As what was once startlingly modern gradually becomes enshrined as a classic, so does A Modern Vision: European Masterworks from the Phillips Collection come to the Kimbell. Fort Worth’s repository of the Old Masters will be home for some treasures from the Washington, D.C. museum that was founded in 1921 as a haven for modernism in a country that had been slow to embrace the movement. Founders Duncan and Marjorie Phillips had a capacious understanding of modernism, as the former collected El Greco and Chardin as precursors to the moderns. However, they wound up amassing some of Western art’s most important works.
Sadly, the Kimbell’s Piano Pavilion will not be recreating the Washington museum’s famous “Rothko Room,” but there will still be masterpieces aplenty on view. The Impressionists will constitute an important part of the show, with such names as Monet, van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne. However, the works here will stretch as far back as Delacroix and Ingres and as far forward as the firmly 20th-century art of Picasso, Matisse, and Kandinsky. As far as summer blockbuster art shows go, it’ll be hard to top the star power here.
A Modern Vision: European Masterworks from the Phillips Collection runs May 14-Aug 13 at the Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd, FW. Tickets are $14-18. Call 817-332-8451.
