Annual Meeting 2006: Blanton Museum of Art Tours

Tour held Friday, October 20, 2006

Tours de force is perhaps the best way to describe the expert and enthusiastic Blanton Museum of Art tours by Blanton curators Kelly Baum and Jonathan Bober. Kelly focused on the collections of modern and contemporary American and Latin American art, while Jonathan concentrated on the major exhibition of Luca Cambiaso, which he co-curated. The following are among the highlights they provided.

The Blanton Museum of Art opened in 2006 after a quarter-century of planning, designing, and fundraising. Designed by Kallmann McKinnell & Wood Architects to complement existing buildings, the museum houses some 17,000 works of art, with only a fraction on display at any given time. There are four main departments: prints and drawings, European art, twentieth-century Latin American art, and American art. With virtually no acquisitions budget, the Blanton has relied on major donations which include the James and Mari Michener Collection of American Art, the Barbara Duncan Collection of Latin American Art, the C.R. Smith Collection of Western Art, the Suida-Manning Collection of Renaissance and Baroque Art, and the Leo Steinberg Collection of Prints.

The American and Latin American collections have been integrated to show conjunctions and disjunctions. Wall labels show not nationality but a series of geographic locations in which the artist was born, worked, and in some cases died. Among the artists Kelly Baum singled out were Joaquin Torres-Garcia (his School of the South advocated not just making a painting but a template for some future reality), Philip Evergood (Dance Marathon), Alfred Jensen (Mayan Temple, Per II: Palenque), George Sugarman (Two in One (a hand-carved, multicolored wood installation)), Peter Dean (a depiction of the Oswald assassination), Cildo Meireles (How to Build Cathedrals (an installation of 600,000 coins, 800 communion wafers, 200 cattle bones, 80 paving stones, and black cloth)), Gyula Kosice (kinetic sculptures), Richard Tuttle (the minimalist Light Pink Ocatagon), and Christian Silva (Black Sun—Green Flamingo).

Jonathan Bober, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and European Paintings, took us through the Luca Cambiaso exhibit with great knowledge of and enthusiasm for his specialized subject. Cambiaso worked in Genoa and Liguria, “the most insular and isolated of Italian cultural centers.” Cambiaso was “at least as significant a draftsman as a painter.” His nocturnes “anticipated de La Tour and Caravaggio’s by 25 to 45 years.” Many of the paintings and works on paper reside permanently at the Blanton, while far more are on loan from Genoa and elsewhere. Publication of the major catalog was expected very soon.

Other highlights of the Blanton not covered on the tours were the selections of Renaissance and Baroque painting, largely from the Suida-Manning Collection, and prints, largely from the Leo Steinberg Collection, magnificently integrated and displayed in the beautiful new building. A gem-like exhibition of Rembrandt prints from the Blanton rounded out a great visit.