Renowned for its trim but top-notch permanent wing (which never charges admission), the Kimbell is not exactly the first stop for an art lover looking for something new. That’s to its credit: There’s a place in this world for the paintings you’ve loved as long as you can remember, the ones you always know where to find, and for many of us in Texas, that place is the Kimbell. So if a new face in there is sure to catch your eye, six new faces would be cause to get word out. Here’s a note on each, then, amounting in total to a firm nudge: Get out and see them while you can.
Pablo Picasso, Reclining Woman Reading, 1960
With the current hanging, you can draw a straight line in space through three paintings: Georges Braque’s Cubist Girl with a Cross from 1911, a visiting Picasso from 1960, and the same painter’s Nude Combing Her Hair, 1906. If you stand just right, you can see all three at once, and the view this little exercise affords can be taken as a sort of Picasso supercut: You have the progressive geometrization of the human form, catching the painter just a hair before Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907; a sample of the frenzy of Cubist activity whose floodgates that painting opened; and finally, the great big visitor in black and white, checking in on where Picasso finds himself some five decades later. This latest work is a grisaille reclining nude, substantially larger and more liberal with anatomy than either of the other two, having traded out both naturalism and the systematized refractions of analytic cubism. The canny curatorial technics from the Kimbell frame the visitor with the experimentation that loads its freedom with significance. What it loses in rigor, it regains in what might be called musicality. Attune yourself to the correspondences of curves, here and there a knee generously interpreted to echo the outline of a breast. The rhythmic alternation of just a handful of distinct grayscale tones makes the figure play like a caprice, scaffolded over a bassline of divan legs, those puncti wobbling across the understory.
Paul Gauguin, Still Life with Ceramic Dish, 1888
Famously hardworking Gauguin took hundreds of paintings to manually work through style after style. The visiting work here finds him immediately before he painted Vision After the Sermon, a painting from the same year that hit on the Synthetist vein in which he’d more or less continue for the rest of his career. But without this halo of a breakthrough that only hindsight affords, the painter of Still Life with Ceramic Dish was a decade deep in the throes of various Impressionist and Post-Impressionist techniques, no end-of-tunnel light in sight. In the discrete marks that constitute its roiling tablecloth, I see neither Seurat’s placid optical mixing nor Cézanne’s constructive parallel touches. He’s closer, here, to his friend van Gogh, into whose energetic brushwork can also be read a capacity for a certain violence. (This is the year van Gogh cut his ear, and 1891 would find Gauguin leaving a wife and children in France in the name of a primitivist quest for a notion of Tahitian authenticity.) Look at the staticky red strip at the bottom of this painting — remarkably dense with staccato brushstrokes. Because of the ambiguity of the table’s near edge, it’s possible to see this hectic matrix as the real chaos belied by the tabletop’s comparatively stable screen of paint — a somewhat hallucinatory reading which, even if tenuous, rings true to this moment in the artist’s stormy biography.
Gustave Caillebotte, Still Life with Oysters, 1881
The Kimbell’s own Caillebotte, On the Pont de l’Europe (1876-77), is something of a jetsetter: Artforum praised it as a “masterful work” when it traveled to LACMA in 2022, and now it’s away again, this time on a three-stop trip to Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, then back to Los Angeles for the Getty, and finally Chicago’s Art Institute. Meanwhile, its place is kept warm by a visiting work from the same painter, Still Life with Oysters. It shares a freestanding wall with Gauguin’s still life; while your right eye gets worked by Gauguin’s full reds and complementary greens, train your left on these shimmering shellfish, their opalescent silver set against an icy white cloth. Caillebotte departs here from the careful snapshot clarity that he used earlier to document the novel realities of modern life, as Kimbell regulars know well. In its stead, the gemlike guest displays a mystifying wet-in-wet technique appropriate to the quicksilver optical phenomena at hand: glittering crystal, swimming reflections in bottle green, and the oil slick iridescence of nacre.
Claude Monet, Sunset at Lavacourt, 1880
Few painters can boast admiration as universal as that enjoyed by Claude Monet, and Sunset at Lavacourt reminds us where all that started. The Impressionists owe their name to a different Monet painting, painted in 1872 and shown at the movement’s inaugural exhibition under the title Impression, Sunrise. Eight years later, Monet added a coda of sorts, or a reprise in a different key, which is the present guest at the Kimbell. Nearly identical in palette and composition, the pair brackets almost the entire duration of Monet’s first marriage: He married Camille Doncieux in 1870, and she died in 1879. Among the Impressionists, Monet had a reputation for favoring surface qualities at the expense of psychological depth; Cézanne is quoted pronouncing that “Monet is only an eye—but my God, what an eye!” There are two ways to read Sunset at Lavacourt, then. On the one hand, we could call it a rare instance of poignant profundity, a preciously rare window into the soul behind this eye. On the other, we can take Cézanne at his word and write off the poeticism as incidental to the purely optical reality Monet was faithfully recording. The way I see it, the resonance of the symbol persists either way, whether we credit the artist or the chance-ruled world to which he was bound.
Thomas Couture, The Duel After the Masked Ball, c. 1857
A first look at this painting gives little away. What could Pierrot, an American Indian, and a musketeer be saying to each other about swords in the middle of the woods? A well-known headline would have provided the key for contemporary audiences: There was a duel between minor politicians Deluns-Montaud and Boitelle in the Bois de Boulogne. The combatants and seconds had all come straight from a costume party, with no time to change, naturally. In addition to another painted version of the story from the same winter by Jean-Léon Gérôme, the event was documented by at least ten preparatory studies and one other partially-painted version by Couture, in Houston’s Wallace Collection, which departs from the work visiting the Kimbell only in its overall dimensions and the arrangement of the background’s trees. In all versions, the sad clown Pierrot loses to his traditional opponent Harlequin (of course), even though it’s unclear which politician was in which costume. A Prix de Rome winner perfectly capable of seeing paintings through to the Academy’s highest standards, Couture treated a few of the Duel’s figures with only a skeletal sketch, and he left large swathes of canvas exposed through a warm undercoat. It thus retains something of the overhasty, no-second-thoughts character of the duel that is its subject. These studies and half-paintings all feel like evidence of a hard-fought struggle, one in which Couture apparently was never to come out on top. Small wonder, then, that the sad clown Pierrot is the only one of the duelers whose face Couture could see clearly enough to paint.
Girolamo Romanino, The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, 1540
The last painting of the loan pack is also its chronological outlier, coming from Girolamo Romanino. An artistic heir to Giorgione and Titian, he spent his life living and working in northern Italy, mostly in his native Brescia, a town then under Venice’s control. Romanino might be a name less familiar to an American public reared on a Florence-heavy Renaissance canon (Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo), so if you haven’t yet given Venetian colorism as close a look as the Florentines’ comparatively drawing-dominated style of painting, now’s your chance. This Mystic Marriage exuberantly embodies the Venetian tradition that Romanino loved: Compare the glacial blue waters of its distant landscape to those in Giorgione’s The Tempest (c. 1508). The Kimbell shows how later artists took up the chromatic torch in turn, bringing these jewel-toned fabrics into the company of Tintoretto’s Portrait of Doge Pietro Loredan (1567-70), just around the corner.
