September 5, 2004 - January 16, 2005
MASTERPIECES FROM THE RAU COLLECTION:
From Fra
Angelico to Bonnard:
 |
Auguste Renoir, HEAD OF A WOMAN or WOMAN WITH A ROSE Oil on Canvas, H 35 cm; W: 27 cm GR 1.682 |
The exhibition will feature 95 paintings from one of the world’s most distinguished private collections. Spanning nearly six centuries of art history, the Rau collection features rarely seen masterpieces by El Greco, Gainsborough, Cézanne, Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cassatt, and others.
“The Dayton Art Institute is one of a small, select group of museums to showcase this spectacular exhibition on its first and only American tour,” said Alex Nyerges, Dayton Art Institute Director and CEO. “Most of the paintings have never been shown in public before. This is a rare opportunity to see spectacular works by some of the world’s greatest artists.”
Highlights of the exhibition include: El Greco’s Saint Dominic in Prayer; Canaletto’s Saint Mark’s Square; The Sea at Estaque by Paul Cézanne; Auguste Renoir’s Woman with a Rose; and six paintings by Claude Monet, including The Wooden Bridge. The 95 paintings represent a selection from 800 works of art acquired by Dr. Gustav Rau (1922 – 2002) over more than 40 years. Half of the works on display are Old Master paintings from the 15th to the early 19th centuries; the other half represents art from the mid-19th through the mid-20th centuries.
ABOUT DR. GUSTAV RAU
Unlike most private collectors, Dr. Gustav Rau selected each work personally
without professional advice. He did not focus on a single area of art
nor did he attempt an academic survey of a period or theme. Each individual
work triggered his personal esthetic response.
The only child of a wealthy German industrialist, Gustav Rau was born in 1922 in Stuttgart. At the age of forty, he decided to return to school to become a doctor while continuing to run the family business. Soon after graduating with a medical degree from Munich University in 1969, he sold the factories he inherited from his father and uncle to set up the Fondation Médicale du Docteur Rau. The foundation’s purpose was to diminish misery and disease in Third World countries through preventative practices and the distribution of medication.
Dr. Rau’s specialty was pediatrics. He worked initially in Nigeria, then in Zaire. In 1977, he built a hospital in a remote village near Zaire’s border with Rwanda. Unmarried and childless, Rau said, “The hospital is my family.” With the largest pediatric unit in the area, his hospital cared for nearly 2,000 patients per year and distributed food to more than 8,000 people a day. In 1992, complications from surgery along with the outbreak of a civil war in Rwanda prevented the 70-year-old doctor from continuing his work. Today, the hospital continues to function with Congolese doctors and the occasional help of Belgian doctors. Gustav Rau died in 2002 near the city of Stuttgart where he was born.
ABOUT THE COLLECTION
During his two decades in Africa, Dr. Rau lived a spartan lifestyle but
allowed himself one indulgence – purchasing art. He made trips to
Europe three times a year to build his collection.
Dr. Rau did not take his acquisitions back to Africa
but kept them in storage in Switzerland where he viewed them only on periodic
visits.
In the early 1980s, he envisioned making his collection available to the
public by creating a museum in the port city of Marseilles, France. The
influx of refugees from the Rwandan civil war to Zaire increased demands
on Dr. Rau’s finances, making it difficult for him to support both
his hospital and the creation of a museum. In the end, he chose to concentrate
his resources in Africa.
Dr. Rau ceded the museum building – completed in 1985 – to the city of Marseilles, now a museum of modern art. In 1999, he signed a new will giving his art collection to UNICEF of Germany with the stipulation that it eventually be sold to raise funds for Third World philanthropy.
Dr. Rau said of his gift to UNICEF, “I know my material possessions are now in good hands. I entrust it to an organization that focuses entirely on that which I also gave my life to: the assistance of distressed children.” During the last year of his life, Dr. Rau attended the premier exhibition of his collection at the Musée de Luxembourg in Paris. He took great delight in knowing that thousands of viewers, all over the world, would share and enjoy the paintings that had afforded him such pleasure. The exhibition drew a record attendance of 300,000 visitors and was declared by the French press to be the best art exhibition of the year in 2001.
Following the success of the Paris exhibition, Dr. Rau entrusted the private French company SVO Art to organize an international tour of the exhibition From Fra Angelico to Bonnard: Masterpieces from the Rau Collection, making it available to the largest audience possible.
ADMISSION (audio guide included with admission price):
$12 for adults;
$10 for seniors (60+) and students (19+ with valid ID);
$5 for youth (7-18) and
FREE for children 6 and under and museum members.