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| The McNay Museum of Modern Art in San Antonio, Texas |
It is with great interest
that people go to museums for the works of art, but seldom do people
take the time to investigate the origins of the artwork, or more
specifically the origin of the museum's collection. Unbeknown to
most people and in most cases, private collections have become the
foundation of many a great museum. Some institutions, like the
Uffizi in Florence, Italy, started out in 1560 as an extension to the
Medici Palace to house government offices, hence its name Galleria
degli Uffizi, generally known as the Uffizi. The private Medici art
collection was displayed in the piano nobile, or “noble
floor” of the building, and was open to the public; eventually the
collection expanded to all the galleries and became one of the
largest and grandest private art collections to become a public
museum housed in its original setting.
In Italy, all the well
known family names have large and small palaces, which have also been
turned into private museums, for the purpose of displaying the
extensive family art collections. Two impressive collections in Rome
are the Doria Pamphilj, and the Colonna, both housed in the families'
exquisite palaces bearing their names.
Another gem, though less
known, the Musee Jacquemart-André
in Paris is another private collection turned museum, and housed in
the owner's original home. Édward
André devoted much of his
banking fortune to purchasing works of art which he and his wife
Néllie Jacquemart exhibited in their Paris palais,
completed in 1875. The collection is one the finest private
collections of Italian art in France, which the couple amassed
through their yearly travels to Italy. The museum opened to the
public in 1913 and the collection is displayed just as the owners
enjoyed it in their life time.
On this side of the
Atlantic there are as many private collections as there are wealthy
collectors, most of whom are unknown to the general public, and their
collections are still in private hands. However, through the years
there have also been a number of collectors who like the Medici, the
Jacquemart-André in Paris, or
the Doria Pamphilij and Colonna in Italay, their collections are world renowned and open
to the public in the original setting where their owners once enjoyed
them.
In New York City, the
Frick Collection is probably the most well known collection
turned private museum in the East Coast of the United States. Millionaire
industrialist and great art collector Henry Clay Frick built his
Fifth Avenue mansion to house his incomparable collection of Old
Masters, nineteenth century paintings, sculpture and decorative arts,
and with the specific intention to leave it to the public upon his
and his wife's death.
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| Marion Koogler McNay c.1935 |
Another significant
private collection turned museum and now open to the public is the
Huntington, in San Marino, California. Heir to a railroad fortune,
Henry E. Huntington started collecting art and rare books late in
life, in 1910, when he was already 60 years old. In 1913 he relocated
with his second wife, his uncle's widow, to a 500 acre estate in
San Marino where the couple built a mansion to house their art and
rare book collection. The art collection focuses on 18th
Century English portraits, including Gainsborough's the Blue Boy,
and Lawrence's Sarah Barrett Moulton: “Pinkie.” By the
time he died in 1927, Huntington had amassed the largest ever
assembled English portrait collection by one individual collector,
and estimated to have been worth $50 million. As stipulated in his
will Huntington's collection opened to the public in 1928.
In Texas, where
everything is bigger and grander, there are plenty of collectors such as John and Dominique de Menil in Houston, who collected close
to 16,000 pieces of modern art, and Kay Kimbell, successful Fort
Worth businessman, who with his wife Velma collected significant
works of art seldom seen in private collections. But notwithstanding the merits these collections possess in size and importance, they lack in
intimacy and pale in comparison to Jessie Marion Koogler McNay's collection of early modern art at the McNay Museum in San Antonio. Both, the de Menil and the Kimbell collections,
unlike the McNay are housed in structures which were specifically
built for the purpose of being a museum, and where the architecture,
works of art on their own, is at times competing for attention. On
the other hand the McNay, housed in its founder's Spanish colonial
revival home, is one of those gems of a museum that does not boast,
but quietly feeds the artistic soul of the greater San Antonio
Metropolitan area, and imbues its visitors with an intimacy and a
sense of personal relationship with each work art. The museum opened
its doors to the public, for the first time, in 1954, and has the
distinction of being the first museum of “modern” art in Texas.
On February 7, 1883,
Jessie Marion Koogler was born in the small farming community of De
Graff, Ohio, some 50 miles north of Dayton; Jessie Marion was the
only child of Dr. Marion Koogler and his wife Clara Lippincott. But
the Kooglers would not be long in De Graff; the following year, in
1884, the family moved to El Dorado, Kansas, where Dr. Koogler had invested in large tracts of grazing land. Call it luck or intuition, it is
from these lands that the Koogler fortune derives after extensive oil
deposits were discovered on Dr. Koogler's properties.
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| Poster for the 1913 Armory Exhibit |
In 1900, after a rather
strict childhood in which she was not permitted to participate in
dances or other school functions so common among children and
teenagers, Jessie Marion Koogler enrolled at the University of Kansas, in
Lawrence—and much against her father's judgement who thought art
was an undesirable subject for a proper young lady. Three years
later, in 1903, she enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago, a
move that would forever change her life and her views on art.
Liberated of what must have felt like a small town yoke, it was in
Chicago that Jessie Marion dropped her first name in favor of Marion, the
name with which she would be known for the rest of her life, and
beyond. In Chicago, Marion's joie de vivre came into being in
the company of other young, more liberated people her age with whom
she could discuss a variety of subjects, and she met a number of
artists who were making a living doing what they loved: art. In
Chicago, Marion found a far more sophisticated cultural environment
than her small town of El Dorado could have, heretofore, offered her.
Another watershed moment
was in 1913. On a trip to New York City Marion attended what has
been acknowledged as the first modern art exhibit in the United
States, the groundbreaking and influential The New York Armory
Show of 1913.1
It was at this shocking and eye opening art exhibit that Marion
experienced in vivo,
for the first time, the revolutionary works of the many European and
United States artists whose canvases would in the future adorn the
walls of her home: Braque, Cezanne, Degas, Gauguin, Henri, Marin,
Pendergast, Picasso, Pissarro, Renoir, Sloan, Weber, and Van Gogh.
But one year earlier, in
1912, Marion had joined her parents who by then had coincidentally
retired to Marion, Ohio; there, she busied herself teaching art for
the public school district, and where she was highly regarded. The
Superintendent of schools in Marion wrote in June, 1915, that McNay
was,
...one of the best qualified art teachers I have ever known .... She
teaches Art in a manner that arouses and develops the child's
observation and enlarges his aesthetic nature.2
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| Women Crossing the Fields, Vincent van Gogh, 1890, Oil on Paper Bequest of Marion Koogler McNay |
It was there, in her new
hometown, that Marion met Donald Denton McNay, a manager at the local
railway. To the shock of everyone, the couple married on 9 December,
1917, in spite of the bride being ten years older than the groom, who
had recently enlisted in the United States Army as a Sergeant.
Shortly after the wedding, the couple left en route to Laredo, Texas
where the young Sergeant McNay was stationed at Fort McIntosh, and
where the couple lived in an adobe cottage. Ordered to Florida in
October 1918, the newlyweds stopped in San Antonio, staying at the
socially fashionable Menger Hotel. It was here, across the Alamo
Mission that the McNays said their last farewells: Sergeant McNay
left for Florida where he died shortly thereafter, a victim of the
world-wide influenza epidemic of 1918 which killed an estimated 50
million people.3
Marion filled her void
with family, friends, and more importantly with art, and four more
husbands. Returning to Marion, Ohio, she married local banker
Charles Newton Phillips, in 1921, but the marriage broke apart four
years later. Back in San Antonio, with her mother, Marion married local legend and
renowned ophthalmologist Donald Taylor Atkinson in 1926, and she devoted herself to creating her “masterpiece,” a Spanish colonial
revival-style home with the help of prominent architects Atlee B. Ayres in partnership with his son Robert M. Ayres. In the
process of building the house (1927-1929), Marion designed and applied
many of the elaborate stencils to the coffered ceilings and tiles, as
well as assisting with many other decorative elements in the mansion.
Her attention to detail is evident everywhere, including the
outdoors where McNay planted the 23 acre Sunset Hills site with
southwestern botanical specimens, palms, evergreen pines, yuccas, and
magueys (agave). While the building process was a personal success,
Marion's marriage to Atkinson was not, and this union also ended in
divorce after ten years of marriage.4
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| Hay Makers Resting, Camille Pissarro, 1891, Oil on Canvas Bequest of Marion Koogler McNay |
In the late 20s and 30s
Marion often traveled to Santa Fe, and to Taos where she studied under
Emil Bisttram. In Taos, she bought a painting by Victor Higgins who
had been a fellow Chicago Art Institute student, and had also trained
in Europe. Higgins was greatly influenced by the southwest style of
the Taos artistic community, but he added another dimension to his
work: that of modernism which he had seen in Europe and shifted the
subject matter of his canvases away from Pueblo inspired settings, to
landscapes, still life, and nudes. After 1918, and quite possibly
one of the reasons Marion married him in 1937, Higgins shifted his
style further into Cubism, Impressionism and Modernism. But the
artistic nexus that connected them broke, with the end result that,
as with her two previous marriages, Marion and Higgins divorced in
1940.5
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| Delfina Flores, Diego Rivera, 1927, Oil on Canvas Bequest of Marion Koogler McNay |
But Marion may not have
been troubled by this last divorce; that same year she married
Chicago art dealer Adelbert E. Quest. Marion, who appeared determined
to not give up on the institution of marriage, must have realized she
was fighting a losing battle: she and Quest divorced after only one
year. But married or not, Marion always returned to her first love,
Donald McNay, choosing his surname as her own after every divorce
until she died.
McNay devoted her time
and wealth to the arts, not just in purchasing art, but in supporting
the art communities in Taos, Santa Fe, and San Antonio, and other
areas lesser known outside of the “art" colonies. In San Antonio,
McNay rescued the Art Institute after World War II forced it to close
its doors in 1942—collateral damage of the United States entering
the war. Arrangements were made to renovate an aviary on her home's
grounds to include classrooms, offices, storage rooms, and a library.
Under McNay's joint sponsorship with the San Antonio Art league, the
school re-opened on October 15, 1943 as the San Antonio Art
Institute.6
McNay never forgot her
love for the Pueblo culture and she collected Pueblo, southwestern
and colonial art, and was an active participant in the preservation
of the local culture of New Mexico. In 1943 when Congress proposed
preliminary studies for the construction of a dam on the Rio Grande, McNay opposed it on the grounds that it would destroy the shrines and
culture of several pueblos. With her help and that of other
conservationists, the project was defeated.7
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| Girl with Blue Eyes, Amadeo Modigliani, 1918, Oil on Canvas Bequest of Marion Koogler McNay |
In her later years, McNay
withdrew from the public eye, spending her time helping with the
administration of the San Antonio Art Institute, and planning for the
future of her fortune, her works of art, her charities, and most
importantly the museum that would bear her and her first husband's name: The McNay Museum. The end came too soon, in 1950, when McNay
succumbed to pneumonia; she was 67 years old.
In 1954, Marion Koogler McNay's
Spanish revival-style mansion, on 23 acres of lush landscaping, opened
as the first modern art museum in Texas. From the 700 works of art
collected by McNay, the collection has grown to over 20,000 pieces,
and includes works by Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, Edward Hopper,
Georgia O'Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Pierre-Auguste
Renoir, Alberto Giacometti, and Rodin.
As with most museums, the
McNay has overgrown its original building and has been forced to
expand, adding gallery space, a library, a new entry hall and gift
shop, theater and other necessary rooms. While the placement of some of the additions, like the Stieren Center for Exhibitions, works well with the original
structure, in spite of its decidedly modern architecture, the
library in particular is at odds with the “home” atmosphere
throughout the rest of the museum—jarring the visitor passing from an a small and intimate room in the main house to a modern, sun filled glass enclosure holding the Rodin sculptures, and
leading to the Tobin Collection of Theater Arts and library. But
this is a minor wrinkle in an otherwise fantastic experience: the
ability to get lost in the thought of admiring these magnificent
works of art as though one were in one's home, and unconsciously being always appreciative and
thankful to the woman who made it all possible, Marion Koogler McNay.
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| McNay Museum, Stieren Center for Exhibitions |
D. A. Pardo-Rangel
Photograph Credit: The McNay
Photograph Credit: Marion Koogler McNay
Photograph Credit: Armory Exhibit Poster
Photograph Credit: Artwork, the McNay Museum
Photograph Credit: The Stieren Center
