This handsome book will present for the first time a comprehensive overview of the Blanton Museum of Art's notable and distinguished permanent collection. The collection comprises more than 17,000 works of art and is recognized for its Old Master paintings, modern and contemporary American and Latin American art, and an encyclopedic collection of prints and drawings. Since its founding in 1963, the museum has experienced significant growth and become particularly strong in the following areas: modern and contemporary American art, featuring the Mari and James A. Michener Collection of American art; twentieth-century Latin American art, including the Barbara Duncan Collection; fifteenth-century to contemporary prints and drawings, featuring the recently acquired Leo Steinberg Collection; and European paintings, including works from the Suida-Manning Collection of Renaissance and Baroque art. Through 235 stunning color illustrations, the handbook features some of the most important holdings in the Blanton's collection, including works by Albrecht Dürer, Correggio, Rubens, Rembrandt, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Manet, Picasso, Joaquín Torres-García, Marsden Hartley, Hans Hofmann, Helen Frankenthaler, Jacob Lawrence, Sol LeWitt, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, Fernando Botero, Antonio Seguí, and Cildo Meireles.

Blanton Museum of Art: Guide to the Collection

Arts & Photography

Blanton Museum of Art

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Transactions: An Exhibition

Baum, Kelly

Colorful and playful kinetic sculptures, experimental objects designed to be catalysts for community building, manifestos calling for joy and the negation of melancholy: these are the elements that have shaped The Geometry of Hope. The title of this richly illustrated, 340-page volume brings together two threads that epitomize postwar abstract art from Latin America: on the one hand, geometry, precision, clarity and reason; on the other, a utopian sense of hope. The book contains new scholarship by an international cast, with examinations of six key cities--Montevideo, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas and Paris--as well as insightful essays on individual works of art. It comes to us via the Cisneros Graduate Seminar, a collaborative program of the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas, and the renowned Fundación Cisneros, and covers more than four decades of art-making with works by 52 artists, among them Lygia Clark, Gego, Jesús Rafael Soto and Hélio Oiticica.

The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection

De Torres, Cecilia

Pérez-Barreiro, Gabriel

Aldana, Erin

History & Criticism

Documenting the production of the New York Graphic Workshop (NYGW), a group founded in 1965 by three young Latin American artists in New York--Luis Camnitzer, José Guillermo Castillo and Liliana Porter--this is the first comprehensive overview of this crucial, yet not so well-known, episode in the history of U.S. and Latin American Conceptual art. The mission of the NYGW was to redefine the practice of printmaking in Conceptual terms, focusing on the mechanical and repetitive nature of the medium rather than its traditional techniques. The NYGW functioned as a collective. It held unconventional exhibitions, including several by mail and one in a safe-deposit box on 57th Street, and it participated in The Museum of Modern Art's 1970 exhibition Information. The NYGW also produced prints by some of the leading contemporary artists of the period, including Michael Snow, Max Neuhaus, José Luis Cuevas and Salvador Dali.

New York Graphic Workshop: 1964-1970

Establishing congruences between Modernist abstraction and the Pre-Columbian traditions of the ancient Americas, Uruguayan artist Francisco Matto (1911-1995) was a pioneer of Latin American art, and one of the most significant students of El Taller Torres-García, the workshop school established by Joaquín Torres-García. Matto remained in his native Montevideo, Uruguay for all of his life, and was financially secure enough to not need to sell or promote his work; consequently, it rarely circulates in international exhibitions, instead remaining in the estate of the artist and a few private collections in Montevideo, New York, Houston and Belgium. The Modern and the Mythic is the first comprehensive U.S. publication on Matto, and presents more than five decades of artistic production, from the artist's early work under Torres-García to his late works of the 1990s.

Francisco Matto: The Modern and The Mythic

Desire: February 5-April 25, 2010

Annette Dimeo (Editor) Carlozzi

In this first comprehensive presentation of art from the 1990s in Argentina, Recovering Beauty places the Centro Cultural Rojas (CCR) at the core of this creative period. The CCR, or "El Rojas" as it was later known, opened in 1989 as a venue for emerging artists. The "El Rojas" artists epitomized a collective will to move beyond a grim recent past by creating introspective narratives that looked towards the ordinary as a source of inspiration. Artists such as Feliciano Centurión, Sebastián Gordin, Jorge Gumier Mier, Miguel Harte, Graciela Hasper, Benito Laren, Marcelo Pombo, Cristina Schiavi and Omar Schiliro espoused conceptions of beauty, color and fantasy, and the projection of psychology as artistic expression. Recovering Beauty is the first sustained examination of this fascinating moment in Argentine culture, which chimes with trends towards the fantastical and the decorative in American art of the late 1990s and 2000s.

Recovering Beauty: The 1990s in Buenos Aires

How the influential American art historian used his print collection to theorize body language and the concept of the copyBeginning in the early 1960s, with only the meager budget of a part-time art history professor, Leo Steinberg (1920-2011) amassed a collection of more than 3,500 prints spanning the medium's 500-year history in the West. Steinberg's prints formed a visual library that shaped his scholarship in fundamental ways. His collection, incorporating the work of artists both famous and obscure, illuminates his claim that before photography, prints functioned as the "circulating lifeblood of ideas," disseminating figures and styles across boundaries. Through close observation of his prints, Steinberg developed some of his most innovative arguments about the instructive richness of the copy and the expressive potential of body language. This lavishly illustrated volume examines the development of Steinberg's remarkable collection and its role in his scholarship. It also serves as an introduction to the history of Western printmaking that these works broadly encompass.

The Circulating Lifeblood of Ideas: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints

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