What’s Texas Buying? A Primer on What Museums Acquire

In 2023, Lone Star museums made room for Judaica, Civil War drama, a jade rain god, and much more.

I t’s not a dirty little secret but a sign of depth and rigor. The wisest, sharpest curators and directors are most proud not of their exhibitions, new buildings, or journal articles but of acquisitions. We’re decorators and scholars but also shopaholics, not sleuthing for bulk but for the singular gems that, I like to believe, define a museum. To me, and I hope it’s not antiquated thinking, an art museum’s work revolves around its permanent collection. It’s the lodestar and the source of civic pride. “I just love that painting” is what brings people back to an art gallery over and over. I tend to judge a curator’s acumen by what he has acquired. If he has bought good things on a tight budget, I like him even more.

I’ll look today at Texas and what some of its museums acquired in 2023. It’s a case study in how museums build their collections. Texas has first-rate museums in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio. They’re booming, they’ve got money to spend for art, and, unlike lots of legacy museums in New York and New England, they’re confident, inquisitive places. Many of the stately old East Coast museums straddle incongruent worlds. They’re tired and stressed, and they’re easily addled by fads.

I’ll start in Fort Worth and the Amon Carter Museum, which collects American art only. As museums go, it’s new, opening in 1961 and evolving over time from a cowboy-art museum — Remington and Russell — to an encyclopedic American art museum like the Addison Gallery, where I was the director for years. The Addison was its model.

Last year, the Amon Carter bought Pyrrhus when a child, brought by Glaucias, king of Illyria, for protection, painted by Benjamin West in 1767. It’s a good story, putting aside its clunker title. The young Pyrrhus, a cousin of Alexander the Great, was sent to the court of Glaucias after his father was deposed as king of Epirus. Epirus is, today, part of Albania. Even in 300 b.c. or so, Albania was a fine kettle of fish. Pyrrhus is known today for the word “Pyrrhic,” as in “Pyrrhic victory,” and he did indeed, as an adult and general, beat the Romans in battles around 280 b.c. but at a dreadful, intolerable cost. Here, the baby Pyrrhus, fresh to a new home and new king, seems to rise in supplication, as if he’s a natural suck-up.

West (1738–1820) is famous for The Death of General Wolfe and was born and raised in Pennsylvania. We consider him an American artist, but he would have called himself British. His career as an artist was nearly entirely in London, where he was a high-establishment painter of portraits, history scenes, and religious pictures. He was the most florid of artists from his era, which included Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney.

West’s Pyrrhus is a good buy. It surprised me to see that it’s the earliest painting in the collection. Art museums west of the Mississippi early on usually grabbed a Copley or two, a Smibert, a Feke, or a West to anchor their American collections, in useless emulation of New England museums, which they aren’t. Today, the taut, dour Yankee faces in these paintings look out of place in Phoenix, Denver, and San Diego. “Too much sun and fun,” they seem to think. The Amon Carter’s new get is an action picture, colorful and crazy, and with a good story. Pyrrhic victories seem to sum up our age.

The Amon Carter, according to its press release, is in the throes of “telling an ever broadening story of America’s past, present, and future,” which is fine, except when it’s forced. It’s jarring to read that the museum is celebrating “a diversity of voices” in relation to art, which is seen and not heard. María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959) is a very good artist, and I think the museum’s In Between the News, a piece by her from 2019, looks great.

When I first saw one of Sadie Barnette’s FBI Drawings, I thought they were clever and pungent. Barnette takes photocopied pages from the extensive FBI surveillance file kept on her father, a civil-rights era activist. She copies them on pink paper and annotates them. I’ve seen so many of them now and think they’re trite and a shtick. Queer Rage, P.S. Your Parents Are Nuts, by Martine Gutierrez (b. 1989), is what I’m calling “Barbie Art.” It’s colorful kitsch about contrived trauma. Talk about a shtick. She’s a transgender “Latinx” woman “whose work reclaims elements of colonialism and cultural appropriation.” Yawn, and it’s junk.

What I’m seeing is brazen purchase-by-identity. And “Latinx” is a term real Latinos despise. It’s used by gringo academics and not-for-profit rent-seekers.

The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth is an anomaly since, by its very nature, it doesn’t fill gaps. The collection is tiny, fewer than 400 objects, ranging from antiquity to the last century, and only masterpieces need apply. In a succinct acquisitions policy, the Kimbell looks for works of art “that not only epitomize their periods and movements but also touch individual high points of aesthetic beauty and historical importance.”

In December, the end of its 50th-anniversary year, the Kimbell bought Standing Figure Holding a Were-Jaguar Baby. Yes, something we don’t see every day. It’s a carved jade figure of an Olmec king, or possibly a shaman, holding the god in charge of rain and the production of maize. It dates to 900 to 300 b.c., the Olmec era. The Olmec were a people, style, and civilization in southeastern Mexico and the foundation of Mesoamerica. The “were” in “Were-Jaguar,” as in “werewolf,” suggests that the baby can switch from animal to human form when the mood or occasion suits.

It identifies as phantasmal. It’s only a bit over eight inches but packs a punch. The two navels are aligned, representing an Olmec umbilical-cord fetish. The jaguar’s magic was believed to travel via the navel from the god to the shaman or king to the general welfare. I’ve heard crazier things, like “carbon from fossil fuel causes droughts.”

We don’t know why the Olmecs disintegrated, but for 2,000 years no one knew anything about them. The Kimbell sculpture is one of the finds that identified the Olmecs as artists of the highest order. It’s been famous since the late 19th century.

The translucent, sea-green jade has emerald veins. It’s polished to the point where I can see my reflection, uniting me with the supernatural. No slouch made it. Jade is a demanding, tough material, and the artist made it without the benefit of metal tools. It’s bewitching. So we know it’s a masterpiece, but why bring a were-jaguar baby to Fort Worth? It’s the best of its kind, but it and Fort Worth go back a long time together. In 1986, the Kimbell organized The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art. It was the first scholarly blockbuster on Maya art, and our were-jaguar baby was among the exhibition’s stars.

So in its anniversary year, the museum is saluting its past. The Kimbell already owns superb works of African and Oceanic tribal art. It has two four-foot-tall ceramic censer stands, probably from Palenque and dating to a.d. 700. Depicting angry jaguars and serpent birds, they’re suitable to scare naughty children into submission. Last year, the Kimbell also bought a smashing Gainsborough landscape from 1773. The museum buys one or two things a year, sometimes nothing, depending on whatever jaw-droppers come on the market.

As a matter of protocol and good manners, I never ask a museum how much it paid for something. It’s like asking a lady what color knickers she’s wearing.

Auction prices are easily available, and dealers, at least in New York, have to disclose if asked. I suspect that the Kimbell paid in the high seven figures for the Olmec sculpture. It’s money well spent for a unique work of ancient art.

Cruising to Dallas, I’ll look now at the Meadows Museum, the art museum of Southern Methodist University. 2023 was Amanda Dotseth’s first full year as director there. She succeeded Mark Roglán, a dear friend who died of cancer at age 50 in 2021. The museum focuses on Spanish art, and Dotseth’s specialty is Spanish medieval art, but this didn’t stop her from looking outside her field. This sends a message that she’s not an agenda director, aside from having an agenda of quality, and that she has catholic taste.

Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz painted the Portrait of Vicenta Beltrán de Lis Espinosa de los Monteros in 1845. Madrazo is Spanish art royalty. His father was director of the Prado, and his daughter married Mariano Fortuny, Spain’s best artist in the decades before Picasso. A donor gave the museum the money to buy this charming portrait of a young girl, in memory of Roglán, whose youngest daughter, Anna, was the apple of his eye.

In a show of the new director’s breadth of vision, the Meadows also bought José Guerrero’s Yellows Contained, an abstract picture from 1970. It’s got wall power. I reviewed a great exhibition at the Meadows a year or so ago on Spanish abstract art in the age of Franco. Guerrero’s work was on view then.

Too many curators and directors focus on art orbiting their dissertation topics, so fearful they are of leaving their comfort zone. The Meadows’ new director likes adventure, and she likes balance, both good things.

The Dallas Museum of Art bought idiosyncratically, which is good and different from the Amon Carter, which bought dogmatically. Bubbles is a whimsical, lovely consommé service in silver and glass made by Julia Woodman, an American metal artist who lives in Finland. The DMA has a very good contemporary silver collection, a rare thing in museums, and actually adds to it.

For the past few years, the DMA’s contemporary-art curators have received a $100,000 grant from a group that sponsors the very good Dallas Art Fair. The funds are for buying art by emerging artists shown at the fair. I’m a big believer in finding under-the-radar artists and putting their work in museum collections. This boosts careers, but it also is a challenge to curators to find new, quality work that, over time, keeps resonating with viewers. A good contemporary collection doesn’t need the newest million-dollar fad paintings.

During the fair’s April iteration, the DMA bought Michael Dumontier’s and Neil Farber’s Out in the Open, painted in 2023. They’re Canadian, which surprised me, since their art isn’t boring, and they work as a pair. They’re inspired by Ed Ruscha, except their work is better.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston is a favorite for its gorgeous new building, good exhibitions, and entrepreneurial collecting. In December, it inaugurated a new Judaica gallery. Judaica, a niche genre, is art made for Jewish communities around the world, fulfilling the practice of their faith. The gallery’s endowed by the Albert and Ethel Herzstein Charitable Foundation.

Albert, I learned, was a Houstonian who personified the American dream of the self-made man. A capitalist through and through, he made a fortune via the Big Three Welding Equipment Co., which pioneered the use of nitrogen, oxygen, and argon in oil drilling. My kinda guy.

The museum is buying superlative examples of Judaica, such as a Polish Torah crown from around 1800. It’s silver and silver gilt and exudes both reverence and exotic flair. This and a velvet and gilt-metal-thread Turkish Torah mantle from the 19th century are among the gallery’s star attractions. Jews have lived in Turkey for 2,400 years but now number only around 15,000 among 83 million people. NR readers probably know what happened to Jews and their synagogues in Poland, though I’m shocked to see how many young people don’t. The objects are not only beautiful, they provide layers of teachable moments.

The Houston museum is also doing something extraordinary, but it makes so much sense it astonishes me that so few places venture there. It’s collaborating with the Jewish Museum in New York, borrowing long term from its world-class Judaica collection. The Jewish Museum can’t display all the wonderful things it owns, but it’s not locking them in a vault. It’s sharing them with Houston. Most curators and registrars are too siloed — and too lazy — to collaborate, but Texans make things happen. The Jewish Museum has very savvy curators, too.

Houston has a fantastic photography collection started at the right time — the mid 1970s, when few museums wanted photographs — and in the right place. The museum, still fledgling, missed many of the old masters bargains and wanted a signature specialty. I’ll add that it had the right people in director Bill Agee, one of my old cronies, and local photography fans Stan and Joan Alexander. Houston’s Target branches agreed to give 5 percent of their profits to the museum to buy photographs. A star collection was born. Now, the MFA owns 35,000 photographs by 4,000 artists.

This year the museum got the grandest coup of all in buying Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the War, which is probably the most significant illustrated book of the 19th century aside from Audubon’s Birds of America. It’s a history of the Civil War, barely over when Gardner did the two-volume set. With 100 albumen silver prints by a corps of Union war photographers, it shows the everyday life of a brutal struggle. Harvest of Death is there, along with many other iconic images. Most of the 150 or so sets of the Sketchbook have been taken apart. Few are left in private hands. What a treasure.

My last stop is the very nice San Antonio Museum of Art. I’ve been there once, in May 2020. The museum in San Antonio and the Houston MFA were the first to reopen after the Covid lockouts. I’ve written so much about how destructive, how wicked the school and museum closures were that I felt obliged to visit the first museums to shun the mass hysteria and hypnosis that Covid became. As I predicted, no one died. Life went on. The only way to halt a respiratory virus is to ban breathing. Museums are public buildings, meant to serve the public.

Last year, the San Antonio Museum of Art got two important local collections of Mesoamerican art. Buying is one way to add art, but most acquisitions are made by gifts. This, of course, involves decades and lots of moving parts. Collections have to be formed. Relationships between the collectors and the museum need to be stewarded. Many of these relationships are botched along the way, usually by new, fatuous directors. The collections have to be museum-appropriate and stellar — baseball cards or subway tokens won’t do — and, finally, the collectors have to be in a place to let the art go to a new home.

San Antonio’s got a strong Latin American collection, from ancient days through the colonial period to today. Nelson Rockefeller helped start it. In 2023, John and Kathi Oppenheimer, two locals, gave their collection of Maya, Olmec, and Zapotec antiquities to the museum. Their things are mostly ceramic and stone.

Lindsay and Lucy Duff, also San Antonians, gave their South American antiquities. You don’t have to have Mexican or South American heritage to be fascinated by this art.

Texas art lovers, then, have much that’s new to savor.