Merrill Rueppel Records

Merrill C. Rueppel was born May 7, 1925 in Haddonfield, New Jersey. He served in the United States Army in Europe from 1943 to 1946. Upon his discharge, he attended Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin receiving his BA, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1949. He would go on to study art history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, receiveing his MA in 1951 and PhD in 1955.

After graduating from UW Madison, Rueppel held positions at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1956-1961, serving as Assistant Director 1959-1961. From Minneapolis, Rueppel moved to St. Louis where he served as Assistant Director of the City Art Museum, St. Louis from 1961-1964.

Rueppel was appointed to the position of Director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts in April 1964, and took up the position July 1 of that year. When he started at the DMFA, his goals were threefold: acquire major paintings and sculpture; bring important exhibitions to the museum; and originate important showings at the museum for touring ["New Dimensions for Museum," Bob Porter, Dallas Times Herald, April 4, 1964]. Rueppel also stated, "There is a great opportunity in Dallas to expand the Museum from its regional orientation. We now have the best representative Southwestern collection. We are on our way to having a great American collection." ["DMFA Director Looks to Future," John Neville, Dallas Morning News, July 9, 1964]

Rueppel's tenure was one of consolidation, as the first director after the merger of the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts with the Dallas Msueum of Fine Arts in 1963, and stability. He was successful in some of the goals he outlined when he came to the DMFA. During his eight-year directorship, Rueppel made exceptional acquisitions and strengthened the DMFA collection, particularly in the fields of Japanese, Classical, African, pre-Columbian, and Contemporary art. The press release announcing Rueppel's departure notes several noteworthy exhibitions organized by the DMFA during his tenure: Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective Exhibition (1967), Masterpieces of Japanese Art (1969), The Arts of Oceania (1970), The Romantic Vision in America (1971) and Geometric Abstraction (1972). Overall, Rueppel succeeded in changing the character of the DMFA from a "Southwest regional to a broader if modest repository of art history." ["Is DMFA at the Crossroads?" Janet Kutner, Dallas Morning News, 18 March 1973], though not without controversy. In working to change the character of the museum, Rueppel ceased all of the various regional annual juried exhibitions. He also changed the museum's education programing by closing the Museum School and discontinuing weekly public gallery lectures, though he did launch a large education program which brought 30,000 school children to the museum in 1972. Rueppel left the DMFA as of June 30, 1973 to become director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Rueppel died in Needham, Massachusetts on January 8, 2011, survived by wife Joan, two children, and three grandchildren [Obituary, The Boston Globe, January 11-16, 2011]

Note written by Hillary Bober