this. If I cannot fit the information from the little plaque on the slide itself, or if this picture is one of the "stops" on the audio tour, you will see one or more small, light blue stars in the upper right corner of the slide. If you would like to read this additional information, just click on the star and you will get a popup window containing it. If there are multiple stars, click on each one individually. Please remember, though, to close these popup windows before you continue through the slideshow.

I have tried to organize the slides in the same order as you would have seen if you had attended the exhibition, although when you are in a room with four walls it can be hard to know where to start and in which direction to move. But I think I've been able to sequence things appropriately.

After this work, I very much hope that you will walk through the exhibit as we did, and I hope you will enjoy doing so!

Towards the end of our time in the Renoir Exhibit, we found ourselves back in the first of the interconnected rooms of the exhibit space, and that is where Fred got a nice picture of Nancy and Renoir.

In the Lobby of the Worthington

The reason that Prudence and Nancy were here in Fort Worth was two-fold. First, one of their quarterly family financial meetings was scheduled for Monday. And, secondly, Prudence was meeting with a new artist that she hoped would want to display her works at Art Gallery Prudencia.

So the three of them were staying in Fort Worth tonight, at Prudence's favorite hotel there- the downtown Worthington Hotel. We have been there with them before, and this evening Prudence wanted to have dinner with us at the hotel, which we did. Before dinner, we had drinks and hors d'oeuvres in the lobby- chatting about the exhibit and telling them a bit about our trip.

Presently, we walked through the lobby bar area to the restaurant. We were also joined by Vicki and Dan Pier, long-time friends of Prudence and Nancy. We had a very nice dinner, but Fred and I were exhausted, having just returned from Buenos Aires that morning, so as soon as we were done, we thanked Prudence and Nancy and took our leave to head home.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	December 10, 2019: A Visit to the Amon Carter Museum
	December 7, 2019: A Walking Tour of Buenos Aires
	Return to the Index for 2019