William Bryan Jordan

May 8, 1940 - January 22, 2018
Bill Jordan, who used his scholarly and keen eye to enrich art museums from Dallas and Ft. Worth to Madrid, died January 22 in Dallas at the age of 77. He was born in Nashville, Tenn. to William Bryan Jordan and Dixie Owen Jordan. In 1945 his family moved to San Antonio where he grew up and graduated from Alamo Heights High School in 1958. After earning a B.A. from Washington and Lee University in 1962, he obtained both a Master's degree and a Ph.D from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. It was in San Antonio that he developed his love for art, working summers at the McNay Art Institute where John Palmer Leeper, the first director of the McNay, was his mentor.

Soon after earning his Ph.D in 1967, he was called to serve as director of the Meadows Museum at SMU, named for collector and oilman Algur Meadows. He was also chairman of the division of fine arts and began to assemble a collection of masterpieces including works by Goya, Velasquez, Picasso and Miro. "More than any other individual, Bill Jordan deserves the credit for Algur Meadows' art collection," said Sam Holland, dean of SMU's Meadows School of Arts. "He was the adviser and buyer that helped Algur Meadows acquire what is the best collection of Spanish art outside of Spain."

In 1981, Jordan left SMU and joined the Kimbell Art Museum and is credited with making the Kimbell collection considerably more meaningful to the public. He was the institution's deputy director until 1990. At the Kimbell, Jordan was chairman of the scholars committee that planned the historic 1982 exhibit El Greco of Toledo, which was shown at the Dallas Museum of Art, the Prado Museum in Madrid and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C. In 1985, his groundbreaking exhibition Spanish Still Life in the Golden Age: 1600 - 1650 was held at the Kimbell and the Toledo Museum of Art.

His scholarship continued in 1995 with Spanish Still Life from Velazquez to Goya held at the National Gallery in London which was, at the time, the highest attended exhibition in the Gallery's history.


In 2005-06, he organized the exhibition Juan van der Hamen y Leon and the court of Madrid. The primary venue for this exhibition was the Royal Palace in Madrid and a reduced version was shown at the Meadows Museum in Dallas

In 1988, Jordan's scholarly instincts led him to purchase a painting at a London auction house. The Prado later authenticated it as Portrait of Philip III by Diego Velazquez, a Spanish master of the Golden Age. It had been attributed to another artist at the time of purchase. In late 2016, he donated the work to the American Friends of the Prado Museum and it was subsequently placed on view in the museum. In the summer of 2017, the Prado named Jordan an honorary trustee.

He has served on boards of the of Dallas Museum of Art, the Foundation for the Arts and the Nasher Foundation, of which he was a founding director. He also was past president of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa.

He was preceded in death by his parents and a sister, Ettie Lu Jordan Soard. He is survived by his husband Robert Dean Brownlee, two sisters, Frances Jordan Hearn-Rigney and Sue Jordan Rodarte as well as numerous nieces, nephews, great nieces and great nephews and a great-grandniece and great-grandnephew. A memorial service will be held in Dallas in the future.