Detroit Institute of Arts
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The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), originally named the Detroit Museum of Art, has one of the largest, most significant art collections in the United States. Its first painting was donated in 1883 and its collection consists of over 65,000 works. The DIA is an encyclopedic museum, not a specialist one: its collections range from ancient Egyptian works to contemporary art. The DIA is located in Detroit's Cultural Center, about two miles (3 km) north of the downtown area, near Wayne State University.
Featured Holdings and Important Works
The collection of American Art at the DIA is one of the most impressive and top ranked collections in the United States. Works by American artists began to be collected immediately following the museum's founding in 1883. Today the collection is a strong survey of American history, with acknowledged masterpieces of painting, sculpture, furniture and decorative arts from the 18th century, 19th century, and 20th century, with contemporary American art in all media also being collected. The breadth of the collection includes such American artists as John James Audubon, George Bellows, George Caleb Bingham, Alexander Calder, Mary Cassatt, Dale Chihuly, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole, John Singleton Copley, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Winslow Homer, George Inness, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Willson Peale, Rembrandt Peale, Duncan Phyfe, Hiram Powers, Frederic Remington, Paul Revere, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John Singer Sargent, John French Sloan, Gilbert Stuart, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Andy Warhol, Andrew Wyeth, and James McNeill Whistler.
Important works at the DIA include James Abbot McNeil Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, a dragon from the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Wedding Dance, a Vincent van Gogh self-portrait, Hans Holbein the Younger's Portrait of a Woman, and Giovanni Bellini's Madonna and Child. Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry fresco forms the center of the museum. The Nut Gatherers by William-Adolphe Bouguereau is, by some accounts, the most popular painting in the collection.
History
The museum had its genesis in an 1881 tour of Europe made by local newspaper magnate James E. Scripps. Scripps kept a journal of his family's five-month tour of art and culture in Italy, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, portions of which were published in his newspaper The Detroit News. The series proved so popular that it was republished in book form called Five Months Abroad. The popularity also inspired William H. Brearley, the manager of the newspaper's advertising department to organize an art exhibit in 1883, which was also extremely well-received. Brearly convinced many leading Detroit citizens to contribute to establish a permanent museum. Among the donors were James Scripps, his brother George H. Scripps, Dexter M. Ferry, Christian H. Buhl, Gen. Russell A. Alger, Moses W. Field, James McMillan and Hugh McMillan, George H. Hammond, James F. Joy, Francis Palms, Christopher R. Mabley, Simon J. Murphey, John S. Newberry, Cyrenius A. Newcomb, Thomas W. Palmer, Philo Parsons, George B. Remick, Allan Shelden, David Whitney Jr., G.V.N. Lothrop and Hiram Walker. Scripps gave the single largest gift of $50,000, which enabled the Detroit Museum of Art to be incorporated on April 16, 1885. The original Romanesque style building on East Jefferson at Hastings opened its doors on September 1, 1888.
In 1889, Scripps donated 70 European paintings, valued at $75,000 at the time. Later support for the museum came from the auto barons, especially Edsel Ford. Robert Hudson Tannahill of the Hudson's Department Store family left a European art collection and endowment to the museum. Part of the current support for the museum comes from the state government in exchange for which the museum carries out state-wide programs on art appreciation and provides art conservation services to other museums in Michigan.
In 1922 Horace H. Rackham donated a casting of Auguste Rodin's sculpture,The Thinker, acquired from a German collection, to the DIA. In 1927, when the new museum building was opened, this work was placed inside. Sometime in the subsequent years the work was moved out of the building and placed on a pedestal in front of the building, facing Woodward Avenue and the Detroit Public Library across the street.
In 1949, the museum was among the first to return a work looted by the Nazis, when it returned Claude Monet's The Seine at Asnières to its rightful owner. The art dealer they had purchased it from reimbursed the museum. In 2002 the museum discovered that the 17th-century seascape painting, Ludolf Backhuysen's A Man-O-War and Other Ships off the Dutch Coast, a painting under consideration for purchase by the museum, had been looted from a private European collection by the Nazis. The museum contacted the original owners, paid the rightful restitution, and the family allowed the museum to accession the painting into its collection, adding another painting to the museum's already prominent Dutch collection. [1]
More recently, on February 24, 2006, a 12-year-old boy from the Holly Academy in Michigan stuck a piece of chewing gum on Helen Frankenthaler's 1963 abstract work 'The Bay', leaving a small stain. The painting is valued at $1.5 million as of 2005, and is one of Frankenthaler's most important works. Curators and conservators of the museum believe that the painting was not significantly damaged and that a cleaning treatment should remedy the situation. [2]