Dallas Museum of Fine Arts

I confess that Dallas has long filled me with bad vibes--Dealey Plaza and its School Book Depository rifle roost, the Cowboys and their high-stepping Cowgirl cheerleaders, and billionaire bluster. So I was making a duty trip to cover every museum when I hailed a cab for the ten-minute (off-peak) ride to Fair Park.

Talk about prejudice evaporation. The whole park is a fairyland of art deco. I could walk up and down its esplanades for hours, never enter a door and be blissful. But enter the DMFA I did, and thereby hangs a tale of total and unconditional surrender.

True, I had to grit my teeth before the newest coup, Frederic Church's ode to a deep freeze, the $2.5 million Icebergs (which was given to the museum, some say, by H.L. Hunt). But the Nora and John Wise collection of ancient South American art is not only a pupil-boggling parade of Peruvian textile, gold, pottery, and sculpture, it also sets the highest standard of museology I've seen anywhere in the world. It explains things with an aesthetic flair that is a joy in itself. If Cairo's museum is the bottom in this respect, then Dallas is the tops.

And it was there that I first gazed upon that minor painter, Gerald Murphy, expatriate friend of the Scott Fitzgeralds. I regard it as a major loss to American painting that he just up and walked away from his easel. Dallas has most of his works, and a damn good catalogue by William Rubin, with an illuminating reminiscence by friend Archibald MacLeish.

I feared the museum shop in Neiman-Marcus land would exceed my Visa limits. Surprise, the stock is a laid-back blend of Korvettes and Cartier's. There are good restaurants in the Fair Park, but I recommend a Casa something or other (I forgot the name but not the hot taste-haaaaaaahh!!) kittycorner from the bus stop to downtown at the main gate.

For dessert, visit the Texas Hall of History; really gargantuan, tall-tale murals--with a splendid photo gallery in the basement, next to a library full of helpful librarians. (They love art deco too!)

--from 20 Museums You've Never Heard Of/Horizon Magazine 1981