The Blanton opening

Meet the donors who've made art museum possible

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Saturday, March 25, 2006

The scion of a Gilded Age fortune. The aviation pioneer. The best-selling novelist. The family of quiet art historians. The outspoken scholar. The woman with a progressive cultural vision of the Americas.

All these figures shaped the Blanton Museum of Art, which opens in five weeks on the University of Texas campus, at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Congress Avenue, after more than 25 years of proposals and planning. What will be on permanent display in the new Michener Gallery Building — modern and contemporary American and Latin American art, Old Master paintings, Western art — came to UT from a divergent lineup of art lovers. Their names and legacies will grace the art museum, soon to be the third largest in Texas and the largest university museum in the country.

Archer M. Huntington

The adopted son of a railroad baron, Archer M. Huntington (1870-1955) once commented that "wherever I put my foot down, a museum springs up." With little evidence to suggest that he actually set a foot in the Lone Star State, Huntington receives credit for paving the path for what is now the Blanton.

With a passion for all things Spanish, Huntington devoted his life to philanthropy. Specifically, he helped found institutions such as the Hispanic Society of America, the Museum of the American Indian and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others.

When a sculpture by his wife, the noted artist Anna Hyatt Huntington, was donated to UT in 1927, he learned of the university's need for an art museum. He donated about 4,000 acres of land that he owned along Galveston Bay, with the proviso that income from its oil and gas leases be used for an art museum.

The university eventually sold the property and used the proceeds in 1963 to build the University Art Gallery inside a modern, new Art Building. The gallery was renamed the Archer M. Huntington Gallery in 1980. Hyatt Huntington's "Diana of the Chase" statue still graces a quiet quadrangle surrounded by women's dormitories on the UT campus.

C.R. Smith

So passionate was Cyrus Rowlett Smith about all things Western that when he lived in New York in the 1930s, he fashioned his bedroom curtains to resemble cowboy chaps. A native of Minerva, in Milam County, Smith was named the first president of American Airlines in 1934. He built the company from a small carrier to one of the largest airlines in the world by the time he retired from the board of directors in the mid-1970s. He also built one of the finest privately gathered assemblages of Western paintings with more than 100 pieces, including major works by artists such as Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt; Smith began to donate his art to UT in the 1960s. Portions of it will be featured in an intimate gallery at the new museum.

James A. and Mari Michener

Ultimately recognized by the White House Arts Program for his lifelong financial assistance to artists, famed novelist James Michener's passion for the arts began when he was a boy. As a poor foster child in Pennsylvania, Michener collected stamps, intrigued by the miniature images. When he later worked in publishing in New York, he frequented the Whitney Museum of American Art on his lunch hours to ponder American painting. After achieving considerable financial success with his popular, painstakingly researched novels — "Tales of the South Pacific" netted him the 1948 Pulitzer Prize — Michener, who was born in 1907, decided that he would spend as much as he could on art created during his lifetime.

Along with his third wife, Mari, Michener set about collecting with his characteristically methodical style. He carefully researched artists, read everything possible and spent time getting to know the artists whose work he purchased. The result: a very thorough collection that charts the trajectory of the first half of 20th-century American painting — from the 1920s expressive landscapes of Marsden Hartley to the cool minimalism of Brice Marden in the mid-1960s.

The Micheners began donating their collection to UT in 1968 and continued to bequeath paintings into the 1990s. They settled in Austin in the early 1980s when the author was asked by then-Gov. Bill Clements to write a novel, "Texas," for the Lone Star sesquicentennial. Now totaling more than 400 paintings, the Michener Collection still stands as the core of the Blanton's American art holdings. In 1997, James Michener pledged $10 million toward a new museum; the new 124,000-square-foot gallery building is named in their honor. In all, the Micheners donated $44 million in art and money to UT, including $15 million to endow a graduate writing program that today bears James Michener's name.

"People who collect . . . are doing so in response to some inner deficiency," Michener once said. "If we were all perfectly adjusted, we would not need to engage in such bizarre occupations."

Barbara Duncan

When even the most curious of art historians regarded Latin American art as not much more than exotic folk craft, Barbara Duncan was developing an intellectual expertise and an art collection that made her a pioneer in the field. Her interest began while she and her businessman husband, John, lived in Lima, Peru, from 1947 to 1955, when she traveled South America, met artists and purchased their work. After returning to New York, she organized several seminal exhibits that made the art world sit up and take seriously art from Latin America. Duncan also spearheaded the first auction of Latin American art at Sotheby's in New York. Its unpredicted success virtually established the market for Latin American art.

Perhaps most importantly, though, was the group of postwar Latin American artworks that she personally put together. Finding kinship with the Blanton's first director, Donald Goodall (he served from 1963-1978), who himself had initiated a Latin American collection, Duncan also recognized UT's strengths in Latin American studies. Beginning in the 1960s, Duncan contributed more than 300 paintings, prints and drawings, and in 1975 spearheaded UT's first symposium to gather noted literary and art critics from around the Americas. Today, the Blanton's Latin American collection — with Duncan's visionary contributions at its core — is recognized as one of the best of its kind outside Latin America.

Robert Manning and Bertina Suida Manning

It's a long way from tiny Mart in the Texas Blackland Prairie back to the Renaissance. But

it wasn't too far for Robert Manning. It didn't take long for the precocious artist and student to land at New York University to study art history in 1949. There he met and married Bertina Suida, the daughter of Viennese-born art historian and collector William Suida, who had already begun to amass an impressive gathering of Baroque and Renaissance prints and paintings. After Robert and Bertina inherited the collection when the elder Suida passed away, the couple, who both made careers as art historians, spent three decades systematically acquiring art.

By the time Manning contacted the Blanton in 1994 — he called the museum out of the blue on a visit to the UT campus — the collection contained more than 700 works and was coveted as one of the best baroque and Renaissance art collections in private hands. Packed with work by masters such as Rubens, Tiepolo and Poussin, it was valued at $35 million when acquired. Next fall at the Blanton, works by Renaissance master Luca Cambiaso from the Suida-Manning Collection will anchor the first major exhibit of the artist's work in 50 years.

Determined to see the collection remain intact and end up in Texas, Manning began negotiations with UT to arrange for a partial donation and partial payment. Following his death in 1996, his daughter Alessandra Manning Dolnier, an art historian like her parents, continued the liaison until the university took ownership in 1999 after agreeing to pay the family $20 million.

Leo Steinberg

Imaginative, outspoken, visionary — octogenarian art historian and MacArthur "genius" grant-winner Leo Steinberg assembled a personal collection of more than 3,200 prints that still ranks singularly among those ever privately assembled. Over nearly half a century, Steinberg, who was born in Russia in 1920, acquired prints that matched his broad intellectual interests, from Leonardo da Vinci to Texas pop master Robert Rauschenberg.

Best known for his provocative 1983 book "The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion," Steinberg began assembling his collection in the early 1960s, when few recognized the value of fine-art prints, purchasing for $3 a 16th-century engraving that is today worth $7,500. Steinberg's serendipitous connection to the Blanton's curator of European prints, drawings and paintings, Jonathan Bober (Steinberg studied with Bober's father in the 1940s), led Steinberg to donate his collection to the Blanton in 2002.

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699