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Skriven 2015-03-31 12:05:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: San Antonio art 448
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Two museums, one quietly excellent, the other noisily
pretty good.

SAMA, the San Antonio Museum of Art, was a bit of a
surprise. I guess that shouldn't have been, as the Nelson
Rockefeller collection of Latin American art is entrusted
to here (the connection of that famous New York name and
here remains obscure to me). It's a great collection, worth
the trip. The surprise to me was the perhaps world-class
collection of Egyptian funerary and other artifacts, plus
a corridor lined with glass items, some exquisite, and
a classical department with fine Attic pottery and some
monumental sculptures. Also some well-chosen American
portraiture and landscape works (name a famous artist, and
there is one - two at the most - excellent example of each
hung in the rather dim gallery). The rest I wasn't so
enthusiastic for - the donors seem to have run out of mojo
when giving American 20th century work, for example. There's
also what is said to be a pretty fine Asian collection, but
it was mostly closed for renos when we were there. Two hours
was not too much, borderline not enough, and were the Chinese
and Japanese collections fully open, another half hour would
have been in order.

The McNay Art Museum, built around the collection of a
socialite and artist who was coincidentally one of Texas's
major heiresses, is much more heralded and much more glitzy
and to my taste a lesser experience. You know something is
amiss when the sizable parking lot is clogged with tour
buses. That's because the permanent collection is free
(specials cost a pretty penny). The current exhibition was
Impressionists curated I believe by the National, so I figured
I'd seen most of them at least a zillion times before, having
first become interested around 1960 (one of the few tastes I
shared with my mother, but then her taste in inanimate objects
exceeded her taste in animate ones).

Anyway, what can I say about the permanent collection? The
physical plant is kind of interesting, a Spanish colonial
accretion not in the best of taste that was Mrs. McNay's
home, I believe partially self-designed. In the 24 rooms
are strewn assorted treasures and a lot of not treasures:
I find that her fondness for mediaeval saintly art was a bit
undiscriminating, and I recall nothing of worth in these
rooms. The 20th-century Europeans were from fairly eminent
sources (Picasso, Beckmann, Matisse, Monet, Rodin, Gauguin,
Modigliani, you name it, a veritable Jansen in the canvas)
- some large and no doubt important, but on the whole not
the most emotionally gripping to me - perhaps a reserve that
was engendered when Mr. McNay, the love of her life, died a
year into the marriage might have affected her artistic
predilections. Her American stuff ranges from the coolly
abstract (Calder, O'Keeffe) to the bad. There's one Hopper
that I hadn't seen before, though. I didn't care for it

As the price is right, the galleries are filled with people
oohing and aahing about the wrong things - sort of experience
collectors a la me, only less informed. This is not the hugest
deal, as they tend to collect around pieces that I'd spend
moments with (and vice versa).

We budgeted a couple hours here and got out with half an
hour to spare.

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