Barry Walker helped bring Arshile Gorky's Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia (c. 1933-1934), into the MFAH. Photo: Dave Rossman. © 2011 Estate of Arshile Gorky / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
After 20 years at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, curator Barry Walker is leaving in a different fashion than he anticipated.

“I thought they’d take me out of here feet first,” says Walker, who instead has watched his office gradually empty while he sorts out the details of selling his Houston home and buying one in Los Angeles.

Walker says he’s loved working with his MFAH colleagues and grew to love Houston despite coming here with the usual East Coast misconceptions of Texas. But the December death of the man who hired him to launch the MFAH’s prints and drawings department, longtime director Peter C. Marzio, brought back memories of Walker’s previous post at the Brooklyn Museum.

There, he went from being a favorite of one director to persona non grata when that boss left and a new one arrived. Walker, 66, decided he’d rather not chance reliving those days.

So Walker and Maud, his 12-year-old Labrador retriever, are off to an art capital that has always held a mystique for him. There, he’ll start life as a free agent, working on independent curatorial and writing projects, including some consulting work for the MFAH. (Hired in 1991 as curator of prints and drawings, Walker added modern and contemporary art curator to his title in 2002.)

The first such project, the exhibit Highlights From the Peter Blum Edition Archive, will open Dec. 18 at the MFAH and revisit a major coup of Walker’s tenure — one that illustrates the long patience a curator needs at a growing encyclopedic museum.

In 1996, the MFAH purchased all the prints and books that Blum — a print publisher who collaborated with such leading American and European artists as James Turrell, John Baldessari, Louise Bourgeois, Alex Katz, Brice Marden and Francesco Clemente — had released from 1981 through June 1994.

Eric Fischl, American, born 1948: Untitled (Woman with Child Watching) from: Year of the Drowned Dog, 1983. Sugar-lift aquatint, scraping and soft-ground etching in colors. Printed by Peter Kneub hler, Z rich, Switzerland, Swiss, d. 1999. Published by Peter Blum Edition/Blumarts, Inc., New York, founded 1980 The Peter Blum Edition Archive, 1980-1994, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston purchase with funds provided by the Alice Pratt Brown Museum Fund. Print #1 of the portfolio, Woman with Child Watching (description provided by Peter Blum Edition).© Eric Fischl

Walker, who had followed Blum’s publishing work from the start, talked to Marzio about purchasing the archive while he was still interviewing for the job. Getting to know the trustees and win their confidence took a few years, but once Walker secured their backing, he landed a windfall.

To supplement the published prints and books the MFAH bought, Blum himself and Blumarts Inc., the parent company of Peter Blum Edition, donated all the related Blumarts-owned preparatory material. The MFAH now owned a complete record of many of the print projects from initial concept drawings through early, tentative proofs to their finished states.

So that he could display the collection with the respect he thought it deserved, Walker waited 10 years for sufficient real estate to become available. Singular Multiples: The Peter Blum Edition Archive, 1980-1994 opened in three segments in 2006 in the Law Building, where it took up 35,000 square feet. It was the largest museum exhibition of late-20th-century graphic arts ever mounted but still included just 400 of the 1,500 acquired objects. So Walker has plenty to work with for December’s smaller show.

Another Walker triumph worked in the reverse sequence: His 1996 exhibit Jackson Pollock: Defining the Heroic preceded the following year’s purchase of four paintings, 12 drawings and two rare sculptures — only five are still extant — from the artist’s estate.

Jackson Pollock, American, 1912-1956: Number 22A, 1948 Enamel on gesso on paper mounted on panel Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum purchase with funds provided by the Brown Foundation Accessions Endowment Fund. © 2011 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Two of the works — the early painting Overall Composition and Number 22A (1948), a masterful “drip painting” on paper — frequently appear in art-history books.

Jackson Pollock, American, 1912-1956: Overall Composition, 1934-1938 Oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum purchase with funds provided by the Brown Foundation Accessions Endowment Fund. © 2011 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

So does Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia, a 1933-34 painting by Arshile Gorky, one of Walker’s all-time favorite artists. The culmination of dozens of studies begun in 1930, it draws on cubist, Surrealist and Spanish Baroque influences and is considered a Gorky masterpiece.

Walker and Marzio accidentally discovered the painting’s availability during a visit to New York's Gagosian Gallery, where they had been looking at Francis Bacon paintings. Because it needed to be acquired within 30 days, Walker and Marzio won approval of the $4 million purchase in a special committee meeting.

Meetings are one of the few things Walker won’t miss in a career that’s included such highlights as last year’s Alice Neel: Painted Truths, which resulted in one purchase and one gift from the late artist’s sons; working with major figures such as Marden and Jasper Johns on important acquisitions; and installing The Heroic Century: The Museum of Modern Art Masterpieces, 200 Paintings and Sculptures when it came to the MFAH in 2003.

Alice Neel, American, 1900-1984: The Family (John Gruen, Jane Wilson and Julia), 1970 Oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum purchase with funds provided by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund. © Estate of Alice Neel

“I’m terrible at meetings,” Walker says. “My mind wanders, and I never can think of anything bright to say until it’s over. … I’d much rather be at my desk writing an essay or thinking about the installation of a show.”