by Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, Curator of American and Contemporary Art

The Blanton's collection of American art since 1900 is chockfull of surprises. Featuring a corpus of more than 400 works that traces the history of achievement in American art, especially painting, from 1900 to the present day, it is a strong teaching collection, and contains significant examples of works from the Ashcan School, early American modernism, Regionalism and Social Realism, Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, Pop, Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and most contemporary trends. That makes it user-friendly for our primary audience of university students and faculty and an admirable cultural resource for the greater community. But in addition to its excellent survey of works by well-known artists that together illustrate the modernist narrative of twentieth-century American art history, the collection is also filled with unexpected riches—bold and idiosyncratic expressions—that confound expectations and pique the curiosity of scholars and visitors alike. It is rare to find this kind of texture in a university collection, to peruse collection catalogues or museum galleries and encounter a trove of Yayoi Kusamas or Lee Lozanos alongside majestic works by Adolph Gottlieb, Alfred Jensen, and John Wesley commissioned especially for the collection, not far from signature examples by artists like Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, Donald Roller Wilson, and Dario Robleto, mavericks all. With a core of historic material acquired and gifted by Mari and James A. Michener, now supplemented by new gifts, purchases, and additional commissions of contemporary art, the collection is rich in masterworks that show artists' production at its most ambitious; experimental works that provide clues to artistic transitions and new directions; strong representative works that capture the essence of an artist's style; and uncommon works that enrich the context of an accepted movement or direction, making clear that history is never simple and that our view of truth is inexorably affected by perspective and circumstance.

Over the past ten years, we have assiduously cultivated this collection, applying curiosity, imagination, and sustained attention, along with a healthy measure of skepticism, open-minded reconsideration of the art historical canon, and the intro duction of fresh outside perspectives. We have dedicated time for research and museological experimentation, made strategic new acquisitions, and now, with the advent of our new facility, provided better exhibition space and technologies to the task of its re-presentation. The installations in the galleries and this new publication together presume several assumptions that have guided us: each is grounded in profound respect for the works of art and an earnest desire to champion the stories of the artists who made them. We believe that a work of art, experienced on its own without embellishment of any kind, has something unique and powerful to communicate. And yet understanding the social, historical, and art historical context in which it was made—even if it was made last year—is extremely relevant, as is knowing the artist's ambitions and intentions, the work that preceded and followed it in the artist's oeuvre, its critical reception, and, most elusive still, its potential meaning to the unending variety of its audiences today. Works of art are artifacts of history; they offer us a parallel language with which to craft a narrative of time, place, and character. In addition to being extraordinary objects capable of inspiring visual, intellectual, and spiritual awareness, they engage the history of ideas and embody the cultural attitudes of a given moment. Put two works of art together in a gallery and the possibilities for meaning expand exponentially. Add two viewers, who focus independently on different aspects of those works, and discussion commences. Support those works, that viewing situation, with new research, as was commissioned for this catalogue, and hopefully we have offered access to the multiple layers of information and the singularly rich experience that a university museum should provide.

The title of this book—American Art Since 1900—was determined on the basis of context as well. Generic to most tastes, it describes the particular circumstances that gave shape to the Blanton's collection. "Since 1900" indicates the span of more than a century, allowing us to establish and explore essential reverberations between modern and contemporary art. "American," perhaps a charged term, here suggests complementarity with the Blanton's collection of "Latin American" art—itself a misnomer—whose important new collection catalogue has also just been published. For our purposes, "American" implies the US context in which the work was made, rather than the nationality of the artist. Just as early and mid-twentieth-century "American" artists were as often immigrants as they were first- or second-generation citizens of the United States, so too is a new generation of artists working in New York and Texas as likely to have come from Pakistan or Argentina as they are to have been raised in Michigan or Oregon. Geography is still relevant, but only to the degree that its fluidity and contingency are understood, now that space and time have been effectively collapsed through the ease of worldwide travel and the development of new technologies and economic models.

What the title does not stress is that these works are but a selection of the almost 4,000 American artworks in the Blanton's collection. Evenly distributed over the past century and then some, they constitute many of the most distinctive works acquired before January 2005, showing a range of media and stylistic approaches and a mix of both historic/established and emerging artists. Supplementing these featured works are several hundred additional paintings and sculptures, many of them quite fine; a superb collection of several thousand twentieth-century American prints; as well as a distinctive collection of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century paintings and sculptures depicting images of the American West, most notably the renowned C. R. Smith Collection, which has its own first-rate catalogue. We invite students, scholars, colleagues, and interested audiences to get to know our collections through these publications, our recently redesigned website, and hopefully, for there is no substitute, visits to our galleries.

History of the Collection: Foundations and Their Generosity, Collectors and Their Passion

The collection began in the usual hodgepodge way: a group of works gifted here, an exhibited work retained there. In 1960, three years prior to the establishment of this institution, the Longview Foundation of New York gave a parcel of paintings to The University of Texas. This donation included recent works by Peter Agostini, Robert Mallary, and other New York-based contemporary artists who were deemed underrecognized at the time, but the most important object was a signature abstraction by Norman Lewis, painted in 1958. Discovered in deep storage in the late 1990s after not having been exhibited in almost forty years, it is a vivacious work by a respected Abstract Expressionist whose career has only recently received the attention it deserves. In some ways, the Lewis painting's experience is emblematic of that which awaits the entire collection now that a handsome new catalogue and state-of-the-art facility in which to showcase it exists.

The core of the collection arrived not long thereafter and still constitutes fully three-quarters of the twentieth-century American painting collection: the Mari and James A. Michener Collection. Tracing critical developments in American painting from 1900 to the mid-1970s, the Michener Collection was actively built by the noted author and his wife during a sixteen-year period, 1959-1975, after which modest acquisitions funds were made available to museum staff. Comprising almost 300 paintings, it ranges from works of singular historical and artistic importance (one of Jacob Lawrence's earliest gouaches, a rare Alfred Jensen commission, one of Hans Hofmann's last and greatest paintings, for example) to groups of works which together illustrate the broad diversity of painting at a particular moment in a particular place (New York in 1960 and 1968, for instance). The Micheners' motivations in building the collection were exceptionally altruistic: while they relished the process of researching, scouting, debating the merits of, and finally purchasing works of art, their vision of the collection was educational and instructive. With no children of their own, they wanted to pass their passion, discipline, and zeal for expanding the boundaries of their visual imaginations (which not incidentally fueled Mr. Michener'' extremely successful career as a writer of historical fiction about vivid places) to a younger generation—preferably those who, like Mr. Michener, were raised with few advantages. Their search for a public university with a diverse student body and an art museum that could exhibit and publish their works ended with The University of Texas at Austin. The gift was given in two parcels, one in 1968 and one in 1991. Most of the works the Micheners purchased never hung in their own home but were instead temporarily stored and shipped directly to Austin. The gift immediately put UT's University Art Museum on the map as one of the foremost university collections of American painting, and today the works form the nucleus of a vital cross-disciplinary teaching resource.

The collection has continued to expand as the Blanton has received numerous gifts of modern and contemporary American art from other benefactors and has purchased selectively in the field over the past thirty years. Critical to the success of these efforts has been the support of longtime donors such as Jack S. Blanton and the Blanton family and Mary and Jack Bartholow. The contributions of our constantly evolving affinity group, the Contemporary Circle, have been essential as well. The Judith Rothschild Foundation's support for increasing knowledge of the art of recently deceased, under-recognized artists has been of enormous benefit to the museum, allowing the acquisition of key works by Ana Mendieta, Lee Lozano, and George Sugarman. Visiting scholar and artist David Reed has opened doors to several gracious donors, including Miles Bellamy, the son of legendary gallerist and Michener advisor Richard Bellamy. Scholar and UT professor Linda Henderson also has encouraged the museum to acquire representative examples by artists whose works have enriched the teaching curriculum.

No one has been more devoted to helping the Blanton's contemporary collection grow than Jeanne and Michael Klein, whose passionate risk-taking merges perfectly with the museum's goal to build an exceptional collection of works by emerging artists. Inspired by their own experiences as UT students whose eyes and horizons were widened by exposure to contemporary art at university, the Kleins represent the next generation of enlightened philanthropy. In their own inimitable manner, they have followed the Micheners' sterling example and taken it a step further. Among the first prominent American collectors to propose private/institutional partnerships for collection building, the Kleins have worked in tandem with the museum over the past six years to identify works that are of mutual interest and then to purchase them as partial and pledged gifts to the museum. The advantages of the partnership are manifold. The Kleins expand their knowledge of emerging artists, add to their already extraordinary collection works that otherwise would have been reserved for prestigious private institutions, and enjoy the ongoing pleasures of getting to know the artists personally and living with the works of art for part of the time. Meanwhile, the museum benefits incalculably by their shared enthusiasm for the process of discovery, ongoing commitment to new endeavors, and infusion of financial capital. The Kleins have helped the museum acquire works right out of the studio by such promising young artists as Trenton Doyle Hancock as well as rising art stars like Amy Sillman, Oliver Herring, and Anne Chu. Thev have allowed the museum to expand its own network of relationships with key galleries by purchasing major pieces from shows of new work by Jeremy Blake, Rachel Harrison, and Arturo Herrera, among many others. And in several instances they have extended their support beyond the museum to include the residency program at Artpace in San Antonio, from whose international exhibitions program significant new commissions by Shahzia Sikander and Robyn O'Neil were purchased. The Kleins' support is fundamental to our success.

Highlights of the Collection

The early twentieth-century collection is notable for its excellent examples of work by leading artists and unusual works by lesser-known artists. Certainly, the museum's small grouping of early modernist paintings—with its first-rate Marsden Hartley, Arthur Doves, John Marin, Max Weber, and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, its early Stuart Davis, and its intriguing Marguerite and William Zorach double picture—is distinctive. The Depression era is well represented, for it was both the time of Mr. Michener's young adult years and a political moment that reflected his lifelong commitment to democratic principles. Masterworks by Philip Evergood, Raphael Soyer, and Thomas Hart Benton describe how life was then in unforgettable images; an early painting by Jacob Lawrence indelibly captures the moment as well as the seventeen-year-old artist's incipient style.

Although the collection is missing paintings by some of the major figures of Abstract Expressionism, it features a small yet intriguing Mark Rothko that traces his first attempts at a universal abstract language, both early and late Arshile Gorkys that shed light on that seminal artist's development, and an interesting Bradley Walker Tomlin that stands in for the AbEx group's groundbreaking experimentations with gestural imagery in the mid-1940s. Representing the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the Abstract Expressionist style was fully mature and at the height of its popular acceptance, the collection is dense with major paintings. It includes superb works by Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottlieb, and William Baziotes as well as signature examples by many artists who espoused the style—Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Philip Guston, Alfred Leslie, Norman Lewis, Michael Goldberg, and Jack Tworkov among them. Reactions to the hegemony of the New York School ranged from new developments in geometric abstraction and figuration to the formalist abstractions of the Color Field painters. The collection includes excellent work by Alfred Jensen, Al Held, Elmer Bischoff, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Ellsworth Kelly, Harold Stevenson, Leon Golub, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland. Proto-Pop and Pop works—the next generation's response—include significant paintings by Robert Indiana, Peter Saul, Larry Rivers, and John Wesley as well as unusual early works by Jim Dine and Lee Lozano and a striking Tom Wesselmann still-life.

The collection possesses an extraordinary resource of late 1960s abstraction. A now-classic Jo Baer diptych, major early works by Brice Marden and Richard Tuttle, and paintings spanning almost a decade of experimentation by David Novros are joined by strong examples of less canonical artists such as Alan Cote, Lawrence Stafford, and Mary Corse. A fine Carl Andre floor piece is one of the few sculptures in the collection that predated recent efforts to expand its focus beyond painting.

The Michener Collection, with its impressive breadth of works from 1900-1975, was built by serious scholars who did their homework, but its assumptions were that painting was primary and that most artists were white men who lived in New York. As a result, acquisitions over the past decade have addressed the need to fill historical gaps and to diversify the collection in terms of media and approach. In order to establish continuity between the existing collection and the new works, a dialogue with the ideas of painting prevailed in the first rounds of selections. Later, moving off the wall became key: noteworthy sculptures by George Sugarman, Louise Nevelson, Stephen Antonakos, George Segal, Alan Saret, Joel Shapiro, James Surls, Jesus Moroles, Anne Chu, and Rachel Harrison now engage the three-dimensional space of the galleries. A strong representation of leading Texas-based artists' work made since the 1980s was acquired to complement works by Melissa Miller, David Bates, Derek Boshier, Jack Minis, and Frank X. Tolbert, among others, which had been purchased earlier. And so a rich assembly of works by Vernon Fisher, Gael Stack, Celia Alvarez Muñoz, Luis Jiménez, Robert Levers, Jesse Amado, John Pomara, Claudia Reese, Benito Huerta, Joseph Guy, Stephen Daly, and the above-mentioned Surls and Moroles have been engaged in conversation with those by a younger generation of artists working here. The new "post-Texas" generation, including Annette Lawrence, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Robyn O'Neil, Dario Robleto, and Brent Steen, shines when placed within the national and international context of our most recent works in the collection.

Indeed, building upon the strong critical response to the Blanton-organized conceptual painting exhibition, Negotiating Small Truths (1999), we have now amassed an exciting survey of works made during the past ten years by an international roster of culturally diverse artists working in the United States. This survey brings the collection into the present day with verve and integrity. In addition to those extraordinary contemporary works mentioned in various contexts above, we have acquired brand-new works by Wangechi Mutu, Emily Jacir, Leo Villareal, Terry Adkins, Bill Viola, David Recd, Janine Antoni, Radcliffe Bailey, John Valadez, Amy Globus, and Glenn Ligon and have commissioned works from Byron Kim, Fabian Marcaccio, and Peter Rostovsky. Our newest art is a dynamic and well-balanced representation of contemporary works in all media, including painting, sculpture, animation, video, and mixed media installation.

Excavating the Collection: The Curator's Perspective and Scholars' Responses

Of course, it is the curator's job to reassess continually the merits of a collection—to add, to cull, to advocate on its behalf both internally, within an institution's acquisitions and exhibitions priorities, and externally, to colleagues in the field, whose knowledge may lead to greater exposure and a new understanding of the museum's holdings. On staff for more than a year in 1997, but preoccupied with a full slate of temporary exhibitions and the committee work associated with a new museum-wide strategic plan, I headed into the storage rooms with mixed expectations to view works of art that, in many cases, had not been exhibited in years. Some of the findings were extraordinary. They included Joan Semmel's feminist masterwork, Mythologies and Me, and Alice Neel's double portrait of David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock, both of which I had seen reproduced and had never forgotten after they debuted in New York in the 1970s. Also, the astonishing compilation of thirteen Yayoi Kusama works was a revelation: almost a dozen exquisitely potent small paintings on paper, an important transitional assemblage that has now traveled from Los Angeles to New York to Tokyo, and the large-scale diptych that was reproduced on the cover of the catalogue for her 1991 New York retrospective. Others were merely unexpected—a small grouping of austere Minimal works that were extremely different from the high-keyed objects that more often appealed to the Micheners' taste. It was clear that the museum possessed an idiosyncratic collection with enough breadth to sustain a series of thematic exhibitions drawn from it on a variety of topics. And so, over the next year or two, we dismantled the conventional chronological installation that had been hanging, with small adjustments, for years and regrouped the works into topical galleries—landscape as metaphor, approaches to the figure, comparisons of artists' early and mature works—in order to read them from, literally, new perspectives. With the remaining Michener funds, we began to acquire some brand-new paintings, which, once installed in the galleries, formed analogous relationships with the historical core of the Michener Collection. Compelling juxtapositions of Luis Cruz Azaceta's biting social commentary, Sleepless (1996), with Raphael Soyer's powerful Depression-era group portrait, Transients (1936), for instance, or Byron Kim's series of sly monochromatic panels, Synecdoche (1991/1998), with Brice Marden's early abstract diptych, Fave (1968-1969), allowed fresh, multiple readings of the older, more familiar works, which seemed to come to life again. At the same time, the recent acquisitions achieved greater resonance and depth.

Exhilarated by the interpretive possibilities suggested by these exhibitions and determined to generate a new assessment of the collection's strengths, we sought support for the first extended period of collection research in two decades. In 1999 the Henry Luce Foundation awarded a three-year grant to the Blanton to develop "New Perspectives on American Art," a multifaceted program designed to expand awareness and encourage use of the museum's holdings of twentieth-century American art, especially the Michener Collection. The program allowed us to invite a wide-ranging group of art historians, critics, and artists to visit the Blanton multiple times in order to research, lecture, teach, and write about works for this proposed catalogue. The visiting scholars—art historians Dr. Ann Eden Gibson and Dr. Karal Ann Marling, critics Dave Hickey and Raphael Rubinstein, and artists Robert Kushner and David Reed—were chosen because of the scope and independence of their research interests as well as their specific expertise in modern and contemporary painting. In addition, art historians Richard Shiff and Frances Colpitt, artist Mark Schlesinger, and gallerist Mitchell Algus all provided salient information during short consultations with the visiting scholars. "New Perspectives" provided students and the public the rare opportunity to observe artists, critics, and art historians—all researchers in their respective enterprises—solving related problems within equally valid but different vocabularies and frames of reference. Most importantly, the project allowed the museum to provide alternate forums for ongoing consideration of and debate about the collection over the past several years, while we operated without the proper access to collections that our new facility now affords.

The "New Perspectives" scholars were invited to choose their own research topics, and most delved into storage and the museum's archives looking for connections to subjects they had been thinking about for a while. Ultimately, each chose to focus on lesser-known works in the collection, and each took special care to illuminate the biases, as well as serendipities, that inevitably affect an artist's reputation and place in history. Here the similarities ended, however, for among them the scholars interrogated the works in the collection from every possible perspective. Art historian and American culture expert Karal Ann Marling examined Kenneth Hayes Miller's career-long struggle to master a particularly challenging composition. Her contribution offers both a classic art historical investigation of the painting's previously accepted date, subject matter, and source material as well as a discursive consideration of the social context of downtown painting in 1930s/1940s New York. Cultural critic Dave Hickey wrote about artist Bradley Walker Tomlin, the outsider status that plagued him throughout his career despite his dense network of artistic connections, and the inspired qualities that convince the author that Tomlin's mid-century paintings were ahead of their time. Painter Robert Kushner took on Michener himself and conducted a subjective, spirited, and ultimately sympathetic examination of the inherent patterns, achievements, and weaknesses of his collection. Poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein traced the overlapping professional and personal connections among three painters—Norman Bluhm, Sam Francis, and Joan Mitchell—who spent substantial portions of their careers abroad and evolved important variants of Abstract Expressionism. Art historian Linda Henderson and painter David Reed both looked at abstract painting in mid-1960s New York: Henderson from a rich art historical perspective and through a lens attuned to the intersections of art, music, and science; and Reed from a critical and painterly perspective that gives the reader an incomparable sense of how painters see and how complicated and sometimes compromised official histories may be. Each reclaimed almost-forgotten works and reestablished their vitality in the context of the museum's collection. Finally, art historian Ann Gibson constructed a comparative theoretical study of two vastly different but contemporaneous artists, Richard Anuszkiewicz and Sam Gilliam. Tracing their motivations, innovations, and critical reception, she uncovered propositions about color that link them, perhaps unexpectedly.

Following the scholars' visits in 1999-2001, the extended process of planning the new facility began, and the museum ceased its regular program of temporary exhibitions—a healthy mix of shows organized by Blanton curatorial staff and loan shows from institutional partners—in favor of small exhibitions drawn exclusively from the collection. What might have been a disappointing task for curators—looking inward only to the museum's own holdings and not outward to the ever-expanding world of temporary loans and presumably new topics of investigation—became an optimal experience of working intensively with the collection, slicing into it from diverse perspectives, and ultimately revealing more of the works in a wider variety of combinations than had ever been seen before. These curatorial experiments included the Blanton's first-ever interweaving of its modem and contemporary American and Latin American collections: a yearlong, two-part exhibition on the subject of time titled Past Present Future: Notions of Time in Twentieth Century Art (2001) and time/frame (2002). With the bulk of its collection in storage, the museum then returned to chronology as an organizing principle that best suited faculty needs. Large exhibitions highlighting popular favorites as well as many rarely exhibited works included Routes to Modernism: Ameri can Painting 1870-1950 (2002); Painting Explosion 1958-1963 (2003); and Twister: Moving through Color, 1965-1977 (2004), the latter of which once again juxtaposed American and Latin American works in an exploration of perceptual painting. Finally, the museum organized three exhibitions that grouped works from the collection according to provocative topics: Cartoon Noir (2002), a series of recently acquired contemporary works by Jeremy Blake, Ellen Gallagher, Arturo Herrero and Trenton Doyle Hancock whose comic overtones bely an anxious world view; Transgressive Women (2003), which looked at clusters of work by audacious experimenters Yayoi Kusama, Lee Lozano, Ana Mendieta, and Joan Semmel; and Visualizing Identity (2003), a small exhibition of works by Jesse Amado, Radcliffe Bailey, Byron Kim, and Glenn Ligon that offered visitors a platform for exploring notions of personal and cultural identity with the aid of an experimental interactive handheld device.

With the opening of the Blanton's new facility in spring 2006, the museum seized the perfect opportunity to showcase its new collections in every area, from antiquities to the present. The presentation of the modern and contemporary American and Latin American collections was conceived as a special project, titled America/Americas, which was several years in the making. Highlights from each collection were interwoven in one dynamic installation featuring more than 200 paintings, sculptures, prints, and other works of art dating from 1875-1985. The integration of these rarely juxtaposed works allowed for exploration of the shared hemispheric histories and cultural dialogues that unite the diverse political and geographic areas of North and South America. Notions of the frontier and the impact of early twentieth-century industrialization, developments in European modernism, scientific discoveries, psychological theories, and the rise of the civil rights movements that spread north and south throughout the century—all had more similarities of effect on artistic practices in North and South America than differences. Without mitigating the distinctions and particularities that do exist in any wide spectrum of creative circumstances, America/Americas suggested that geographic readings of content have become increasingly limiting when applied to works made in the mid- and late twentieth century. Indeed, an exhibition called New Now Next: The Contemporary Blanton, which presented more than thirty-five recent acquisitions made in the past decade in the United States and South America, put forth a cogent argument that the artistic concerns of the contemporary moment are indistinguishable across continents, and that it would be not only difficult but also pointless to try to distinguish works in one collection from those in another given the global nature of contemporary life.

Repositioning the Collection: New Directions

In the past decade, the modern and contemporary American collection has gained new visibility. Masterworks from the collection have traveled to exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D .C.; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Dia Center for the Arts, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy; the Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea in Rivoli, Italy; and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, among other important venues. During the museum's recent construction process, several exhibitions drawn from the Michener Collection have traveled to institutions across the state, including the Grace Museum in Abilene, the Victoria Regional Museum Association, and the Amarillo Art Museum. And, thanks to the efforts of the museum's education department, university faculty from departments within the Colleges of Fine Arts, Education, Communication, Liberal Arts, and Natural Sciences and the Business, Architecture, and Social Work Schools have discovered the interdisciplinary riches of the collection and mined the exhibitions in the galleries as forums for class debate.

The museum's dynamic new collection of contemporary works by emerging and established artists now is considered one of the three most important publicly held collections of contemporary art in Texas. Seen for the first time during the grand opening of the new facility, selections from this collection, along with a lively range of educational and interpretive programs, reflect the museum's renewed engagement with the art and ideas of our time. International by definition and multifaceted in form, the contemporary collection constantly extends into the future, proposing new experiences, experimental concepts, and an open-minded perspective on the world in which we all live.