Prado, Meadows Museum Expand Partnership

By Peter Simek

Nearly two years ago, the Meadows Museum announced a partnership with Madrid’s Prado which would bring three significant paintings to the SMU-housed museum over the course of three years. The third installment will open in mid-September with works by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. Now comes word that the two museums will extend the partnership, which also includes a scholarship exchange, for two more years:
 

Under the expanded partnership, the Meadows and the Prado will work together to mount two additional exhibitions that will be held in both Madrid and Dallas. Impressions of Europe: 19th-Century Vistas by Martín Rico, (Madrid, October 12, 2012 – February 10, 2013; Dallas, March 10 – July 7, 2013) will be the first-ever monographic exhibition on the work of Martín Rico y Ortega, one of the most important artists of late-19th-century Spain and a pioneer in landscape painting. Rico’s work enjoyed wide international recognition and exposure during his lifetime, particularly in the United States; some of the greatest American collectors of that period, including Henry Clay Frick, Henry Walters, and William H. Stewart were his admirers. The exhibition will examine each period of the artist’s career, from his earliest paintings of the mountainous countryside outside of Madrid to the glorious Venetian canals and Parisian vistas he painted in his later years.
 
In summer 2014 an exhibition featuring an important group of Spanish drawings from the Kunsthalle of Hamburg, Germany will be first presented at the Meadows Museum and then travel to the Prado to be exhibited there (October 2014—January 2015). The Kunsthalle has one of the most significant collections of Spanish drawings anywhere, including masterpieces by Murillo and Goya. These additional partnership exhibitions will again be accompanied by bilingual exhibition catalogues and academic symposia....