Celebrating 100 years of art collecting at BYU

PROVO — It began, as so many great things do, with a simple gesture of goodwill.

In 1909, J. William Knight, the son of early BYU supporter Jesse Knight, had a painting by John Hafen of an old sycamore tree that he wanted to donate to the school.

It was a time of growth for BYU; the Maeser Building was under construction, and the school was just beginning to expand to the upper campus. John Hafen was one of the leading artists in Utah at the time. He'd been to Paris to study art and was well recognized and appreciated, so school officials thought perhaps it could be part of a fine art collection.

Little did they know!

But from that modest beginning a great tradition of collecting and appreciating art developed at the school.

In honor of that tradition, BYU's Museum of Art has put together an exhibition featuring works from its extensive collection, which will run through Sept. 25.

It's a very exciting show, says Paul Anderson, curator of Southwest American art at the museum and one of five curators who worked on the show. "It gives us a chance to show a lot of things that have not been part of other exhibitions."

The works represent all genres and periods in the BYU collection. The other curators who helped put the show together are Marian Wardle, curator of American art; Diana Turnbow, curator of photography; Jeff Lambson, curator of contemporary art; and Dawn Pheysey, curator of religious art.

The museum collection now numbers more than 17,000 pieces, so it was not necessarily an easy task to limit it to one exhibition. Curators chose many of the pieces that are both significant and represent a century of collecting.

The Hafen painting may have started it all, but there wasn't much activity until the 1930s, Anderson explains. In the early '30s, the school acquired a few works, but a huge milestone occurred in 1937, when Harold R. Clark went to California and met Maynard Dixon.

"He went with the idea of buying a painting or two," Anderson says. "But after he got there and met Dixon and became so impressed with him, he ended up buying 85 of Dixon's paintings — for $3,700, which was quite a bit in those days."

Clark gave the paintings to BYU, which overnight became the chief repository of Dixon's work. "We now have about 100 Dixon paintings, and we still have the largest Dixon collection of any museum. Dixon was forgotten for a time, but he's very hot again now," Anderson says.