Countdown to opening day

Texas-size vision

Long before the soon-to-open Blanton took shape, UT leaders had a clear idea for a first-rate museum

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Sunday, April 23, 2006

When the Blanton Museum of Art opens Saturday, the University of Texas museum will bear a history rooted in the Lone Star State's urge to possess the best of everything — a university of first-class stature to rival the Ivy Leagues cultivating a collegiate art school that competes with the best studio programs and an art museum open to students, faculty and the general public, packed with renowned treasures.

It's taken almost 80 years to grow up to those ideals.

In 1927, when New York railroad baron Archer M. Huntington gave UT approximately 4,000 acres along Galveston Bay, the proceeds from which were to fund a UT art museum, the ambitious public university didn't even school students in art. (Similarly, money for the renowned McDonald Observatory was donated before UT had an astronomy program.) Not many universities in the United States did at the time. Training in painting, drawing and sculpture was the province of studio schools and academies modeled after great European institution such as École des Beaux Arts in France — specialized guildlike seats of learning where students learned from master artists.

Texas had no such advanced fine art academy when Huntington left his largesse. Nearly a decade later, then UT president and classics professor William Battle sent a proposal for a College of Fine Arts to the state legislature. This reflected a balancing act — which continues today — in land-grant universities to teach general knowledge and practical skills to ready graduates for the potential workplace.

When UT launched its program in 1938, it was one of the few U.S. universities to offer fine arts instruction. Classes — and exhibits — were shoehorned into UT's new Main Building — the Tower — and 109 students enrolled the first year.

After World War II, the G.I. Bill unleashed thousands of returning servicemen onto U.S. universities. The art department — now with 574 students — relocated to army barracks (leftover from the war) where the current Winship Drama Building now stands on the northwest corner of 23rd Street and San Jacinto Boulevard.

And there it stayed for a while. Student and faculty exhibits were scattered around campus. Creativity percolated, but restrictions sometimes hindered development. "It was very limiting to teaching art without a museum," says Kelly Fearing, the octogenarian painter and professor emeritus who joined the art department in 1947. "And we were anticipating a new art building and museum since the day I arrived at UT."

Fearing remembers that without galleries and exhibits, printed reproductions and slides stood in for the real thing. "There weren't any real art galleries in town, either," he says.

In 1963, UT opened the doors of a $1.6 million Art Building that included the 10,000-square-foot University Art Gallery. The boxy modernist building — designed by Austin's Page Southerland Page Architects — was called "whiz-bang" by one local publication.

Art history professor Donald Goodall was appointed the museum's first director. His charge? About 400 works of art, cobbled together from various donations over the years. Almost immediately, Goodall set about building a serious collection. He trained his focus on Latin American art, a field virtually overlooked by most U.S. museums at the time.

Goodall also snagged shows from art world capitals. "He brought us some wonderful exhibits of contemporary art from New York," Fearing says. "They really opened students' eyes." Student and faculty exhibits balanced the schedule.

Over the next couple of decades, the collection multiplied and the University Art Gallery began to morph from an exhibition hall to a museum that mined its own troves.

In 1968, best-selling author James A. Michener and his wife, Mari, donated 141 paintings from their growing collection of 20th-century American art, beginning a relationship with UT that would continue until Michener's death in 1997. Eventually the Micheners gave more than 400 works of art and $44 million to UT.

Then, in 1971, New York collector and scholar Barbara Duncan donated 200 paintings and about 1,200 prints from her holdings of 20th-century Latin American art, initiating a relationship with UT that would last until her death in 2002.

By 1972, the museum emerged with the problem that it would wrestle with for the next 34 years: a lack of space. Reserving the Art Building gallery for temporary exhibits along with faculty and student shows, the museum staked out the first two floors of the new Humanities Research Center (now the Ransom Center) on the other side of campus for the display of its permanent collection.

To this day, even informed Austinites confuse the literary archives of the Ransom Center and the university's primary art collection, which will be displayed at the new Blanton.

The space shortage and bifurcated gallery locations didn't stop UT from acquiring art. After finally renaming the University Art Gallery for its original benefactor in 1980, the Archer M. Huntington Gallery saw a spike in its holding over the next two decades. Its collection of prints and drawings multiplied exponentially and began to rival those of long-standing East Coast museums. Its Latin American holdings emerged as the best outside Latin America, and in 1984 the museum became the first in the U.S. to hire a full-time curator of Latin American art. Donors added to its American and contemporary strengths.

A rapidly professionalizing staff upped the pace of scholarship. Exhibits were organized and sent to other institutions. Books and catalogs were published. Conferences and symposia brought important artists and critics — and the international arts press — to campus.

In 1994, Mari Michener stepped forward with $5 million for the construction of a new museum building and the university finally started to get serious. By 1997, it announced officially that, yes, a new museum made the to-do list. After the Houston Endowment gave $12 million in honor of UT alumnus, former regent and Houston oilman Jack S. Blanton, the university renamed its art museum one more time.

At the time, it seemed that the museum's primary strength would remain 20th-century art, and that Austin had no chance at the expensive treasures of previous centuries that draw visitors to America's and Europe's encyclopedic institutions, such as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art or Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery. Yet the promise of generous exhibition space helped land two spectacular acquisitions in the following 10 years: the Suida-Manning Collection of more than 300 Old Masters paintings and prints and the Leo Steinberg Collection of 3,200 prints and drawings spanning five centuries. Now the UT collections can claim breadth and quality in Old Masters paintings, drawings and prints matched by only the nation's top museums.

Along with the Blanton gifts came a new name — the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art — an official recognition of the long journey the art institution had made from collegiate art gallery to an internationally respected museum with 17,000 works of art.

"It's been a long time coming," says Fearing, who plans to celebrate at this weekend's opening. "But we're finally here."