A nice place, but someone should explain what ‘extraction’ means to the wealth of the nation and people’s paychecks.

T he last time I was in Austin, in 1995, the University of Texas’s art museum was tinier and in ad hoc homes. It wasn’t yet called the Blanton Museum of Art. Both Austin, which is Texas’s capital city, and the museum have certainly changed since then. The university, Texas’s overall boom, and, with it, the thriving lobbyist, legal, and high-tech sectors make Austin what has to be the yuppie capital of the Southwest. When I went to Central Market, the upscale gourmet supermarket, during food rush hour, I was nearly trampled in the Camembert aisle.

The university is an intellectual powerhouse and especially dynamic on a home-game football weekend. Alumni take their Longhorns seriously. I was on campus visiting the Blanton and the LBJ Library on Saturday and Sunday and can write that Longhorn love is catching. I stimulated the local economy via my new burnt-orange Longhorn swag. Texans are very endearing. They’re friendly, and they take pride in their communities, have entrepreneurial zeal, and aren’t snooty.

Today, the Blanton is a big, lively place, with nearly 200,000 square feet, a nice building from 2006 designed by the Boston firm Kallmann McKinnell & Wood, a 2023 plaza designed by the Norwegian firm Snøhetta, and a small chapel-like building designed by Ellsworth Kelly and called Austin. Kelly made stained glass windows for the space. It’s meant to be Austin’s answer to the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Kelly’s true calling may be stained glass rather than painting.

The Snøhetta exterior is distinguished by a cluster of what the museum calls “petals.” These are three-story-tall metal structures — they look like abstract palm trees — that shade the plaza from intense Texas sun but that also, perforated as they are, allow for dappled light. The Snøhetta plaza cost $35 million — a lot of money — and seems, as statements go, to verge on contrivance. The space is certainly distinctive. What’s changed since 2006 is the sweeping mall renovation making the Blanton Museum one end of a vista, with the Capitol the other. The 2006 Kallman McKinnell & Wood building was too quiet to sustain its new marquee spot.

All these elements make for a snazzy look. The Blanton is on campus, but its impressive view of the Capitol suits its dual mission, which seems to be unusually well balanced. It serves the university’s students and faculty — the university has a very good art history department — and is also Austin’s civic museum. The Blanton seems to treat town and gown as equals.

The Blanton’s strengths are Latin American art, feverish Baroque art — with lots of swooning, prancing saints — Old Master prints, and modern American art. I spent the morning into the afternoon in the permanent-collection galleries but wanted especially to see Spirit & Splendor: El Greco, Velázquez, and the Hispanic Baroque, a new exhibition displaying 57 works of art, nearly all paintings, borrowed from the Hispanic Society in New York.

Some of the Hispanic Society’s fantastic El Grecos are there, as well as Velázquez’s full-length portrait of the Count Duke of Olivares from around 1625. Olivares was Philip IV’s prime minister, consigliere, and partner in empire-building. Velázquez, around 25 and new to the king’s court, was still painting in the dark, sculptural style of his native Seville but flirting with the dash and sparkle that soon became his calling cards and placed him among the great court painters in Europe. There are two beautiful full-length saint portraits by Zurbarán from the 1630s; Murillo’s Prodigal Son Among the Swine, from about 1665; Valdés Leal’s Christ Carrying the Cross on His Way to Calvary, from 1661; and Christ Presented to the People, from the late 1560s by Luis de Morales. No one did sad better than Morales but, alas, the picture is in a climatized box — it’s on panel and very fragile — and glazed for maximum glare, so it’s hard to see. It convulses and dissolves as if Salvador Dalí designed that box.

The exhibition sags here and there as high points like Zurbarán and Velázquez are followed by second-raters such as Mateo Cerezo and Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, Velázquez’s son-in-law, or second-rate paintings by first-raters like Jusepe de Ribera. There’s plenty of wonderful, strange colonial Spanish art, but snark about imperial Spain’s focus on money-making extraction of gold and silver both dampens and then derails the mood. Spain had many motives in conquering the New World. And, goodness, the Blanton is in Texas! I suspect oil wealth pays some of its bills. I’m at the museum to look at art. If I need to hear about extraction, I’ll go to the dentist.

There are so many more engaging and informative directions to go. As an example, the three Philips — Philip II, Philip III, and Philip IV — were extraordinary connoisseurs whose patronage of foreign artists such as Titian and Rubens revolutionized Spanish art. Still, Spanish art retains a medieval touch. Why and how? Spanish polychrome wood sculpture is a vital part of Spanish art. Why only one work? The Hispanic Society has got loads of it.

I’d never heard of Nicolás de Correa, a colonial artist working in what is now Mexico in the 1690s. Only four paintings are signed by him. His Wedding at Cana, from 1696, starts with oil paint, but he overlays it with iridescent mother-of-pearl, a technique he learned from Japanese Nanban lacquerware. How in the world did he develop this? Enquiring minds want to know. An anonymous artist working in Cuzco in Peru in the 18th century used mother-of-pearl for spectacular frames for paintings depicting Christ’s presentation at the temple in Jerusalem and the Flight into Egypt. I wanted more information on materials and how Indigenous styles and techniques informed Spanish colonial art, which is an amalgam of styles and techniques, European and native.

Spirit & Splendor is a treat if for no other reason than the chance to see the Olivares portrait by Velázquez, the suite of El Grecos, and the other top things. It lost its way, though, leaving visitors with a few colonial things that were new and a thrill to see, at least for me, but that lacked a compelling storyline. The Blanton probably was wearing its civic-museum hat, since the show seemed to aim at a general audience.

I loved A Family Affair: Artistic Dynasties in Europe (Part II, 1670–1900). It’s the second segment of a two-part exhibition using prints and drawings from the Blanton collection. Art is many things, but in ye olden days it could be a family business. There were three generations of Piranesis depicting Italian views, Tiepolo the father and son, Whistler and his brother-in-law Francis Seymour Haden, Fragonard and his sister-in-law Marguerite Gérard, and 15 other art-making families, and that’s only Part II. Part I covers art families from 1500 to 1700. Themes such as workshops, dissemination of style, and family brands are fascinating. It’s a deep show about connoisseurship, technique, and mentorship, not for the casual looker, and it must have been fun for the curators to do.

The Metropolitan, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and two or three other big museums are encyclopedic, since they own superlative things from every era and medium. Other museums develop locally, often acquiring collections assembled by the idiosyncratic tastes of local collectors and, in the case of museums owned by schools, by alumni. What happens are surprises, sometimes dazzling ones, and depth in unexpected places. At the Blanton, it starts near the front door with Stacked Waters, the reflective, watery-blue cast acrylic that covers the walls of the museum’s cavernous atrium. Teresita Fernández (b. 1968) made it in 2009. It’s the most serene, enchanting museum atrium I’ve ever seen.

Frederic Remington’s The Charge, from 1906, is another surprise. A horse picture, a cowboy picture, and a cinematic scene of conquest, it’s the biggest thing Remington painted. Luis Jiménez’s painted fiberglass Longhorns, from 1983, is another approach to the history of the American West. Longhorn cattle were much valued for their durability in dry, hot conditions and were herded across Texas to the marketplace by the thousands. With the advent of barbed-wire fencing, though, better-quality beef cattle could be bred in captivity. The longhorn nearly disappeared, but it’s still part of Texas lore.

Another surprise was James Michener, from the 1940s into the ’70s the very famous writer of middlebrow historical fiction such as Tales of the South Pacific, Hawaii, Centennial, and Bridges at Toko-Ri. I didn’t realize that he’d spent time in Austin researching a novel about Texas and, liking it so much, he and his wife moved there. They became involved with the Blanton, leading to a gift of nearly 400 works of American art and $10 million. Being a Book-of-the-Month standard pays. Among the Michener art gifts are powerful paintings by Marsden Hartley, Max Weber, Oscar Bluemner, and Thomas Hart Benton. The Blanton doesn’t have great Hudson River School things. No one will die. It’s got other strengths, and since it belongs to a university with a million alumni in a rich state, one day someone will give it a great Church or Cole or Inness.

Antonio Carneo (1637–1692) is an artist I didn’t know, but his Death of Rachel, from 1660, persuaded me that he’s one of those creepy-crawly Italian painters — Magnasco leads the cohort — who lend a vampiric touch to their art. Rachel was one of Jacob’s two wives in the Old Testament. She died in childbirth, but everyone in the picture looks, if not dead as a doornail, as is Rachel, at least half dead and miserable about it. The picture is part of the Suida-Manning Collection of Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo art, acquired by the museum in 1999.

For this collection, two generations of art historians in the family assembled hundreds of objects revealing a taste for the extreme: extremely pallid, as in The Death of Rachel, or extremely acrobatic or extremely agitated or extremely poised even when, as in The Suicide of Lucretia, by Luca Cambiaso, the subject is stabbing herself. Good for the Blanton in buying a distinctive collection of art, much of it by artists who aren’t household names. Many are drawings known only to connoisseurs, all Old Masters in an era when they were out of style. The Rubens portrait of a young man, painted when Rubens was only 23, is superb.

And then there’s the art historian and critic Leo Steinberg’s collection of prints, more than 3,000 of them, from the Renaissance to contemporary art. Steinberg (1920–2011) was, with Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, part of the trio of titan critics of postwar, avant-garde art, though Steinberg was most famous for his very good book on a small but weighty subject: the religious significance, expressed in Renaissance art, of Baby Jesus’s genitalia. The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, published in 1983, still packs a punch. That anatomy can figure in theology shouldn’t surprise anyone, but it did.

Steinberg came to the University of Texas as a visiting lecturer in the mid-1990s. He spent time looking through the Blanton’s print collection, finding resonance with his own in quality, depth, and significance in teaching. Clearly, the Blanton has a knack for turning curious acquaintances into friends and then donors. Maybe it’s Texas hospitality, but people thinking about the future of their collections probably realize that their art will be used and loved. The Blanton’s collection is around 21,000 objects, not tiny but not a behemoth, either. Judging from friends and students who have gone through the university’s art history program, I think the Blanton is serious about both teaching and research.

Nearly all academic art museums have sunk into the woke swamp, turning preachy and vapid and tiresome. What about the Blanton? A two-part exhibition on climate hysteria featured the work of ten artists, ten writers, and a Blanton-collection painting called Cloud World (#3), from 2014 by Aaron Morse, which features jarring, hot-orange clouds over a massive seascape. They are greenhouse gasses, cue the Jaws music. The two-part extravaganza was likely pompous and ponderous. Some ideas are so dumb that only an academic will believe them. Otherwise, the Blanton’s exhibitions look good. Anni Albers, the supernatural in Maya art, Helen Frankenthaler, and lots of Latin American artists make for an unusual calendar, as do shows spanning centuries. An exhibition on living artists looking at medieval art sounds good, as does Fantastically French, about three centuries of French design and architecture using the Blanton print collection.

Finally, who’s Blanton? Jack Blanton (1927–2013) was a Texas oilman and a donor and volunteer supporting countless University of Texas causes, among them the Blanton’s 2006 building, its first permanent home. Until the place was named after Blanton in 1997, it was called the Archer Huntington Gallery. The Huntington Gallery really didn’t get up and running until the 1960s. The Blanton Museum of today is in many ways a recent phenomenon.

Archer Huntington was the founder of the Hispanic Society, an extraordinary collector of Spanish art, and a benefactor of causes far and wide. In 1927, the widow of a Confederate veteran and federal judge from Texas gave a sculpture by Huntington’s wife, Anna Hyatt Huntington, to the University of Texas. Archer heard about the gift, which reminded him that Texas was not especially rich in high culture, so he gave 4,300 acres of land that he owned near Galveston, along with the mineral extraction rights, to the university to support the establishment of an art museum. A stand-up guy. The Blanton has used the Huntington fund for acquisitions and building projects. The money still helps the museum finance its work, which, in sum, is fascinating.