Visual Arts
Treasures from Dante to Brando tucked away in Texas museum

By Jim Vertuno
The Associated Press

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A million photographs, about 60,000 works of art and hundreds of reels of film sit on the shelves of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas.

Marlon Brando's little black book is there. So are works by Johann Gutenberg, Dante and Walt Whitman. Woodward and Bernstein, Jack Kerouac, Frida Kahlo, Ernest Hemingway and thousands of other writers, artists and actors, are all represented through collections of their works and personal odds and ends — valued at about $1 billion.

Harry Huntt Ransom, the university's vice president and provost, wanted the center that bears his name to be "a center of cultural compass." Today, it is recognized as one of the world's top cultural archives, a treasure trove of works tucked deep in the heart of Texas.

On the Web For more information, see www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/

Collecting culture is the mission. The collection dates to 1897, when Swante Palm, a Swedish book collector and immigrant to Austin, gave the university 10,000 volumes from his personal library. In 1918, the university started collecting rare books.

It was Ransom, a former English professor who became chancellor of the University of Texas System, who established the Humanities Research Center in 1957 and guided it through its most prolific period of growth.

By 1968, the center had 2 million volumes, and it expanded to include photography and collected a broader range of the humanities, such as theater, motion pictures and the performing arts.

Housed in a building on the edge of campus that looked more like a concrete fortress than a museum, the center this year opened a new gallery and reading room after a $14.5 million renovation to better display its holdings.

The new gallery features 25-foot-tall windows near the entrance, decorated with intricate etchings of images from photographs at the center, such as Picasso's piercing stare and Dorothea Lange's famous photo of a Depression-era farm woman.

The first items encountered are the center's prized possessions: a two-volume Gutenberg Bible printed in the 1450s and the world's first photograph — "View From the Window at le Gras" — created by Frenchman Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1826.

The photograph was acquired in 1964 as part of a collection assembled by Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, who found it stuffed in a trunk that had been misplaced for many years. The Gutenberg Bible, purchased in 1978 for $2.4 million, is worth about $20 million today.

Those are the only two items on permanent display, and they stay under the watchful eye of security guards at the door. On the rare occasion the Bible is removed from its glass case, an armed guard remains by its side.

The new gallery's first exhibit, "In a New Light," which ran in September, was designed to showcase the center's range of works from the important — a first edition of Dante's "Divine Comedy" — to the frivolous — the Leatherface mask from the movie "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

Other items included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's golf clubs; a copy of the first book printed in English, the "Historyes of Troye"; and Brando's lost address book, acquired from the collection of Broadway stage manager Robert Downing, who worked on the set of "A Streetcar Named Desire."

The center recently opened a new exhibit titled "Make It New," a showcase of 20th-century "modernism" which center director Thomas Staley called a "major, major exhibition on a national level."

Two years in the making, it includes the final galley proofs for James Joyce's "Ulysses" and a copy of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," with extensive notes and criticism from Ezra Pound.

Also displayed is Picasso's "Venus of the Gas" which curators believe to be one of the first examples of "found" art, a term used when routine objects are seen for an inherent artistic value beyond their utilitarian function.

The center recently finished a project to post images of its Gutenberg Bible on the Internet to give the public greater access to view its detailed lettering and the margin notes made by Jesuit monks who used the book until the 1760s. The digital Bible has drawn nearly 10 million hits from Internet users.

"This is probably the most extensively annotated and corrected copy surviving," said Paul Needham of Princeton University's Scheide Library.

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