By Karen A. Levine
In the heart of Silicon Valley stands a California ranch house that has become a pilgrimage site for museum directors, curators, artists, and art historians from around the world. Owned by Harry W. ’49 and Mary Margaret Anderson, an unassuming retired couple who have lived in this peaceful neighborhood for more than 30 years, this residence is the home of one of the most important private collections of modern and contemporary art in the United States.
The Andersons are unlikely to have any pilgrims on their doorstep this
fall, however, as most of their collection has been transferred to the
galleries of two distinguished San Francisco museums. From October 7,
2000, until January 15, 2001, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
(SFMOMA) presents Celebrating Modern Art: The Anderson Collection,
an enormous exhibition that includes more than 300 remarkable examples
of
modern sculpture, New York School painting, California art, contemporary
art, and works on paper by nearly 140 artists of international renown.
Meanwhile, from October 7 until December 31, the Fine Arts Museums of
San Francisco’s California Palace of the Legion of Honor hosts An
American Focus: The Anderson Graphic Arts Collection, a show of
nearly 200 modern and contemporary prints.
Who are these Andersons? Are they scions of old, art-collecting families? Are they artists themselves, or former curators or gallery owners? Not at all.
When Harry (“Hunk”) Anderson met Mary Margaret (“Moo”) Ransford in the 1940s, he was an economics and history major at Hobart College and she was a student at D’Youville College in Buffalo, New York. In 1948, during his senior year at Hobart, Hunk Anderson ’49 and his fellow classmates Bill Scandling ’49 and Willie Laughlin ’49 founded Saga Corporation, a food-service provider to colleges and universities, with Hobart and William Smith as its first client. The Saga-run HWS dining hall fed and employed thousands of students between 1948 and 1986, when the company, which had branched out profitably into health care, business, and other markets, was acquired by Marriott.
The Andersons married in 1950 and relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early ’60s, when Saga set up a joint headquarters operation in Menlo Park, near Palo Alto. Until 1964, when they departed on a fateful vacation to Europe, the couple had little more than a passing interest in art.
A visit to Paris’ Musée du Louvre set off the initial spark. In a recent conversation with former SFMOMA chief curator Gary Garrels, Hunk Anderson recalled, with a laugh, “We had given the Louvre all of half a day in our agenda.” According to Moo Anderson, “We were absolutely intrigued, and we decided to go back the next day. I remember we saw the Degas dancer, and we looked at all the Impressionists.” By the time their vacation was over, the Andersons had fallen in love with art, and they decided to investigate what it would take to acquire some pieces of their own.
In a characteristic understatement, Hunk Anderson remembers saying to his wife on the way home, “Let’s think big—maybe two or three dozen works.” The Anderson Collection now numbers some 800 works of art.
The
Andersons started out small, acquiring a few paintings by such artists
as Alfred Cornelius Howland in the fall of 1965. However, unable to
shake the enchantment of the masterpieces of late-19th-century European
art they had seen at the Louvre, they soon began to search for impressionist
artwork for their budding collection. Although they did manage to acquire
paintings by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
they soon discovered that these artists’ best works tended to be securely
ensconced in museum collections or private hands, and rarely come onto
the market.
Uninterested in acquiring mediocre works, even if they were by great artists, the Andersons revised their collecting strategy and began to redefine their notion of modern. They set out to learn about early-20th-century painting—especially work by artists associated with the legendary photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Marsden Hartley. They also started to follow work by more contemporary American artists.
By the late ’60s, the American art scene was dominated by such New York-based painters as Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Having emerged in the ’50s, the work of the avant-garde New York School artists—dubbed action painting or Abstract Expressionism and widely recognized, as Hunk Anderson points out, as “the first truly American” art movement—was embraced internationally for its bold, physical qualities, innovative handling of paint, and fresh exploration of abstraction. The Andersons—who had admired the Impressionists’ rhythmic, uneven application of paint, which is intended to represent the ever-changing effects of light and perception—were immediately taken with the action painters. Drawn in by the visible signs of the artists’ creative process and the experimental qualities of New York School paintings, they decided to make Abstract Expressionism the new focus of their collection.
As the Andersons’ areas of interest have grown and shifted over the years, they have remained faithful to work—from California painting to contemporary sculpture—that extends the New York School’s experiments with abstraction and with the limits of their chosen medium. As Hunk Anderson explains, “The Anderson Collection doesn’t go where the hand is gone. In all our work the brain and the hand [of the artist] must be present.”
At the time that the Andersons began to identify works by de Kooning,
Guston, Pollock, and Rothko for acquisition, they still had much to
learn about art and its history. With the Saga 
business
rapidly expanding and a young daughter, Mary Patricia (“Putter”), at
home, formal art education was out of the question. So the Andersons
began to build an art library, purchasing and avidly studying essays,
books, and exhibition catalogs on modern and contemporary art. They
also started collecting fine-art prints from renowned publishers such
as Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, U.L.A.E. in New York, and Crown Point
Press in San Francisco, which introduced the Andersons to such artists
as Richard Diebenkorn, Roy Lichtenstein, and Frank Stella. More modestly
priced than paintings and sculptures, these works of graphic art—which
would become the core of the print collection now on view at the San
Fransisco Legion of Honor—enabled the couple to, as Hunk Anderson puts
it, “see what we like and what we don’t like.”
Meanwhile, the Andersons also began to forge invaluable friendships with other art-world individuals. Stanford University professor Albert Elsen taught the Andersons what to look for when approaching modern sculpture (his specialty) and also provided a crucial art-historical context for late-19th-century and 20th-century art.
“We both took it upon ourselves to try to get to Al Elsen’s Art 101 class,” says Hunk Anderson, who attended “whenever I could sneak out of Saga. Moo, I think, was far more regular.” Painter Nathan Oliveira, also then teaching at Stanford, introduced the couple to dozens of Bay Area artists, laying the foundation for the Andersons’ extensive collection of California art. The couple also made connections with key West and East Coast dealers, curators, art historians, and collectors, each of whom, in turn, contributed to their knowledge about art and thus helped to focus their developing interests and burgeoning collection.
By the early ’70s, the Andersons had amassed a fine grouping of modern art, with particular strengths in modern sculpture, New York School and California painting, and works on paper. But despite the very interesting developments in the Bay Area’s art schools, where young artists were honing their skills under such mentors as Oliveira, Diebenkorn, David Park, and Hans Hofmann, West Coast museum and private collections could not keep pace with the Andersons’ thirst for the new and challenging. Sustained by a devoted but small cadre of trustees and supporters, Bay Area museums such as SFMOMA and the Fine Arts Museums had to focus their extremely limited acquisitions resources on a few primary movements that had already entered the modern art canon. As Hunk Anderson has noted, “It was lonely out here.” And so the couple set out to find and encourage a new community of art lovers who might get as much out of their provocative collection as they did. The first step was to hang selected artworks at the Saga headquarters. In addition to simply needing more space for their increasingly large collection, the Andersons wanted to reach out to their extended family of colleagues. “The reactions of the Saga employees were terrific,” Hunk Anderson says. “The art had a real effect.” But he points out that there were some mishaps.
“One time,” he remembers, “we hung one of Jasper Johns’ gray paintings in what was one of the computer rooms. We thought, ‘On Monday, they’re going to be so happy about this.’ Well, by the end of the week, some employees came to me to say, ‘We work as keypunch operators all week long, and whenever we look up, all we see are shades of gray. Would it be possible for us to have more colorful works in there?’ And so we changed it. That was one of the few times in my career that that happened.”
After surmounting these few minor glitches, the Saga complex became the new Anderson Collection outreach headquarters. The Andersons moved part of their art library there, organized lunchtime art lectures for employees, sponsored evening lectures by artists and historians, screened films, and facilitated tours of the collection. (The Saga campus, now called Quadrus, is still home to Anderson Collection artworks and activities thanks to a special arrangement with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, which took over the office buildings in 1987.) The couple also instituted an internship program. Since 1975, nearly 30 students from Stanford and San Francisco State University—many of whom are now well-known art historians, curators, and artists—have had the opportunity to organize exhibitions and research artworks from the Anderson Collection.
At the same time, the Andersons brought key works of art to even larger
audiences through donations to the permanent collections of a number
of Bay Area museums, including the Oakland Mus
eum
of California, the San Jose Museum of Modern Art, the Stanford Museum
of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and SFMOMA.
Friends and classmates of young Putter Anderson also benefited from her parents’ desire to share their collection. When Putter was a student at Sacred Heart School in Atherton, California, Moo Anderson installed rotating exhibitions of work by Diebenkorn, Robert Motherwell, and Frank Stella—not the usual convent fare—in the corridors of the school. Girls invited to slumber parties at the Andersons’ house would find themselves sleeping beneath Jackson Pollock’s Lucifer—widely acknowledged to be one of the artist’s masterpieces, a standout among his drip paintings—which hung over Putter’s bed. “She didn’t know what it was,” laughs Hunk Anderson, but “she didn’t touch it,” chimes in his wife.
Indeed, living with the artwork seems to have instilled a strong sense of respect, discipline, and responsibility in all the Andersons. “We have a special intimacy with the work,” says Hunk Anderson. In a museum you can’t touch the artwork; here we have that liberty. But these artworks are only in our care during our lifetimes—we’re their custodians. And so it’s our responsibility to take every precaution to keep the art safe.”
With so much exposure to museum-quality art in their home, the Andersons expected their daughter to become an enthusiastic student of art history. And although Putter Anderson Pence is now avidly interested in contemporary art and for many years represented artists through the Pence Gallery in Santa Monica, California, she was a reluctant convert to the family cause. “I tried to get her to take courses in school,” insists Moo Anderson, “but she always refused. Finally, she had a college roommate who was in art history. When the roommate was studying for her exams, going through the slides, Putter was able to stand there and identify everything. They were all artworks that she had seen and learned about through osmosis.”
In the end, it is Putter’s influence that has directed her parents toward the work of a number of emerging contemporary artists, including the now critically acclaimed painter Susan Rothenberg, whom Putter discovered while working as an intern at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “She has a good eye,” says Moo Anderson.
Unlike many collectors, who identify a favorite movement or style and
stick with it over the years, the Andersons have continuously sought
out new developments in art. Sometimes this has led them to support
artists who have dramatically changed their methods over time. In Celebrating
Modern Art, viewers will be able to trace the divergent styles developed
over the course of their careers. Works by such artists as Richard Diebenkorn,
Philip Guston, and Frank Stella. In addition, the exhibition will provide
the public with an opportunity to view work by important contemporary
artists not often shown in the Bay Area, including Vija Celmins, Martin
Puryear, Matthew Ritchie, and Terry 
Winters.
Collecting contemporary art is often a risky proposition, but the Andersons have never shied away from difficult work; in fact, the family treats it as a sort of game. Notes Moo Anderson, “If we go to see a show, and it’s interesting, Hunk and Putter and I will pick the three works that we liked best,” thus targeting specific works for possible acquisition.
The Andersons, who recognize that not everyone feels as comfortable with modern and contemporary art as they do, believe that anyone with an open mind and a measure of imagination and intuition has much to enjoy and learn from the works in their collection. “I think with abstract art you can bring more of yourself to the painting,” says Moo Anderson. “Some people like to look at landscapes or horses and carriages; they feel very much at home because the subject is familiar. Children love to look at abstract art.
But some adults are afraid because they won’t give of themselves. I think if you’re not willing to give yourself to the art, you probably won’t appreciate it.”
Although the pieces in their collection now number in the hundreds, the Andersons clearly cherish each individual work. “Each piece of art has a story to it,” Moo Anderson says. “And every time I see a work, I remember its story—how we got it, why we got it, where we got it, who has criticized it, who has enjoyed it.”
According to Hunk Anderson, “One of the results of our having lived with art is that it’s enhanced our very lives. It’s a family affair. We have something that binds us together as a family, and that’s very important, I think, in today’s world.”