Art School Memory: The Unbearable Humbling of Being (an Artist)

Robert Motherwell studio wall

This shot of Robert Motherwell's studio wall reminds me of my "Dr. William Jordan story." You see how overshot paint/ink marks were made on the backdrop wall behind the art? Well I had a similar pattern on my own backdrop in my Graduate studio at SMU -- only there were no paintings pinned up this one time. I had just "cleared the decks." Dr. Jordan happened by, and he thought that the backdrop was my actual artwork. 

As a fan of Cy Twombly and other artists of that era, he began to lavish high praise on this "work." Since Dr.  J. was one of the finest art historians I have ever known, and was responsible for curating the fabulous Meadows Museum collection, including those Velazquez and Goya masterworks, I was not about to interrupt or correct his assumptions. 

Truth be known, as a neophyte Grad student, constantly challenged by my faculty over my searching efforts -- I was also "starved for compliments." So, I politely soaked it all in. After he left, I was both flattered and embarrassed by this development. 

Welcome to the bitter-sweet and ambiguous world of Fine Art appreciation. Always an extremely mixed-bag of results for me. A perfect example of my lot.

Everett Raymond Kinstler: Algur H. Meadows Portrait

Portrait of Algur H. Meadows by Everett Raymond Kinstler

Everett Raymond Kinstler

Everett Raymond Kinstler

Everett Raymond Kinstler

The art philanthropy of Algur H. Meadows and his foundation is just the best. He has added so much to the SMU and Dallas arts scene, even long after his passing. 

Here is a posthumous portrait of the great man by comic book artist-turned-portrait painter, Everett Raymond Kinstler. I suspect that Kinstler may have told our family friend -- watercolorist legend Edmond J. Fitzgerald -- about the SMU art program, and that's why Jim recommended it to dad. The two were artist-friends in NYC. For many years Kinstler was a protege-caregiver of the great illustrator-cartoonist, James Montgomery Flagg. 

The six degrees of separation are always at work in my life. I am constantly seeing the connections in the web...

In the fall of 1928 Algur H. Meadows and a friend, Ralph G. Trippett, founded a loan company, the General Finance Company, which became the General American Finance System in 1930. In the summer of 1936 Meadows and Trippett united with J. W. Gilliland, a petroleum expert, to form the General American Oil Company, the headquarters of which were moved from Shreveport to Dallas in 1937. 

The new company experienced a phenomenal expansion in operations, due to an ingenious method of acquiring oil-producing properties that Meadows developed. The scheme, which Meadows dubbed the "ABC plan," involved three parties in the purchase transaction to minimize tax liability and the use of interest-bearing oil payments to meet a large percentage of the purchase price. Meadows became the president and major stockholder of the General American Oil Company in 1941 and was elected chairman of the board in 1950. By 1959 his company had acquired 2,990 oil wells in fifteen states and Canada and was drilling for oil in Spain.

On business trips to Madrid in the 1950s, Meadows visited the Prado museum, which inspired an interest in Spanish Old Masters. He began acquiring paintings attributed to artists such as El Greco and Goya. Following the death of his wife in 1961, he donated his collection and a million-dollar endowment to Southern Methodist University in order to establish a museum of Spanish art in her memory. He subsequently donated a collection of contemporary Italian sculpture to SMU in order to found an outdoor sculpture garden in honor of his second wife, Elizabeth Boggs Bartholow, whom he married in 1962. In recognition of Meadows' multiple gifts, exceeding $34 million, the SMU trustees named the University's School of Arts in his honor in 1969, Meadows School of the Arts .

In 1964 Meadows, with the encouragement of his second wife, began collecting paintings by French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Three years later, in a widely publicized discovery, he learned that thirty-eight of the fifty-eight works in his private collection were forgeries and that many of the earlier works in SMU's Meadows Museum collection were falsely attributed. With characteristic generosity, Meadows immediately gave the museum a million dollars to replace the questionable works and began rebuilding his private collection, much of which was donated to the Dallas Museum of Art after his death.

Meadows generously benefitted programs throughout Texas in health, education, visual arts, and social services, under the auspices of the Meadows Foundation, which he and his first wife established in 1948. He was on the board of directors of Republic National Bank of Dallas, a trustee of SMU, and on the board of directors at St. Mark's School, Presbyterian Hospital, Children's Medical Center, Hope Cottage, and the Wadley Research Center. Meadows was a Presbyterian, a Mason, and a member of numerous professional, civic, and social organizations, including the American Petroleum Institute, Independent Petroleum Association, Dallas Petroleum Club, Dallas Art Association, Dallas Citizens Council, and Sigma Nu fraternity. 

He received an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from SMU in 1965 and an honorary doctor of laws degree from Centenary College in 1969. He was killed in an auto accident on June 10, 1978.

His legacy of generosity to the public lives on in the Meadows Museum of Art at Centenary College, and the Meadows Museum at SMU -- now considered to be the finest collection of Spanish art outside of Spain -- and through the beneficence of the Meadows Foundation, which by the end of 2013 had donated more than one- billion dollars to charitable organizations in Texas.

William B. Jordan and Algur H. Meadows in the first Meadows Museum at SMU

Dr. William B. Jordan (1940-2018)

William B. Jordan

William B. Jordan

William B. Jordan

William B. Jordan

William B. Jordan

William B. Jordan

Another one of my first-rate art mentors at SMU has passed away. I had no idea that Dr. Jordan had passed when I posted my earlier piece about his gift to the Prado. He was always very nice to me and the other studio majors of my era.

"William B. Jordan, one of the most significant museum professionals in North Texas' history, died Monday in Dallas after a short illness, according to the Dallas Museum of Art. He was 77.  

His legacy began when, as a newly minted Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts in New York -- and a long-haired native of San Antonio -- he arrived in Dallas to help Algur Meadows form a new collection of Spanish paintings for Southern Methodist University. 

His combination of charm, knowledge, modesty, and guts endeared him to his new employer, and the fabled collection of the Meadows Museum was not just begun, but given a level of quality and a range that became the envy of Old Master curators worldwide. 

From that start, there were few museums in North Texas that he didn't transform. He was curator at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum and, eventually, a trustee of the Nasher Sculpture Center and the DMA. 

His taste was unerring, his eye secure and his gambler's instinct unwavering. A simple list of the acquisitions made with his leadership is unrivaled among American curators of his generation. 

Perhaps his crowning achievement was the discovery and subsequent personal gift to the Prado Museum in Madrid of the Portrait of Philip III by the greatest Spanish painter of the Golden Age, Diego Velázquez. Jordan donated the work (estimated at $6 million) to the Prado on Dec. 17, 2016, and was consequently made a trustee of the most significant museum of Spanish art in the world.

The Dallas Museum of Art acknowledge Jordan's death in an email to trustees Monday night from director Agustín Arteaga, museum president Catherine Marcus Rose and chairman Melissa Foster Fetter: 'We hope all of you will remember him as the great scholar and gentleman that he was; the passionate, brilliant curator who left his imprint upon so many distinguished institutions, in Dallas and abroad; and the cherished friend who placed art at the very center of his life.'"

Bill Jordan and his unpublished painting of Phillip III, attributed to Diego Velazquez.

Dr. William B. Jordan has had a lengthy career devoted to museums. He obtained his doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 1967. That same year he was appointed the first director of the Meadows Museum of the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He spent fourteen years there, working closely with the late Algur H. Meadows then with the foundation that Meadows left on his death for the creation of what is now one of the most important collections of Spanish painting outside Europe.

Between 1981-1990 Dr. Jordan was deputy director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, where he built up an important collection that represents all periods and artistic schools, in addition to creating an influential programme of exhibitions and research. 

In addition to curating exhibitions on El Greco and Ribera, Dr. Jordan is one of the leading experts on Spanish still-life painting and has curated a number of exhibitions on this subject in museums, including the Museo del Prado, the National Gallery in London, the Royal Palace in Madrid, the Kimbell Art Museum and the Meadows Museum in Dallas. 

During the course of his career he has handled the acquisition of four works by Diego Velázquez. Now retired, he continues to be active in research and is also a collector and a member of several art museum boards in the United States.

Portrait of Philip III by Velázquez

The painting was acquired by Dr. Jordan on the London art market, where it was catalogued as a "Portrait of a Gentleman." Following its restoration, Dr. Jordan studied the painting, leading him to consider the idea that it is a work by Velázquez, specifically a preparatory painting for the face of Philip III in "The Expulsion of the Moriscos."

Among the reasons that have led Dr. Jordan to defend this attribution are:

Philip III appears to be aged around 40 in the painting, his age in 1609 when the moriscos were expelled from Spain.

Stylistically, the work necessarily dates from later than 1609. It may have been produced between 1623, when Velázquez arrived at court and introduced a new style of royal portrait that corresponds to that of this work, and 1631, when he returned from Italy and adopted a notably different portrait style.

The fact that Philip III is in near-profile and looking up indicates that this is not a portrait (in which the sitter normally looks straight ahead) but an image to be included in a narrative scene.

The fact that the work’s characteristics are not comparable to the styles of the other portraitists working at the court in the 1620s, such as Van der Hamen, Maíno, Diricksen, etc.

A study of written descriptions of "The Expulsion of the Moriscos" suggest that the portrait of Philip III in that scene had a similar expression to this one and was looking in the same direction.

A study of those descriptions led Dr. Jordan to consider the idea that "The Expulsion of the Moriscos" was conceived as a pendant to Titian’s painting of "Philip II Offering the Infante don Fernando to Victory" (Museo del Prado), which hung in the same room (the Salón Nuevo in the Alcázar) for which Velázquez’s work was painted. This idea led him to compare the portrait of Philip II in Titian’s work with that of Philip III in the present painting -- a comparison that revealed numerous points of comparison with regard to the size and pose of the portraits.

William B. Jordan