The river city celebrates a classical past: the San Antonio Museum of Art's collection of antiquities is one of the finest in the USA, with particular strengths in Greek vases and Roman sculpture. Next month it reopens in a fresh installation. Its curator, Jessica Powers, explains the thinking behind the new displays and introduces some highlights

Apollo, Feb, 2008 by Jessica Powers

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

South Texas is more likely to call to mind images of oil wells and ranches than portraits of the Caesars. However, one of the largest collections of classical antiquities in the southern United States will return to public view when the San Antonio Museum of Art's galleries of Greek and Roman art reopen at the beginning of March. The redesigned galleries will house over 600 objects that represent a 3,500-year period, from Bronze Age marble figures to Late Antique sculpture. The highlight of the reinstallation is the museum's collection of Roman sculpture, which is displayed in the lofty Gilbert Denman Gallery (Figs. 1 and 5), one of the most dramatic spaces dedicated to ancient art in the US.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

The San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) is a relatively young institution. The museum opened in 1981 to house the art collection of the San Antonio Museum Association, an umbrella organisation that encompassed the Witte Museum, which focuses on Texas culture and natural history, and a now-defunct Transportation Museum. (The Association was disbanded, and the museums separated, in 1994.) The founders of the new art museum acquired the former Lone Star Brewery complex on the banks of the San Antonio River. The massive 19th-century brick and stone brewhouse, now on the National Register of Historic Places, was renovated to accommodate museum galleries. SAMA'S collection was initially intended to centre on the art of the Americas, including 18th-20th-century American painting, pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial art, and Latin American folk art.

The scope of the museum's collection expanded substantially in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of major gifts from private collections. Although the San Antonio Museum Association had received a handful of gifts of antiquities over the years, art from the ancient Mediterranean did not become a major emphasis of the collection until 1986. In that year the late Gilbert M. Denman, Jr., a San Antonio attorney and philanthropist, and one of the museum's founding trustees, gave SAMA his collection of nearly 200 Greek vases and Greek and Roman sculptures. Denman continued to support SAMA'S antiquities collection throughout his life and was its most important benefactor. A collector with wide-ranging interests, he contributed to almost every area of the museum's collection and made particularly important gifts of Oceanic art and of European paintings and drawings. Denman began collecting antiquities in the 1960s, when he started purchasing Roman sculptures from Italian dealers. In the late 1970s and 1980s, he expanded his focus to encompass Greek vases and Egyptian art. Denman's vision was comprehensive. Rather than focusing on a specific medium or genre, or on individual masterpieces from a particular period, he collected objects representative of the major genres and developments in Greek and Roman art. Denman saw his collection as a means to introduce the achievements of Greece and Rome to the public and anticipated that it would serve as a resource for both teaching and research.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Denman's initial gift in 1986 led to the hiring of SAMA's first antiquities curator, Carlos Picon, who is now curator-in-charge of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Shortly thereafter, a gift from Robert and Margaret Pace Willson enabled SAMA to purchase the antiquities collection of the Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas. The Stark-Willson Collection, as it is known today, comprises over 800 artifacts--mostly Greek and Roman glass and bronzes and Egyptian objects--acquired by H.J. Lutcher Stark and his family during their travels in the Middle East and Egypt in the 1920s. Picon and his successor, Gerry D. Scott m, now director of the American Research Center in Egypt, oversaw the initial installation of the Greek and Roman galleries in 1990.

The antiquities collection continued to grow in the 1990s through purchases by the museum and several important gifts from Gilbert Denman. In 1991 Denman made a second large gift to the museum that complemented the first: this included Egyptian objects, Greek and Roman bronzes and terracottas, and Roman coins. He also encouraged the growth of the collection by purchasing objects for the museum. On his death in 2004, he bequeathed the remainder of his collection to the museum, including nearly 100 antiquities.

Altogether, SAMA'S Western Antiquities department, which also includes ancient Near Eastern and Islamic art, now encompasses approximately 3,000 objects. Although this collection grew rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, that expansion has not continued in recent years. Apart from the objects in Gilbert Denman's bequest to the museum, which entered the collection in 2005, no acquisitions of Greek or Roman art have been made since 2003. In light of the ongoing controversy over the collecting of antiquities by American museums, SAMA is now revising its acquisitions policy to clarify procedures for future additions to this collection.