Volume 35, Number 18 · November 24, 1988
Poussin in Texas
By Richard Wollheim
Poussin, The Early Years in Rome: The Origins of French Classicism September 24–November 27, 1988.
an exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas,, Catalog of the exhibition by Konrad Oberhuber, foreword by Edmund P. Pillsbury
Hudson Hills Press, 367 pp., $34.95 (paper)
To see the early works of one of the greatest of seventeenth-century painters inside a late work by one of the greatest of twentieth-century architects has its own heady appropriateness. In their art Nicolas Poussin and Louis Kahn, the architect of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, aimed at the same sumptuous austerity. The spectator who, slipping out of the Texan heat, observes, under Kahn's silver-covered barrel vault, Poussin's Diana and Endymion, in which the heavy curtains of night are pulled back to reveal the chariot of the sun racing across the sky, gold on gold, witnesses art conversing across the centuries with art in a common idiom. (See the illustration on this page.) Until November 27 the Kimbell Art Museum shelters about one hundred works on canvas or on paper, almost all from the hand of the great French master, and anyone who loves painting or drawing and can get there, should see them.
Review, 3499 words
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