The story
The two towers over the San Antonio River were built for beer. The Lone Star Brewing Company, backed by the St. Louis brewer Adolphus Busch, raised this fortress-like complex between 1895 and 1904, to designs by a St. Louis firm that specialised in breweries. Prohibition ended the brewing, the buildings went through other uses, and after a 7.2 million dollar renovation the San Antonio Museum of Art opened inside them in March 1981.
The old brewery now holds more than 30,000 objects spanning some 5,000 years. Ancient Mediterranean art is a particular strength, with Egyptian, Greek and Roman sculpture and pottery. In 1998 the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Latin American Art opened, with pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial work and a folk-art collection of more than 7,000 objects, and in 2005 a wing for Asian art followed.
The European rooms are smaller but reward a stop. The Lake, Near Saint-Point, by the French Realist Gustave Courbet, was painted in November 1872 while he stayed with friends by that lake near the Swiss border. Three fishermen push off under a gathering storm, laid on thickly with the palette knife. Not far away is Admiration, a large canvas by the French academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, five young women crowding around a small Cupid, which came to the museum through the bequest of Mort D. Goldberg.
