The story
The first museum of modern art in Texas started as a rich woman's house and her collecting habit. Marion Koogler McNay married five times and inherited oil money, and she built a sprawling Spanish Colonial Revival mansion in San Antonio in the 1920s, filling it with modern French and Southwestern art. When she died in 1950 she left the house and collection to found a museum, which opened in 1954.
You still enter through her home, around a tiled Spanish courtyard with a fountain, before the galleries open out. The collection is strong in late-19th and 20th-century European painting, with Cezanne, Gauguin, Picasso and Matisse, and in the art of the American Southwest she loved.
Later wings added modern architecture behind the old house, and one gallery holds an unusual collection of theatre and stage design, so the museum keeps the feel of a private house that kept growing after its owner was gone.
