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Mary Margaret “Moo” Anderson, who along with her husband, donated the core of her family’s 20th-century American art collection to Stanford University, died Tuesday, Oct. 22, at her home in Atherton at the age of 92, according to a news release from the university.
The Andersons announced in 2011 that they would donate 121 works by 86 artists to the university, with Stanford in charge of constructing a free-standing building to house the collection. The Anderson Collection, which is housed next to the university’s Cantor Arts Center, opened its doors in 2014.
By that time, the Andersons had already donated much of their collection, which once numbered more than 1,200 pieces of art, to various museums, including Stanford, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Mary Margaret Anderson’s husband, Harry “Hunk” Anderson, died last year at the age of 95.
The Anderson gallery includes works from schools of American modern art including abstract impressionism, color field painting, post-minimalism, California funk art, and light and space. Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, Morris Louis, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella and Jackson Pollock are among the artists that are included.
“‘Moo’ Anderson will forever be remembered for her love of art, but also for her love of sharing art,” said Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne in the news release. “In the early days of her and Hunk’s collecting, she listened and learned from curators and art historians, and spent a great deal of time examining the artwork in museums, galleries and artists’ studios in person.”
Mary Margaret Anderson was born in Boston, graduated from D’Youville College in Buffalo, New York, and met her husband in the summer of 1948.
They were married two years later and moved to the Bay Area in 1964, when Hunk Anderson opened the national headquarters of Saga, the food service company he founded that specialized in serving college dormitories, in Palo Alto. Saga then moved to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where Quadrus is now located.
The Andersons started collecting art about that time and soon began working with Stanford art professors Nathan Oliveira and Albert Eisen to guide them with their acquisitions.
The Andersons also developed a library of art books and catalogs related to the art and artists represented in the collection.
As part of the Andersons’ original gift, they donated a large percentage of that library to Stanford so that scholars are able to benefit from the same educational material as the family.
More than 30 doctoral candidates in art history at the university have interned at the Anderson Collection, engaging in intensive study and curating exhibitions, according to Stanford.
“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,” Mary Margaret Anderson said at the opening of the collection. “I think in order to enjoy art, you have to share it.”
Mary Margaret Anderson is survived by her daughter, Mary Patricia “Putter” Anderson Pence of Los Angeles and a granddaughter, Devin Pence.
In lieu of flowers, donations in Anderson’s memory may be made to the St. Francis Center in Redwood City.
The Almanac will publish more about Anderson in its next issue.
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