A “WHO KNEW?” surprise at
another of America’s
lesser-known, university-based museums …
The
Meadows Museum
at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX, houses one of the largest and most comprehensive
collections of Spanish art outside of Spain. With works dating from the
10th to the 21st century, the internationally renowned collection presents a
broad spectrum of art covering a thousand years of Spanish heritage.
During business trips to Spain
in the 1950s, Texas philanthropist and oil
financier Algur H. Meadows spent many hours at the Prado
Museum in Madrid. The Prado’s spectacular collection
of Spanish masterpieces inspired him to begin his own collection of Spanish
art. In 1962, through The Meadows Foundation, he gave SMU funds for the
construction and endowment of a museum to house his Spanish collection. The Meadows Museum opened in 1965 as part of a new
arts center at SMU. Until his death in 1978, Algur Meadows provided the impetus
and funds for an aggressive but highly selective acquisitions program through
which an extraordinary collection was developed in a remarkably short period of
time. The Foundation continues to provide ongoing support for collection-development, education, and more.
The Meadows Museum collection includes masterpieces
by some of the world’s greatest painters: El Greco, Velázquez, Ribera, Murillo (St. Justa),
Goya, Miró, Gris (Cubist Landscape) and Picasso. Highlights of the collection include Renaissance
altarpieces, monumental Baroque canvases, exquisite Rococo oil sketches,
polychrome wood sculptures, Impressionist landscapes, modernist abstractions, a
comprehensive collection of the graphic works of Goya, and a select group of
sculptures by major 20th-century masters, including Auguste Rodin, Jacques
Lipchitz, Henry Moore, Claes Oldenburg, David Smith and Fritz Wotruba. At the
base of the plaza is a 40-by-90 foot moving sculpture, Wave, designed by
Santiago Calatrava.
And, now through August 2nd,
The Abelló Collection: A ModernTaste for European Masters makes its international debut
at the Meadows Museum.
Ranked among the top of private art holdings of Spain, the Juan Abelló Collection
comprises works by some of the greatest artists from the sixteenth to the
twenty-first centuries. For more than thirty years, impresario Juan Abelló
and his wife, Anna Gamazo, have collected the finest and rarest of masterpieces
by Spanish artists such as El Greco, Francisco de Goya, Pablo Picasso, and Juan
Gris. In several instances, Mr. Abelló and Mrs. Gamazo spent several years in
search of particular works, to bring back to Spain national masterpieces dispersed
over the course of history.
Among the works in this special exhibit are works by Juan de Flandes (c.
1465-1519) as well as
The Virgin with the Christ Child, or
The
Virgin of the Milk (c. 1485-90) by the Palencian master Pedro de
Berruguete (c. 1450-1504), masterpieces by Fernando Yañez de la Almedina (c.
1475-1540) and El Greco (1541-1614) including
The Stigmatization of Saint
Francis (c. 1580).
The baroque
period is represented by Spain’s
great expatriate artist Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652),
The Sense of
Smell (c. 1615) from his
Five Senses, and from his later period,
Saint Peter (c. 1644), which relates to the artist’s series of
apostles and philosophers. Also included are magnificent examples of
still life, a genre that flourished during seventeenth-century. From
farther afield,
vedute
by Francesco Guardi (1712-1793) and Canaletto (1697-1768) capture
dazzling, sun-drenched visions of Venice.
Goya’s nineteenth-century portraiture is represented in two works.
The Abelló collection also holds an impressive array of twentieth-century works. The
display from this period is about as varied as the number of art theories and
movements spanning that era. Several of Spain’s most important artistic
representatives of the past century play a prominent role. Included are
masterpieces by Juan Gris, Salvador Dalí, Miquel Barceló, and a
suite of rare drawings by Picasso. Non-Spanish artists of the twentieth
century are also included, such as Braque, Léger, Matisse, Modigliani (Portrait of Brancusi), and
Francis Bacon.