: The RISD Museum of Art has received a gift of Southeast Asian art
from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Museum officials say
they were "extremely fortunate" to receive the bequest.
The famed heiress and philanthropist had a strong commitment to
Southeast Asian culture and over her lifetime amassed a large
collection of objects only recently dispersed. The exhibition
"Sumptuous Expression: The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Gift
of Southeast Asian Art" introduces highlights from the new
acquisitions and related pieces from the permanent collection.
Works from the Duke collection range from a late Nineteenth
Century Burmese gilded lacquer sculpture of the "Death of the
Buddha" to a Fifteenth Century Thai standing bronze Buddha to
exquisitely crafted baskets and objects for ritual and domestic
use. The earliest piece on display is a Cambodian head thought to
be an image of Shiva from the RISD Museum's permanent collection.
This Eleventh Century sculpture dates from the Angkor period.
During the 1950s and 60s, Duke traveled extensively throughout
Southeast Asia collecting mainly Eighteenth to Nineteenth Century
Thai and Burmese art. The bulk of her collecting efforts focused
on religious (Buddhist) objects; however, she also gather secular
objects including ceramics, baskets, teapots and bowls. At that
time, she was the only active Western collector outside of
Thailand with the foresight to collect objects of this caliber.
In 1960, Duke had a vision to recreate a Thai Village near her
Shangri La residence in Hawaii. She dreamt of lining a waterway
with Thai houses, a temple and a sala, or large open-air meeting
hall, and filling the structures with ritual objects from
Thailand and Burma. A mere four years later she had amassed a
collection of some 2,000 pieces of art, 14 Thai teak houses
(disassembled and relocated to storage in Honolulu), 500,000 roof
tiles and a sala.
Regrettably, plans for her Thai Village never reached fruition,
yet Duke's passion for collecting Western and Asian art continued
until her death in 1993 at the age of 80. In her will, she left
the majority of her estate to the Doris Duke Charitable
Foundation.
The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Walters Art Museum,
Baltimore, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum
in London, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, were also
recently selected to receive gifts of Southeast Asian art from
the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
For information, 401-454-6500 or www.risdmuseum.org.
