Art from the Bass House: a masterpiece of Modern architecture provided the perfect setting for major works by post-war greats 

Undoubtedly the most ambitious — and perhaps the most elegant — of Paul Rudolph’s residential designs, the Bass House in Fort Worth, Texas, is a masterpiece of Modern architecture. Commissioned by  Anne and Sid Bass in 1970, the house provided the ideal setting for the couple’s world-class collection of contemporary painting and sculpture, further complemented by exquisite garden and landscape design by Russell Page and Robert Zion respectively. Staggering in scale, and with generous white walls illuminated by natural light, the house embodies the immensity of American Modernism and was designed to showcase the Basses’ growing collection of monumental works of art. Together, the house, art and gardens form a singular, transcendent work of art, defined by sweeping scale, dramatic lines, open space and harmony of forms.

On 12 May, Christie’s will offer exceptional works from the famous residence in Art from the Bass House. Headlined by a rare Rothko hailing from 1950-1951, as well as works by Ellsworth Kelly, Alexander Calder and Frank Stella, the collection will be sold as a single-owner presentation within the 20th Century Evening Sale, with additional works appearing in the Post-War & Contemporary Art Day Sale. Art from the Bass House marks a triumphant continuation of the Bass collection at Christie’s, begun in 2022 with the record-breaking sale of The Collection of Anne H. Bass, in which 12 works from Mrs. Bass’s legendary Manhattan residence achieved a combined $363,087,500.

The investor and philanthropist Sid Richardson Bass and his wife Anne Hendricks Bass were in their 20s when they sought out Paul Rudolph to design a home for them. The same vision that drew the couple to the pioneering architect also guided their art collecting. Together they compiled one of the most significant American collections of the 20th century, anchored by masters of the post-war period who fundamentally changed the mediums in which they worked. In addition to their trailblazing art collection, the Basses became well known for their commitment to philanthropy, supporting a wide range of causes including conservation, the environment and the arts.

Paul Rudolph was the chair of the architecture department at Yale University when his iconic Art and Architecture Building opened on campus in 1963. That year, Vogue called him a ‘Young Mover, Changing the Look of American Architecture’. Mr. Bass, then an undergraduate at the university, was swept away by the imposing concrete structure, which was lauded by critics and received the Award of Honor from the American Institute of Architects. A few years later, he and his wife spent a year drafting a letter to convince Rudolph to build a residence for them and were delighted when he quickly agreed.  

The Basses made a diagram of the house — how they wanted it to flow and how they would use the various rooms, including even a sunken seating area. Rudolph visited Fort Worth to look at the site, and on a flight back from Dallas to Japan, he made an initial drawing of what would become the largest and most intricate single-family dwelling of his career. The Bass House ‘represents Rudolph at his most lyrical, even dramatic, as well as at his most refined’ writes the architecture critic Paul Goldberger in his catalogue essay for Art from the Bass House.

Projecting outward in four directions, each supported by a 40-foot cantilever, the house consists of a series of interlocking horizontal planes that appear to float around a central courtyard. ‘The ideal of weight and counterweight, similar to the movement of the human body, became the genesis of the house,’ Rudolph later told House & Garden in 1991.

Constructed from white enamelled structural-steel and white porcelain-enamelled aluminium, the shining 18,000-square-foot structure includes 12 distinct levels within the four main floors. According to Goldberger, the house stands apart in Rudolph’s oeuvre as the only design in which he ‘expressed monumentality not through heaviness, but through a sense of lightness and refinement, with a series of horizontal planes stretching across the long façade, their forms playing off each other in a composition of exquisite balance. It is a house defined most of all, perhaps, by the word precision.’ Ample walls for large-scale paintings were illuminated by a combination of natural light that poured through the floor-to-ceiling glass panels and many skylights, alongside lighting designed by Ernst Wagner.

The Piano Room

Dedicated to the humanities,  Anne and Sid Bass were keen supporters of art, music and dance in Fort Worth and around the country. Music and art come together in the Piano Room of the Bass House, which also contains several of the most prized paintings in their collection.

Mark Rothko once said, ‘I became a painter because I wanted to raise painting to the level of poignancy of music and poetry,’ so it’s only fitting that his No. 4 (Two Dominants) [Orange, Plum, Black] had pride of place in the Piano Room. Completed in 1951, the canvas hails from a critical period in the early 1950s when the artist crystallised his signature mode of abstraction. Rothko executed just 18 paintings in 1951, and others from this year can be found in the collections of the Tate, London, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

In the words of the Rothko scholar and author of the artist’s catalogue raisonné David Anfam, ‘From 1951 onward, Rothko’s artistic self-confidence was everywhere visible – from the meticulousness, authority and range of the paintings to his very attitude toward them.’ A major highlight of Art from the Bass House, No. 4 exudes this confidence with dynamic fields of plum and black that reflect Rothko’s sophisticated understanding of the possibilities of colour.

An appreciation for syncopated rhythms and offbeat melodies contributed to Frank Stella’s own experiments with colour and Minimalism. Hanging to the right of the Rothko, Stella’s Itata is one of only nine monumental Notched V works the painter created from 1964-65. Four are now in institutional collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Executed in metallic powder in polymer emulsion, these bold canvases embraced flatness and linearity and anticipated the aesthetics of Minimalism. Prior to its acquisition by the Basses, the offered work was owned by renowned Modern architect Philip Johnson.

Complementing the geometry of Stella’s sharp Vs are two square canvases by Agnes Martin from 1975. With her spare and ordered compositions, Martin, like Stella, played a pivotal role in the development of Minimalism, the influence of which can be seen throughout the art and furnishings of the Bass house.  

The Living Room

Proceeding through the series of cascading terraces that make up the main level, one enters the Living Room, where the sweeping scale of the Bass House is immediately felt. Full-height window glazing frames a panoramic view of the surrounding gardens and landscaping. On either side, vast, vibrant canvases by Morris Louis and Frank Stella — from the Unfurled and Protractor series respectively — can be seen from every angle of the room.

Morris Louis considers his Unfurled paintings his greatest achievement. The 13-foot Gamma Upsilon from the series is a centrepiece of the Living Room, where it hangs across from one of Frank Stella’s sprawling Protractor works. Gamma Upsilon was painted in 1960, when the celebrated series became larger in scale with a greater variety of hues. Louis’s dripping bands of poured colour run in contrast to the systematic fan pattern of Stella’s Firuzabad III. Like many of Stella’s works, the fluorescent polymer work has an affinity with architecture, both in its geometric structure and its monumentality.

The Conversation Pit

There is perhaps no interior architectural feature more closely associated with Mid-Century Modern design than the conversation pit, and the Bass House has an unforgettable one. Alexander Calder’s Gypsophila (1949) presides over the sunken seating designed to encourage dialogue. The delicate large-scale mobile named for Baby’s Breath — which no doubt appealed to Mrs. Bass, herself a serious gardener — hovers above the seating area with white circular elements that cascade down like falling snow.

All-white mobiles from this period are incredibly rare to market, the present work having been in the same private collection for more than 50 years. Calder was drawn to the flower in part for its airy, weightless appearance. Likewise, Rudolph’s Bass residence stands apart from his well-known concrete structures for its floating lightness.

The Library

In the Library, where Mrs. Bass kept her desk, hangs Gino Severini’s Danseuse (1915-1916). Mrs. Bass was an avid balletomane who made instrumental contributions to the New York City Ballet, where she was on the board from 1980-2005, and the Fort Worth Ballet. Scenes from cabarets and nightclubs like this one were a cornerstone of Severini’s Futurist works from this period, and the work from the Bass House was included in the artist’s 1917 exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession Gallery in New York, the first solo show of any Futurist to take place in the United States.

The Bass collection encompasses several works that reflect Mrs. Bass’s passion for dance. Another highlight is the David Smith sculpture Boaz Dancing School (1945), which stood in the ground floor stairway. Here, Smith depicts figures in dynamic motion, based on the dancers he observed in the studio of choreographer Franziska Boas. Adding a pop of colour to the Living Room’s understated palette was Andy Warhol’s pink Ballet Slippers (1981). Mrs. Bass was also the owner of Edgar Degas’ Petite danseuse de quatorze ans. The artist’s iconic sculpture of a young dancer, which stood in Mrs. Bass’s Manhattan apartment, set a record for a sculpture by the artist when it sold for $41.61 million at Christie’s in 2022.

On a tabletop facing the Severini in the Library sits a luminous resin sculpture by Peter Alexander. The sculpture epitomises the beauty and minimalism of the Light and Space movement, of which Alexander was a key figure.

The Playroom

Downstairs from the Library is an informal living space that the Basses called the Playroom. Ellsworth Kelly was fascinated with how painting could engage with architectural space via form, line and colour. He was reportedly enchanted when he saw his Blue Black Red  (1964) installed in the Playroom of the Bass residence.

Spanning 15 feet, the canvas is a grand example of the artist’s vibrant hard-edge forms. Here, vast fields of unadulterated blue and red surround a central void of deep, rich black in a stunning demonstration of the artist’s powerful ability to create pictorial tension and enthrall the viewer using just a few basic elements.

The Garden and Pond

Mrs. Bass’s love of gardens was well known and evident in each of her homes. In the Fort Worth house she collaborated with the master gardener Russell Page as well as the landscape architect Robert Zion on a harmonious setting that complements the house’s Modern aesthetics. Page designed the dedicated garden area closest to the house, while Zion oversaw the surrounding grounds on the eight-acre estate.

Paul Rudolph had suggested Page to the Basses after seeing the magnificent gardens he had conceived for the Frick Collection in New York. Page’s choices at the Bass House — pleached oaks clipped into neat rectangles and casting long linear shadows at dawn and dusk, square flowerbeds — echo the clean lines of Rudolph’s architecture. An angular reflecting pool dotted with a variety of tropical waterlilies features a monumental reclining sculpture La Rivière. There was even a pinwheel-shaped greenhouse for Mr. Bass, who cultivated orchids.

A total work of art

More than half a century since  Anne and Sid Bass commissioned their iconic Fort Worth home, Art from the Bass House presents a rare opportunity to acquire works from a truly singular collection guided by a vision that married boundary-pushing architecture, natural beauty and exceptional post-war painting and sculpture in a total work of art.