Before the Museums Came

I grew up in Fort Worth “before the museums came.”  As a teenager I wore braces on my teeth.  Each week I rode the bus downtown to the orthodontist’s office to have the braces adjusted.  (In those days children, like myself,  rode city buses all over town and no one noticed.) 

After the dentist tightened the braces (my jaw always ached) I walked six blocks to the Public Library to return five books and check out five more.  Then I’d go upstairs.  To reach the little room at the back of the building, where I listened to recordings of classical music, I crossed the large second floor lobby with paintings on loan from a Mr. Kimball. 

Beside the door to hallways was an Eakins of nude boys at a swimming hole.  On an end wall, dominating the room, was enormous portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence of a homely 18th Century English lady with a headband around her short curly hair,  white satin shoes peeking out beneath the hem of her diaphanous, white, Empire-style dress. 

Those paintings spiked my interest in art.  In college I audited two semesters of history of art.  Sitting in the back of the darkened classroom, as the professor flashed slides of famous paintings on the screen, I longed to see the originals. The paintings at the library were the only art I saw, except in commercial prints, before I married Wallace Gaarsoe and moved to Chicago. 

Fifty years passed in which my life changed in many ways.  Then in 1984 I returned to Fort Worth to live for a year with my Mother.  At 54 I was too old to become Mother’s child again.  We were both miserable.  My solace was going to the art museums and walking in the Japanese Garden. 

While I was away, living in Northern cities and traveling to Europe, Fort Worth also changed.  Amon Carter endowed the museum which bares his name.  The lobby displayed bronzes of cowboys and Indians as well as paintings by Remington and Russell. I enjoyed going there, but my favorite museum was the Kimball. 

Kay Kimball made his fortune in oil.  He and his wife had no children.  They left their entire estate to establish the Kimball Foundation, with an annual budget for acquisitions of about $7,000.000.  Each paintings in their museum (a Rembrandt, a Goya, a Caravaggio, a Monet) is among the artist’s finest work.  The Kimball has a Munch (famous for “The Scream”), a painting, girls on a bridge, is one of the few of this Norwegian artist’s work on display in the U.S. 

Today people come to Fort Worth from all over the World to visit its art museums.  Besides the Kimball and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the city has a stunning new museums of modern art.   The three museums are in a row on a hillside, just west of downtown, in striking modern buildings.  Philip Johnson’s Kimball, with its vaulted ceilings, is considered one of the famous architect’s finest designs.

Since the Kimball’s collection is primarily European art, the Thomas Eakins has moved up the hill to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.  As for Lawrence’s homely lady in her beautiful, gauzy Empire dress, she is no where to be seen.  Perhaps she is in storage and will debut again when the Kimball completes its new addition, now under construction, to display more of its permanent collection.