|10/02/14

Mary Patricia “Putter” Anderson Pence’s voice quavered at the microphone, for good reason. The Sept. 19 opening of the Anderson Collection at Stanford University was an “incredible journey,” she said, not only for the school, but for her parents, Harry W. “Hunk” Anderson, a food distribution company magnate, and his wife, Mary Margaret, a.k.a. “Moo.” The quiet couple’s trove of modern and contemporary art, regarded among the world’s finest, fills the new museum and is so coveted, said one museum curator, that “I would kill for this collection.” The gala night dinner, chaired by Andrea Hennessy, wife of university President John Hennessy, drew hundreds eager to see the works on display, such as Jackson Pollock’s “Lucifer” and Clyfford Still’s “1957-J No. 1,” and to chat with more than a dozen artists whose works hang on the walls, including Frank StellaCharles Arnoldi and David Sultan. Collectors and philanthropists mingled with no fewer than five museum directors past and present: Connie Wolf of the Cantor Arts CenterNeal Benezraof the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, former Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco director Harry Parker and its current director, Colin Bailey, and Jason Linetzsky, head of the Anderson. The museum, open to the public for free, was intended to help in “cementing relationships across cultures,” Hunk Anderson said, and, he added, “make a great university a little bit greater.”

— Carolyne Zinko