Word: museum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Chicago, the Terra Museum of American Art has a different agenda. Daniel Terra, 76, head of Lawter International Inc., the Illinois-based manufacturing firm, raised millions for Ronald Reagan's campaign fund and was given the Ruritanian honorific of "Ambassador-at-Large for Cultural Affairs" -- as though culture, to an Administration that spends virtually as much on military bands as on the National Endowment for the Arts, were a foreign state. Ambassador Terra, as he likes to be called, is an enthusiastic buyer of 18th, 19th and early 20th century American...
...collection, in short, more notable for size than quality. But Terra has big plans for it; he says it will be the nucleus of a $75 million museum development whose first stage, two gallery buildings designed by Booth/Hansen & Associates, opened in April with a loan show of American historic paintings from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, along with some of Terra's own holdings...
...past this is to see the two together, to compare them, and this can best be done under the roof of a great encyclopedic museum. Hence it is a pity that Terra did not give his collection to the Art Institute of Chicago. Much, no doubt, would have gone into storage, because much is not of museum quality. But that is not what the new Maecenases wish to hear. There is vanity museumship, just as there is vanity publishing. Can it be that America now has too many museums -- and that the Terra Museum is a sign that the saturation...
Well, yes and no. There is always room for a really fine museum, and the proof is in Houston. The Menil Collection, which opened in June, houses the works assembled over the past 45 years by Dominique de Menil and her late husband John, who was chairman of Schlumberger, the giant oil-field services company. Through the '70s, as American museum and collecting habits became encysted with hoopla, glitz and architectural manipulation, Dominique de Menil remained absolutely committed to the ideal of art as art, of a museum whose discretion and neutrality would release the eloquence of the work...
...very strong in three areas: surrealism (it has perhaps the best Magrittes of any museum in the world), archaic Mediterranean objects and African tribal art. But everywhere in the collection one encounters images, large and small, whose intensity comes fairly burning out of the vitrine or off the wall, from a horrendous stone Celtic effigy of the Tarasque, or earth demon, to a gold Byzantine reliquary in the form of a miniature sarcophagus. Their vividness is helped by the subtle and often witty installation carried out by the Menil's director, Walter Hopps. It is not "systematic," presenting objects...