The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that sixty-four people move to Fort Worth every day. One of the most recent transplants is the Kimbell Art Museum’s new chief curator Emerson Bowyer, who joins us from Sydney, Australia, by way of Chicago – and New York and San Francisco. An expert in British and French art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Bowyer was most recently at the Art Institute of Chicago after working at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and The Frick Collection in New York. Born and raised in Sydney, Bowyer studied art history and law at the University of Sydney and art history at Columbia University. What does someone who’s been in Cowtown for two months think of the place, and what might his background suggest is in store for our museum-goers?
Bowyer is known for organizing ambitious and timely exhibitions based on rigorous scholarship. His major exhibitions have focused on sculpture, like David d’Angers: Making the Modern Monument (2013, The Frick Collection) and more recently Canova: Sketching in Clay (2023–24, Art Institute of Chicago and National Gallery of Art) with C.D. Dickerson. But it’s Camille Claudel (2023–24, Art Institute of Chicago and the Getty) with Anne-Lise Desmas that really gets him talking. “It was the first retrospective in America about Camille Claudel in more than thirty years, so it presented this neglected artist to a new generation of the American public. She has this kind-of tragic story that’s often in movies and operas and all sorts of things, but it was great to focus on the artworks themselves and be able to appreciate her on her artistic terms.”
Claudel’s unique painted portrait bust of her brother Paul is one of Bowyer’s important additions to the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, along with Danish master Vilhelm Hammershøi’s early-twentieth-century masterpiece The Music Room, Strandgade 30, to name just two. But there is also a “wacky” painting he bought from Andrew Lloyd Webber: The Shadow of Death by William Holman Hunt (1873-74). “In 2021 I had the opportunity to acquire a significant painting for the Art Institute of Chicago and immediately thought of trying to find one by one of the pre-Raphaelites. For the most part, American museums aren’t rich in that material and it’s increasingly hard to get them out of England. Andrew Lloyd Webber has the most significant private collection of pre-Raphaelites in the world. He’d had the painting for thirty years.” It depicts a young Jesus Christ in his father’s woodworking shop, stretching at the end of the day, as his mother digs through a chest which contains his gifts from the Three Wise Men. She glances up to see his shadow cast, in a literal foreshadowing of the crucifixion. “My nickname for the painting is ‘Jesus Christ Superstar.’”
In the Kimbell’s collection, he was particularly impressed with the opportunity to see Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Modello for the Triton Fountain in Piazza Navona, Rome (1653) every day. “It’s the greatest Bernini terracotta in America. Terracotta is so wonderful because the artist has worked the material with their hands, so you see those flashes of creativity. The work itself is bursting with energy, and you can walk around it and see it at various angles.”
And what does someone new to Fort Worth think of the Kimbell after working on site for a couple months now? “It’s confirmed what I always thought of the museum which is that it’s a jewel box. One thing I wasn’t quite expecting, but should have, was the number of people who come here just to see the architecture. I knew the Kahn Building was significant, but I hadn’t realized how many make pilgrimages to see it. And I’m just looking forward to the opportunity to curate exhibitions in the Piano Pavilion galleries. Artworks look so beautiful in that space, and it will be amazing to work in there.”
Fort Worth is looking forward to that, too.
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