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Director Marla Price announces Modern Masters: A Tribute to Anne Windfohr Marion, an exhibition of contributions of one of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s greatest patrons, tracing her support over nearly a half century. Marion’s generosity to many institutions is legendary, but no organization stood above her love for the Modern. With 80 works by 47 artists, this tribute exhibition is on view October 23, 2022, through January 8, 2023.
Marion began collecting modern and contemporary art in the 1980s. At that time, her passion, and strategy, was to focus on American art at the highest level. She began by forming a small but stellar private collection of Abstract Expressionism, one of the most significant art movements since World War II. The exhibition begins with three renowned works from her collection, given to the Modern on her passing in 2021: Arshile Gorky’s The Plow and the Song, 1947, Willem de Kooning’s Two Women, 1954–55, and Mark Rothko’s majestic White Band No. 27, 1954.
The Museum’s former chief curator, and the curator of this exhibition, Michael Auping, has described the gift of these paintings as “a monumental addition to the Museum’s collection, each work a classic example of the artist’s signature style.” A scholar of Abstract Expressionism, Auping elaborates: “The Plow and the Song is an homage to the central theme of Gorky’s imagery, memories of the farms and landscape of his homeland of Armenia, and de Kooning’s Two Women stands perfectly in the center of the development of the artist’s famous group of Women paintings. White Band is nothing less than a masterpiece within Rothko’s oeuvre. A diaphanous blue atmosphere holds a mysterious white band in its field, creating an immersive experience that you can only find in his greatest paintings.”
The exhibition will combine these stellar paintings, seen together here for the first time, with a major group of works by Jackson Pollock, purchased by the Modern in the mid-1980s. At that time, Abstract Expressionism was generally out of the financial range of most museums. However, with Marion’s help, and that of her Burnett Foundation, the Museum was able to purchase an important group of works by Pollock, arguably the most famous and radical member of the Abstract Expressionists. The twelve drawings, paintings, and prints acquired by the Modern in 1985 poignantly trace Pollock’s expressive journey between psychological figuration and abstraction.
Marion’s support of the Modern’s acquisition program stretched far beyond Abstract Expressionism. Her recent gifts also include David Smith’s Dida Becca Merry X, 1964, and Ellsworth Kelly’s Spectrum III, 1967, major works by two artists who were critical to the transition from expressive abstraction to Minimalism. Marion was also instrumental in the acquisition of iconic minimalist works by Carl Andre, Agnes Martin, and Richard Serra.
Marion championed many new initiatives that would bring the Modern recognition nationally and internationally. In 1995, she provided a one-million-dollar grant for the acquisition of photography after 1970, when the medium took a leap beyond traditional forms of documentation into conceptual and performance art, allowing the Museum to acquire major works by an international field of artists including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sally Mann, Yasumasa Morimura, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Carrie Mae Weems, among many others also in this exhibition.
In 2001, Marion donated more than twelve million dollars to the Museum to purchase major works by key artists, resulting in the acquisition of art by Francis Bacon, Howard Hodgkin, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Sean Scully, and Richard Serra.
Many will argue that her greatest legacy will be her leadership in the effort for a new building for the Museum, designed by the world-renowned Japanese architect Tadao Ando. The building has been acclaimed by critics, artists, architects, and curators as one of the finest museums for the presentation of contemporary art in the world and is celebrating its twenty-year anniversary in December 2022.
Director Marla Price said, “Every great museum has its primary patrons who step up in ways that change their museums forever. Anne Marion’s generosity to the Modern was deep and broad and moved the Museum to a new level of importance and recognition. It is a joy to bring these works together in the building she loved.”
Each of the works presented in this exhibition was made possible by Anne Marion, Anne and John Marion, or The Burnett Foundation, in addition to gifts donated anonymously or in partnership with the Sid W. Richardson Foundation.
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