From the Director's Chair

April 2008

One of the true pleasures of my job is listening to curatorial discussions, notably over possible acquisitions, and learning current information about anything from a pair of seventeenth century Japanese screens to a contemporary video piece, from a small painting created for the court of Rudolf II in Prague to an African statue created to commemorate a dead child. This kind of solid art history permeates everything in the DIA's reinstallation, where we approach art through a combination of chronology and themes that connect the general viewer with the works themselves. The DIA's fine curators continue to carry out and publish research that furthers our understanding of art through the discipline of art history.

Scholarship is also at the forefront of the various lectures and symposia presented at the DIA. In the last week of March, DIA curators and visiting scholars presented a five-day conference on American art at the turn of the twentieth century, and each month this year has included at least one lecture sponsored by one or more of the DIA's curatorial auxiliaries. This month, the featured presentation is the Dr. Coleman Mopper Memorial Lecture, made possible by an endowment established by Mrs. Shirley Mopper. The speaker is the London-based master framer Paul Mitchell, who will talk about reframing paintings at the DIA.

Chief Curator and Curator of European Art George Keyes has long been concerned with finding appropriate frames for our paintings, and he has steadily replaced many of the unsuitable ones selected by dealers and decorators for private collectors decades ago, long before the works entered the DIA collection. The ideal, of course, is to have the original frame or something from the same period. Next time you're in the DIA, look at Nicolas Poussin's Selene and Endymion, painted in Rome about 1628. One of our greatest paintings, it is set in a Roman frame (found by George through Paul Mitchell) that dates from the same time as the painting. Another frame to look at is the spectacular rococo creation around Murillo's Flight into Egypt. When we lend this painting, the frame is replaced by one more suitable for traveling. As period frames can be formidably expensive, we often have recourse to reproduction frames—though even these can cost as much as $15,000—and a good example can be found on Van Gogh's Banks of the Oise. Nearby is Seurat's View of Crotoy, the frame of which was painted by the artist himself with his characteristic pointillist brushwork. We are always being asked to lend this work but rarely agree because the frame's surface is so fragile and, as it's part of the work, sending it in a traveling frame seems to violate the artist's intention.

Frames in our American collection also receive a high degree of curatorial attention. The frames around our Dwight Tryon-Thomas Dewing triptych were designed by the architect Stanford White, and the one on Sargent's Mosquito Nets is a period frame specifically acquired for the painting when it entered the collection. The American-born painter James Whistler was at the center of the Aesthetic movement that placed special emphasis on frames. He designed his own, and the little seascape by him that we recently acquired still has the original glass as well. Our conservation laboratory has a separate frame department, and you can see a dramatic example of our frame restorer's skills in the frame of Samuel Richards's Evangeline Discovering Her Affianced (below). The frame was in a ruinous state, but was rebuilt based on an early photograph taken when the work was first exhibited in the late nineteenth century.

Graham W. J. Beal Director