Discoveries: Bragging Rights
January 2008
In the last four decades, the University of Texas at Austin’s art museum has remapped the cultural landscape of central Texas. Its respected collections, formerly housed in cramped quarters scattered around the campus and therefore too little known, now receive star billing at the largest university museum in the country.Opened originally in 1963, the museum was called simply the University Art Museum. In April 2006, rechristened and dramatically recontextualized, it became the Blanton Museum of Art. Its new home, The Mari and James A. Michener Gallery Building, serves as a repository for more than 17,000 works encompassing a remarkable range of art historical riches. The museum’s modern and contemporary American art collection began in earnest due to bequests by the best-selling author and his wife beginning in 1968 and continuing through the early 1990s. Its more than 400 paintings include signature works such as Jerry Bywaters’ 1940s regionalist masterpiece, "Oil Field Girls," as well as social realist, Abstract Expressionist and Color Field paintings, including Adolph Gottlieb’s "Cadmium Red over Black" (1959), Ben Shahn’s "From That Day On" (1960) and Helen Frankenthaler’s "Over the Circle" (1961).
A striking counterpoint to the American holdings is the Blanton’s modern and contemporary Latin American art, whose centerpiece is the John and Barbara Duncan collection, which entered the institution in 1971. "The Blanton is one of the international leaders in the field of modern and contemporary Latin American art and has been for more than 30 years," says Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, curator of American and contemporary art and director of curatorial affairs.
European paintings and drawings comprise a third realm, including a recent arrival, the Suida-Manning Collection of Renaissance and Baroque art, a cache of predominantly Italian Old Masters assembled by two generations of art historians and acquired in 1998. The museum’s fourth ace, 15th- through 21st-century prints and drawings, was spearheaded by the acquisition in 2002 of the 3,200-piece Leo Steinberg Collection, making the Blanton the state’s only encyclopedic print collection.
The Blanton is named for former University of Texas regent and past chairman of the Houston Endowment, Jack S. Blanton. (The Houston Endowment, a private philanthropic foundation, gave $12 million in Blanton’s name for the new museum’s capital campaign.) The road to the reborn Blanton has been "a very long and complicated process. But the reward of a fabulous new building and the incredible response have made it worthwhile," says director Jessie Otto Hite, who began at the museum in 1979 as a conservation apprentice and rose to assume its highest post in 1993. Hite recalls, "The move to the new building started in 1978 but failed [at that time] because the governor of Texas [Bill Clements] wanted to build a state art museum that never materialized." Hite’s instrumental involvement ranged from the capital campaign to the dual coups of landing the Suida-Manning and Leo Steinberg collections. In addition to Hite, who retires this spring, and Carlozzi, who together are the museum’s most visible faces, there are five other curators and a total staff of 76 who work with an annual operating budget of $5.8 million.
Designed by the Boston firm Kallmann McKinnell & Wood Architects, the new 124,000-square-foot Michener Building, on the edge of the campus and within blocks of the state capitol, is hewn out of Texas granite and multiple varieties of limestone, a material native to Austin’s Hill Country. What it lacks in architectural surprises (the design complements the campus’s Spanish-Colonial Revival leitmotif) the building makes up for in a pleasing flow of classically conceived galleries that serve the collection well.
The Blanton is divided lucidly between downstairs spaces for major traveling exhibitions and its second floor galleries, devoted to the permanent holdings; a soaring, glass-covered, colonnaded atrium and commanding staircase connect the two levels. (The building’s original architects, the more adventuresome Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, resigned over a design disagreement in 1999. The controversy seems to have subsided, however, and most art audiences are genuinely pleased to have the new museum opened; the first-year attendance total of 160,000 exceeded expectations by 20,000.)Praise for the new $83.5 million museum comes from another museum director, Dana Friis-Hansen of the Austin Museum of Art. "The Blanton allows Austinites and visitors to enjoy an encyclopedic collection in a formal and dramatic setting," he says. "Their temporary exhibitions are backed by top-notch scholarship and fine catalogues, and range from little-known Italian masters to conceptual media and performance artists. It is a tremendous addition to Austin’s already rich art ecosystem."
Phase II, the 56,000-square-foot Edgar A. Smith Building (named for the Houston businessman and University of Texas alum who donated $4.5 million), is set to open this coming summer, with spaces for an auditorium, café, gift shop, classrooms and offices. Also coming in mid-2008 is the eagerly anticipated Larry and Mary Ann Faulkner Plaza, which will connect both Blanton buildings. (Larry Faulkner, the immediate past university president, championed the new museum and the Suida-Manning and Steinberg acquisitions.) The site’s 145,000-square-foot green space is being designed by California-based landscape architect Peter Walker, whose other prominent Texas project is Dallas’ Nasher Sculpture Center.
It’s a Saturday afternoon in mid-summer, and despite a huge deluge, the museum is packed. (Since the Michener Gallery Building opened, memberships to the museum have skyrocketed eightfold, from 1,200 to 9,600 households.) On this visit, drawings from Yale University Art Gallery and 19th-century masterworks from New York’s Dahesh Museum of Art present a panorama of art history on the main level, while the second floor showcases permanent treasures such as Simon Vouet’s canvas "Saint Cecilia," a circa-1626 jewel from the Suida-Manning Collection that holds court in the European painting galleries. In a nearby wing, the innovative America/Americas installation, culled from the Blanton’s dual-hemispheric holdings, boldly mounts North and South American greats side-by-side. Color Field painter Morris Louis and cult figure Alfred Jensen are placed with Uruguayan modern master Joaquín Torres-García, while sculptor George Sugarman’s jubilant, primary-hued, 19-piece 1966 wooden floor construction contrasts with Argentine kinetic artist Gyula Kosice’s motorized, bubbling, futuristic assemblages. Several galleries over, a WorkSpace show highlights Josefina Guilisasti’s canvases comparing the terrain of her native Chile with the landscape of Marfa, Texas. (WorkSpace, a series of contemporary exhibitions and residencies initiated by Carlozzi, has increased the museum’s profile as a nexus for contemporary international art.)
Deep in the heart of Texas, at the new Blanton, this art dialogue continues across centuries and continents, enlivened by a dose of contemporary and a measure of master prints, but with very few cowboys and Indians.
Catherine D. Anspon is an arts writer and contributor based in Houston.