Raymond D. Nasher, Dallas Art Collector Who Built Museum, 85

[DGH]

.

Raymond D. Nasher, 85, Dallas Art Collector Who Built a Museum, Dies

By RANDY KENNEDY

Raymond D. Nasher, a real-estate developer and banker who, along with
his wife, Patsy, amassed one of the world's best collections of Modern
and contemporary sculpture and built a lavish public home for it in
downtown Dallas, died on Friday [March 16, 2007] in Dallas [Tecas]. He
was 85.

Mr. Nasher had become ill the day before on an airplane while
returning home from a business trip in Europe, officials in Dallas
said.

A native of Boston [Massachusetts] and the only child of a garment-
maker who had emigrated from Russia, Mr. Nasher developed an early
appreciation for art during monthly museum visits with his parents.
His first sight of Van Gogh's "Postman Joseph Roulin" at the Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston, he once said, "did something to my psyche."

His life as a dedicated collector began after he graduated from Duke
University and moved to Texas with his wife, the former Patsy
Rabinowitz, daughter of a prominent Dallas businessman. The two had
been spending relatively small amounts of money on pre-Colombian art.
But in 1967, for his birthday, Mrs. Nasher bought her husband a
sinuous Jean Arp bronze, "Torso With Buds," and was waiting nervously
with it in their foyer when he returned from work.

He loved it, and the couple began collecting Modernist work in
earnest, acquiring sculptures by Henry Moore, Joan Miró, Alexander
Calder, Barbara Hepworth and others. In 1971, when Mr. Nasher
commissioned the sculptor Beverly Pepper to make a work for NorthPark
Center, a huge mall complex he built in Dallas, he became one of the
first developers to regularly include art in commercial and retail
buildings.

Ever the astute businessman, Mr. Nasher later said that he
concentrated his collecting activities on sculpture in part because,
when he and his wife began visiting galleries and studios, he found it
was less expensive than paintings.

"No one wanted it," he said. "That gave me a great opportunity."

He took advantage of it. In the 1970's and 1980's, the couple
increased the pace of their collecting, adding many pieces by
Minimalist and Pop artists like Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Claes
Oldenberg and Roy Lichtenstein, while also buying older masterpieces
by Giacometti, Rodin and Picasso.

Often, Mrs. Nasher took the lead, traveling, consulting, befriending
artists and buying while Mr. Nasher focused on his business and civic
duties, which included serving as a United States delegate to the
United Nations General Assembly and a part ownership in the Texas
Rangers. But after her death from cancer, in 1988, Mr. Nasher
continued to build the collection aggressively on his own.

As it grew, filling his North Dallas home and the courtyards and
atriums of his developments, so did jockeying among museums that
wanted the collection and fevered speculation about where it would
eventually reside. In the 1980's the Dallas Museum of Art built a
sculpture garden largely in hopes of winning the works. In 1997, the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York devoted the entire museum to
an exhibition of the Nasher collection, pieces of which had also
traveled to exhibitions around the world. The National Gallery of Art
in Washington and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco also courted
Mr. Nasher.

But he eventually frustrated all his suitors, deciding to spend $70
million of his fortune to build a 55,000-square-foot museum and
sculpture garden, the Nasher Sculpture Center, controlled and owned by
a private foundation, in downtown Dallas adjacent to the Dallas Museum
of Art. The center, which was designed by Renzo Piano and Peter
Walker, opened in 2003.

Mr. Nasher also gave $7.5 million to his alma mater, Duke, for the
construction of a new museum there, which opened in 2005, and he
established a long-term association that enabled the Guggenheim to
exhibit some of his works at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in
Venice.

While Mr. Nasher had seriously considered the offers from other
institutions, the decision to create his own namesake museum did not
surprise many who knew him and were familiar with his penchant, as a
self-made man, for doing things his way.

"There is an interesting quality of the loner about this man," said
Paul Ylvisaker, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education,
where Mr. Nasher had taught. "I think he ultimately consults his own
oracles."

Those oracles generally told Mr. Nasher to surround himself with art,
of which he once said: "It's much more fun than business."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/arts/design/20nasher.html?ref=obituaries