Austin museum acquires art treasures

By Gwen Gibson
Special to Third Age News Service

AUSTIN, Texas — For years it was a small, struggling art museum crammed into two buildings on the University of Texas campus. Then through a storybook scenario it acquired one of the world’s greatest private collections of Renaissance and Baroque art.

Today the eyes of the international art world are on UT’s Blanton Museum of Art, the new permanent home of the Suida-Manning collection, a treasure trove of some 700 works of art spanning the 14th through 18th centuries. These include 250 paintings, 400 drawings and 20 sculptures.

Dozens of the paintings and scores of the drawings are among the best in existence by such master artists as Correggio, Veronese, Piazzetta, Tiepolo, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Boucher and Fragonard, according to Jonathan Bober, the Blanton’s curator of prints, drawings and European art.

Six of the paintings had been on long-term loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and another 12-were taken from the walls of the Vassar College art museum.

Acquisition of these remarkable works — the last great collection of late Renaissance and Baroque art still in private hands — was announced in November 1998.

"This gives Austin a world-class museum, transforms UT into a major center of Renaissance and Baroque scholarship and elevates the Blanton into a center for the kind of original art research usually possible only through extensive travel to museums throughout Europe," UT officials proudly noted.

Fifty masterworks from the collection — some never before exhibited — went on display in March 1999 in the Harry Ransom Center, which houses the Blanton’s permanent collections. (Blanton’s staff and temporary exhibits are housed in the UT art building.)

Included in this exceptional exhibit are Veronese’s ethereal "The Annunciation," produced during the last years of the Venetian master’s life; Rubens, "Study of the Head of a Youth," an oil sketch epitomizing Rubens, contribution to the Baroque style, and two outstanding paintings by Guercino — "Landscape With Tobias and the Angel" and "Mary Magdalene."

The exhibit will remain in the Harry Ransom Center here until 2002, when the Blanton will move into a new, $47 million facility on the UT campus. Designed by the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, this will unite the Blanton’s art collections and programs for the first time in its 36-year history.

How did a relatively small museum acquire such a major collection? The story dates back to 1994, when the late Robert Manning, who grew-up in the tiny town of Mart, Texas, stopped at the Blanton museum and called director Jesse Otto Hite from the galleries.

Hite admits that she didn’t recognize Manning’s name, but she invited him to coffee in her offices and called in Jonathan Bober, who knew full well who Manning was.

Bober had visited the home of Robert and Bertina Manning in Forest Hills, N.Y., years earlier while attending a Harvard graduate seminar. And he had seen works from the remarkable Suida-Manning collection hanging on every wall of the house.

Over coffee with Hite and Bober, Manning described by Hite as "a quiet man with a shy demeanor" began pulling reproductions of his family’s holdings from a worn, brown paper folder.

Bober realized, incredulously, that Manning was looking for a permanent home for his collection. But he couldn’t imagine buying this treasure chest of art, valued at some $30 million to $35 million.

"It seemed utterly implausible," he said.

Nonetheless, he launched an intensive fund-raising campaign, convinced four anonymous Texans — longtime supporters of the Blanton — to put up $5 million in seed money. And the rest is legend.

After four years of discussions and negotiations, and much more fund-raising (which is still under way), UT President Larry Faulkner announced that Blanton had acquired the Suida-Manning collection.-"This is a great day in the cultural life of the university, the state of Texas and the art world," he said.

This rare collection — which Bober calls "a staggering sum even greater than its exquisite parts" — was assembled over two generations by a family of scholars who were experts in early European art.

William Suida, an Austrian-born.art historian, started the collection in the early 1900s. After his death in 1959, his daughter, Bertina, and her husband, Robert Manning, inherited the collection and continued to refine and enrich it.

Bertina Manning died in 1992; Robert Manning died in 1996. And the collection was left to their daughter, Alessandra Manning Dolnier, and her husband, Kurt Dolnier.

The Dolniers "generously allowed the university to purchase the collection for far less than its full market value," said Faulkner.

Several museums had courted the Dolniers. And "Sotheby’s was avid to have these masters pass through its doors," says Bober.

But Alessandra Dolnier said her parents wanted the collection kept together "in an environment where it would be treasured, studied and utilized by future generations of art historians and the general public."

"And it was my father’s special wish to bring it to his native state, Texas."

(To learn more, call 512-471-7324. Or visit the UT Web site: www.utexas.edu/cofa/hag.)

PHOTO: "The Annunciation" by Veronese is among the many masterworks on view at the University of Texas’ Blanton Museum of Art.