Blanton Museum of Art

The collection of European paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts before 1900 includes the Suida-Manning Collection of over 275 works, with paintings by Parmigianino, Paolo Veronese, Tiepolo, Rubens, Claude Lorrain, and Simon Vouet, along with many other European artists from the 15th through 18th centuries.[13] The collection also includes works by lesser-known, but still historically significant, painters such as Daniele Crespi and Luca Cambiaso.[14] While the Suida-Manning Collection predominantly showcases Italian and French artists, eighteenth-century English painting is represented by a group of portraits bequeathed by Jack G. Taylor, including George Romney's Lady Hamilton (1791).

The Blanton owns a collection of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman vases, the earliest of which date to the sixth century BCE. Many came from the Castle Ashby Collection formed by the Spencer Compton, 2nd Marquess of Northampton, who funded numerous excavations at Vulci, an Etruscan town north of Rome, during the 1820s.[15]

Statues at the Blanton Museum of Art

The Blanton's modern and contemporary art holdings comprise more than 4,000 objects.[16] Novelist James Michener, and his wife, Mari Michener, began giving their collection of 20th-century American paintings to the Blanton in the 1960s. The gift spanned into the early 1990s and eventually totaled more than 300 works. The Micheners also gave acquisition funds to the museum, supporting the purchase of approximately 75 additional paintings.[17]

The museum's collection includes 20th-century artists such as Thomas Hart Benton, Alice Neel, and Brice Marden.[17] The Blanton's collection of contemporary art also includes works by El Anatsui, Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler, Natalie Frank, Nina Katchadourian, Byron Kim, Yayoi Kusama, Glenn Ligon, Donald Moffett, Susan Philipsz, and Tavares Strachan. In 2009, Stacked Waters, an installation by artist Teresita Fernández commissioned by Jeanne and Michael Klein, debuted in the Rapoport Atrium of the Blanton Museum. In 2014, the Blanton acquired an important group of drawings, prints, and a major painting by the African-American artist Charles White from Drs. Susan G. and Edmund W. Gordon.[18][19]

Shortly after his appointment as founding director of the University of Texas Art Museum in Austin in 1959, Donald Goodall acquired for the Blanton what was at that time the largest collection of Latin American art in the United States.[1] The Latin American collection expanded significantly in the 1970s and 1980s with gifts from collector Barbara Duncan of 277 works of art, including 58 paintings and 112 drawings.[20] The museum was the first institution in the United States to create a curatorial position for Latin American art in 1988. The founding curator of the department was Mari Carmen Ramírez who acquired one of the signature works in the Latin American collection, Cildo Meireles' Missão/Missões: How to Build Cathedrals (1987).[21] The museum received a notable addition of Latin American modern and midcentury Latin American art from collectors Judy and Charles Tate in 2015. The 114-object collection includes paintings, sculptures, and drawings by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Tarsila do Amaral, Rufino Tamayo, Joaquín Torres García, Wifredo Lam, Herman Braun-Vega, Armando Reveron, Jesus Rafael Soto, and Lygia Clark, among others.[22][23]

The Julia Matthews Wilkinson Center for Prints and Drawings houses most of the Blanton's 16,000 works on paper. The center also includes the H.E.B. print study room, a library, and curatorial offices. The center's holdings reflect the Blanton's fifty-year focus on three specific collecting areas: European art from 1450 to 1800, Latin American art after 1960, and American art of the 20th century.

The Wilkinson Center's holdings include over 380 drawings from the Suida-Manning Collection, which are mostly pre-1800 Italian, including drawings by Raphael, Correggio, and Guercino.[24] Also representing European art from this period is the Leo Steinberg Collection of almost 3,500 prints, including early impressions by Hendrick Goltzius, Claude Lorrain, and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione.[25] The center's holdings in contemporary Latin American art feature several thousand works from eighteen Latin American countries and includes 230 works on paper from the Barbara Duncan Collection of Latin American Art.[20] Prints and drawings by American artists since 1900 comprise about twenty-five percent of the Blanton's holdings on paper. Julia and Stephen Wilkinson and their Still Water Foundation gave over 1030 prints, primarily wood engravings from the first half of the 20th century tied to the tradition of social realism. Among them are 757 prints by Clare Leighton, best known for her images of rural workers.[26]

The C.R. Smith Collection of Western American Art is a collection of 91 works given to the Blanton between 1968 and 1988. The collection includes works by Oscar E. Berninghaus, Albert Bierstadt, Solon H. Borglum, Dean Cornwell, Maynard Dixon, Henry Farny, Thomas Hill, Ransome Gillett Holdridge, Peter Hurd, Frank Tenney Johnson, Tom Lea, William Robinson Leigh, Alfred Jacob Miller, and Thomas Moran.[27]

In January 2015, the artist Ellsworth Kelly gave the Blanton the design concept for a 2,715-square-foot (252.2 m²) stone building that he subsequently named Austin.[28] This work of art relates to the tradition of modernist artist-commissioned buildings that includes Rothko Chapel and Henri Matisse's Matisse Chapel. Kelly said that the design of the building was inspired by Romanesque and Byzantine art he studied while in Paris on the G.I. Bill. Following Kelly's gift, the Blanton launched a $15 million campaign to realize the project.[29] Austin opened February 18, 2018, with a ceremony featuring University of Texas at Austin President Greg Fenves, Austin Mayor Steve Adler, and museum director Simone Wicha.

SoundSpace is a hybrid performance series that takes place at the Blanton three times per year. The series features simultaneous, interdisciplinary performances throughout the museum and has received awards from the Austin Critic's Table,[30] the Austin Chronicle,[31] and profiled at the annual SXSW Festival. SoundSpace has featured Graham Reynolds, Adrian Quesada, Thor Harris, and Panoramic Voices, among others. The series is directed by Austin artist Steve Parker[32] and underwritten by local arts patron Mike Chesser.[31]