NOW/THEN/AGAIN: Contemporary Art in Dallas 1949-1989 Page: 21
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number of artists who avoided the active and self-conscious avant garde groups of
New York. Indeed, it is apparent from even these three brief paragraphs that the
Dallas Museum of Art consciously followed the leads set in the cultural capital of
America. This decision was clearly made to communicate to the rest of America that
Dallas, Texas was not a provincial place and that the most difficult and rigorous of
"capital" trends were almost instantly appreciated in its homes, galleries, and mu-
seums. When New York avoided realism, so too did Dallas, and not until the creation
of internationally viable "alternative" centers in Chicago and Los Angeles in the late
1970s and 1980s did Dallas break out of the New York mode.
The nationalism of the Dallas Museum's collection of contemporary art follow-
ing World War II must be seen as a challenge to the regionalist art movements active
in Texas since the late 1920s. As a result of massive outmigration of military troops
during the war, many young Americans had been in Europe or Asia and had come
to know not only foreigners, but also people from the various states and regions of
Giacometti's 1948-49 Three Men America. In this way, World War II broke down many of the cultural boundaries in
Walking, a gift of Mr. and Mrs.
Stanley Marcus, is a splendid repre- America, perhaps to as great an extent as had the railroad by the end of the 19th
sentative of the DMA's European
post-War holdings, but works by century. Texas, like most other American states, wanted to participate in the larger
other contemporary Europeans are
either absent in the collection or on
loan to it. national agenda of America, and the city of Dallas was built not merely on a local
economic and cultural foundation, but as part of "the American dream." Its most
progressive citizens dreamed of a city linked by air to the rest of the world, focused
on a gleaming skyline, and organized around the rhythm of automobiles.
The effect of post-War nationalism on American taste in the visual arts was
profound, especially in prosperous Texas, and this self-conscious nationalism surely
guided the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts and, between 1960 and 1964, the Dallas
Museum for Contemporary Art, to build their collections of American post-War art
which are now united at the Dallas Museum of Art. The Dallas Museum, therefore,
fought a winning battle against regionalism by persuading the community to realize
that art, too, formed part of a cultural agenda that was fundamentally national.
This tendency toward nationalism precluded a broad-based collection of con-
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Brettell, Richard R. NOW/THEN/AGAIN: Contemporary Art in Dallas 1949-1989, book, 1989; Dallas, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth307668/m1/26/: accessed May 1, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Museum of Art.