The Kimbell Art Museum has commissioned distinguished director Philip Haas to make a short film inspired by Annibale Carracci’s “The Butcher’s Shop” (c. 1582), a remarkable early Baroque genre painting in the Museum’s collection.
Through a series of sensuous and poetic moving images, combined with telling touches of narrative, Haas conjures up the world of the butchers, the world of the artist, and the encounter that led to the painting. The Sonnabend Gallery in New York will host a preview from April 17 to 26, 2008.
The film is presented on a pair of screens facing one another. The images on one screen represent the scene depicted in the Carracci painting: two butchers working amid wooden trellises with iron spikes and hooks from which animal carcasses hang, a large wooden table containing various cuts of meat, a massive chopping block with a pair of sheep’s hooves and axe, an earthen floor featuring additional animal carcasses and severed animal heads, etc. The images on the other screen represent the opposite side of the shop, a view not shown in the painting, where Carracci has set up an easel to paint the butchers at work. The film is a meditation on Carracci's painting, work, and life -- and on the depiction of meat and human flesh in art from Carracci to Rembrandt and Francis Bacon. It features music by renowned film composer Angelo Badalamenti.
The Kimbell’s acting director Malcolm Warner commented: “For the Museum this is a voyage of exploration, pursuing into new territory our mission of interpreting art. As well as being a gorgeous work of art in itself, Philip’s film takes us into the imagination of someone looking creatively at a painting. We should take every opportunity to encourage our visitors in such creative looking. That’s why the film will be an invaluable educational tool.”
Before becoming a filmmaker, Philip Haas studied art history at Harvard University. He has made films with contemporary artists ranging from David Hockney and Gilbert & George to Australian aboriginal ground painters and Malagasy funerary sculptors. His work has been shown in retrospectives at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He has also directed six feature films, including the Oscar-nominated “Angels and Insects” and “Up at the Villa,” starring Sean Penn and Kristen Scott Thomas.
Kimbell Art Museum hours: Tuesday–Thursday 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. Web site: http://www.kimbellart.org/