Academy of Fine Arts showcases guitarists
No sooner will the Lone Star International Film Festival have wrapped its annual expo — on Nov. 15 — than the city will see another global-scale event taking shape, this one at the Fort Worth Academy of Fine Arts.
The concentration of worldwide interests begins Nov. 11 with film-fest activities based at Houston Street’s Norris Conference Center. These newer developments compare favorably with such long-established benchmark events as the Cliburn Piano Competition and the Fort Worth Opera Festival in terms of magnetizing the city to attract widespread attention with local-origin appeal.
On Nov. 20, guitarist Philippe Bertaud of Mansfield will launch a three-day classical-guitar competition at the Academy of Fine Arts, 3901 S. Hulen St. The Mansfield connection is recent: Bertaud, who was raised in France, has settled in as a teacher at the charter-school campus, in the process of developing a new base of operations for his 23-year career as a touring artist.
Bertaud’s greater objective with the International Guitar Competition is to identify promising students and “help them realize their dreams,” as he puts it.
“The event,” he explains, “will bring six talented young guitarists — of college age or older — from across the country to compete in Fort Worth at the Academy.
The goal is twofold: To discover talents poised for a breakthrough, and to offer grants and resources to students interested in the classical guitar as a profession. Sponsorships have been secured from Alhambra Guitars of Spain, the guitar-strings manufacturing firm of D’Addario and New York’s Carl Fisher Publishing Co.
Bertaud envisions the juried competition as a springboard to launch careers with paying performances on a worldwide scale. This event also will raise funds to benefit the Fort Worth Academy of Fine Arts, with proceeds supporting the instrumental program and offering grants for students in need of formal training and equipment.
A jury of working guitarists will select the finalists, in addition to performing and offering master-class instruction.
Details on the competition can be found online at www.philippebert-aud.com.
Kimbell connects Big Oil with Big Art
A Nov. 22 opening at the Kimbell Art Museum will unveil an exhibition called From the Private Collections of Texas: European Art, Ancient to Modern. The operative words are Private Collections — as in personalized mass acquisitions of art, enabled by oil-boom bucks. The industry-to-artistry connection is vivid, covering a sweep of history from Spindletop to the Barnett Shale.
The exhibition relates the stories of Texans who have collected European paintings and sculpture at the highest levels. Many of the resulting collections might seem more at home at an English countryside estate than on a West Texas ranch.
The exhibition draws from the most prominent such collections, showcasing more than 100 works. Reflecting the Kimbell’s own collecting areas, the exhibition will focus on the art of Europe and the ancient Mediterranean from around 700 B.C. to the 1940s. More than 40 collectors will be represented. Featured artists include Guido Reni, Guercino, Rembrandt van Rijn, Thomas Gainsborough, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian.
Roughly half the works in the exhibition grace private residences, unknown to the public and little known even to specialists. One important rediscovery is a sparkling landscape on copper by Paul Bril, a Flemish artist who worked in Rome around 1600.
The other half of the exhibition comprises works that were collected privately in Texas and later donated to museums. These selections are more widely known, though seldom contemplated in the context of private collecting. So who brought them to Texas, anyhow, and how did their collectors originally display them? The exhibition and its catalogue will lift a veil on private artistic enthusiasms and, through historic photographs, show how collectors have lived with their acquired art.
Collectors come in many forms. Some have felt no obligation to conform to traditional patterns of collecting and indulged eclectic tastes. Others have bought only one general type of painting — 18th-century French works, for example. Others are so explicitly focused that they have become definitive of this or that preferred genre — such as the Barrett Collection of Dallas, the most important array of Swiss painting outside Switzerland. A significant concentration of paintings by Mondrian descends from the collection of James H. and Lillian Clark of Dallas.
Texans not only collect ambitiously, but also give ambitiously. The Clarks made regular gifts of art to the Dallas Museum of Art during their lifetimes. And some philanthropic ambitions have combined with discerning taste to yield significant museums: Hence Kay and Velma Kimbell of the Kimbell Art Museu, as an obvious example.
The catalogue itself is a gem — the first comprehensive survey of the history of private art collecting in Texas. It will be available in the Kimbell Museum Shop.
On the Web: www.kimbellart.org
Michael H. Price’s new exhibition of original graphic-novel art is on
view through Nov. 28 at the Central Library Gallery in downtown Fort Worth. Contact: mprice@bizpress.net
