Description: The Amon Carter Museum was the dream of Fort Worth philanthropist Amon Carter. He didn’t live to see it happen but he donated his collection of American Art to as the base for the permanent collection and made provision for a foundation to be established and managed by his daughter to allow for future acquisitions. The Museum opened in 1961 and the building was designed by Philip Johnson, and again he was in charge of the expansion design. It is a beautiful building with a very open and light feeling.
You will have no doubt that you have entered a museum in the Wild West as soon as you walk into the lobby. Works by Frederic Remington line the walls (paintings) and fill the cases (sculptures). If you aren’t familiar with Frederic Remington, you will get a very good introduction here in Fort Worth. For Al who is an aficionado of all things Western this was pretty much as good as it gets.
Remington’s works are not just flat paintings, they are moments caught in time. You can feel the movement , the pain, the strength of the animals, the soldiers, the drummers, the Mexicans, the cowboys, and Indians all come alive. Especially in his sculpture, you are drawn into the moment he has created. On the first floor you will see the works of Charles Russell and Frederic Remington. We really enjoyed "The Right of the Road", it depicts a bicycle rider and a stage coach meeting on a country road. The horses are started by the newfangled apparatus and it is very much a case of yesterday and today meeting head on. Through the works of Charles Russell the Native American is given a face, in the snow, climbing the rough mountain trail and in the battle. These to artist give us the west as they saw it, gritty, dirty, rough, and crude, but also very much alive.
On the second floor you find some of the more usual 19th century American Artists, Childe Hassam, Thomas Eakins, William Merritt Chase, Winslow Homer, George Caitlin, and John Singer Sargent. They have a small but very lovely collection of this period. There is a more modern section which I have to admit I didn’t visit. I did find an artist I wasn’t familiar with, Martin Johnson Heade, an oil painting of two hummingbirds hovering above a while orchid. It was beautiful. There is also a small bronze of Diana which is a copy of the original that stood atop the Madison Square Garden and now in on the main staircase at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Allow at least an hour, probably more, to visit this museum. They have a very nice gift shop on the lower lever rear. When we were visiting there were two exhibits of photographs, one of portraits and one of Native Americans. For information on the museum visit their website at
www.cartermuseum.org.
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