Kimbell Art Museum

The Kimbell Art Museum is an art museum in Fort Worth, Texas, United States.

History

The initiative to build an art museum for the people of Texas, came out of the Texas industrialist and collector Kay Kimbell - from (1886 April 1964). He determined in his will that such a museum should be built. His wife, Velma Fuller Kimbell decided to employ the entire inheritance for this purpose and donated her share of the inheritance for the Kimbell Art Foundation ( Kimbell Art Foundation ), which operates the museum and its collection today. Admission is free for all time.

The Board of Trustees addressed in consequence intensely with museum architecture, visited museums in Europe and the United States and consulted with leading museum directors and art experts. 1965 was engaged as first director Richard Fargo Brown. As a result, the collection concept and a detailed space program to be planned for the museum has been developed. The contract for the design of the museum was awarded directly to Louis I. Kahn in the fall of 1966, in the following winter Kahn began with the designs. Until 1969, four versions created for the project. In 1972 the museum was opened. In 2008, the museum announced extensions to the architect Renzo Piano.

Architecture

The building is surrounded on three sides by roads to the west lies a park that existed before 1972. Thither oriented Kahn the main entrance. Access for visitors is done by car from the parking lot to the north and east on a deeper level, so that the building is entered in the basement. About a symmetrical staircase leads from there to the central entrance hall. The delivery housed - was on the north side - also on the lower level. To the south lie the terraced gardens and a sculpture garden.

The floor plan of the ground floor is a three-piece, symmetrical construction of the museum. In the middle of the entrance courtyard, the foyer and museum shop, behind a management zone and the staircase to the library on the first floor is located. The south wing is the space for temporary exhibitions, a cafe at one atrium and auditorium. The north wing is completely used as an exhibition space, in the middle of two light wells were located. Other facilities were housed in the basement. The floor area is around 11000 square meters.

Kahn divided the total area into unitized units. The building consists of a total of sixteen parallel arranged tons roofs. Six form the northern and the southern wing and four the central building. These arched roofs that characterize the structure of the building are crucial, inside each 30.5 m long, 6 m high and 7 m wide. They each consist of two thin prestressed concrete shells, which are separated from each other at the apex by a light slot and only every three meters connected by short concrete members. The roof molding represents a cycloid curve, which describes a point of a wheel during rolling, whereby the desired low but yet elegant roof shape has been reached. Unlike real vault store developed by August Komendant for Kahn roof shells only at their endpoints on supports. So, from static- structural point of view they are more like curved concrete beams as barrel vaults. By far exciting design provides great flexibility within the exhibition space could be achieved. Are lower zones for technical installations in the ceiling between the individual roof elements. The very large, flat space is high-low structured and organized through the arched roofs and the resulting interplay of light and dark / buckle flat ceiling /.

The museum is naturally exposed to a large extent and the daylight was used by Kahn deliberately used to divide the space. He used the light in many different ways, reduced, reflected and filtered it so that there are a variety of light, space and color configurations from the homogeneous daylight.

• The apex of the roof shell, a light slit is arranged. A " light body " ( Kahn ) distributes the daylight evenly throughout the room while preventing glare. The element has been designed based on the angle of the sun and is made of a thin aluminum sheet which is perforated to 50%. The domes with their " silver light " practically form a reflector shield that optimally illuminates wall and floor surface.
• The courtyards with their " green light " break up the floor plan, so that an abundance of different spatial impressions created.
• There are no windows and no outside reference. Although the building is passed through by daylight, but it still remains quite introverted.

Kahn said: Every building, every room needs natural light; because the natural light, the mood of the day. The seasons are brought into the room. One might even say that the sun did not know how big it was before they touched the wall of a house. When the light falls into a room, it's your light, it's there for you and not for anyone else. It belongs to this space. The Kimbell Art Museum uses all natural light.

It was designed by Kahn and significantly influenced by its structural engineer and prestressed concrete experts August E. Komendant museum was founded in 1998 awarded the Twenty -five Year Award from the American Institute of Architects.

Collection

The museum has no actual collection highlights, but acquires and presented in the permanent collection of works of art from different eras and countries, especially from Western Europe (also medieval art ) and Asia (China, Japan), antique art (Egypt, Assyria, Rome, Greece), but also art from Africa, Oceania and Pre-Columbian art.

American Art is not collected because it neighboring Amon Carter Museum is responsible, and art from the mid-20th century also not, as there are in the immediate neighborhood in the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

The collection includes works by Duccio ( Resurrection of Lazarus ), Fra Angelico, Parmigianino, Giovanni Bellini, Andrea Mantegna, Adam Elsheimer ( Flight into Egypt ), Jan Mabuse, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Caravaggio, Titian, Canaletto, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo Nicolas Poussin ( Venus and Adonis ), Georges de la Tour ( cheaters with ace, saint Sebastian and Irene ), Claude Lorrain, Watteau, François Boucher, El Greco ( Dr. Francisco de Pisa), Diego Velázquez ( Don Pedro de Barberana ), Murillo, Jusepe de Ribera, Gianlorenzo Bernini, Francesco Guardi, Peter Paul Rubens ( Duke of Buckingham on horseback ), Frans Hals, Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael, Rembrandt ( portrait of a young Jew ), Francisco de Goya (Picture of the matador Pedro Romero ), Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, George Romney, Thomas Lawrence, William Turner ( Glaucus and Scylla ), Antonio Canova, Caspar David Friedrich, Frederic Leighton ( Portrait of May Sartoris ), J.-B. C. Corot, Jacques -Louis David, Eugène Delacroix, Camille Pissarro, Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet ( La Pointe de la Hève at low tide, weeping willows ), Édouard Manet ( portrait of Georges Clemenceau ), Gauguin ( Self-Portrait), Edgar Degas, Cézanne ( Maison Maria with a view of Chateau Noire, man in a blue coat ), Pablo Picasso ( man with Pipe ), Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse ( Asia), Georges Braque, James Ensor, Edvard Munch ( girl on the pier ). In addition, regularly traveling exhibitions.

2009 acquired a painting by Michelangelo ( " The torture of Saint Anthony" ) the museum.