The Dallas Fort Worth area is rich with fine art institutions. Each city boasts of more than three major museums and are also fortunate to have many galleries, community art centers, outdoor sculptures of merit and artist studios. Of all the treasure troves of possible destinations, my personal favorite is the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, TX.
This gem of an American museum opened its doors in 1961 through the generosity of the Amon G. Carter estate (Fort Worth philanthropist) and his family.
Mr. Carter collected art that epitomized his love of the west. It has been said that early on in his collecting, the idea of a future museum for his beloved Fort Worth began to form. Originally the museum opened as the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art and housed Amon G Carter’s original collection of 60 works by Frederick Remington and 250 works by Charles Russell. The museum’s collection has grown in the last nearly fifty years, thanks to a large part by the museum’s driving force, Ruth Carter Stevenson and her teams of dedicated museum scholars and administrators. The museum currently holds nearly a quarter million objects ranging from 19th and 20th century American paintings, sculpture, drawings and watercolors, photography (including archival and monographic collections), and prints; each and every one of them a masterwork of the highest aesthetic standards. The museum strives to place western art as well as important American artworks with themes of American exploration and expansion, views of settlement, and depictions of cowboy and ranch life in the larger context of American art, culture, and politics that were happening concurrently throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
Recently, the museum has acquired several new acquisitions of note, a box assemblage by Joseph Cornell (American, 1902-1972), Soap Bubble Set, 1959, and two oil paintings -a meticulous American Pre-Raphaelite example Woodland Glade, William Trost Richards (American, 1833-1905), 1860 and an example of a pre-World War II American modernist, Conversation – Sky and Earth, Charles Sheeler (American,1883-1965), 1940. With the addition of the Charles Sheeler painting, the Amon Carter Museum increases its collection of Precisionist paintings and enhances its already notable collection of Modernists holdings.
The Sheeler painting is a great preview to a year-long theme that the museum plans in 2010 – “The Carter Gets Modern”. The museum is planning three special exhibitions this year. The first is American Moderns on Paper: Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, February 27 through May 30, 2010 which includes works on paper created from 1910 and 1960 by artists that include Georgia O’Keeffe, Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper and Charles Demuth. Next is Constructivist Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s, June 26 through September 5, 2010. This exhibition will be the first international exhibition of modernist art that the Amon Carter Museum has hosted. The exhibition will chronicle personal and conceptual ties that link artists working in North and South America in the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning October 2, 2010, a photography exhibition organized by the Carter, American Modern: Abbott, Evans and Bourke-White, will explore how these three photographers transformed documentary photography from a reform genre into a recognized facet of modern art. It will be an exciting year for the museum and its patrons.
If you think of the Amon Carter Museum as the museum with "cowboy art”…..you are right, there is still plenty of great examples of western art. A new Remington and Russell study area opened last spring. However, the museum’s interior displays many pleasant surprises that go way beyond American western art. If you haven’t been to the Carter in a while, I strongly urge you visit again. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed!
Submitted by,
Christine Guernsey, ISA AM
Guernsey and Associates, Fine Art Appraisals
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