Above: Moonbird, Joan Miró, 1944-46 (enlarged 1966, cast 1967). Bronze. 90 x 80 1/2 x 57 3/4 in. Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Dallas, Texas. photo by David Heald

Above: Squares with Two Circles (Monolith), Barbara Hepworth, 1963 (cast 1964). Brown with green patina. 124 x 65 x 30 in. Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Dallas, Texas. photo by David Heald

Nasher looks on NorthPark as an aesthetic statement, a giant sculpture composed of a single material and form. He assembled a team of accomplished architects and designers; none had ever worked on a shopping center before. At the time it was built, it was the largest climate-controlled retail establishment in the world, with a white faÁade meant to suggest great buildings as they've been conceived through history. It stretches over a half mile along a naturally lighted promenade filled with fountains, shrubs, flowering plants, and a pond populated with turtles and ducks. One of Nasher's aims was architectural integrity; another was what he refers to as "the democratizing of the retail business."

That NorthPark retail business is accompanied by art, lots of art, all of which comes from the Patsy and Raymond Nasher Collection. The dominating work greets shoppers at the entry along NorthPark Boulevard: Jonathan Borofksy's Hammering Men, a twenty-foot-tall, five-figure group with motorized arms that continuously move up and down. In the Fountain Court is Frank Stella's Washington Island Gadwall. Configured of enamel, crayon, and glitter on aluminum, it's a colorful and cacophonous assemblage, the largest metal relief from Stella's Exotic Bird series. One corridor has an Andy Warhol Ads series: silkscreen prints of Ronald Reagan selling Van Heusen shirts, Donald Duck hawking war bonds, and Judy Garland in Blackglama fur. Outside Neiman Marcus, the shopper comes face to face with John Newman's Torus Obicularis, an aluminum construction of two flowerlike orbs connected by a large pipe. Nearby is Barry Flanagan's Large Leaping Hare, a gilded-bronze hare balanced atop an altar-like pyramid. Jim Dine's The Field of the Cloth of Gold invites contemplation of a twisted, brightly colored riff on the Venus de Milo.

NorthPark signals a lot about Nasher both as developer and collector, says the Nasher Center's Steven Nash. "For great developers, it's the process as much as the product that is exciting, the idea of having a dream and being able to put together all the ingredients to make it happen. And that is very much like the vision and independence and willingness to take a chance that a great collector has to have. Patsy and Ray's history of collecting sculpture has been marked by a very important pioneering quality. They were way out ahead of the market, even as they understood what they liked. That required a forward-looking ability to stare straight into the future without being distracted by other people's opinions."

The Nasher Collection comprehensively traces the idea of modernism, representing the techniques of abstraction and figuration, the use of different media, and the pairing of indoor and outdoor display. "There are collections of modern sculpture that are bigger," says Nash. "There are museum collections that have great individual pieces in them. But you'd be very hard-pressed to find a collection that, piece-by-piece, artist-by-artist, has these amazing aesthetic continuities within it. There is barely a letdown anyplace along the way, and if there is, it's not a very serious one. It covers a lot of territory and hits all the high notes of all the great sculptors of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries and into the twenty-first century. But it also has some very interesting byways, in terms of going down rivulets that are not as well-known or understood but that had been recognized by Ray and Patsy as tremendous examples of sculptural invention and quality. All those things together add up to something that is unparalleled."

Large Seated Nude, Henri Matisse, 1922-29. Bronze with dark brown patina. 30 1/2 x 31 5/8 x 13 5/8 in. Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Dallas, Texas. photo by David Heald

Nasher says he and his wife determined early on that if they had any surplus funds, "the first thing we'd do is buy art." Patsy Nasher, who had graduated from high school at age fourteen and had taken art classes as a Smith undergraduate, became known for her acute aesthetic judgment and for the connections she cultivated with dealers, curators, scholars, and artists. Their art purchases represented "a true partnership," says one of their three daughters, Nancy A. Nasher J.D. '79, now president of the NorthPark Development Company. "If there was a piece that he liked that she didn't like, they didn't get it. If there was a piece that she liked that he didn't like, they got it. If there was a piece that they both liked, they got it."

Says Ray Nasher, "We felt strongly that it had to be art that we wanted to live with, so the works really had to become members of the family. It wasn't a question of the quality of the work or formal considerations about art in general, but what it meant to us." Each piece, he says, has a story behind it.

An early interest in pre-Columbian and other ethnographic arts, including Navajo rugs and Guatemalan textiles, was stirred by several vacations in Mexico. The couple mingled with workers at archaeological sites and made inexpensive purchases, $10 or $20 for an object. (Nasher notes that those purchases preceded UNESCO protections of native cultural artifacts.) "You could see in that pre-Columbian art the whole range of the people's religious considerations, the nature of their schooling, the nature of their buildings. You had the whole culture of that period depicted through their arts. It was a very important beginning for us."

Their first purchase of a major work of art was a Ben Shahn watercolor, Tennis Players. That purchase, from a New York gallery, sparked a string of acquisitions of American Modernist paintings. "I'm such a tennis fan, and I felt it was just fantastic," says Nasher. "I told Patsy that we had to have that piece on account of the fact that I've played tennis all my life. How many times do you see tennis players in an art form?"

In 1961 the Nashers moved into a house built by Howard Meyer, a Dallas architect and disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright. Nature is accessible from every vantage point. So is modern sculpture, inside and outside. The house is surrounded by four-and-a-half woody acres; Nasher eventually acquired property across the street that now serves as a sculpture garden. As he has said, "You can't put a twenty-foot, five-ton sculpture in a New York apartment."

Working Model for Oval with Points, Henry Moore, 1968-69. Bronze with brown patina. 44 x 40 x 36 in. Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Dallas, Texas. photo by David Heald

Inside, the first thing the visitor notices is Jean Arp's Torso with Buds, which fills the front hallway of the house. The couple acquired the work, a bronze fusing of floral and human shapes, rising some six feet in height, in 1967. Its suggestion of organic growth seems a fitting starting point for a collection that subsequently blossomed. His wife bought it as a birthday present for Nasher. "She had seen it at the Janis Gallery in New York, and she thought it was one of the most beautiful forms she had ever seen. This was a major breakthrough. It basically was the beginning of our searching out the very important artists of the twentieth century."

Some of those very important artists became well known by the Nashers. Says Nancy Nasher, "They would either come to our house and sometimes live with us for months on end, or we would go to their studios or their foundries where they would be making the pieces, or we would be with them for the installation of the pieces." World-class tennis players also came to visit, as did other celebrities--among them, Paloma Picasso, the artist's daughter. As soon as she walked in the door of the Nashers' house, she saw a Picasso bronze, Pregnant Woman. It had been done in stages in the Fifties, when Picasso's companion at the time was pregnant with Paloma. "The first words out of her mouth," recalls Nancy Nasher, "were, 'That's me in there!' "

One of the Nashers' extended artistic encounters was with Andy Warhol. Patsy Nasher had come to know Warhol during her frequent forays into the New York gallery scene. She negotiated a trade-off with Warhol: In exchange for Navajo rugs, pots, jewelry, and other pieces of ethnographic art, Warhol would do individual family portraits. The family had long lived with a Warhol presence in their kitchen, a series of Warhol's silkscreen poster-prints of Campbell soup cans. Nancy Nasher has held on to some real Campbell soup cans with Warhol's signature; a couple of them have exploded, she says, so she has had to give them to a conservator for attention.

Warhol and his retinue came to Dallas and configured a makeshift studio in their hotel. Says Nancy Nasher, "My mother told me what the process was going to be, which was pretty much, take everything off and wrap a towel around yourself, and he's going to cover you in white powder--totally, everywhere, every inch of you, everything but your hair. And then you sit, and he's there with this Polaroid camera and a few people telling you how to sit, how to hold your head up. And he's taking hundreds of Polaroids."

Nancy Nasher says she was impressed with Warhol's workmanlike ways; she recalls his quiet manner, his ghostly white complexion, his riveting eyes, and his team of scurrying assistants. "In some of his portraits, he put in a little more color or a little more detail around the eyes or the month. In ours there was not quite as much." But there was a bigger issue. When her portrait came back, she noticed that Warhol had taken artistic license with her hair color, shifting it from its authentic brown to an unfamiliar black. "I told my mother, 'This is not an accurate representation.' I don't know how I had the nerve to do it, but I knew that it wasn't accurate. So Warhol redid the portrait and lightened up the color."

Although the Nashers were never driven by an academic impulse, they collected intelligently as well as passionately. One of their acquisitions, from the estate of Picasso, was the artist's Head (Fernande), from 1909. It's a first casting in plaster, from the hands of Picasso. A portrayal of Fernande Olivier, Picasso's love at the time, the work is considered the first true cubist sculpture. The surface is broken up as on a cubist canvas, with the woman's features rendered in sharply angled planes.

Their collection received an academic endorsement in 1978, when it was exhibited at Southern Methodist University. In 1987-88, "A Century of Modern Sculpture: The Patsy and Raymond Nasher Collection"--some one hundred works by more than fifty artists--appeared at the Dallas Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It later traveled to Madrid, Florence, and Tel Aviv. In their foreword to the catalogue, J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery at the time, and Harry S. Parker III, his Dallas counterpart, said the collection constituted "a cohesive historical continuum" even as it showed "that rich stamp of personal taste which can distinguish a private collection from its museum or institutional counterpart." They noted that even as the Nashers collected in depth such modern masters as Duchamp-Villon, Matisse, Moore, and Giacometti, they also encouraged new developments on the contemporary scene, acquiring pieces by Borofsky, Segal, and Serra.

The Nashers installed sculptures at civic spaces around Dallas, and lent works for exhibitions around the world. A selection from the collection rotates perpetually through the sculpture garden at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Venice. Nasher helped design the sculpture garden, which the Guggenheim named after the Nashers. (Patsy Nasher died in 1988 after a long series of illnesses.) He lent it thirty pieces for its opening in 1995. He was also on the design committee for the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, the fluid-form, titanium-clad Frank Gehry creation that he calls "a revolution in the nature of museum building."

When, a couple of years ago, Nasher announced the gift of the sculpture center to Dallas, The New York Times reported: "For years, museums from the Solomon R. Guggenheim in Manhattan to the National Gallery of Art in Washington to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have courted Raymond D. Nasher and coveted his extensive collection of modern and contemporary sculpture. All but one of the museums have courted in vain."