Director's Letter

This month, we will be opening the exhibition Detroit Experiences: Robert Frank Photographs, 1955, containing images of Detroit that were included in one of the most influential publications in the history of U.S. photography. Frank, a Swiss photographer, came to the United States soon after World War II and, funded by a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, took a big, looping tour around the country, visiting many regions and photographing people. He depicted a very different America from that captured by Ansel Adams. Frank's book The Americans, published in the United States in 1959, was an immediate sensation and influenced several generations of American artists who have developed the style and imagery sometimes informally called "Street Photography." He was particularly drawn to Detroit--to him, quintessential America--and the DIA's curators have, over the years, assembled the rare works that constitute this show.

"Detroit," he wrote in a letter to his wife, "is all right--just the way I thought an American city looks." He was awestruck by Ford's Rouge River plant and, in the same letter, referred to it as "God's factory." He went on to say, "I am sure the devil gave him a helping hand," a comment that conveys his lively awareness of less appealing aspects of this country. His book's title emphasizes that it was through the daily lives of ordinary people, rather than through landscape or cityscape, that he wanted to capture the essence of American life. Nothing could be further from Charles Sheeler's pristine modernist hymns to the Rouge plant that we exhibited here a few years ago than Frank's pictures of the same location. Frank focuses on the workers, whether in the factory or in the bars, soda fountains, and parks they frequented, and his mixed response to what he saw very much mirrors that of another famous foreign artist who came to Detroit two decades earlier to depict its industrial glory: Diego Rivera. As with Rivera's murals, some were offended by the unflattering pictures they saw in Frank's groundbreaking book and, although a few images may have acquired a slightly nostalgic sheen, as a body they remain as visually, socially, and psychologically sharp as when they were first published just over fifty years ago.

Exhibitions

Detroit Experiences: Robert Frank Photographs, 1955

Special Exhibition Galleries: Central
March 3-July 3

While traveling the country taking photographs for his groundbreaking book The Americans, artist Robert Frank stopped in Detroit, where he was inspired by autoworkers and the cars they made, local lunch counters, drive-in movies, and public parks such as Belle Isle (above). Through his images, he transformed the everyday experiences of city residents into an extraordinary visual statement about American life.

Detroit Experiences: Robert Frank Photographs, 1955, showcases more than sixty rare black-and-white photographs from the DIA's collection, including eight images that were published in The Americans. In addition, an in-depth body of work representative of Frank's view of Detroit's working-class culture and automotive industry is exhibited together for the first time.

With funding from a Guggenheim grant, Frank set out in 1955 and 1956 to create a large visual record of America, which was to become The Americans. According to the photographer, the book documented "things that are there, anywhere, and everywhere...a town at night, a parking lot, the man who owns three cars and the man who owns none...the dream of grandeur, advertising, neon lights...gas tanks, post offices, and backyards." Whether in the disorienting surroundings of a massive factory or during the solitary and alienating moments of individuals in parks and on city streets, the Swiss-born photographer looked beneath the surface of life in the United States and found a culture that challenged his perceptions and popular notions of the American Dream.

Frank developed an unconventional photographic style that was innovative and controversial in its time. Photographing quickly, Frank sometimes tilted and blurred compositions, presenting people and their surroundings in fleeting and fragmentary moments with an unsentimental eye. Beat poet Jack Kerouac expressed the complex nature of the artist and his work in a passage from the writer's introduction to The Americans, stating, "Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world."

Robert Frank, American (born Switzerland); Belle Isle, 1955; gelatin silver print. Museum Purchase, Forum for Prints, Drawings and Photographs Purchase Fund
© Robert Frank, from The Americans

Closing in March

Government Support for the Arts: WPA Prints from the 1930s

Schwartz Galleries of Prints and Drawings
Through March 21

This exhibition features about one hundred prints created under the Federal Art Project, a unit of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) created in 1935 to provide economic relief to Americans during the Great Depression. Like railroad workers, miners, farmers, and anyone out of work, artists were recognized as a special group of laborers in need of financial assistance.

The Neighborhood Project

Walter Gibbs Gallery, Wayne and Joan Webber Education Wing
Through March 28

Artists Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert view their efforts to revitalize a Detroit neighborhood as an ongoing artistic project, one they are replicating in this ongoing, interactive installation. In their DIA project, the artists illustrate how art can transform neighborhoods, both visually and socially, by looking at how public space and aesthetics can be integrated.

New On View

Islamic Art Gallery

The reinstallation and reinterpretation of the museum's permanent collection continues with the opening of a new gallery of Islamic art, including works from the Mediterranean region, the Middle East, Central Asia, and India that date from the seventh through the early twentieth centuries. As with the rest of the museum, the gallery is arranged according to thematic stories narrated by works of art: The Silk Road; Masterpieces of Carpet Weaving; Art of the Great Empires: Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal; The Medieval Islamic World: Urban Settings and Goods; Art of the Mamluks; Mediterranean Trade 1250-1500; and Sacred Writings from the Islamic World.

Sacred Writings features not only Qur'ans and other manuscripts from the Islamic tradition, but also exquisite manuscripts from the written traditions of all the religions that flourished in Islamic lands. In addition to manuscripts from the DIA's own collection, this section of the gallery includes manuscripts lent by other collections, among them the Alex and Marie Manoogian Museum in Southfield, the Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Like all works of art created with delicate, organic materials, the manuscripts are on view for only three months at a time and changed throughout the year.

Bukhara, Uzbekistan; Jewel Box, 1909; white-gold, copper, gold, niello, enamel, rubies, diamonds, lead crystal, velvet textile. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Lester F. Ruwe

Part of the excitement in researching the collection was the rediscovery of important works of art that had remained unrecognized for decades. These include a very large, early Ottoman mosque candlestick from about 1500 and a fifteenth-century Timurid cut-tile panel in the shape of a star. Other works of art were studied by the DIA's conservation scientists to determine their construction, composition, and materials. For example, a jewel box commissioned in 1909 by Sayyid 'Alam Khan, emir of Bukhara, as a diplomatic gift, was originally thought to be made of silver and paste gems. On reexamination, the materials were correctly identified as white gold decorated with diamonds and synthetic rubies.

Haitian Art at the DIA

The Procession to the Citadel, 1977; oil on board. Gift of Richard and Alison Jones

As the people of Haiti face the ongoing struggle of surviving the recent earthquake there, the Detroit Institute of Arts is highlighting a selection of Haitian paintings from its collection. The paintings exemplify Haiti's rich cultural heritage, which has been devastated by the natural disaster. Included are two paintings that focus on Haitian heroes Henri Christophe and Toussaint L'Ouverture.

Procession to the Citadel (1977) by Philomé Obin, who specialized in paintings about Haiti's history and is regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern Haitian art, depicts mourners and soldiers as they walk slowly toward the Citadel, a mountaintop fortress built by Christophe between 1805 and 1820 to prevent invasion by the French. The casket supported by the soldiers carries the body of Christophe, a key leader during the Haitian slave rebellion after the territory gained independence from France at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Arrest of Toussaint L'Ouverture, June 7, 1802 (1971) by Jean Wilner shows Toussaint, a self-educated former slave who had driven European colonialists out of Haiti in the late eighteenth century and led his country to independence, as he is arrested by French troops after being betrayed by Napoleon. Toussaint was then taken to France, where he was imprisoned until he died in 1803.

Also on view are Village Scene: Wedding (1980) by Télémaque Obin and Edouard Duval Carrié's untitled painting dating from 1980 of an enigmatic representation of the vodun god, Agowe, master of the seas. Agowe, perched atop a submarine, symbolizes the arrival of the U.S. Marines in Haiti during the 1920s.

The museum has approximately twenty-five Haitian works, including metal sculptures. The late Roland Charles Wiener, a board member of the Friends of African and African American Art, initiated the museum's collecting activities in this area. A Haitian native, he donated several art works by his countrymen and directed donations of the same to the museum. Some of the other highly regarded Haitian artists represented in the collection are Montas Antoine, Sisson Blanchard, Murat Brièrre, Casimir, Préfète Duffaut, Serge Jolimeau, Jasmin Joseph, and Gerard Paul. The four paintings currently on view are in the African American Art galleries.

For more on the earthquake's effect on Haitian art and culture, click here.

Detroit Film Theatre

Emil Jannings in The Last Laugh

This month marks the beginning of DFT 101, a series of essential cinematic masterworks from around the world that constitute the building blocks of the medium: innovative ways of telling stories, great performances, visual audacity, and powerful themes. The series kicks off March 20 with F. W. Murnau's The Last Laugh, starring Emil Jannings (right) as the proud doorman at a luxury hotel who experiences a deep personal crisis following a demotion. This silent classic is shown with live piano accompaniment by David Drazin and is a co-presentation of DFT and DetroitMoviePalaces.com, celebrating the legacy of historic movie theaters in southeastern Michigan.

Next is Federico Fellini's 8½ (April 3), the story of a renowned film director suffering from a massive creative block that may be the greatest of all movies on the subject of filmmaking. In the quintessentially French film The Baker's Wife (April 10), villagers are up in arms when the wife of their beloved baker takes up with another man. It's not that they're prudes, exactly, but rather that in his depressed state the baker has stopped turning out the town's supply of baguettes. A dangerous affair leads to dire consequences in Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer's Day of Wrath (April 24), in which a young seventeenth-century woman's fling with her stepson results in her being charged with witchcraft. The series concludes with the Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers (May 1), featuring Groucho as a college president with a philosophy of "whatever it is, I'm against it." All DFT 101 films are free for members. DIA Film Curator Elliot Wilhelm provides an introduction to each film at 3:45 p.m., fifteen minutes before the 4 p.m. show time.

Rebecca Hall as Paula Garland in Red Riding 1974. Photo Credit: Phil Fisk An IFC Films release

Also on the March schedule is one of the year's most audacious cinematic events, the Red Riding Trilogy. An adaption for British television from David Peace's series of crime novels about the hunt for the "Yorkshire Ripper," a serial killer who terrorized England in the 1970s and '80s, each of the three interlocking tales deals with a different year in the search for the killer. The three films all share the same screenwriter, but each is from a different director, who uses his own unique cinematic style to bring the story to the screen.

Special ticket prices apply: $10 general admission, $9 members, students, seniors. Ticket valid for all three films, together or on separate days.

For the complete DFT schedule, click here.

New from the Shop

Can't find a poster of the work of art you like in the size you want at the DIA shop? Then check out what's available online through our partnership with 1000Museums, the destination for archival museum reproductions. More than sixty objects spanning the museum's collection, with more to be added in the future, are available and include favorites like The Wedding Dance and Van Gogh's Self-Portrait, as well as lesser-known paintings, and sculpture, works on paper, and textiles.

Prints are available in a variety of sizes, ranging from 11 by 19 inches to 32 by 40 inches, with prices from $19 to $99. They may be purchased unframed or framed, at an additional cost. Three frame options are available. Members discount does not apply to purchases from 1000Museums. To browse what is available or purchase prints, click here.

Vote for Poster Contest Winner

Voting has begun to chose the winner in the Let's Save Michigan poster contest sponsored by the DIA and Let's Save Michigan, a public outreach effort supported by the Michigan Municipal League that aims to get people involved in debates over issues related to the state's economic future.

Judges selected sixty finalists from more than 300 poster entries created in the spirit of art created under the auspices of the federal Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. The public decides the eventual contest winners by voting on the Let's Save Michigan Web site. You may vote for multiple posters, however, you may only vote for any given poster once a day. Winners will be announced March 16. There's a $1,000 top prize and the runner-up gets $250.

Save the Date

Join Friends of African and African Art (FAAAA) board members at this gala event. The groundbreaking exhibition Through African Eyes: The European in African Art, 1500 to the Present, showcases some of the finest works by Africa's indigenous and contemporary artists, depicting the story of Africa's interactions with Europe and the West over the past 500 years. FAAAA is a major sponsor of the exhibition. The evening's proceeds support acquisitions for the collections of African and African American art, as well as lectures and programs sponsored by FAAAA. For more information, or to obtain tickets for the annual Bal, please call 313.833.1049.

Valet Parking

Valet parking has returned to the DIA. Beginning Friday, March 5, this parking option is available at the Farnsworth entrance on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays only, during regular museum hours. The price per car is $8.