The Anderson Collection at Stanford opens its doors next weekend in world-class style.
_Among the 121 major pieces of postwar American art he has given to Stanford, Harry W. “Hunk” Anderson has bled for just one — Frank Stella’s “Zeltweg,” a heavy, nine-piece, mixed-media painting that resembles a kids’ slot car track.
So when it arrives by heavy Freightliner on a mid-August morning, Anderson and his wife, Mary Margaret (Hunk and Moo, as they are known to just about everyone who has ever met them), come by to see its installation and note its symbolism as the last big artwork to take its place in the Anderson Collection at Stanford University.
“Well, what do you think?” Hunk says, while getting his first look at the walls nearly covered in his art. In terms of a single donation to open a museum on a prestigious college campus in a major metropolitan area, the Anderson Collection might be the most important opening since the Trumbull Gallery at Yale opened in 1839. In theWest, the only thing that comes close is the Hammer Museum, which was open four years before being annexed by UCLA in 1994.
‘Unquestionably world class’
“The Anderson Collection is absolutely, unquestionably world class,” says Jeffrey Fraenkel of Fraenkel Gallery, the prominent San Francisco dealer in photography, a genre not included in the Anderson Collection. “Museums all over the country had their eyes on it hoping to get it until Hunk and Moo made their decision in favor of Stanford.”
The Andersons did not choose Stanford because they went there. They didn’t, and neither did their only child, Mary Patricia “Putter” Anderson Pence. Hunk attended Hobart College in New York, where he co-founded a company to manage the school’s cafeteria. He then cameWest to establish Saga in Menlo Park, a national company distributing dorm food to college campuses across the United States.
Museums far and wide courted the Andersons, but, logically, the art collection paid for by college cafeteria food belongs on a college campus. The deal, struck in 2011, was that Stanford would supply a Anderson Collection at Stanford University: Opens to the public 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. next Sunday. Regular hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Monday (until 8 p.m. Thursday). Free. For information and weekend reservations, go to http://anderson.stanford.edu.
To watch a short video, go to www.sfgate.com/news/item/ Anderson-Collection-32615.php. new building, at a cost of $36 million, to be run independently of the neighboring Cantor Arts Center. The Andersons would supply the art, which has been scattered between Quadrus, their private showroom in Menlo Park, and their home in Atherton, where it has always been rumored that Putter slept beneath the last Jackson Pollock drip painting in private hands.
“We’re taking 60 works from the house and about 60 works from Quadrus,” Anderson says, raising the question of whether Quadrus will now be closed and the walls of his home will now be bare. “Even now, with the gift, we still have 700 works left,” he says. “But they’re not the irreplaceables. The irreplaceables are here (at Stanford).”
The irreplaceables
The irreplaceables include work by Jackson Pollock, Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud, and the Frank Stella now coming up the elevator in a wooden crate.
The “Zeltweg” story is indicative of how the Andersons built their collection. As Hunk tells it, the acquisition began
with a doubles match at the Menlo Circus Club in Atherton. Stella and San Francisco art dealer John Berggruen were the guests and opponents of Hunk and Putter.
After the match, Stella invited the Andersons to a showing of his work, in 1981. They flew to New York and were driven to Stella’s studio in Lower Manhattan by Leo Castelli, the famed art dealer, who represented Stella. Also there for the showing were Donald Marron, a New York financier-collector, and Philip Johnson, founder of the architecture department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The rules, as dictated by Castelli, were that Johnson got first choice and Anderson second choice. “I said, ‘Leo, you are putting me in an awkward position,’ and he just ignored me,” recalls Anderson, who could not conceal which one he wanted. Johnson deferred to him by making a different selection, leaving “Zeltweg” to Anderson. It was probably a six-figure purchase, even 33 years ago.
“I think this was Philip’s first choice,” Anderson says of “Zeltweg.” Named for a Formula One racetrack in Austria, the painting is on honeycombed aluminum. “A map of the experience of the track” is how Stella described it.
Records show that the work was publicly displayed during the opening of the new wing at the San Jose Museum of Art in 1992, and at an exhibition of the Anderson holdings at SFMOMA in 2000, but has not been out since.
When it arrived at Stanford on Aug. 14, Jason Linetzky, 43, director of the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, was there to receive it. His arrival is almost as good a story as that of “Zeltweg.” In 1996, he was a struggling gallery owner at the Cannery, at Fisherman’s Wharf. As a side job, he did private installations
and was hired to hang work for the Andersons.
“He used to come in coveralls, and he and a little buddy used to do installation work,” Hunk says. “He dressed like a hippie, but he always did good work.” The gallery closed, and soon Linetzky went to work full time for the Andersons, rising to the position of collections manager.
Now he is a full-time Stanford employee, with a typical Stanford employee’s commute, from Oakland, where he lives with his wife, Kerry, an art therapist, and their two young children.
“My God, look at him,” Hunk says proudly. “Here he is the director of the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, and he deserves every bit of it.”
Before the first piece of art arrived, earlier this summer, a scale model of the gallery was built and Linetzky did endless tinkering with it, deciding what would go where. He got it just right — then the first artwork arrived and he had to start over.
New life
“Once we started bringing things into the building, the works took on a totally new life,” he says. “The scale and the light and everything that is amazing about this space dictated some pretty dramatic changes to what we had modeled.”
The second floor, where most of the art is displayed, has 15,000 square feet of gallery space. By comparison, the Fisher Collection will be about 60,000 square feet when the expanded SFMOMA opens in 2016. The Anderson gallery is fluid in that its interior walls don’t meet at corners, and you can stand at one piece and see other pieces behind it.
The operating credo is never to crowd the gallery with art, which is why only 108 of the 121 pieces will be shown in the opening exhibition. The secondary operating credo is never to crowd the gallery with people. Capacity is 600, and to avoid long lines in front on weekends, an online ticketing system will be used to dictate an arrival time for each guest. Once inside, visitors can stay as long as they wish.
The inaugural exhibition, which opens to the public next Sunday, will be up for a year and will rotate in all 121 pieces. Thereafter, other works on loan may join the permanent collection. Although it is one big gallery, there are 10 rooms within it, each with a theme — Bay Area Figurative Art, New York School and so on.
Once “Zeltweg” is brought upstairs and freed from its wooden crate, it is carried into a room dedicated to Shaped Canvas.
“This is for artists who were interested in stepping away from painting on a rectilinear flat surface and working to emphasize the edges of the objects,” Linetzky say.
The main panel is propped against the wall opposite the clerestory light. Then Linetzky and his crew take a lunch break to call in expert consultants.
One hour later, the Andersons arrive in a 1992 Mercedes coupe.
“Did I tell you how I bled for this painting?” Hunk asks those who have gathered, and here comes the story.
“Way back when,” he says, he was preparing to show the piece and reached down to grab one side of the steel framework and lift it. “We didn’t have an installer,” Hunk says, “so I said, ‘I’ll help.’ The next thing I know my little hand is bloody from the edges here.”
The painting does have some reddish streaks, suggesting that Hunk was incorporated into the finished artwork.
“It’s got my blood on it,” he says, looking for signs and momentarily forgetting the job he has come here to do, which is to oversee the hanging of “Zeltweg.” Movers are standing by to try the piece on every wall in the gallery, if need be.
“I think it belongs right where it is, Jason,” he says. “You’ve got plenty of room. I think it will be great here.”
Bigger picture
Stepping back, Hunk looks at the bigger picture, which is bigger than the Anderson Collection. It includes Cantor, the university museum next door; Bing Concert Hall, which opened in 2013 a few hundred yards away; and the McMurtry Building for Art and Art History, which opens in a year and can be seen going up outside the window.
“If you take all the pieces in the Stanford Arts District,” he says, after giving it some thought, “I hope it can improve the world.”