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Because many works owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Menil Collection, including pieces by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois and Robert Mapplethorpe, once passed through Texas Gallery, it’s startling to hear owner Fredericka Hunter sum up its 40-year history in two words: “We survived.”

Douglas Britt / Chronicle Fredericka Hunter, seen in front of Pat Steir’s 2006 painting Lama Ghost, is celebrating Texas Gallery’s four-decade survival.

But Hunter and director Ian Glennie, who are marking the gallery’s anniversary with a group show of 40 women artists called, appropriately enough, 40, say the gallery has always looked different from the outside.

“There have been some very funny ideas about who we are and what we are and why we’re here,” Hunter says. “We’re really just a very quirky, eccentric gallery that has advanced our personal tastes all this time.”

Hunter and Glennie were both art history students — she at the University of St. Thomas, he at Rice University — when they joined the gallery in 1970 shortly after it began life as Contract Graphics. Founders Dossett McCullough and Donnelley Erdman launched the venture to sell more modestly priced prints to corporate clients who might balk, for example, at splurging on a Rauschenberg painting.

“But it turns out that within a year or so of starting, the print market took off, and all of a sudden a (Rauschenberg print) was not within the budget of some of the companies,” Hunter says. “Or at least they weren’t willing to invest in that kind of thing.”

McCullough and Erdman sold the business around 1972 to Hunter, who changed the name to Texas Gallery and moved it from a house on Morningside to a building on Bissonnet.

Also in the early 1970s, Hunter visited Los Angeles to meet artist Edward Ruscha, whose drawings had been the subject of an early Contract Graphics exhibit. (They sold for $300 apiece. In a sign of how Ruscha’s market value has increased, one of his drawings sold for $227,370 at auction in October.) Ruscha introduced her to Los Angeles artists Joe Goode, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Graham and Ed Moses.

Meanwhile, Hunter and Glennie knew up-and-coming New York artists such as Brice Marden, Chuck Close, Lynda Benglis and David Novros from having spent a year working in the New York art world prior to joining Contract Graphics.

“Once we started thinking about what we were doing, we decided we would show artists we knew in New York and artists we knew in L.A. along with some people working here,” Hunter says.

That model has made for a bumpy ride. Efforts to market Houston as “an arts mecca — which it really is,” Hunter says, have never quite caught fire.

And the gallery, which moved to its current River Oaks Shopping Center location in 1978, gets far less local interest when it shows non-Houston artists unless they’re celebrities like Ruscha or Warhol. Glennie says 80 percent of sales are to out-of-state buyers. Meanwhile, artists whose prices have soared beyond the budgets of most Bayou City collectors often decide it’s not worth it to exhibit in Houston.

Add to those challenges several recessions, the savings-and-loan crisis and the Enron collapse, which wiped out the gallery’s largest client overnight, and one can see why Hunter says the gallery’s lucky to be around. During some lean years, Hunter and Glennie survived off sales of inventory like the early Ruscha drawings they’d been prescient enough to buy when they were cheap.

But as far as they’re concerned, they’ve thrived where it counts — in the relationships they formed with Warhol, Rauschenberg, Marden, Ruscha and other artists.

“We had a lot of adventures — tons of adventures all the time,” Hunter says. “That is the real story of the gallery — all the comings and goings and mixings and who knew whom and who was here when.”