Dallas Museum of Art Acquires the Rose-Asenbaum Collection of Modern Jewelry
On May 1, the DMA announced the acquisition of the Rose-Asenbaum Collection, an exemplary group of over 700 pieces of modern studio jewelry created by more than 150 internationally acclaimed artists from the 1960s through the end of the century. It is named for the 90-year-old Inge Asenbaum, a celebrated Viennese gallerist, collector, and seminal figure in the field of design and jewelry. Her collection, which she amassed over four decades, was purchased by longtime DMA supporter Deedie Potter Rose in 2014 as a gift to the Museum. Selections from the Rose-Asenbaum Collection will go on public view at the DMA this summer as a new part of the ongoing exhibition Form/Unformed: Design from 1960 to the Present. The acquisition of the Rose-Asenbaum Collection was coordinated at the direction of Kevin W. Tucker, The Margot B. Perot Senior Curator of Decorative Arts & Design.
Images: Bracelet, Marta Breis (Spanish, designer), date unknown, silver, plastic, textile, steel, and pigment, Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Edward W. and Deedie Potter Rose, formerly Inge Asenbaum collection, gallery Am Graben in Vienna, 2014.33.37; Ring, Frank Bauer (Australian, designer), date unknown, gold, Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Edward W. and Deedie Potter Rose, formerly Inge Asenbaum collection, gallery Am Graben in Vienna, 2014.33.22; "Eye" brooch, Bruno Martinazzi (Italian, designer), date unknown, gold, Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Edward W. and Deedie Potter Rose, formerly Inge Asenbaum collection, gallery Am Graben in Vienna, 2014.33.202
Masterwork of Pre-Columbian Art Acquired for DMA Arts of the Americas Collection
The DMA acquired an artistically significant pre-Columbian Maya vessel earlier this year. This Late Classic (700–900 C.E.) ceramic vase is from the site of Quirigua in Guatemala, near the border with Honduras. Small, at only seven inches high, and striking, it features a modeled face, perhaps that of a Maya god. Appearing in scholarly publications in 1913, 1916, 1935, 1943, and again in 1980 and 1988, the ceramic vessel was sold at auction in November 2014 by the St. Louis Chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America, which had acquired the object in 1912 through the St. Louis chapter’s support of field excavations by archaeologist Earl H. Morris during the Third Quirigua Expedition.
image: Effigy vase, Guatemala, Maya, Late Classic, 700–900 C.E., ceramic, Dallas Museum of Art, The Roberta Coke Camp Fund
DMA Acquires 18th-Century Painting by French Artist Jean Antoine Théodore Giroust
The DMA recently acquired The Harp Lesson, a remarkable life-size triple portrait by the neoclassical painter Jean Antoine Théodore Giroust. The work is a significant addition to the Museum’s holding of 18th-century portraits and is an important example historically of the art of portraiture. Giroust’s large and elegant conversation piece à l’anglaise is a masterpiece of portraiture at the start of the French Revolution. Each of the three sitters would have been a well-known personality to the Salon audience, and the painting is an indelible document of the self-fashioning of the liberal French aristocracy under the National Assembly (1789–1792). It depicts the daughter of Louis Philippe Joseph de Bourbon, duc d’Orléans (1747–1793), the future “Philippe Égalité,” taking a music lesson from her governess, Madame de Genlis, while her English companion, Mademoiselle Paméla, looks on. Giroust’s detailed representation of the sitters, their dress and accessories, and their elegant neoclassical furnishings testifies to the efforts of the duc d’Orléans to craft a public image of his family and retinue as paragons of Enlightenment virtue and progressive cultural tastes.
Image: Jean Antoine Theodore Giroust, The Harp Lesson, 1791, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, Mrs. John B. O'Hara Fund
Work by “the French Titian,” Jacques Blanchard, Newly Restored in the DMA’s Paintings Conservation Studio
The 17th-century oil painting Zeus and Semele by Jacques Blanchard, a French baroque painter known as “the French Titian,” has been newly restored in the DMA’s Paintings Conservation Studio and is on view in the DMA’s European Galleries on Level 2. The picture is part of the Museum’s conservation program to collaborate with private collectors on the study and care of their collections and then present the works in the DMA’s galleries for public viewing. Jacques Blanchard (1600–1638) was a French baroque painter who worked and studied in Italy, returning to Paris for the last nine years of his life. This painting was originally attributed to an anonymous French 18th-century artist, but in the spring of 2014 it was recognized as the work of Jacques Blanchard, based primarily on its close relationship to Blanchard's Danae in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. Conservation on this painting, which depicts Zeus seducing Semele, who becomes the mortal mother of Dionysus, was executed over the course of six months and included treatment to the canvas and restoration from previous conservation efforts.
Images (left to right: pre treatment; during treatment; post treatment): Jacques Blanchard, Zeus and Semele, 17th century, oil on canvas, lent by Mr. and Mrs. Thomas C. Campbell