Go from Paper to Metal at the Carter

It was a serendipitous moment when the Terry Dintenfass estate approached the Carter last year, offering a rare work for sale by Richard Hunt (1935–2023).

I was looking for a midcentury sculpture to acquire for our twentieth-century collection, and this was a fortunate discovery. Hunt was a prolific artist who worked for almost 70 years, and finding one of his earlier works from the 1960s is challenging. Not only was this sculpture, Natural Form, available, but I also discovered the work relates directly to the Carter’s collection of prints Hunt created at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in 1965.

Richard Howard Hunt (b. 1935)
Untitled, 1965
Lithograph
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Gift of Ruth Carter Stevenson
1970.334

Acquiring Hunt’s Natural Form inspired this exhibition, and this is the first exhibition to feature the Carter’s collection of Hunt’s lithographs. The display reveals Hunt’s unique visual strategies exemplified by Natural Form, exploring spatial and figurative ideas in two dimensions that relate to his unparalleled work in three dimensions. On view together for the first time, Hunt’s sculpture, Tamarind prints, and an early drawing the artist created while stationed in the army in Texas reveal the striking continuities between Hunt’s two- and three-dimensional ideas and his contributions to midcentury American art.

This was written by Shirley Reese-Hughes, the Carter’s Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Works on Paper and curator of Richard Hunt: From Paper to Metal. The exhibition opened this weekend and runs through March 2nd.