The Kimbell Art Museum announces 2023–24 exhibitions: Bonnard's Worlds, Art and War in the Renaissance: The Battle of Pavia Tapestries, and Dutch Art in a Global Age: Masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
News & Stories
Bonnard's Worlds
November 5, 2023–January 28, 2024
Pierre Bonnard, Dining Room in the Country, 1913, oil on canvas. Minneapolis Institute of Art. The John R. Van Derlip Fund
In Bonnard’s Worlds, the Kimbell Art Museum will present its first exhibition dedicated to the works of French painter Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), inspired by its 2018 acquisition of the artist’s Landscape at Le Cannet (1928). The exhibition explores the sensory realms of experience that fueled the painter’s creative practice—from the most public spaces to the most private. Comprising a careful selection of approximately seventy of Bonnard’s finest works created over the course of his career, Bonnard’s Worlds reunites some of the artist’s most celebrated paintings from museums in Europe and the United States, as well as many unfamiliar to the public from worldwide private collections. Governed neither by chronology nor geography, but by measures of intimacy, the exhibition will transport visitors from the larger realms in which Bonnard lived—the landscapes of Paris, Normandy, or the South of France—to the most private interior spaces of his dwellings and of his thoughts.
Bonnard’s Worlds is organized by the Kimbell Art Museum and The Phillips Collection. It is supported in part by Frost, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
Art and War in the Renaissance: The Battle of Pavia Tapestries
June 16–September 15, 2024
Willem and Jan Dermoyen, after Bernard van Orley, Invasion of the French Camp and Flight of the Women and Civilians, c. 1528–31, wool, silk, and metal-wrapped thread, 173 1/4 x 322 in. (440 x 818 cm). Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples
In the Renaissance, monarchs and religious leaders glorified their power and wealth through the art of tapestry, commissioning some of Europe’s greatest artists to commemorate significant events through the lavish medium. Monumental tapestries, much more costly than paintings, could serve as immersive and elaborate tools for dynamic storytelling and political propaganda, depicting histories in fine wool, silk, and metal-wrapped thread at monumental scale.
Art and War in the Renaissance: The Battle of Pavia Tapestries marks the first time that this entire cycle of seven large-scale tapestries—some of the most awe-inspiring examples of this often-overlooked artform—has been on view in the United States. The tremendous images, each about twenty-seven feet wide and fourteen feet high, commemorate Emperor Charles V’s decisive victory over French King Francis I that ended the sixteenth-century Italian Wars.
Designed by court artist Bernard van Orley, the tapestries were woven in Brussels by Willem and Jan Dermoyen in deeply saturated hues and exquisite detail, luxuriously highlighted with gold. Each composition is packed with figures including richly adorned military leaders, horsemen, and mercenary foot soldiers armed with swords, pikes, and firearms, all inhabiting beautifully undulating landscapes dotted with hills, towns, and forests. The immersive scale of the tapestries draws viewers into the world of Renaissance history, military technology, and fashion and will be complemented by impressive examples of arms and armor from the period.
Art and War in the Renaissance: The Battle of Pavia Tapestries is organized by the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte and The Museum Box in collaboration with the Kimbell Art Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Dutch Art in a Global Age: Masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
November 10, 2024–February 9, 2025
Jan van Huysum, Flowers in a Terracotta Vase, 1730, oil on panel, 31 1⁄2 x 24 in. (80 × 61 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Promised gift of Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, in support of the Center for Netherlandish Art, L-R 13.2019
In the seventeenth century, Dutch merchants sailed across seas and oceans, joining trade networks that stretched from Asia to the Americas and Africa. This unprecedented movement of goods, ideas, and people gave rise to what many consider the first age of globalization and sparked an artistic boom in the Netherlands.
Dutch Art in a Global Age brings together paintings by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Gerrit Dou, Jacob van Ruisdael, Maria Schalcken, and other celebrated artists from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s renowned collection. These are joined by four Dutch paintings from the Kimbell’s permanent collection, along with prints, maps, and stunning decorative objects in silver, porcelain, glass, and more, from the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. Exploring how Dutch dominance in international commerce transformed life in the Netherlands and created an extraordinary cultural flourishing, the exhibition also includes new scholarship that contextualizes seventeenth-century Dutch art within the complex histories of colonial expansion, wealth disparity, and the transatlantic slave trade during this period.
Dutch Art in a Global Age: Masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
ART & ARCHITECTURE