TEXAS: HOUSTON MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, PART III (KINDER BUILDING - 20th CENTURY ART)

 November 24, 2021

I've never done THREE posts on a single museum, but this museum is really a museum network of seven museums. Had we spent another day in Houston, I would have visited another museum in the network.

After finishing our tour through the first of the Houston MFA buildings, we decided to cross the street to check out a beautiful church we had admired on our way to our parking spot. It turned out to be St. Paul's United Methodist Church, built in the 1930s, and it also turned out to be locked. 

Before heading in to the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building, a relatively new addition to the Houston MFA, we took a quick walk through the sculpture garden.  The one piece that looked the most interesting, Anish Kapoor's Cloud Column, was pretty much un-seeable. 

I wasn't overly impressed by anything else in the sculpture park, but I did love this architectural feature, which I guess is a kind of a sculpture. From this side it looks like stadium seating, or maybe a freeway onramp. 

However, it is really a zig-zaggy path up a hill, almost like a linear labyrinth. If you don't have time for the zigs and zags, you can just take the stairs on the left.

Before heading into the Kinder Building, we stopped in the restaurant on the main floor to re-energize.

The Kinder Building contains art that is mostly from the 20th century. 

What a way to begin. This lizard-like creature is an assemblage of various organic and non-organic things: old-fashioned camera flashes for the eyes, bottle caps for the claws, old plant roots and discarded wood for the back. It is meant to embody "the vicious appetites and vices that plagued a deeply troubled sociopolitical era in [the artist's native] Argentina."

Sordidness from the series Cosmic Monsters (c. 1964) by Antonio Berni

Twenty years ago I had very little knowledge or understanding of 20th century art. My youngest son has given me a great education over the years, and I can identify almost every one of artists who created the following twelve paintings. Can you?  I divided the paintings into two sets and posted the artists' names and the titles of the works after each set of six.

SET A

#1 and 2

#3

#4 and #5

#6

SET A:

#1 Joan Miró, Circus (1927)

#2 Pablo Picasso, Portrait Bust of a Woman (1938)

#3 Edward Hopper, Excursion into Philosophy (1959)

#4 Salvador Dalí, Nostalgic Echo (1935)

#5 Alberto Giacometti, Standing Woman, Tall Figure (1948-1949)  [Okay, I could not have come up with the artist's name, but I recognized his style from another of his works we saw in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.]

#6 René Magritte The Kiss (1951)

SET B: 

#1 and #2

#3 (two views)

#4

#5 and #6

SET B

#1 Georgia O'Keeffe, Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow (c. 1923)

#2 Pablo Picasso, Two Women in Front of a Window (1927)

#3 Jacques Lipchitz, Still Life with Musical Instruments (1918)  [I would have missed this one too, but at least I am familiar with the artist.]

#4 Henri Matisse, Olga Merson (1911)

#5 Pablo Picasso, The Rower (1910)

#6 Piet Mondrian, Composition with Grid (1918)

How did you do? Having three Picasso's should have helped. 

On approach, this looked like a waterfall of gum wrappers to me.

Little Infinity by Jason Salavon (2020)

But zoom in, and this is what you'll see. There are almost a quarter million images from the ImageNet dataset, which is a picture collection used by researchers to train artificial intelligence systems. The symbolism is clear--we are being flooded by imagery in our modern world.

This reminds me of those "Find these items" games in kids' magazines. Can you find a sun, man, snail, tea kettle, tractor, and arrows? What else can you find in this iron design that started out as a window grill?

Constructive (c. 1970)
by Francisco Matto

Self-Portrait (1986) by Andy Warhol

I found the description for this T-shaped work especially powerful, so I have included it below the artwork.

Traditional Hang-up (1969) by John Outterbridge

Ventriloquist (1984) by Jasper Johns

We saw a lot of Robert Rauschenberg art on this trip. In 1964 he was the first American to win the Venice Biennale's grand prize. This is his homage to the floating city. The tub supposedly evokes the canals, and that's a cloud suspended over it. Together they also represent the city's decaying architecture.

Sor Aqua (Venetian) (1973)
by Robert Rauschenberg

This is another artist my son introduced me to and whom I've come to love. This painting reflects "the dappled light, shifting winds, and brilliant colors of eastern Long Island, where [de Kooning] had made his home."

Back Porch (1975) by Willem de Kooning

I thought these were concrete slabs  . . .

Le Sacre (1992) by Guillermo Kuitca

. . . until I got closer and saw that they were child-sized mattresses hand-painted with real and invented maps--some alluding to "wonder and fantasy," and others to "physical and psychological dislocation."

Love love LOVE this depiction of King Herod ordering the killing of children--reimagined in the pre-Civil War era and referencing the treatment of Black slaves.

Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might Be Guilty of Something) (2016) by Kara Walker

Does this remind you of anything? Maybe the Ghent Altarpiece? The artist used the same format but replaced the Ghent artwork with images from Villa 31, a shantytown in Buenos Aires. The top panels represent a shifting stock market.

Polyptych of Buenos Aires (2014/16) by Grupo Condongo

The Ghent Altarpiece for comparison:

I find I appreciate much of the politics of contemporary art. This fiberglass sculpture pays homage to the laborers who risk their lives to cross the Rio Grande to work in the United States. It evokes the patron saint of travels, St. Christopher, who carried a child across a river and then learned it was the Christ Child. 

Border Crossing (1989) by Luis Jiménez

Just a few months earlier we had seen two other fiberglass works by the same artist, Luis Jiménez, at the El Paso Museum of Art.

Cameras catch visitors as they finish exploring the museum and are on their way out. The images are projected on giant screens in the lobby.

Houston, you do yourself proud--at least as far as art goes.