The Suida-Manning Collection
of Renaissance and Baroque Art
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With a lot of hard work, a little faith, and some generous donations, The University of Texas at Austin has scored the Suida-Manning Collection, giving new meaning to the term "oil-rich Texas." "I've taught for 20 years at UT, and if someone had told me that we'd have Old Master paintings in Austin, Texas, I would not have believed it," says UT art history professor Linda Henderson. But that's exactly what has happened. 
In the early 1990s, Robert Manning and his wife, Bertina Suida Manning, the owners of the last great private collection of late Renaissance and Baroque art, began to think they should do something with their huge collection of approximately 250 paintings, 400 drawings, and 20 sculptures. The collection spans the 14th through 18th centuries in Italian, French, and German art. Jonathan Bober, curator of prints, drawings, and (now) European paintings at UT's Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, says, "This is a family to whose collection, to whose home, every major scholar and curator concerned with Renaissance and Baroque art went." 
He cites a letter he received from the director of the Louvre congratulating the museum on acquiring the collection. The director fondly remembered visiting the Mannings' home, which he considered a must-see whenever he was in New York. The Suida-Manning Collection boosts the Blanton Museum's reputation dramatically. A few superlatives. The Blanton now houses:
The story begins in Austria in the late 19th century, when William Suida began collecting art from the late Renaissance and Baroque periods. Forced to flee from the Nazis in 1939, he came to America, where he continued collecting. His daughter, Bertina, shared his passion and, more importantly, his eye for art--that ability to pick out the masters from the impostors, developed from careful study. A connoisseur like her father, Bertina joined him on his tours through Europe, expanding the collection. Bertina met Robert Manning at New York University, where they both were studying at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts. She married the native of Mart, Texas (near Waco), and together they began to build a collection of their own. In their day jobs, Bertina was curator of the Chrysler Collection, and Robert and William were curators for the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. They arranged exhibits and publications to increase knowledge of Baroque art in the United States. "Through the exhibitions they organized and through the collectors they helped and educated, they almost single-handedly developed an audience for Baroque painting in the United States," says Jessie Otto Hite, director of the Blanton Museum. The Italian government eventually knighted Bertina for her efforts in the study of the art of Genoa and the artist Luca Cambiaso. 
Robert and Bertina inherited Suida's collection in 1959 and increased their holdings even further, buying from high-end and low-key shops and galleries all over Europe. At times they found paintings priced at little more than the cost of their frames, yet they recognized the brushstrokes and style of an Old Master. After snatching up the find, a later restoration or consultation with another expert usually confirmed their suspicions. Thus they were able to amass a collection of familiar and lesser-known Old Masters that included Cambiaso, Guercino, Lorrain, Poussin, Rubens, Veronese, and Crespi. When Bertina died in 1992, Robert began thinking seriously about placing the collection into the public's hands. He felt that the state of Texas could use a collection like his, and, after curating a series of exhibits for Finch College in New York, he also hoped the collection would go to a university. He and Bertina had spent their whole lives amassing the collection and didn't want to see it split up by an auction house or museum. Even if a major museum bought the whole collection, it might show only the rarest pieces and leave the rest in storage, never to be seen by the public. In 1994, Manning was visiting a cousin in Austin and decided to call on Hite. He asked her if she'd ever heard of him, which she had not. He told her he was a collector. "Of what?" Hite asked. When he replied that he collected Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, she said, "Would you like to come over for a visit?" She then picked up the phone and made a quick call to Jonathan Bober. "Have you heard of Robert Manning?" she asked. To Bober, that question was like, "Have you heard of the Holy Grail?" He had studied in the owners' home as a graduate student at Harvard. When he excitedly replied yes, Hite invited him to join them. 
A few months later, Hite and Bober were in New York on business and paid a visit to Manning at his home in Forest Hills. "He greeted us at the door ... and he had an old, gooseneck desk lamp and the world's longest extension cord," says Hite. They started in the attic and wound their way through the house. Paintings hung floor to ceiling in the hallways, living room, dining room, the powder room, and every bedroom, where some were even stashed under the beds. Everywhere Manning cast the light, they found a treasure. Then Manning pulled out 400 drawings dating back hundreds of years. Hite says that when Manning and Bober started going through the drawings, "I knew they were kindred spirits. Jonathan is extremely smart and one of the best connoisseurs I've ever known. Manning recognized in Jonathan a like mind and eye, and he was very pleased with this." Bober sensed that Manning was sizing him up during their visits, but he says it was more in the way two sports fanatics compare statistics in a game of one-upsmanship. During a subsequent visit to Austin, they sat for two hours in the Doubletree hotel bar, perusing reproductions of artwork, comparing opinions and testing each other's knowledge. Manning believed the art defined who and what he was, and he "passionately felt that his collection was his greatest achievement," says Bober. Manning would eventually propose donating a significant part of the collection to UT in the form of a charitable trust, and allowing the University to buy the remainder so that he and Bertina could pass something on to their daughter, Alessandra, and her family. Bober never expected to have the chance to negotiate for such a collection, but he wanted to keep Manning interested so that even if he didn't give anything to UT, he might make a loan. But the more Bober and Hite talked to each other and their colleagues, the more they thought that UT had a chance. Then, in 1996, Manning unexpectedly died, and the collection was left in the custody of his daughter, Alessandra Manning Dolnier, and son-in-law, Kurt Dolnier. The Dolniers immediately sent the entire collection to be stored at Vassar College for protection as they wrestled with the conflicting financial and emotional factors that now faced them. The art had enormous sentimental value to Alessandra. Like her mother, she had traveled with her parents when they were collecting. "Sandy said these paintings were like her brothers and sisters," says Hite. "She was an only child and grew up with them." But in the end, two factors worked in UT's favor: the Dolnier's desire to honor Robert's wishes that the collection stay together and go to a public Texas museum, and the promise of a prohibitive inheritance tax if they kept the artwork. Bober and Hite began to work around the clock to build support for the acquisition, and in the summer of 1998, the planets started lining up: An anonymous UT alumna pledged $3 million, followed by three other donors who would give an additional $2 million. The first donor also wrote a letter to the Board of Regents that caught the attention of Chairman Lowell Lebermann, an art lover himself, who encouraged UT to acquire the collection. Bober got to know the Dolniers well in the months following Manning's death. He says that with Manning, the relationship was based on scholarship and their mutual obsession over the art of the period, but with the Dolniers, it is a personal friendship based on trust. That friendship, along with the advice of Manning's chief financial advisor, helped the Dolniers decide to proceed with Manning's wishes. "They made a hard decision and a very selfless decision in some ways to go ahead and try to make this work," says Hite. One of the final endorsements from UT came from President Larry Faulkner. Hite had approached him about the collection earlier, but buying it had seemed highly unlikely, especially as the University was still raising money for a museum building to house such collections. After Lebermann called a lunch meeting that included Faulkner, the UT president asked to see some reproductions of the artwork. Bober gathered transparencies of the collection's highlights and Faulkner spent several weeks studying them. Now convinced, Faulkner told Hite that buying the collection was the single most important thing that the University could do for the visual arts in its capital campaign. Bober says, "There are a number of heroes here, but without Faulkner, this was a wild-eyed dream. He immediately understood the importance of this collection to the entire university." It took four teams of lawyers six months to hammer out the deal, but it was finalized in November 1998. Paintings in the Met in New York and at Vassar College, some of which were on display, were taken off the walls, packed up, and shipped to Austin. 
After the papers were signed, Hite remembers asking, "President Faulkner, can you believe that we really have pulled this off?" He turned and chuckled, "No. The first time you said this to me, I thought you were a lunatic!" The Learning Begins The Suida-Manning Collection is unique in the art world because it was amassed by a family of scholars. According to Hite, it contains works by artists that are not well-represented in museums outside of Italy. As far as late Renaissance and Baroque Italian art, she says, "Any student who is trained here will probably get as good or better an education than they could anywhere else in the country." When the exhibition of 60 top paintings opened on March 6, 1999, more than 500 people filed through the second floor of the Harry Ransom Center to view it in the first 30 minutes. It will remain on display in various campus galleries until the new Blanton Museum is built. Art history professors immediately incorporated works into their classes, despite the middle-of-the-semester timing. The Department of Art and Art History was drooling over the works for several reasons: the depth of the collection, the quality of the art, and the critical fact that the works are on the campus, not just in pretty books and slides. By the depth of the collection, art historians mean that one can see what's happening artistically in several different geographical places at once. According to Bober, the best chance of making sense of an object is when another object acts as context. Art historians all over the world were excited to learn that the collection would remain intact because the potential for authenticating new finds is increased exponentially that way. Already, several drawings and paintings have been re-attributed to different artists. One painting thought to be a copy after a work by Parmigianino was discovered to be by the artist himself--only the third painting by Parmigianino in this country and the greatest surviving link between his painting and printmaking. On the other hand, Bober discovered that a painting attributed to Strozzi, which some experts had considered authentic, if quirky, was in fact a clever modern recreation of his style. The collection includes three other paintings and a drawing known to be by Strozzi. These are major finds, and Bober still hasn't had time to systematically sort through the collection. Adds Hite, "You can look at a whole school and see the highlights of what was going on not only in Rome and Venice, but also Genoa, Naples, Milan, and Florence, after its heyday." That's depth. During the time of the late Renaissance and Baroque periods, it was de rigueur for countries all over the world to send their best painters to Italy for instruction. The public can now see an artist's development, how different schools influenced his techniques, and how artistic schools compared to one another. Just as a great novelist's edited transcript can freeze in time the workings of his mind, the preparatory drawings show how an artist worked, the thoughts shaping his paintings. Add the fact that the Blanton's collection of prints and the 400 Suida-Manning drawings support the paintings as well, and the whole becomes more extraordinary than even the sum of individual pieces. Art history professor Jeff Smith happened to visit colleagues in Munich after UT announced the acquisition. Smith recalls them asking, "How did you get this?" with a little disbelief. As Bober explains, "In one fell swoop, this brings the highest-quality material of the early Western tradition right here. Statistically, qualitatively, as a basis of research and interpretation, and socially, relative to all the University's communities, not just its students and faculty, this is a remarkable accomplishment." Bober has his own story from a recent visit to Milan, where he lectures periodically. A professor colleague from the University of Milan looked through the transparencies of some of the Suida-Manning artwork Bober brought with him and commented that it was a great collection. Then Bober reminded him of two Daniele Crespi paintings, personal favorites of his, that are part of the collection, and his colleague's reaction was immediate and animated: "My God! Those came with the collection? The two that were at the Metropolitan? How extraordinary." Most of the pieces are in excellent condition because they were housed in a private residence for years. Few paintings were exposed to the accidental brushes of visitors and few were touched by past conservators, many of whom managed to ruin paintings they thought they were improving. Art history students are the most obvious group to use this collection, but everyone from those taking massive survey courses all the way up to specialized art history graduate students will use the works. Bober checks them off on his fingers: "Basically any survey course, every introductory course, every upper-division survey course, any methodology course, any painting course, and once departments get hip to it, any early European history course, courses in literature, and religious history." Professor Linda Henderson adds to that list by including the English, French, Italian, and anthropology departments, as well as music and architecture. She calls the collection a "wonderful visual record of culture in the 14th through 18th centuries." Students can see what life was like during those periods and see what others of that time were looking at. Henderson herself plans to use the collection, even though she specializes in 20th century American art. She muses that one can trace the legacy of the landscape tradition from the lushest Guercino painting to the starkest modernist painting of a city. She says that it would be ridiculous not to use a collection like this as much as possible. Professor Jeff Smith plans to create seminars on how certain themes and issues of daily life were expressed artistically. Bober has planned a course on the history and connoisseurship of Italian drawings, using the actual drawings, not slides. 
All of the professors agree that to be able to work directly from the art objects is vital to the learning process. Slides are nice, but can't convey a crucial element of painting: the surface. According to Henderson, all of the record of a painting's execution is on the surface, and one can't examine that from a slide. Smith mentions Rembrandt, who used thick layers of paint called impasto, almost sculpting the image onto the canvas. He says that on some paintings, the paint is sticking out as much as a third of an inch to draw attention to certain facial features or objects. Students interested in that technique, or any painting technique, lose that tool without the original. Painting has always been taught by what has gone before. Says Henderson, "It's very hard to teach painters on a desert island." Well-known objects don't hold the only value in the Suida-Manning Collection. Smith recalls a graduate school course in which the professor would pull unfamiliar pieces out of the storeroom of the Met and ask the students what they thought of them. "You suddenly have the object in front of you. It's not something you've memorized from reading in a book or an object you've even ever seen," he says. "You have to apply the knowledge that you've learned elsewhere or admit your profound ignorance. That's the starting point for learning." As any sweaty-palmed student in a final exam can attest, applying knowledge is more difficult than straight memorization. Professors are waiting to release hordes of students upon this collection, but they'll have to share the gallery with experts from all over the world who will be learning from the collection, too. Those experts will mainly be working to match artists to paintings, to better understand the subject matter, and the way the works were originally used. The learning environment is enhanced by one of the best art department-university museum relationships in the country. According to both entities, this is exceedingly rare. Elsewhere, "there is almost a malevolent disinterest, where art historians don't use the museum collections or the museum curators don't want them to bring their classes in," says Professor Smith. All of this learning and public viewing will eventually take place in a new, consolidated Blanton Museum of Art. The University has raised a little more than $5.3 million but needs another $16 million to call the collection its own. And since the acquisition of the Suida-Manning Collection and the construction of the museum that will house it both are being funded privately, UT development officers are giving the collection and the Blanton Museum high priority in the capital campaign. As Hite says, "We still have miles to go before we sleep, but it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We just had to do it." By Cora Oltersdorf,
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