DIA eNews September 2014
In This Issue
Director's Letter
Exhibitions
New on View
DFT
Dlectricity
News and Notes

Director's LetterDirector's Letter

Graham W.J. Beale, Director 

It was a great pleasure to learn that the DIA had been awarded four stars out of four from the independent charity evaluator Charity Navigator for our sound fiscal management practices and commitment to accountability. Our score was 65.58 out of a possible 70 and placed us, we were told, higher than the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I'm not sure how many donors base their giving on such ratings, but from the inside, as it were, it's very nice to see that all the hard work we have done to ensure we are fiscally effective has been publicly acknowledged. I can also report that a review of our governance structure related to the potential change (return) to a private charity revealed that the DIA met or exceeded the standards of "best practices" in the categories examined.

----

There are those who assert that selling a couple of works to save the institution is a reasonable thing to do, as has come up in the Detroit bankruptcy case. But a sudden influx of cash to address a financial bind doesn't solve anything. Recently, there has been a lot in the press about the Delaware Art Museum's determination to sell as many as three of its most notable artworks to pay off debts incurred through an ambitious expansion about a decade ago. The first, William Holman Hunt's Pot of Basil, has already been sold. While hardly a household name, Hunt was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of young painters who, in 1848, challenged the British art establishment with a vision entirely at odds with accepted practices. Because their brightly colored, meticulously detailed style was also at odds with most forms of modernism, their fall from prominence was precipitous and long lasting. Now they are back in fashion with a vengeance and the Delaware trustees hoped to get $8 million out of the painting--almost half the debt. It sold for $4 million, probably creating the need to sell more than the two already assigned for sale: a Winslow Homer painting and an Alexander Calder sculpture. The museum and the community are being stripped of their masterpieces--its very reason for being. The debt may be satisfied but patrons may be scared away and a new shadow cast over the museum.

A few years ago, rather than address the structural problems causing annual operational deficits, the National Academy of Design (NAD)--the oldest art museum in the country founded by some of the nation's most important artists--sold two paintings, one given by an original member! There were alternatives that would have entailed sacrifice, but selling art did not solve the problem, and a few weeks ago, the NAD let go a significant portion of its staff.

In the Great Depression, the DIA remained open and staffed, largely thanks to the secret support of Edsel Ford. The City of Detroit arts commissioners could have sold the van Gogh self-portrait, Matisse's The Window, Ruisdael's Jewish Cemetery, or even Breugel's Wedding Dance, but the thought never seems to have crossed anyone's mind. And if they had, not only would we not have them today, we would not have been given much of the art that came from private donors or the financial contributions that enabled so many purchases. Why give to a museum who, in times of crisis, converts your treasured donation into cash to make up for failed fundraising, bad management, or poor fiduciary judgment?

Graham Beal Signature
Graham W. J. Beal

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Exhibitions

Detroit--Bruce WeberOrdinary People by Extraordinary Artists
Works on Paper by Degas, Renoir, and Friends

September 19, 2014-March 29, 2015
Schwartz Galleries of Prints and Drawings

The "extraordinary artists" in this exhibition are a "who's who" of late nineteenth-century impressionists and post-impressionists responsible for moving art from its traditional academic moorings into the modern era. The pastels, etchings, and lithographs on view include Edgar Degas' bathers, dancers, and jockeys; Pierre-Auguste Renoir's portraits of his family and well-known public figures; Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's stage performers; Paul C�zanne's bathers; and Pierre Bonnard's and Edouard Vuillard's intimate interiors and scenes of city life. Other artists featured are Edouard Manet, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Mary Cassatt, and Camille Pissarro.

Although well known for their colorful landscape paintings, these artists saw beyond villages, fields, and beaches in their search for themes from everyday life, an equally prominent category of subject matter. Images of friends and family members shown at ease, at play, in contemplation, perhaps making art, reading, writing, or sewing take their place alongside anonymous crowds enjoying public parks, taverns, caf�s, theaters. By shunning topics based on grand historical, religious, or literary themes, these artists bucked the expected order of the art academies. Their sketchy styles, emphasizing free brushwork in painting and broken, choppy lines in drawing and printmaking, were considered inadequate for finished work ready for exhibition. Their odd spatial settings, atypical perspectives, and emphasis on capturing fleeting moments of time and light were also  judged unacceptable.

This exhibition is organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts. Support has been provided by the DIA's Women's Committee.

Above: Dancers, about 1897, pastel with charcoal; Edgar Degas, French. City of Detroit Purchase

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Detroit--Bruce WeberDetroit--Bruce Weber

Through September 7
Special Exhibition Galleries: Central

 

Parishioner outside Perfecting Church, Detroit, Michigan, 2006, pigment print; Bruce Weber, American. �Bruce Weber

 

Only a few days remain to see this exhibition of noted photographer Bruce Weber's celebration of city sites and residents in more than seventy black-and-white and color photographs. Among the pictures on view are ones taken on Belle Isle, at a Sunday church service, in the now closed Kronk Gym, and at a Detroit Hair Wars competition. Also included are photographs from other times and places of well-known figures with Detroit ties--Aretha Franklin, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, and others. For decades, Weber's work has appeared in such magazines as Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Vogue.

This exhibition is organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts and presented in collaboration with Cond� Nast.

Cond� Nast

Coming October 1

Detroit--Bruce WeberGuest of Honor: Monet's Waterlily Pond, Green Harmony

October 1, 2014-January 4, 2015

 

Waterlily Pond, Green Harmony, 1899, oil on canvas; Claude Monet, French. Mus�e d'Orsay, Paris, Bequest of Count Isaac de Camondo 1911 �RMN (Mus�e d'Orsay)/Herv� Lewandowski

 

Our latest visiting masterpiece is one of Claude Monet's water lily paintings of his Japanese-themed garden in Giverny, on loan from Mus�e d'Orsay, Paris. Previous of guests of honor were paintings by Vermeer, van Gogh, and Caravaggio.

Exhibitions are free with museum admission unless otherwise noted. 

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New on ViewNew on View

 

Still Life with Fruit and Dead Hare, 1630s, oil on oak panel; Frans Snyders, Flemish. Gift of Raymond and Jane Cracchiolo

 

Frans Snyders, born in Antwerp in 1579, was a skillful still-life and animal painter, who specialized in representation of hunts (deer, boar, fox), bird concerts, and animal fables from classical texts. The intense and brilliant colors, the energetic rendering of the fruit with self-confident brushstrokes fully charged with pigment recall the art of Peter Paul Rubens--Snyder's collaborator and the most revered Flemish artist of the time.

Over the years, Snyders's compositions became larger, more horizontal, dramatic, and energetic, showing the influence of Rubens. Seventeenth-century European aristocracy and royal families favored these kinds of works. Philip IV, king of Spain and the greatest art collector of his time, commissioned from Snyders an entire set of paintings representing hunts to decorate the royal palace (Alc�zar) and a hunting lodge (La Torre de la Parada) in the outskirts of Madrid. Owning still-life and animal paintings by Snyders became fashionable, and the sales of these works provided the artist with significant wealth.

Snyders painted Still Life with Fruit and Dead Hare at the height of his powers as a mature artist. On a tabletop covered with a red cloth, the artist represents two melons, a pumpkin, a prominent bunch of grapes, some peaches, Neapolitan figs, two partridges, and a woodcock. There are other objects in the background, while in the middle sits a monumental cane basket overfilled with varieties of grapes, volumetric quinces, apples, and branches with peaches and dark purple plums. Nailed to the wall on the upper left is a large hare suspended vertically, and in the upper right, a small parakeet sits on a branch ready to peck on a peach. The bird is the only living creature depicted, perhaps a reference to the celebrated contest between two great painters of antiquity, Zeuxis and Parrahasius, recorded in Pliny the Elder's the Natural History. According to Pliny, Zeuxis demonstrated his great talent by painting a bunch of grapes so realistically that birds flew down to peck at them.

Curator of European Paintings Salvador Salort-Pons discusses the significance of the sumptuous fruit and dead game in the painting in a lecture, "Capturing Feathers and Fruit: A New Flemish Still Life, Gift of Raymond and Jane Cracchiolo," on Tuesday, September 9,  at 6:30 p.m. Click here for information on other lectures in the DIA's Arts and Minds series.

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Detroit Film TheatreDetroit Film Theatre

After a summer off for mechanical upgrades to the auditorium, the DFT reopens Friday, October 10, with the area premiere of Jonathan Demme's A Master Builder. But just because the theater has been dark, it doesn't mean that Curator of Film Elliot Wilhelm hasn't been busy seeking out new cinematic delights for upcoming seasons on the film festival circuit.

 

Elliot Wilhelm

 

"The New York Film Festival (NYFF), now in its fifty-second year, remains one of the most carefully and intelligently curated showcases for world cinema, despite the many international film festivals that have blossomed in the United States since its debut. It is a vital annual event, where--for the last forty-one consecutive years--I have discovered countless gems to present to audiences at the DIA's Detroit Film Theatre.

"The first NYFF I attended was in 1973 when I was just beginning the job of DFT film programmer, and the first film that unspooled was Fran�ois Truffaut's now-classic Day for Night, one of the most insightful and joyous of all films about the process of filmmaking. Truffaut's film was so exhilarating that I assumed nothing in the rest of the festival was likely to top it. Yet in the next few days, I was present for the premieres of such new masterworks (and future DFT presentations) as Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, Werner Herzog's Land of Silence and Darkness, Satyajit Ray's Distant Thunder, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and Terrence Malick's Badlands, among others.

"In the years since, I've discovered countless films at the festival that have made their way to the DFT, including Neil Jordan's The Crying Game, Jane Campion's The Piano, Jonathan Demme's Melvin and Howard, Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andr�, Ousmane Sembene's Xala, Akira Kurosawa's Ran, Errol Morris's The Fog of War, and more than a hundred others.

"Still, despite the vast population of New York and its reputation as the country's primary market for specialized foreign and independent films, the NYFF boasts neither the sheer volume of offerings nor the staggering number of annual attendees as North America's other major September film event, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Currently in its thirty-ninth year, the ten-day-long festival presents more than 300 feature films, which are seen by more than 400,000 ticket buyers each fall. While the New York Film Festival presents about thirty films in its "main slate" over an eighteen-day period, even the most dedicated filmgoer (or film programmer) at TIFF can see, at most, a little more than 10 percent of the offerings, which assumes viewing at least five films each and every day.

"My goal in attending these events--indeed, the basis of my primary mission at the DIA-- is, in a critical sense, to 'pan for gold.' Making sure that the best of the films I discover each year (many, but not all of them, at these two festivals) are brought to the DIA, along with an abundant selection of newly restored classics, and made available to Detroit-area film lovers on a year-round basis."

Check the DIA website next week to view the 2014 schedule.

The DFT is presented by Buddy's Pizza.

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dLECTRICITYdLECTRICITY

The DIA, along with the rest of Midtown, is transformed into a temporary exhibition space the evenings of Friday, September 26, and Saturday, September 27, as part of Dlectricity, a light fest that invites the public to see familiar places in new ways. Festivities begin at 7 p.m. and run until midnight both evenings.

 

 

P.O.V. takes up both the DIA's Woodward fa�ade and that of the Detroit Public Library across the street. Created by Mindfield, a collaborative of Detroit video and digital artists, the dual installations explore questions of influence, exposure, and judgment by telling the same story from two different points of view.

Also on the Woodward side of the museum are two other light displays, Minecraft Intervention, Detroit 2014 on the South Lawn and Wind to Color on the North. In Minecraft Intervention, fantastical structures are constructed and deconstructed in a choreographed vision of the city's future, using the interactive and multi-player functions of the Minecraft video game. Moving to the museum's North Lawn, at the corner of Woodward and Kirby, fifty whirlydoodles, or small windmills, convert wind into light using tiny high-efficiency generators that power colorful LEDs mounted on clear blades. Breezes and wind currents cause the windmills to spin and light up.

In The Black Pot, internationally known video artist Nathalie Djurberg and composer and musician Hans Berg mix animation, sculpture, and sound to create psychologically charged scenarios to depict the cycle of life in a twelve-minute projection on the museum's east fa�ade (facing John R). Berg performs at 10 p.m. both nights in the Loggia courtyard, beneath the projected images.

Phase Shift, on the north Kirby Street side of the building, presents video projections of color patterns that cycle through all the colors in the spectrum in patterns of shapes that appear to change size and even move, when in reality nothing except the color is altered.

 

Making a return appearance is the Light Bike Parade (left), a four-mile ride through Midtown that adds extra color and energy to the streets, on Saturday, September 27, beginning at 8 p.m. Members of the public are welcome to participate. Preregister to reserve a starting time, or sign up on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

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News and NotesNews and Notes

In the Shop
When it comes to back to school shopping, the DIA Shop has smart gifts for teachers, parents, and students. Educational toys include a Hieroglyphs Memory Game, a book on African masks, an Inuit-art coloring book, and much more.

Get organized for the coming year while displaying beautiful artworks with a new 2015 calendar or appointment book from the DIA Shop. From Chao Shao-An to a survey of Impressionist work, to Edward Hopper, you are sure to find one that you will love!

See the all the shop has to offer during regular museum hours or shop online anytime.

Parking and Traffic Updates
Beginning the week of September 8, look for the entrance to the public parking lot behind the DIA, between Brush Street and John R, to change while construction continues to permanently ease traffic flow. The entrance and exit to the lot will return to John R while work shifts to the Brush side, closing that entrance. In the end, there will be two entrance lanes on John R and all traffic will exit onto Brush.

In other driving-related news, note that the westbound I-94 exit ramp to Woodward/John R is closed until April for construction of the Woodward (M-1) light rail. Check for the latest information on ways to avoid the closure at http://www.dia.org/about/construction-info.aspx 

M-1 construction is also being done on Woodward throughout Midtown, but the street will remain open with at least one lane in each direction at all times.

Book Discussion Group
There's still space available in the Friday, October 24, Art and Authors book group discussion of Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. The session includes conversation about Hayden Herrera's compelling biography and a tour of the Detroit Industry murals painted by her husband, Diego Rivera. The discussion and tour anticipates the upcoming exhibition Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit, which opens at the DIA in March 2015, featurings major work by both artists. The book is available in the Museum Shop. Art and Authors talks are free with museum admission, but advanced registration is required.

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Detroit Institute of Arts
5200 Woodward Avenue
Detroit, Michigan 48202
www.dia.org
313.833.7900

Comments or questions about the newsletter? Please contact us: [email protected] 

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