FORT WORTH, TEXAS.- The Kimbell Art Museum presents Caravaggio to Dalí -  100 Masterpieces from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, on view through September 26, 2004. The collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, is internationally renowned for its quality, rarity, and beauty. Caravaggio to Dalí: 100 Masterpieces from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art presents a selection of the greatest European paintings and sculptures from this remarkable and historic collection. Ranging from the Renaissance to the mid-20th century, the exhibition features major works by Caravaggio, Zurbarán, Hals, Goya, Monet, Cézanne, Picasso, Dalí, and many other outstanding figures.

Throughout its history, the Wadsworth Atheneum has reflected America’s cultural evolution—and on many occasions it has been in the vanguard of that evolution. During the tenure of its most celebrated director, A. Everett  “Chick” Austin, Jr.—between 1927 and 1944—it presented the country’s first important Italian Baroque exhibition, the first Surrealist exhibition, the first comprehensive Picasso exhibition, and one of the early exhibitions of abstract art. It also became the first American museum to purchase works by Dalí and Mondrian. The exhibition will bring its riches—long admired and coveted within the art world—to the broader audience they deserve.

Caravaggio to Dalí: 100 Masterpieces from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of
Art is a unique combination of two traveling exhibitions, Renaissance to Rococo: Masterpieces from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and Surrealism and Modernism from the Collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. The Kimbell’s presentation combines the exhibitions and bridges them with five additional works by Paul Cézanne, Eugène Delacroix, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre Auguste Renoir that will not be seen elsewhere.

Commented Timothy Potts, director of the Kimbell Art Museum, “The Wadsworth
Atheneum Museum of Art is the oldest public art museum in the United States,
and has a reputation second to none for brilliant collecting, ahead of its time and current taste. The best of its collections, as assembled in this exhibition, makes for an experience of sustained quality that very few museums in the United States can match.”

The exhibition features a number of Renaissance works, including Sebastiano
del Piombo’s striking 16th-century Portrait of a Man in Armor and many of
the Wadsworth’s celebrated masterpieces of the Italian Baroque. Chick Austin
began this collection when Baroque art was out of fashion, and was able to
acquire many outstanding paintings such as Bernardo Strozzi’s Saint
Catherine of Alexandria and the first authentic Caravaggio in an American
museum—Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy. Spanish, French, Dutch, and
Flemish paintings of the 17th century were also acquired during this time,
including the great Claude Lorrain, Saint George and the Dragon, and unusual
works of Michael Sweerts such as his dewy-eyed Boy with a Hat.

Austin’s successor, Charles Cunningham, built on this foundation and added
some of the collection’s most notable treasures, such as Francisco de
Zurbarán’s Saint Serapion, Frans Hals’s Portrait of Joseph Coymans, Salvator
Rosa’s Lucrezia as Poetry, and Orazio Gentileschi’s stunning Judith and Her
Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes. Other important works from the
Wadsworth’s collection on view at the Kimbell include The Sense of Taste by
the 17th-century Spanish master Jusepe de Ribera, and the gorgeous Portrait
of the Duchesse de Polignac Wearing a Straw Hat by Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le
Brun, painter to the 18th-century French court.

The 19th-century works in the exhibition, which are exclusive to the Kimbell
showing, tell a compelling story of changing moods in French painting—from
the sensuous exoticism of Delacroix to the Impressionists’ engagement with
the fleeting effects of light and weather, to the more deliberate,
structured picture-making of Cézanne. They include Monet’s The Boardwalk at
Trouville, Renoir’s Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil, and
Cézanne’s Rustic House.

The exhibition also features an array of works representing the major artistic movements of the 20th century. It mirrors a unique era in the history of American museum collecting, when aesthetically adventurous directors and curators struggled to make the case for modern art despite public prejudices and suspicions. The birth and continuation of modernism was a vital interest of the directors of the Wadsworth Atheneum in the mid-20th century, and they acquired and solicited works of great note to tell this amazing story. Almost half of the innovative modern works in this exhibition were purchased directly from the artists or from their first exhibitions. Among the most notable are Salvador Dalí’s frozen, cinematic dreamscape Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach, and Pablo Picasso’s The Bather of 1922. Paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko are also featured, as well as sculptures by Aristide Maillol and Henry Moore.

While the Kimbell Art Museum is among the youngest of the great American art
museums, the Wadsworth Atheneum is the oldest. Established in 1842, it is world renowned for its collection of nearly 50,000 works of art spanning 5,000 years, from antiquity to the present. The museum was founded by Daniel Wadsworth (a descendant of the family who journeyed on foot from Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636 to found Hartford and the Connecticut Colony), and named for the Athenaeum in ancient Rome, an institution of learning named in turn for Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom. from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art is organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut.