THE ARTS WHAT THE NASHER SCULPTURE GARDEN WILL MEAN TO DALLAS

OK. WE WON. AFTER years of speculation about where the single greatest privately held collection of 20th-century sculpture would end up. Dallas won the prize.

Some had speculated that the world-renowned Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection would go to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. After all, that museum had started the war over the art in the late 1980s by commissioning a study for a Nasher Sculpture Garden. Others considered San Francisco’s Fine Arts Museum a front-runner: director Harry Parker had worked with the Nashers in Dallas for years and had played host to the collection in his museum’s renovated galleries. New York’s Guggenheim, home to the collection when the decision was made, also was a strong contender.

But we won. Now Dallas, already the home of the Dallas Museum of Art and Raymond Nasher, will add to its cultural treasures a $32 million garden of outdoor modem masterpieces. When the announcement was made this spring, champagne corks popped, the local media gushed, the mayor spouted statistics about economic impact and DMA director Jay Gates touted downtown’s renaissance. The can-do city had done it again.

Why Dallas, one might ask? II” the family had been offered space in considerably more prestigious institutions both nationally and abroad, why did they elect to actually spend money here? But what looked like a monumental gift from this first family of the Dallas art world was hardly a gift in the conventional sense,

As the announcement made clear, Nasher*s donation remains within his own, almost unfettered control. II does not go to an existing institution but to a new private foundation (incorporated in 1996) bearing the family’s name. The Nasher Foundation has decided: to purchase a block in downtown Dallas from its various owners (one of which is the Dallas Museum of Art); to hold an international competition to design the garden; to build the garden at its own expense; to install it with a rotating display chosen from Nasher’s superb group of outdoor sculptures, of which 66 works have been listed but only 30 to 40 will be installed in the garden. All the works are important, and at least half of them are outright masterpieces. Yet none of them will be owned by the DMA or the city of Dallas. Instead, the Nasher family will retain ownership.

Of the large and internationally significant Nasher Collection of Modern Sculpture, the local project includes only the outdoor sculpture. No provision has been made for that part of the collection-small and/or fragile works-that can only be displayed indoors. These include major masterpieces by Rosso, Rodin, Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, Duchamp-Villon, Calder and Smith. A large number of significant works in The Nasher Collection, many of which are now on display in the Guggenheim, will not have a place in the Nasher Sculpture Garden. Rather, they will continue to surround the collector in his Preston Hollow estate and be available for loan.

However, Nasher has created a special relationship with the DMA and, in so doing, has raised the possibility that a number of indoor works from the collection might be displayed there. By purchasing land from the museum for an amount exceeding $1 million, the potential for synergy in this relationship is enhanced. Ideas for joint projects come to mind easily-reuniting the ’’Women of Venice” series by Giacometti (there are examples in the Nasher Collection and the Meadows Museum) for the first time since 1956; bringing together the scattered works in the area by Maillol with judicious loans from other institutions and the Musée Maillai in Paris; creating the first important exhibition of Gauguin sculpture; publishing the various forms of Picasso’s most famous cubist sculpture, “Head (Fernande).” of which the Nasher Collection has a particularly important plaster.

Part of the package is Nasher’s insistence on the independence of the gift. The Nasher Collection will be strongly associated with, but not limited to, the Dallas Museum of Art. The collection already has long-established ties with institutions throughout the world? many of which will be perfectly free to come to the foundation’s trustees with creative exhibition and collection-sharing ideas that will, in the long run, benefit the DMA far more than if the museum itself owned the collection, When the Tate Gallery in London does a Medardo Rosso exhibition or the National Gallery in Washington mounts a David Smith research project, the Nasher Col lection will play a major role in those programs, providing the DMA with access to ideas, facilities, staff and resources that are beyond its present scope.

Creative opportunities will be ripe for other institutions in the area. It’s easy to imagine a Ph.D. program al SMU in (he history of sculpture, a symposium at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture on the ravaging of the human form in late 20th-century sculpture, an ongoing program at the MAC of commissioned installations by sculptors. Even Fort Worth could get into the act-the Kimbell might well do an exhibition contrasting the portable bronzes of the Renaissance with those by Matisse, Picasso, Maillol and others in the early 20th century. And, with the DMA’s conference, class and library facilities adjacent to the garden, our muse-um can do a good deal more than be a passive neighbor of the Nasher Sculpture Garden.

We must remember, as we celebrate our victor>’, exactly what it is that we have won. The foundation’s trustees will continue to be inundated with requests from institutions throughout the world for gifts, loans, collection-sharing plans, exhibitions and funding for scholarly projects. The DMA will have a special place at the table, but it will have to produce independent and collaborative projects as provocative as those of its global competitors. In this way, the Nasher Foundation has chosen to maintain maximum flexibility and to reward continued creativity.

Of course, independence has its price. The Nasher family rejected the city’s offer to pay for the garden and allow the collection permanent residence in the DMA’s immense Barrel Vault and Quadrant Galleries in exchange for ownership. This proposal was too traditional and inflexible to meet Nasher’s demanding standards. Yet these standards will cost them a good deal of money. The figure published repeatedly is $32 million for the establishment of the sculpture garden. That sum covers the land purchase, the garden competition, its construction and installation, and a $600,000 per year commitment by the family to support ongoing costs of the garden.

Even without the art, the Nasher gift of land and money will be the largest cultural donation since the death of Al Meadows, surpassing the recently announced $30 million gift by the Dedman family to SMU. Rather than simply being a municipal asset to be visited when relatives come to town, the sculpture garden may galvanize the Dallas-Fort Worth area to become the American urban area for sculpture. We already have a good deal more than we realize. Major works by Henry Moore. Auguste Rodin, Antoine Bourdelle, Aristide Maillol, Barbara Hepworth, Robert Smithson, Alexander Calder, Edounrdo Chillida and Robert Irwin are currently on display in downtown Dallas alone. We should feel justifiable pride when we enter the Trammell Crow Building and see the same two monumental lead sculptures by Maillol that flank the entrance from the Louvre to the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. When we add the works by That great French sculptor in Dallas and Fort Worth, they include the majority of his masterpieces. And, we can’t forget the works by Naguchi. Moore, Oldenburg and Lipchitz that surround the Meadows School of the Ans at SMU. Willi the Nasher Sculpture Garden as a focal point, all of these works will have a much greater collective force than the delightfully reassuring kitsch of Las Colinas’ lively Mustangs and downtown’s lumpy bronze longhorns with their politically-correct cowboy escorts.

Why not encourage this artistic Mecca both privately and publicly? The city’s Office of Cultural Affairs could match the contribution of the Nasher Foundation by planning an important international outdoor sculpture exhibition at Fair Park in conjunction with the opening of the Nasher Sculpture Garden. This might culminate in a major sculpture prize-The Nasher Prize-similar to the Pritzker Prize for architecture or the Turner Prize for emerging British artists. The DMA could begin an area-wide program of sculpture exhibitions, publications and educational initiatives to celebrate that occasion. We could name 1999 as The Year of Sculpture; a number of funding sources could help make it possible. We should be as ambitious in planning the opening of the Nasher Sculpture Garden as Patsy and Ray were in collecting.

Some suggestions for the creators of the garden: Real consideration should be given to purchasing the Flora Street frontage of both blocks between The Morton H. Mey-erson Symphony Center and the DMA. rather than all of the block on Harwood. Although there are disadvantages to this (a big street in the middle and an exit ramp off Woodall Rodgers Freeway), there are overarching advantages. The land along Flora Street is less costly per square foot than the land along Woodall Rodgers because it is zoned for lower buildings. It would be possible to acquire more land for the same money. The garden would have a stronger effect on the Arts District by gaining an aesthetic foothold on two urban blocks and creating a continuous garden between I.M. Pei’s glorious west-facing facade of the Meyerson and the museum. This could create the opportunity for a fascinating bridge and/or subterranean tunnel linking the two parts of the garden.

Conceived in this way, the Nasher Sculpture Garden might easily take advantage of the single most fascinating aspect of downtown Dallas-its limestone base. This city is built on a base of solid limestone that, when excavated, forms a quarry. How wonderful it would be if the sculpture garden could be conceived as part of a “quarry,” making a link with the most vital tradition of American sculpture since the war-earth works-and with the oldest material of outdoor sculpture, stone. When thinking of quarry gardens like the Bouchart Gardens in Victoria, Canada, the possibilities of something fabulous in downtown Dallas are much easier to imagine.

Yes, we are the city of Neiman Marcus, the Dallas Cowboys, The Mansion on Turtle Creek, million-dollar teardowns in “The Bubble” and big hair. But putting the Nasher family’s generous gift at the forefront of our civic image may be the greatest cultural challenge we face in the next century.