FORT WORTH, TX.- Some of the most celebrated works of modern art are coming to the Kimbell Art Museum in the fall of 2013. The Art Institute of Chicago holds one of the greatest collections of modern European art in the world. In the largest loan of its kind from the Art Institute, nearly 100 works from this collection will be traveling to the Kimbell Art Museum. The only venue for the exhibition, the Kimbell will present The Age of Picasso and Matisse: Modern Masters from the Art Institute of Chicago from October 6, 2013, through February 16, 2014.

“The Kimbell is proud to showcase Chicago’s treasures,” said Eric M. Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum. “Some of the great icons of modern art will visit Texas for the first time—paintings like Pablo Picasso’s Old Guitaristand Henri Matisse’s Bathers by a River. With nearly 100 paintings and sculptures on view, this will be the most important exhibition ever drawn entirely from the renowned modern holdings of the Art Institute.”

Douglas Druick, the President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute of Chicago, noted that while The Age of Picasso and Matisse is on view in Fort Worth, the museum will be making updates to the galleries that house the collection in Chicago. “We have long enjoyed a wonderful relationship with the Kimbell, and we still remember the warm reception that our collection of 19th-century Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works of art received in Fort Worth in 2008. We are very pleased that more of our collection will be seen in Texas.”

Among the works in the exhibition—which spans the first five decades of the 20th century —are 10 by Picasso and 10 by Matisse, the friends and rivals whose paintings revolutionized Parisian art at the turn of the century. Bold and brightly colored canvases by Matisse and his Fauve colleagues Maurice de Vlaminck and Georges Braque open the exhibition, followed by the complicated and subtly toned Cubist images of Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris.

The major movements of European modernism are represented by superb examples. Vibrant paintings by German and Russian artists—notably Max Beckmann, Vasily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall—will contrast with the reductive purity of abstractions by the sculptor Constantin Brâncusi and the painters Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. Chicago’s famous collection of Surrealist painting and sculpture will be shown in strength, including pieces by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Paul Delvaux, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Paul Klee, Alberto Giacometti and Picasso. A concluding gallery will feature works from the years around World War II by Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Balthus and Fernand Léger.

“It will be an honor to present the collections of the Art Institute in Fort Worth,” said George T. M. Shackelford, Kimbell deputy director, who will curate the exhibition with Stephanie D’Alessandro, the Art Institute’s Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator of Modern Art. “The chance to see some of the 20th century’s greatest masterpieces in one of its most beautiful buildings will be a profoundly moving experience—for us at the Kimbell and for all of our visitors.”