During their lifetimes, the Bay Area–based collectors Mary Margaret “Moo” and Harry “Hunk” Anderson cultivated holdings of works by major American artists including Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, and other marquee names. Theirs was a storied collection known internationally for its quality and breadth, and it included works from artists of the New York School, Bay Area figurative painters, and luminaries from the Light and Space and Color Field movements.
One of the couples’ greatest contributions to the Bay Area art scene was their donation of over 100 works to Stanford University in 2011. Those pieces formed the basis for the university’s Anderson Collection, which opened to the public in 2014. Just before her death at age 92 in 2019, Moo gifted two more significant works to the Anderson Collection: Jackson Pollock’s Totem Lesson 1 (1944) and Willem de Kooning’s Gansevoort Street (1949–51).
[How Moo Anderson wanted to enjoy art by sharing it.]
Some of the earliest influences on Moo and Hunk’s collecting were two Stanford professors: art historian Albert Elsen and painter Nathan Oliveira. Pieces by Oliveira, Richard Diebenkorn, and Paul Wonner were among the first acquired by the Andersons in the 1960s. And in the years since, the Andersons continued to cultivate their eye, buying great art that was distinct to their tastes. Their collecting style over the years could be summed up with the question: “Have we seen it before, and could we have thought of it?”
On the occasion of the opening of the Anderson Collection at Stanford, Moo extrapolated on the family’s decision to gift works to the university. “It’s good to study art in books, but something happens in the presence of the original—it affects the brain, taste, feelings and more,” she said. “I think in order to enjoy art, you have to share it.”
View a selection of pieces from the Anderson Collection in the following slideshow, and read a profile of Moo Anderson here.
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Image Credit: Anderson Collection at Stanford University/© 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Mark Rothko, Pink and White Over Red, 1957.
This painting by Rothko reflects the artist’s quintessential style, which involved situating large rectangles of color next to one another.
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Image Credit: Anderson Collection at Stanford University/© The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation Richard Diebenkorn, Girl on the Beach, 1957.
Diebenkorn’s Girl on the Beach was painted during the artist’s years living in Berkeley. Notably, Diebenkorn attended Stanford beginning in 1940 to study art.
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Image Credit: Anderson Collection at Stanford University/© Estate of Joan Mitchell Joan Mitchell, Before, Again IV, 1985.
Mitchell, who died in 1992, created this painting in the later years of her career. The work shows a lively interplay of various colors.
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Image Credit: Anderson Collection at Stanford University/© The Estate of Philip Guston/Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Philip Guston, The Coat II, 1977.
This work, which contains some of Guston’s signature iconography, is part of a series of “coat” paintings by the artist.
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Image Credit: Anderson Collection at Stanford University/© 2021 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Willem de Kooning, Gansevoort Street, ca. 1949.
Gansevoort Street, gifted to the Anderson Collection by Moo in 2019, stands out from other works from this period by de Kooning for its vibrant colors. The work reflects the artist’s deep interest in the streets of New York.