As recently as the 19th Century, the name of Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-1682) was as famous in art as Rembrandt’s, or those of his fellow Spaniards, El Greco and Diego Valezquez. But Murillo was a traditionalist who favored religious canvases and highly realistic work celebrating everyday life, and was eventually eclipsed by his bolder and less devotional Spanish brethren.
Next Sunday, the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth is returning Murillo to the public mind in a very big way, with the first-ever American retrospective exhibition of his work. It’s a most illuminating representation of what was called “The Golden Age of Spanish Painting.”
On view through June 16, the show features 34 of Murillo’s paintings, including the Art Institute of Chicago’s “Saint John the Baptist Points to Christ” (ca. 1655). Though the religious works dominate the show, there are a number of his popular genre paintings as well, such as his charming “Two Women at a Window” and “Four Figures on a Step.”
The museum is located at 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd. Telephone is 817-332-8451. Web site is www.kimbellart.org. On July 14, the exhibition moves to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Crossing the boundaries
On March 18, Britain’s Tate St. Ives museum in Cornwall opens a show of work by the idiosyncratic Scottish artist Ian Hamilton, which the museum describes as crossing “the boundaries between poetry, literature, politics, fine art and landscape design.” The show, which closes June 30, focuses on creations with a maritime theme.
The Tate St. Ives, in the town of St. Ives on Porthmeor Beach, is home also to the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden. Hepworth, who died in 1975, created extraordinary sculpture that transcends ordinary concepts of dimension and design.
The show closes June 30. The museum’s Web site is www.tate.org.uk/stives.
