Remembering William Jordan, An Art Authority

William Jordan turned SMU’s Meadows Museum into one of the world’s great collections of Spanish art, then went on to build and influence collections elsewhere, from Texas to Spain. Jordan died this week at 77.

By Quin MathewsJanuary 29, 2018 9:31 am, ,

From KERA.

El filántropo, mecenas e historiador,” –  the philanthropist, patron and historian – reads the story in Spain’s newspaper El Pais, as word spread that Bill Jordan had died.

He was an art superstar, a scholar who wrote books, organized exhibitions, and built collections, the first in Dallas in 1967.

“When I was very young, just having finished my doctorate at NYU, I was approached about being the director of the Meadows Museum,” he told me in an interview.

“And I had never heard of it. I came to Dallas to look into it and was amazed that it was not very good. Finally the University and Mr. Meadows reached the same conclusion and agreed that they would like to start over with the Museum, and they offered me the job, and I took it… to essentially build from scratch building a collection of Spanish pictures that would live up to the expectations that Mr. Meadows had had originally when he thought that’s what he was doing several years before.”

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