The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has acquired Gustave Courbet’s Le Coup de Vent (The Gust of Wind), a big 19th-century landscape painting to grace the peach-toned walls of the Beck building. When the painting first came on the market in 1998, it was estimated at between $800,000 and $1.2 million at a Christie’s auction, and ended up fetching $2.3 million — a record for the artist. No dirt on how much Caroline Weiss Law paid for it, or when she purchased it, but doesn’t it seem that if the MFAH would spend some cold hard millions on work by living artists, it could nudge out the Fort Worth Modern and the DMA for the best contemporary art collection in the state (rather than try, and never succeed, to beat the Kimbell for the best older stuff??) Just planting seeds here.
Hooray Courbet
