Thanks to Good Friends: 40 Years of the Friends of the Davison Art Center

Tuesday March 26, 2002 - Sunday May 26, 2002
Thanks to Good Friends: 40 Years of the Friends of the Davison Art Center

Rembrandt, Christ Presented to the People, 1655 Friends of the Davison Art Center funds, 1963

The year 2002 marks two anniversaries for the Davison Art Center: the DAC turns 50 and its Friends organization turns 40.

Thanks to Good Friends paid tribute to the Friends of the Davison Art Center (FDAC). Since the FDAC was founded in 1962, Friends' membership dues and fundraising events have supported the purchase of hundreds of important acquisitions. These continue to build at an impressive level on the collection given to Wesleyan by George W. Davison (1872-1953; B.A. Wesleyan 1892), a discerning print collector as well as the museum's founder and greatest single benefactor.

Pether

William Pether, Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight, 1796

Approximately 75 works acquired with FDAC funds were on view. These included Dürer's woodcut St. John Before God and the Elders;Cranach's The Temptation of St. Anthony; Rembrandt's monumental master print Christ Presented to the People (Ecce Homo); William Pether's Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight (shown above); Daumier's political masterpiece Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril 1834; Munch's spectacular etching and aquatint of one of his best-known subjects, The Kiss; Titre pour "Le Sourire," a woodcut printed in Tahiti by Gauguin; Kollwitz's soft-ground etching Head of a Peasant Woman; Diebenkorn's 12-color woodcut Ochre; and Lewitt's Arcs from Four Corners (reproduced below).

Lewitt

Thanks to Good Friends also presented 22 highlights from George Davison's donation of more than 6,000 prints which remain the nucleus of the DAC Collection.

Davison gifts on view included Dürer'sKnight, Death, and the Devil; Rembrandt'sThree Crosses (illustrated here); and a Whistler pastel, The Japanese Dress.

 Rembrandt

Thanks to Good Friends offered a wonderful opportunity to view nearly 100 highlights from Wesleyan's renowned holdings of more than 18,000 prints, the heart of the DAC Collection of some 25,000 objects.

Tuesday 26 March - Sunday 26 May 2002

Ellen D'Oench (DAC Curator Emerita) and Richard Field (Curator Emeritus of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Yale University Art Gallery and former DAC Curator) gave a gallery talk at 5:30 p.m. on Friday 5 April 2002.