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Why Rick Brettell was the most culturally ‘important’ man in Dallas

Mark Lamster's tribute to the late scholar, curator, critic and builder of arts institutions.

Based solely on appearances, I don’t think the late Rick Brettell ever struck anyone as a particularly tough individual. His baseline state was a kind of beatific optimism. Physically he was unthreatening, a bearded university professor crossed with a cherub from an Old Master painting.

Appearances can be deceiving. Rick’s long list of honors and titles included a run as art critic of this paper, which is how we became friends. He died July 24 at the age of 71, after a yearslong battle with cancer. He was, I can tell you, nails tough, physically and mentally.

In his final months, when his pain was severe, he kept away from prescribed narcotics — he wanted nothing to erode his mind — yet managed somehow to keep up the positive energy that was his essential nature. There was no diminution of his polymathic intellect as his body failed. He faced mortality straight on, with no palliative other than his own galloping intelligence.

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In the week before his death he visited the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, about the best one could hope for in a final outing: Louis Kahn’s timeless and elemental architecture, which he loved, and a tour of an exhibition of loaned masterworks from the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, “Flesh and Blood.” I’m sure the title struck home — Rick’s treatment entailed regular transfusions — but not so much as Caravaggio’s The Flagellation of Christ, a meditation on bodily failure after prolonged suffering.

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Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), 'The Flagellation of Christ,' c. 1607. Oil on canvas,...
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), 'The Flagellation of Christ,' c. 1607. Oil on canvas, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples, coming from Naples, Church of San Domenico Maggiore (property of Fondo Edifici di Culto del Ministero degli Interni)(Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimont)

But that is not what we talked about when he told me about the trip. His pleasure, instead, was from seeing the reaction to that exhibition by the friend who had chauffeured him there, and by their conversations on the drive back to Dallas.

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That was Rick. His joy was in sharing his enthusiasms, in seeing them take root in others. That is what made him such an outstanding teacher and curator, and it explains his passion for building institutions that could propel his interests into the future.

When he died, he was at work on two such institutions, both of his invention. At the University of Texas at Dallas, which he had already — almost single-handedly — turned into a center of art historical scholarship, he was creating an “atheneum,” a group of linked museums and libraries that would advance visual culture. The atheneum concept was one he had long harbored and was characteristic of his thinking: He would resuscitate an obsolete format — a physical library merged with an intellectual society — and reinvent it for the present.

His other grand project was the Museum of Texas Art, which would feature the vast diversity of the state’s art across time, right up to the contemporary moment. Here too he hoped to revive an old institution, at least architecturally, placing this new museum within the bones of the old Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, at Fair Park. When that proposal was rejected a few weeks ago — a harsh blow — he felt sorry for himself for about 24 hours, before pivoting and pushing his board to find another location.

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He was irrepressible that way, right up to the end. There were times that energy could be problematic. Rick didn’t mind stepping on toes, sometimes in pursuit of his interests, sometimes because he simply could not contain himself.

Rick Brettell at his Dallas home in 2018.
Rick Brettell at his Dallas home in 2018. (Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)

The truth is, we were not always friends. Shortly after I had begun my tenure as architecture critic at this paper, I wrote a piece critical of the city’s John F. Kennedy memorial, designed by Philip Johnson, the subject of a biography I was then writing. Rick, without warning, responded with a column defending the project.

I thought he was wrong — we never did agree on that memorial — and I certainly didn’t appreciate being undermined while I was trying to establish my own authority on the subject. At the time, I saw it as a marking out of territory, but I came to understand it more as a defense of the fruits of the Dallas patron class from an upstart critic. I can’t blame him, really.

For my part, I thought he wrote too much about people who bought art, and not enough about art itself, or the people who made it. But that was also Rick. He was born into that patron class, and even as he saw its flaws, he could not escape it. He understood art and patronage as intertwined. The scholarship that made him a star in the world of art history was on Impressionism, and in particular on Camille Pissarro and his role as an artist, patron and critic. He was studying himself.

Gradually, our relationship changed, propelled first by respect, and then affection. I did not always, or even usually, agree with him, but his knowledge and intelligence were so broad and so deep that there was always something to learn. When my book on Johnson finally came out, we took our conversations on the lecture circuit. Rick enjoyed the stage, and he enjoyed the repartee. It was certainly a lot more pleasant for me than lecturing by myself. Audiences, of course, loved Rick.

Herein was another truth: If Rick was your friend, he was also your promoter and champion, and you never quite knew what the next day would bring. It might be a party with Ross Perot (they were fast friends) or a trip to some remote architectural wonder. Maybe he would make lunch (pistou, the Provencal soup, was a specialty) or maybe there would be an invitation to cocktails at the home of some “important” artist — “important” being by far his favorite word. For Rick, even the smallest things could be important. He wanted you to know, to see, to understand why.

It was that impulse that led him, still at the beginning of what was already an impressive career, to quit academia for the world of the museum, becoming first a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago and then the director of the Dallas Museum of Art. His was the proverbial meteoric rise.

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His tenure, in each case, was characterized by bold vision. He liked to tell the story about how, while at the Art Institute, he became the “official buyer” of the National Gallery of Art, in London. The imperious National Gallery didn’t like to purchase works of art, he said, but it would step in if a painting were to be exported out of the country. This meant Rick’s attempted purchases regularly ended up in the Gallery’s collection.

At the Dallas Museum of Art, he convinced the board to hire the architect Edward Larrabee Barnes to finish what he had started, and build the museum’s final expansion. The result is a unified building of modern dignity, and excellent for viewing art.

Endearing himself with trustees was among Rick’s special gifts, although it is perhaps unfair to describe it so transactionally. The relationships he built with this city’s leading philanthropists were genuine and deep, in particular his long friendship with Edith O’Donnell, who endowed the institute for art history he created at UTD.

Our last conversations were about another Dallas matriarch, Margaret McDermott, who died in 2018 at the age of 106. Rick was concerned about the fate of her house, a relatively modest modernist home designed by Scott Lyons. It was, he said, “the most culturally important” — that word again — “house in Dallas.”

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I’m not so sure. The most culturally important man? That was him.