Nicole R. Myers, Barbara Thomas Lemmon Senior Curator of European Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, will present a special evening lecture titled “Naked vs. Nude: Bodies and Bathers in Nineteenth-Century France” on Friday, November 22, at 6 p.m., in the Kimbell Art Museum’s Pavilion Auditorium. This lecture is presented in conjunction with the special exhibition Renoir: The Body, The Senses, which is half-price on Fridays from 5 to 8 p.m. No reservations are required; simulcast in the Kahn Auditorium.
With the advent of Realism in the 1850s, a challenge arose in the depiction of the female nude, once exclusively the domain of mythological goddesses and Biblical heroines. This lecture will explore the fraught, contradictory and shifting rules governing the depiction of the female nude in 19th-century French painting from Ingres to Renoir.
Dr. Nicole Myers completed her master’s and doctorate degrees in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University with a dissertation on Gustave Courbet’s Realist nudes. A specialist of French painting, she has published on wide-ranging topics from Realism to Symbolism, Poussin to Van Gogh. Myers joined the DMA in February 2016 and oversees the museum’s department of European art. Most recently, she was the co-curator of the critically acclaimed exhibition Berthe Morisot, Woman Impressionist, which also traveled to the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (Québec City, Canada), the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), and the Musée d’Orsay (Paris). At the DMA, she has curated several other exhibitions, including Women Artists in Europe from the Monarchy to Modernism, which highlighted the DMA’s exceptional holdings of artwork by female artists working in Europe between the late 18th and mid-20th centuries; Modernity and the City, a works-on-paper exhibition featuring the impact of industrialization on urban European life in the early 20th century; and An Enduring Legacy: The Eugene and Margaret McDermott Collection of Impressionist and Modern Art, dedicated to the single largest benefactors in the museum’s history, the late Margaret and Eugene McDermott, in 2018–19.
Prior to her appointment at the DMA, Myers held curatorial positions at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Saint Louis Art Museum.
RENOIR: THE BODY, THE SENSES
Over the course of his long career, Pierre-Auguste Renoir continually turned to the human figure for artistic inspiration. The body—-particularly the nude—-was the defining subject of Renoir’s artistic practice from his early days as a student copying the old masters in the Louvre to the early 20th century, when his revolutionary style of painting inspired the masters of modernism. In recognition of the centenary of Renoir’s death, the Kimbell Art Museum presents Renoir: The Body, The Senses. This daring exhibition, featuring more than 60 works by Renoir, his sources, contemporaries and followers, is the first major exploration of Renoir’s unceasing interest in the human form. It reconsiders Renoir as a constantly evolving artist whose style moved from Realism into luminous Impressionism, culminating in the modern classicism of his last decades.
This exhibition is organized by the Kimbell Art Museum and the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Additional support is provided by grants from the Texas Commission on the Arts and the Fort Worth Tourism Public Improvement District. Promotional support is provided by American Airlines, NBC 5 and PaperCity.
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Kimbell Art Museum hours: Tuesdays through Thursdays and Saturdays, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; Fridays, noon–8 p.m.; Sundays, noon–5 p.m.; closed Mondays. For general information, call 817-332-8451. Website: kimbellart.org
*Admission is always FREE to view the museum’s permanent collection.
** Admission to Renoir: The Body, The Senses is $18 for adults, $16 for seniors and students, $14 for ages 6–11 and free for children under 6. Admission is half-price all day on Tuesdays and after 5 p.m. on Fridays.