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Peek behind the curtain at the DAI
As you wander through its clean, spacious galleries, the Dayton Art Institute surely seems a big enough place to show off whatever artworks it has to, well, show off.
Ain’t so.
The museum has more than 22,000 items in its collection, from massive metal sculptures to tiny Japanese teacups. Relatively few of them are on regular display, for a variety of reasons — no space on the walls, or because an artwork is too fragile to keep up all the time, or because in some cases, the artwork isn’t actually in the museum’s hands yet.
That’s the case with the two eye-popping paintings by Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock that open the DAI’s new exhibition, “Hello World!” with a colorfully impressive kick. A promised bequest to the museum by the late Dayton industrialist and philanthropist Jesse Philips, they’re being shown at the DAI for the first time in more than a decade.
And they’re marvelous. The 1963 “The Painter and his Model” is pure Picasso, all loose and playful colors. Pollock’s “Night Dancer (Green)” from 1944, was created before he began dripping and spilling his paint, and shows clearly where his mind was before that breakthrough. It’s energetic and amazi
They’re surrounded by dozens of other works that DAI chief curator Will South has brought out of hiding for what is billed as a show of “Rarely Seen Art from Our Collection,” the idea being to mark the museum’s 90th birthday with a peek into the storage vaults.
t’s pretty impressive, what they’ve got in there, and South has made the most of it. The exhibition is organized by topics such as “Textiles,” “Landscapes” and “Florals,” which seems simple until you notice the sly ways South used the artworks to blend the topics together and move you easily through the show.
Each area has some stunners: a huge Irish quilt from the 1820s that boasts bold colors and an intricate, modern-seeming design; a delicate Cezanne lithograph of bathers, from 1898, that shows a lighter touch than one sees in his oils; a bright Picasso print of a woman in a hat, from 1962, nicely contrasted with African and Egyptian masks that reveal his influences; a fascinating Persian begging bowl, made of silver; Sheila Metzner’s astonishing 1980 sepia print of the Pyramids, which looks a hundred years older; a lushly erotic photograph of a calla lilly from Robert Mapplethorpe that makes one wonder, When is a flower not a flower?
One thinks, too, at the bittersweetness of knowing that so many fine works of art are here in our midst, in our fair city, and yet are under wraps — even if for good reason. “Please make this a permanent exhibit,” one visitor wrote in the guestbook, an understandable sentiment.
South, who’s been at the DAI about a year, foresees changes emerging from the responses to “Hello World!” A lot of visitors have responded well to the Islamic art in the show, “and we don’t have an Islamic gallery.” The DAI’s very strong photography collection is a big part of the exhibition as well, and he’d like to see more of it shown.
So stay tuned. Meanwhile, keep in mind that “Hello World!” is up until Jan. 3, 2010. For information on times and tickets, visit www.daytonartinstitute.org.
Correction: Several alert readers let me know that I mistakenly flip-flopped the names of two Jane Austen scoundrels in a post last week about local author Carrie Bebris, who writes mysteries featuring Austen’s Mr. and Mrs. Darcy. Talia Kolker wrote: “Mr. Wickham is actually the charming and deceitful slug of an officer who first dallies with Elizabeth and then elopes with her younger sister Lydia. It later comes out that he had also seduced Darcy’s younger sister Georgianna…. It’s Mr. Collins who’s the ‘squirrelly, irritating parson who keeps after Elizabeth Bennet….’ HUGE difference.” True enough, and a humbling reminder that my readers are smarter than I am. Thanks!
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