Greetings from Houston and the Lone Star State. I’m here for three National Review Institute events and to write about the new Gauguin exhibition at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts and also the Menil Collection. The MFA is, in my humble opinion, Texas’s great encyclopedic museum — a first-rate collection displayed in a spacious, gorgeous campus.
Like every other art museum in Texas, the MFA started late in the blue-chip art chase, but this tortoise, turbocharged with oil money, often outruns the Yankee hares. Locals in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio built superb private collections. Civic spirit is strong in Texas. These collections as well as fresh, big fortunes have come to Texas museums over the past 30 years or so, making the Texas arts scene both rich and appealing. And Texas museums, being in Texas, aren’t suffocatingly faddist. Curators, collectors, donors, and audiences here are intellectually curious and drawn to substance and also to beauty. Often, at New York and New England museums, I see intellectual and aesthetic freak shows.
Comments