Art in Texas

[Helene]

For any Ballet Talkers in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, or anyone planning to travel there soon, there are two superb exhibitions showing now:

Dallas:

Nasher Sculpture Center (next to Dallas Art Museum): The Women of Giacometti, through 9 April, 2006. (In addition to the stellar rotating permanent collection in the sculpture garden.) Admission to the museum is $10 for adults.

http://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/index...&PageID=1000000

(To view the site, you may have to disable pop-up blockers.)

The website shows most of the permanent collection, although not everything is photographed in its current location. For example, the Serra piece "My Curves Are Not Mad" is on the grass, with gravel between the plates, making a path to walk through.

The cafe in the Nasher is catered currently by The Mansion on Turtle Creek, and their famous Tortilla Soup is on the menu. However, their tenure ends on 28 February.

Fort Worth:

Kimball Art Museum: Gauguin and Impressionism, through 26 March 2006. $12 for the show. Permanent collection, free.

http://www.kimbellart.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.cfm?id=29

This is a remarkable show, covering Gauguin's paintings until his move to Tahiti. (One of him Tahitian paintings is shown at the very end of the exhibit.) He was married to a Danish woman, Mette Gad, and he moved to Copenhagen with his family for a brief, unhappy period. There are paintings from that era, including a rare self-portrait. The show is a joint effort by the Kimball and the Ordrupgaard in Copenhagen.

There were several themes from the exhibition's commentators, Richard Brettell and Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark. Gaugin attracted remarkable mentors in both business and art, among his elders and contemporaries. One of the assumptions had been that certain paintings by Gauguin were influenced by specific paintings of his mentors or contemporaries, but it has turned out that several predated the paintings which were supposedly the originals, including one by Cezanne which Gauguin owned. He was also capable of mastering a medium almost immediately, including sculpture in marble, wood, and wax.

Across the street is the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which has another great Serra outside the building. The building by Tadao Ando itself is worth a visit. Admission is free on Wednesdays and the first Sunday of every month, and $8 other times. Unfortunately, one of the main galleries is closed until 11 February to prepare for the Sean Scully show.

http://www.themodern.org/

I also found out that for a $4.50 premium day pass, it's possible to commute from Dallas to Fort Worth and back again.

by DART bus or light rail to Union Station

by TRE (Trinity Railway Express) train from Dallas to Fort Worth ITC (Intermodal Transit Center)

by T bus #7 to the Museums (get off at the Will Rogers Exhibition stop. It's to the left and impossible to miss the big ferris wheel.)

It makes Seattle public transportation look shameful by comparison.

[syr]

Thanks, Helene - I will be visiting that area with some of my family in a couple of weeks, and we will have time for a couple more special outings while we are there. I appreciate this info! - "syr"

[carbro]

Despite the incompleteness of trying to view three-dimensional forms in through two-dimensional medium, the Nasher website is certainly worth a look. Thanks, Helene!

It includes a Typewriter Eraser by Claes Oldenburg. A similar one stands on the Mall in Washington DC, very near my sister's office. She organized a staff meeting for a day that turned out to be, well, too nice to stay indoors, so notified those attending to "meet at the eraser." The younger ones had no idea what she meant! "Oh!," they said , "That's what that is!"