How any museum comes into being is the result of people's need to see art, and that's comparable to people's desire and need to have stories told to them, songs sung to them, and they need to see pictures.

In the case of the Kimbell Museum, it was the case of one man who, after having become a very successful industrialist and made an awful lot of money, he had started to feel this need himself.

So he made his own private collection.

He and his wife, it was his desire to share this with all the public that caused him to put in his will.

That the executors, who were now the trustees of the museum, should create a museum of top quality within the city of Fort Worth.

I don't think the kind meant to much to him as far as mortar and brick.

I think he just wanted a place to for his pictures to be shown to the public.

Where they could freely see them and enjoy them.

As far as he building the museum, he didn't want any part of it.

His friends would say, okay, why don't you build a museum?

He says, I'm going to buy all the pictures that I like and can buy as long as I live.

Then you all do what you want to do.

When I was first approached by the people here in Fort Worth, I didn't understand what they were about to do or wanted to do.

I thought they were going to have a little basket weaving art association somewhere off there in a in a place that hadn't been to noted for its.

Esthetic resources before.

And they, they flew to Los Angeles, where I was director.

Then we talked about it, but I didn't get the full message, though I was rather I was trying to be helpful to them to find somebody to run this little basket weaving place.

And they thought that I was just being very snooty and big shot.

But they came back and they explained the full deal.

And then other people that I had known here, because at that time I had already served about eight years.

I think, on the on the quarter foundation for the Carter Museum and had come here a few times and those friends called me up and said, hey, look, you don't understand.

They really mean business.

They're going to create a place that will be terrific, and you should be more interested.

So I looked into it some more and realized that indeed, it was probably the best opportunity anywhere in the history of making museums in America.

That's why I'm here.

Every work of architecture should be in natural light, and this particularly because you were seeing works of art which are really are.

Poetry and.

I thought of the painter as though he were choosing the place where his paintings would be the real reason for Lou Kahn is that he approaches any job that he has to do, as though he were Adam, the first man, and this has never been done before.

And to be truly creative, that's the way you have to approach any esthetic or artistic problem.

Therefore, we knew that the museum would always be full of surprises.

The blues would be one thing.

One day the blues would be another, and another day.

Depending upon the character of the light, nothing static, nothing static is electric bulb, which can only give you one iota of a character of light.

So the museum has, as many moves as there are moments in time and never as long as the museum remains as a building.

Will there be a single day like the other?

My mind is full of Roman greatness.

And the vault is so etched itself in my mind that though I cannot employ it, it's there always ready and the vault seemed to be the best.

And I realized that the light must come from a high point where the light is best in the zenith.

The vault, then.

Rising.

Not high.

Not in August.

Manner.

Somehow appropriate to the size of the individual and its feeling of home in his came to mind.

Rick always wanted to have the flexibility, but not by devices, but by its how the spaces evoked flexibility.

We met very well on this subject.

I had produced a pre architectural program stating what I thought the ideal museum should be, and sent it to a number of architects and went about 3 or 4 months later and revisited each one.

And in spite of the fact that I had this fairly large book that I'd written and Lucien had done many buildings before at a certain point, instead of talking about specific details, Lou said, well, you know, we really won't know what that museum should be until it starts to tell us what it wants to become.

And I realize that that is the essence of creativity.

It's a little scary because that's treating reinforced concrete and lead and steel and wood and those very expensive things with the same kind of creative innovation that you.

Well, Jackson Pollock used using Duco paint, you know, which you got by a can of very easily this side of the building shows very well the basic decision of materials, concrete does then the work of constructing it of holding things up.

The columns are apart from each other.

The space between must be filled and this is filled in a way which does not use the material that does the heavy work.

Therefore, the travertine, the travertine is a filling material.

It is a warm material which is a enclosing material in old days, the columns were very close to each other.

Today, as we said, we can span a hundred feet and the dome like vault has the properties of a beam.

How marvelous that is.

Therefore, I put the glass between the structure member and the member.

That does not construct because the joint is the beginning of ornament, and that must be distinguished from decoration, which is simply applied.

Ornament is the adoration of the joints.

Of expenditure of $7.5 million, six years of labor and painstaking work.

All the plans possible to make it solid and comfortable, and safe.

And enjoyable.

But we have.

We think, here a new element in the art of museology, or making museums and institution and it has to do with the basic things that one does in order to make a museum, you have to make a house right from the very beginning.

We wanted to answer the problems of reaching the people.

I mean, all of the people in all walks of life, in all kinds of people, in a way so that they were approached by the object of art in all its uniqueness in a way that had to do with the basic and generic things that we have been doing.

And we'll be doing from now on.

And that is the way the house is built and the way the house is furnished, and the way the house is installed.

In other words, the relationship of the things to the place where they are.

The acquisitions policy is actually quite simple and I believe that it is the only right kind of policy to have, and that is you acquire.

Top notch individual objects of art for whatever they may be drawings, prints, sculpture, paintings, whatever.

When you find them and when the price is right and you know they're authentic, and when they are definitive of the particular medium, period or master that they represent well, in a way it's like how you put a dinner party together or relate people in a social way.

You know, the whole history of art and, you know, even though things had no relationship historically that they do speak to each other the way certain people will speak to each other, even though they're very much different.

So in this gallery, we have some of the most recent or modern things in the entire museum, such as painting by Edouard Vuillard of his studio, painted about 1900, and Odilon Redon of 1914, a Georges Braque of 1927, the Matisse of 1921 and a Picasso of 1911, an analytical Cubist picture.

But in the very center of the gallery we have the earliest or the oldest thing in the entire collection, which is this interesting little lady, a Cycladic idol made on the Cycladic islands in the Aegean Sea, about the middle of the third century, before Christ.

She's made of Greek marble, is very delicate and very thin, but made geometrically with parallel arms, geometric nose, simple triangle for the pubic area and kept within a very shallow three dimensional space is very thin and delicate, but the angularity and geometry opposed to that space is part of her expressive and delicate power.

Of course, many of these same elements were used as Braque and Picasso, invented what we call the Cubist style, as in this picture, which shows a man with a pipe seated reading a paper.

All of the objects, some of them quite abstracted, are shown with a tremendous angularity and strength, and vigor.

But there all represented in a space that practically doesn't exist very shallow, difficult to read as space.

And it's the tension between the sharpness, the angularity, the vigor of those shapes within a practically non-existing space that gives a good Cubist picture.

A lot of its power of expressiveness.

Now, of course, one of the things that stimulated Braque and Picasso to invent the Cubist style were objects such as this one a small oboe figure or king priest of the beanie tribe.

In what is now what we call Nigeria, probably made toward the end of the 17th or beginning of the 18th century.

This man achieves his feeling of strength, vigor and leadership because of the Cubist, the blocky, the angular way, the geometric way he was put together much in the same manner as the Picasso painting.

And yet they all speak to each other and have a conversation in which we hope to get as many people today involved.

You just can't even say anything about it.

It was so fantastic, really, to see all those paintings that you've read about.

It was like getting some new freedom.

I thought it was thrilling.

I've got to say that I loved that Léger, but the whole thing was so fabulous.

Don't you think it changed every time I went to see it?

But I think I liked the gauguins, the best.

Life and truth and beauty.

The way this came about was that I had my own collection, which is now touring Russia.

Madame Furtseva saw this collection when it was at the Los Angeles Museum, and she asked if it could be loaned to the Pushkin and Moscow and the Hermitage Leningrad and after it was shown there, I had courage enough to ask her if we couldn't have a cultural exchange and get the Impressionists and reciprocity.

And that was how we got the 41 Impressionists, the Russians selected three museums, one was the Chicago Art Museum, the other was the Los Angeles Museum.

And.

The last was the president.

Kimball Museum.

I have seen new museums in several lands, but so beautiful architect, architecture for museum.

I have not seen never.

Oh, the pictures and sculptures that I know here.

There are first class.

Always the cultural and educational exchanges have come more easily than anything else between peoples of different, different tongues, different languages, different lands.

Next comes the economic exchange, economic cooperation.

Finally, and most difficult of all is political cooperation.

So I think we're seeing here the first step really, in a broadened in a broadened field of cooperation and exchange of cultural, economic and political ideas between this nation and the Soviet Union.

We had been here before and we're so impressed with the building.

And then this exhibit is something we'll never see again.

I think I'm enjoying Matisse and says on the most.

Oh, I like Rousseau.

Well, of course, this exhibition here is a highlight.

The Russian exhibit, I think we're going to spend our time on today.

We figure it's a chance in a lifetime kind of thing to see.

See some of the rare paintings that are in, in the museums of Russia.

We're more happy with the physical facility that is the building than we thought we'd be.

We're delighted with the reception that the collection is received by scholars and critics.

Everybody thinks that we did indeed achieve our goal of acquiring only top notch things.

Now, the relationship between the two is more than satisfying.

The flexibility of the whole institution was proved when we got the Russian show, and we were able to do, in very short order and very economically, safely and again, according to knowledgeable people, beautifully install it.

They quoted to me the people that had been through the museum and the number of them, and I said that, I said, that is the people that Mr. Kimball wanted to see.

The pictures.

That's what it was all for.

Now that one particular have reference to the Russian pictures, but you've had big crowds of people all the way.

We had, yes.

Great crowds, even before the Russian pictures.

Do you go yourself sometimes?

Yes, I go real often.

And as many things.

Yet I enjoy that the way they've hung them and the way people receive them.

When you go down there and hear the comments, it's a source of great satisfaction because they don't know that I built them.

We built the museum, but sometimes the guards sort of whispers, you know, and they'll come up and ask me about them.

And then what do you tell them?

Well, I just tell them, I'm glad they're there.

So I look at my work with a sense of what is forthcoming.

The yet not said the yet not made is what puts sparks of life into you.

This building feels and it's a good feeling that I had nothing to do with it.

There's some other hand.

Did it because it is premised, constructed.

It reminds me also of what truth is.

Truth is what must happen.

You cannot seek the truth.

It comes out of the nature of the human that in the course of his.

His thoughts and work, it reveals the nature of the human.

I wish history were actually taught that way, not just the event.

As a.

As the main point, but the revelation of man's nature.

By what happens.

Probably one of the most rewarding aspects of the first year is that, you know, people will say, you know, when you started that building and we start going up.

I used to go by there and I'd think my God, what are they doing now?

They got this awful thing.

That's all raw, concrete.

And it's dead gray and all that steel.

And that's the weirdest looking building.

I never saw anything like it before.

And then they say, well, you know, I've been down there a few times and it's sort of nice.

There's lots of places to sit and it's fun and I go have a cup of coffee and I enjoy it.

Life is in a tremendous percentage of making esthetic choices.

You have to make these conscious choices all the time in life.

If your life is going to be rich and rewarding and good, and then they begin to think going to the museum is good.

Yeah, but we should have more of that kind of a feeling.

All the rest of the time.

And I think that's why it's important to have a facility like this.

Why it's important to have the best objects you can possibly find.

And have them there all the time, free for the public to come in and look at.