Barbara Duncan, Art Historian -- Rest in Peace

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Subject: Barbara Duncan, Art Historian

Author:
New York

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Date Posted: April 04, 2003 1:21:41 EDT

Barbara Doyle Duncan, who collected, exhibited and wrote about modern Latin American art when the field was still little known to much of the United States art world, died on March 28 at her home in New York. She was 82.

Ms. Duncan's interest in Latin American art began when she and her husband, John C. Duncan, a businessman, lived in Lima, Peru, from 1947 to 1955. There, and on quick trips elsewhere, she met artists and bought their work.

In New York in the 1960's, she earned a master's degree at the Institute of Fine Arts, for which she wrote two theses, one on colonial Peruvian religious art, the other on the painter Joaqu�n Torres-Garc�a (1874-1949).

In 1977 she organized the influential exhibition "Recent Latin American Drawings (1969-1976): Lines of Vision," which included 100 artists, and in 1985 she organized another important show, "Gloria in Excelsis: The Virgin and Angels in Viceregal Painting of Peru and Bolivia." Each exhibition appeared at the Americas Society in Manhattan.

In 1979 she helped plan the first auction of Latin American art at Sotheby's in New York. It was an unexpected success and did much to give that art a wider public and institutional presence.

She and her husband donated their collection, considered one of the best ensembles of post-1960's Latin American work in the United States, to the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery (now the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art) at the University of Texas, Austin, to which Ms. Duncan also gave a substantial collection of archival material.

In addition to being on the board of directors of the Americas Society, she was a life trustee of the International House, New York; and a director of the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art.

In an interview in the catalog for the 1997 exhibition "Realigning Vision: Alternative Currents in South American Drawing," organized by the University of Texas on the model of one of her earlier shows, she said that what she found distinctive about the art to which she had devoted her attention was its "reluctance to give up the subject of the human condition."

Ms. Duncan is survived by her husband of 62 years, who lives in New York; a son, Craig Duncan, of Greenwich, Conn; two daughters, Lynn Tarbox of Tampa, Fla., and Gail Simmons of New York; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

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