By MIKE NORMAN
I’m leaving work early today.
I’m not going to the State Fair to eat fried butter. Not to knock the fair — it’s a lot of fun, and I’m sure this year’s version of heart attack bait is a tasty treat.
I’m going to the Kimbell Art Museum for the unveiling of Michelangelo’s
The Torment of Saint Anthony for museum members.
Whoa, nose way up in the air, you say? No, I’m no art expert, but I do love great art. I consider the Kimbell and the other museums in Fort Worth and Dallas to be possibly
the best reason for living here.
That, and if I ever did want to live someplace else, I’d probably have to pry my wife’s hands away from the door handle at the Kimbell or the Modern Art Museum or the Amon Carter Museum or the Dallas Museum of Art or the Nasher Sculpture Center, whichever one she picked to make her defiant last stand. The heels of her shoes would permanently etch the pavement as I dragged her away.
"We can come back to visit the museums," I’d plead.
"You can come back to visit me," she’d say.
I enjoy the emotions that good art can inspire, but a lot of that comes from what I learn from her. She often attends the lectures that come with each new exhibit, reads art books to prepare for the lectures and does other research on her own, all for the fun of it. It’s great to see her so devoted.
A headline in our paper earlier this year described
The Torment of Saint Anthony as a rare work of art. I guess that’s opposed to your ordinary, everyday art by Michelangelo.
Experts say he painted it in 1487-88, when he was 12 or 13 years old.
This is the same guy who later painted the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, for goodness sake. He painted
The Last Judgment and sculpted the
Pietà, also at the Vatican today, and
David in Florence.
"Rare" understates it. Kimbell experts say
The Torment of Saint Anthony is one of only four easel paintings attributed to Michelangelo. One is at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and two (both unfinished) are at the National Gallery in London.
I’m not going to have another chance to see authentic work by Michelangelo in person without a long airplane ride. The Kimbell scored a major coup by purchasing the painting, which has undergone extensive conservation and study at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and was the focus of an exhibit there this summer.
To see a picture of it, you might think Michelangelo must have been a twisted young teenager. Frightful demons grab and pull and snarl and snap at a levitating St. Anthony against a backdrop of rocks, a river valley and mountains.
In fact, the subject matter wasn’t original to Michelangelo. The egg tempera and oil painting on a wooden panel is his rendition of an engraving done about a decade earlier by the German artist Martin Schongauer.
An article about the painting from the Kimbell says the kid wanted "to try his hand at painting." Being an art genius and everything, he did well.
I’m anxious to see it.
Anyone who did not see the Kimbell’s exhibit of Impressionist paintings last year missed an awe-inspiring event.
Next up is the Nov. 22-March 21 exhibit of ancient to modern European art from private collections in Texas. The Kimbell says it will include work from Rembrandt, Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso, among others.
I’ll be there for that one, too. You don’t get this kind of opportunity everywhere.
Mike Norman is editorial director of the Star-Telegram/ Arlington and Northeast Tarrant County. 817-390-7830
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