Dallas Museum of Art celebrates 25th anniversary of the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection

by PegNews wire

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The gift transformed the museum's collections of European art.

DALLAS — This November marks the 25th anniversary of the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection at the Dallas Museum of Art. In 1985, the museum received more than 1,400 works from the private art collection of Emery Reves – including impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, and decorative arts objects – donated by the Wendy & Emery Reves Foundation, Inc. on behalf of Wendy’s late husband Emery. With this gift, the museum’s collections of late 19th- and early 20th-century European art and European decorative art were transformed.

To house the remarkable collection, the DMA opened a 16,500-square-foot wing in 1985 designed by the museum’s architect, Edward Larrabee Barnes, to re-create five rooms from Villa La Pausa, the home of Wendy and Emery Reves in the south of France. The wing presents the entire Reves Collection, featuring important works by Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, Gustave Courbet, Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vincent van Gogh, among others, which has been installed as it was in the original villa. Since its opening at the DMA, the Reves Collection has been one of the most visited galleries of the Museum. This year, the museum launched an all-new smARTphone tour of the collection highlighting more than 20 works of art and offering “behind-the-scenes” features.

In celebration of the 25th anniversary, the museum will host a special Brettell Lecture focusing on the sculptor Auguste Rodin and his monumental decorative portal The Gates of Hell at 7:30 p.m. October 28, 2010. Guest lecturer Antoinette le Normand-Romain, former curator of the Musée Rodin in Paris, will discuss this masterwork as well as three important sculptures by Rodin in the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection that were the products of the creative process for The Gates of Hell.

“The Wendy and Emery Reves Collection stands as one of the great bequests in the Dallas Museum of Art’s history,” said Bonnie Pitman, The DMA’s Eugene McDermott director. “The extraordinary gift of this remarkable collection 25 years ago significantly developed the museum’s holdings of European art, and the contribution of European decorative arts, the area of Wendy’s particular personal interest, established the institution’s collection in that area. These works of art in this unique setting are enjoyed enormously by our visitors.”

Wendy and Emery Reves’ Mediterranean villa was originally built in 1927 by Coco Chanel, who directed the design of it with the architect Robert Streitz, and many of the furnishings in the rooms were part of Chanel’s original décor of the villa. The rooms re-created in the museum include the library, dining room, salon, bedroom, and hall, as well as a patio built around a central courtyard. The patio and the hall were specifically designed at Chanel’s request to remind her of the Romanesque convent outside Paris where she boarded as a child.

Source: Dallas Museum of Art

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