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AUSTIN, Texas - Jessie Otto Hite says that during her 27 years at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, the one constant - other than Hite herself - has been the need for galleries the institution could call its own.
Consider that over its four-decade history, the Blanton (named for former UT regent and museum benefactor Jack S. Blanton) had quietly accumulated one of the broadest, most impressive collections in Texas. That process began in the late 1960s when novelist James Michener started donating about 400 of his 20th-century American paintings to the school. The museum then began building one of the nation's best collections of Latin American art and eventually added hundreds of European masterpieces. Its collection of prints and drawings, ranging from the Renaissance to the avant-garde, has been extraordinary all along.
But almost no one knew. For most of its existence the Blanton has been a museum in name only. Its works were consigned to storage or divided into rather dingy galleries in two buildings in the heart of the UT campus, available to the art faculty and students but largely hidden from the general public.
"We've been a well-kept secret," says Hite, the museum's director. "We're tired of that. ... Our dream has finally come true."
And in a big way. On Saturday night, on the southern tip of the UT campus, the Blanton will debut a massive gallery building that for the first time will house the museum's 17,000-piece collection under one roof. In its around-the-clock opening celebration that begins at 9 p.m. and features everything from group yoga to gospel music, the Blanton will officially become the first major art museum in Austin and Central Texas, one that is almost certain to become one of the premier visual arts destinations in the state.
The new museum's heft alone might make it so. When a companion building for museum administrative offices, classrooms and a cafe is completed across a plaza next year, the $83 million Blanton will be the largest (in square feet) university museum in the nation, and the third-largest of any in Texas, behind only the encyclopedic Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Dallas Museum of Art.
The museum will also be, as UT administrators have long envisioned, a southern gateway to the campus, easily accessible to Austinites generally (with plenty of parking next door), and a highly visible symbol for the importance of humanities in academia.
"When the pair of buildings are seen together, with the plaza, it's going to become one of the favorite places in the art world, certainly a favorite in Texas," says former UT president Larry Faulkner, a leading proponent of the museum who retired this year. "A quest of long duration is finally coming to a stage of fruition. ... Something extraordinary has been achieved after a long struggle."
He referred to a building process almost biblical in length and difficulty.
There was the morass of state politics to contend with in the 1980s, and the chronic difficulty of raising money. But the most embarrassing and highly publicized agonies came in 1999, when the original Blanton architects, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron of Switzerland, squared off against members of the UT board of regents. The Swiss architects had proposed an avant-garde building, while the regents wanted a traditional style, an impasse that eventually led Herzog and de Meuron to walk away. The dean of UT's School of Architecture resigned in protest, and Hite says she thought about quitting, too.
Instead, with hefty donations already committed and a burgeoning art collection to accommodate, the university pressed ahead with the museum project. Hite stayed on and helped hire another prominent architect, Michael McKinnell of Boston. Which eventually led to a sultry spring morning a few weeks ago, when Hite happily conducted another in a long series of pre-opening tours of the building with the red roof of Spanish tile and Texas limestone walls.
The new Blanton, which sits several blocks north and within plain view of the Texas Capitol, is anything but striking from the outside, a rather boxy structure that resembles several other Mediterranean-style buildings on the UT campus. But most visitors will find the museum enchanting from the moment they enter its soaring 50-foot atrium with skylights and blindingly white walls.
Hite's recent tour began there, then led through new classrooms and boardrooms, and into first-floor galleries where traveling art exhibitions were already installed. Up a winding staircase were the museum's signature galleries (over 28,000 square feet), some of them intimate for the smaller European paintings and the collection of prints and drawings. Larger pieces of contemporary art were hung in sprawling, high-ceilinged spaces with soft natural light. By the end of the two-hour tour, Hite had shown masterpieces ranging from Renaissance works to contemporary abstracts and almost everything in between.
"I had known the collection in bits and pieces over the years, but seeing it installed (on a recent tour), I was knocked out," says Bill Booziotis, a Dallas architect and longtime art lover. "I told Jessie that the big story was going to be what a great collection they had, that it was going to be a bigger story than the building."
To Hite, an affable woman who began her career as a curatorial assistant at the Blanton in 1979, it's about time.
"Patience is my weak point, and boy, has that been tested," she says. "What should have taken four years has taken 10 or 12 years to get this done."
Hite says she will never forget the mental image: Mari Michener, the tiny wife of the famous novelist, hectoring a lanky university president named William Cunningham whenever the two ran into each other at UT functions in the 1980s and early 1990s.
"She used to shake her finger at him," Hite recalls, laughing, "saying, `We need a new museum.' "
The Micheners were entitled to some finger-shaking. For decades, James Michener had been an avid collector of works of 20th-century American painters, researching the art he purchased with the same vigor he did his novels. UT legend has it that in the early 1960s, when Michener was defeated in a run for Congress from a district in Pennsylvania, he began to look for a permanent home for his paintings. The fledgling museum at UT, founded in 1963, promised the Micheners two floors of the humanities building. The first Michener paintings were donated in 1968.
A UT museum building was contemplated as early as the 1980s but was put on hold because of Gov. Bill Clements' dreams for a state art museum (those plans fizzled for lack of funds). As a result, the growing UT collection remained consigned to small galleries in the art building and in the humanities building across campus.
Not until the mid-1990s, when the Micheners donated $10 million for a new museum, did the project again gather steam. Other major donors fell in line. In 1998, Herzog and de Meuron, superstars in the world of architecture, were selected to design the building. That same year, the Blanton acquired what is known as the Suida-Manning Collection, more than 600 paintings and drawings considered one of the finest collections of Renaissance and Baroque art in the nation.
Then - with the Blanton seemingly poised to join the state's cultural elite - came the meltdown. In their preliminary sketches for the museum, Herzog and de Meuron proposed a sprawling 1-story building with an undulating roof. The UT regents, particularly a South Texas oilman named Tony Sanchez, insisted on a traditional approach more in keeping with the style of the campus.
Sanchez, who was also the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Texas governor in 2002, went so far as having his own sketches commissioned to help Herzog and de Meuron along. They quit instead, as did Lawrence Speck, dean of UT's School of Architecture. In a campus protest, outraged students bore a placard reading "Hold the bologna - we want the Swiss."
What the Blanton got instead was a courtly, highly respected architect from Boston. Michael McKinnell says he took the job only reluctantly, after being convinced that "the decks had been cleared for a new approach." In the design process that followed, McKinnell says he encountered no interference from the regents, but he collaborated closely with Faulkner, Hite and her curatorial staff.
Ironically, the building he came up with seems exactly what the regents hoped for in the first place. There are flourishes in the massive structure - overhangs, arcades and detailing on the limestone walls - but even museum officials describe it as somewhat bland and highly in keeping with the red roofs and limestone walls of the rest of the campus.
"This will not be seen as an avant-garde building," McKinnell says. "I think it is an architecture of resistance, resistance to a current and very interesting movement to make museums in and of themselves extra-striking and eye-catching. Some of those museums don't necessarily provide the appropriate environment for the contemplation of (the art.)"
The Blanton, with its eclectic gallery spaces, surely does, in the opinion of university and museum officials and most early visitors.
"I just believe that art looks better in traditional spaces," Hite says. "This is what we're trying to do, and we're not apologizing for it."
Particularly as the opening draws near, and Austin buzzes around its first major museum. From a direct mailing announcing the museum in February, Hite says the Blanton hoped to attract 850 new members from the Austin community and $65,000 in donations.
"We got 1,800 new members and $175,000 instead," Hite says. "In one focus group, when they were showing the works of the collection, one woman started crying. She said, `I can't believe we're going to have a museum.'"
On the recent day in the museum, as the opening drew near, Hite wasn't beyond a little disbelief herself.
"We've suffered a lot to get here," she says, smiling. "I mean, really, a lot."
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IF YOU GO:
-The grand opening of the Blanton Museum of Art begins at 9 p.m. Saturday and continues until 9 p.m. Sunday, with a variety of entertainment, from gospel music to yoga, scheduled in four-hour blocks over the 24-hour period. An opening ceremony is scheduled for noon Sunday and will feature the University of Texas Longhorn Band.
-Admission to the museum is $5 for the general public and free for anyone with a University of Texas ID card.
-Directions: from Interstate 35 South, exit at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and drive west to the intersection of MLK and Congress Avenue.
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(c) 2006, Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
