Anderson Gallery a major art donation to Stanford
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Stanford University will receive a major donation of 121 works of painting and sculpture by 86 artists, including Jackson Pollock's "Lucifer," (above) from a family of Peninsula art collectors. Added to existing art holdings, the gift moves Stanford to the front rank among universities with teaching museums.
The donation, from Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson of Atherton and their daughter, Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, comprises the cream of their peerless collection of postwar American art.
As an added element of its "arts district" and campus-wide Arts Initiative, Stanford will construct a new building, near the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, to house the Anderson Collection. The Andersons will not underwrite its design or construction.
"We will have the responsibility for filling it," Harry "Hunk" Anderson told The Chronicle by phone. That will include the future loan for display of important pieces the Andersons will retain.
2014 opening planned
Stanford plans to open the Anderson Gallery, as it will be called, in late 2014.
The crown jewel of the gift is Pollock's "Lucifer" (1947), a stellar example of the artist's mature, drip-painting style, which reset the level of ambition and the physical scale of American painting after World War II. "Lucifer" stood out even in the great 1998-99 Pollock retrospective shared by New York's Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern, London. Because of the quality, rarity, fine condition and historic importance of "Lucifer," it is probably the privately owned 20th century American artwork most coveted by museums nationwide. The Andersons have kept their thinking about donations so private that no one can say what, if anything, their gift to Stanford portends for future benefactions.
Stanford has not yet released a checklist of the objects in the Anderson gift. But it includes a number of works by other artists comparable to "Lucifer" in significance and artistic stature: "Woman Standing - Pink" (1954-55) by Willem de Kooning, "Pink and White Over Red" (1957) and "Untitled (Black on Gray)" (1969) by Mark Rothko, a canonical black painting by Ad Reinhardt, and major works by other late 20th century painters and sculptors, among them Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Morris Louis, David Smith, Joan Mitchell and Frank Stella.
The Bay Area and West Coast are well represented in the Anderson gift by works such as Wayne Thiebaud's 1962 "Candy Counter," David Park's "Four Women" (1959), Richard Diebenkorn's "Ocean Park #60" (1973), Sam Francis' "Red in Red" (1955) and Los Angeles abstractionist John McLaughlin's "#13" (1962).
No comments:
Post a Comment