American painting - a private collection - various 20th-century American artists, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1997 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

In the heart of the Deep South, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, can be found one of the most notable collections of American paintings still in private hands. It contains hundreds of works owned jointly by the Gulf States Paper Corporation and the David Warner Foundation. The collection is dispersed in a number of buildings. David Park Curry of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond has selected seventy-three canvases, five sculptures, and fifteen decorative arts objects from the collection for an exhibition entitled American Dreams: Paintings and Decorative Arts from the Warner Collection. Among the objects Curry has selected are nineteenth-century English, French, and American porcelains; New York furniture in the style of Duncan Phyfe; and clocks and lighting devices made in America and England. The show is on view from September 20 through January 25, 1998.

The collection spans the history of American art from the Hudson River painters to the works of Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, and other twentieth-century artists. The moving force behind the collection is Jack W. Warner, by his own admission an "incurable artoholic," who has been buying paintings for three decades. His guiding principle is to acquire works that appeal to him emotionally and evoke a sense of nostalgia for the American past. This very personal point of view has resulted in the purchase of works such as Childe Hassam's Ten Pound Island, which reminded Warner of his grandmother sitting on the porch of a hotel on Mackinac Island, Michigan.

The headquarters of the Gulf States Paper Corporation is a building modeled on the Imperial Palace in Kyoto, Japan. Inside hang works by Hudson River school and Western artists. Other paintings are in the Mildred Warner House in downtown Tuscaloosa, named for the collector's mother. The house was built in 1820 and expanded in the 1830s by David Scott, a merchant. The paintings hung inside are surrounded not by the trappings of modern commerce but by decorative arts of the sort that might have been used in a building of this period.

Near the Warner House is the house allocated to the president of the University of Alabama, in which other works from the collection are displayed. The buildings that comprise the North River Yacht Club form a fourth repository for works from the collection.

While Warner has loaned paintings from his collection to exhibitions and allowed them to be illustrated in publications, the collection has not been shown with decorative arts objects as is the case in the current exhibition in Richmond. The show and its accompanying booklet provide a fascinating window into the taste of a man who has assembled an interesting, if selective, survey of American art.

The booklet, by Curry with Elizabeth L. O'Leary and Susan Jensen Rawles, may be obtained for $29.45 (paper covers) postpaid from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts publications department at 800-943-8632.