Starting with a palatial home, French avant-garde art, and one woman’s vision, it’s become a unique cultural treasure.
B right-orange ceramic goldfish float in a turquoise bedroom, green cats cavort in an abandoned kitchen after a nuclear-plant meltdown, and trees and people made of wool fiber dance on grass made of pipe cleaners. Those are three fantasy worlds — fun, bizarre, unsettling — created by Sandy Skoglund (b. 1946) for Enchanting Nature at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas. I’d never been to the McNay, which, when it opened in 1954, was Texas’s first modern art museum. It’s an enchanting place, with a distinctive collection and setting based on a maverick vision from the days when Texas had lots of oil, cattle, ambition, and wide-open spaces but next to no good art.
I was last in San Antonio in 2020. I’d written plenty that spring about art museums staying shut to the public long after Covid could still be called a public health threat. It’s no surprise that the first two museums in the country to reopen were in can-do, commonsense Texas. When the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the San Antonio Museum of Art both reopened to the public in mid-May 2020, I felt obliged to visit. There was lots of hand sanitizer available as well as those useless six-foot distance markers on the floors. No one died.
The McNay started with a determined woman who had avant-garde taste, Marion Koogler McNay (1883–1950), and her San Antonio home, a grand, Spanish Mediterranean Revival pile and gardens she commissioned in the late 1920s, mostly with her family’s oil money. She wasn’t a native San Antonian. Her second of five husbands was a local ophthalmologist. McNay was from Kansas — yes, there’s oil in Kansas — and was, as a young woman, a high-spirited, talented art teacher. With her new home done, she started filling it with art, first a Diego Rivera portrait of a squat child who looks like a wee Aztec and then honing her taste and hoisting her budget to buy unusually good work by Picasso; Modigliani’s entrancing Girl with Blue Eyes, from 1918; a Gauguin self-portrait; and a late, crypto-Cubist Cézanne. She liked French modern art, especially School of Paris art by Dufy and Rouault, but, among the early art lovers to vacation in Taos, she also collected Mexican and Native American ceramics, textiles, and jewelry. McNay liked color and dazzle, and her art must have seemed very edgy. Her aesthetic competition was, after all, the Alamo and ten-gallon hats.
McNay might not have been able to keep a husband, but she was an inviting, supportive presence among locals who had advanced taste — a hostess with the mostest. By the late 1940s, San Antonio’s art school had moved into a wing of her house. On McNay’s death, her will established an art museum in the house with an endowment and her collection, by then 700 works.
Skoglund’s Enchanting Nature exhibition was my introduction to the McNay. It’s in the special-exhibition wing added to the McNay house in 2008 along with the airy, welcoming entrance courtyard. Skoglund is an installation artist who designs and builds environments, though I’d call them stage sets without a performance. On the one hand, they’re playful, even childlike. On the other, they’re creepy, not nightmare-creepy but weird and visceral. She’s been making them since the 1970s. They’re three-dimensional, usually filled with everyday, familiar objects, though with uncanny and theatrical juxtapositions.
Cindy Sherman and Greg Crewdson come to mind — they construct imaginary but real and unsettling sets, posing people in them and photographing them. Or Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, a massive piece of land art made in 1970 in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Or Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms, beginning in the 1960s, which strut with mirrored walls, floors, and ceilings that the artist transforms with colored lights and reflections. We’re meant to walk through them.
In each of three big galleries at the McNay, Skoglund delivers a scene that’s human-scale. The first is Fresh Hybrid, from 2008. It takes the abundance of nature and twists it into a plush, artificial wonderland, as if a wooded park were reimagined by Jeff Koons. Uprooted trees sporting not roots but legs dance alongside human figures made of stuffed felt. Yellow, fluffy chenille-yarn chicks replace leaves. The ground is made of dense, autumn-colored pipe cleaners. A wall, also made of pipe cleaners, is sky blue. Colors are in the realm of realism but off-piste.
Radioactive Cats is from 1980 and famous, though I’d never seen it. Bright-green plaster cats, and they truly look unherdable, fill a gray kitchen and explore the area around a gray refrigerator, with the fridge door open, showing us that it’s empty. It’s not environmental art or even pointedly political. Animal or human, we live on the edge, and it’s always been thus.
Skoglund’s last installation, Revenge of the Goldfish, is from 1981. Orange ceramic goldfish pool on the turquoise carpet of a bedroom and hang from the ceiling as if swimming. It reminded me of Hitchcock’s The Birds — another unexplained displacement event turned horror movie.
The only human figures in the three installations are the museum visitors, but when Skoglund first made them she staged people on the set — a child sleeping in the bed in Revenge of the Goldfish, for example — and photographed them. Inserting human figures into the work of art adds another bizarre aspect. Some photographs of people as actors in her installations are on view in the exhibition as well. The photographs, like Sherman’s and Crewdson’s, are works of art in themselves.
I didn’t love Enchanting Nature at first. “Less is more,” I thought, and that one of Skoglund’s installations would have been enough. The three are different, though, and Skoglund has had a long relationship with the McNay, having done shows there before and with the museum owning her work. Fresh Hybrid is the least effective. It feels kitschy enough to be part of an indoor miniature golf course, except for the pipe-cleaner playing surface.
I’m all for long-standing relationships. After spending lots of time walking through the permanent-collection galleries, I understood what a quirky place the McNay is, at times whimsical, Bohemian, and unexpected. It makes for a stimulating art experience. Visitors were loving it, especially families. “Don’t overthink it,” Skoglund said in her introductory video. I left the show high on the McNay.
Today, 75 years after McNay’s death, her stamp is still there. The house is impressive, with bespoke tile and woodwork, a grand staircase, and an elegant patio with bubbling fountains and a pretty garden. It’s comfortable, and we know it was once a home, but, aside from her art and the house, whose design she closely directed, her presence is mostly via a video gallery and a few wall panels on her life. It isn’t a house museum. Still, her collection sets the tone, though it’s grown from her 700 objects to 22,000 today.
How has it blossomed? For its first 40 years of life, the McNay wasn’t exactly the only game in town in terms of an art museum, but the San Antonio Museum of Art in the center of the city was very slow to develop. It didn’t have its current home — a repurposed brewery — until the early 1980s. Its anchor collections of Greek and Roman art, Asian art, and Latin American folk art came after that. Until well into the ’90s, lots of San Antonio’s art energy and philanthropy went to the McNay.
“Extraordinary” is the best way to describe the McNay’s theater-design collection, a massive gift from Robert Tobin (1934–2000), who lived in San Antonio, had a family fortune made from mapping for the oil industry, and was among America’s foremost opera impresarios. Tobin chaired the McNay board but was also on the board of the Metropolitan Opera. The McNay has done lots of exhibitions on Tobin’s art — ranging from Shakespeare’s set designs to the art of contemporary opera, but the McNay’s barebones website doesn’t give it the splashy attention it deserves. Paul Cadmus’s What I Believe, a Tobin gift, is on view, and it’s a showstopper. His gift is entirely consistent with the vision of Marion McNay. Anyone with as many husbands as she had must have been well tuned to drama, comedy, and farce.
I saw a very beautiful gallery of Art Nouveau and Art Deco glass, mostly French and another bequest, not from McNay but in perfect sync with her own art. There are wild surprises like Renaissance and medieval religious panel paintings, another gift since McNay’s death, juxtaposed against another new addition to the McNay, Thoughts and Prayers, by Einar and Jamex de la Torre, from 2020. It’s a small stained glass altarpiece that imagines the Virgin of Guadalupe. The two men are brothers, based in Mexico and San Diego, and collaborate.
The McNay’s big, stately Hopper, Corn Hill, Truro, is a Cape Cod picture from 1930, but, by the time I saw it, I was in tune with the McNay’s idiosyncrasy. It’s a very beautiful painting that came as a gift to the museum in 1975 from a local couple who collected good art. It’s sensitively interpreted. “Maybe I’m not very human,” Hopper said about Corn Hill. He’s quoted on the label. “What I wanted to do is paint sunlight on the side of a house.”
That’s very human and very much in tune with how artists think. Usually they’re focused on a motif or on materials and not on weighty social, political, or economic issues. The Hopper is in a wing of the museum with Marion McNay’s French art and Abstract Expressionist art that the McNay got in the 1970s and ’80s, lightly interpreted so the art — and artist’s touch — shine. I like offbeat juxtapositions, but some just don’t work. Very odd indeed is hanging Picasso’s Crouching Woman, from 1958, one of his franker nudes, next to Deborah Roberts’s True Believer, a collage from 2020 depicting a black child, and steps from Letitia Huckaby’s silhouettes, created in 2021, of black girls killed in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing. Huckaby’s work isn’t very good and looks ridiculous with the Picasso so close to it and great work by Monet and Joan Mitchell nearby.
The McNay has a substantial outdoor sculpture park mostly close to the building. As a group, the work seemed standard fare, such as Robert Indiana’s LOVE, a big orange Alexander Liberman work, George Rickey, and Joel Shapiro. It was a hot day and the landscaping around the sculpture seemed uninspired, or it needed TLC. But the McNay’s patio garden is so perfectly done that it sets a landscaping standard. The same stewardship needs to be brought to the sculpture park. Having pulled the plug on a hideous outdoor sculpture courtyard when I was the Addison Gallery director, I think that if outdoor museum sculpture isn’t compellingly good and attractive, it’s not worth doing.
Matthew McLendon is the museum director, arriving from the University of Virginia’s art museum in 2023. He has hired some new curators and, I suspect, will overhaul the McNay’s strategic plan. It’s set to run its four-year course this year, good because it might expire from an overdose of platitudes. One-page strategic plans are in fashion now, but the McNay’s takes brevity to the realm of spoof. It focuses on DEI and aims “to foster a fair, impartial, and just environment.” But the McNay is an art museum, not a traffic court. It’s got a fantastic building, a collection with flavor, loyal donors, and, in San Antonio, a bustling city. It’s a Texas treasure.