Dallas Museum Hosts Rare Islamic Collection
“We are deeply grateful to the collection’s trustees for entrusting us with this unparalleled collection, which will enhance the Dallas Museum of Art’s (DMA) growing strengths in the area of Islamic art,” DMA director Maxwell Anderson said in a prepared statement cited by Dallas News on Monday, February 3.
Anderson was speaking about the Keir collection which has been collected over decades in Britain by Edmund de Unger, a Hungarian real-estate magnate who died in 2011.
According to a long-term renewable loan agreement, signed last Friday, the collection will go to Dallas for at least 15 years from next May.
The agreement will give the museum the right to lend pieces to other institutions and to make objects widely available to scholars.
The Keir collection “is recognized by scholars as one of the world’s most geographically and historically comprehensive, encompassing almost 2,000 works in a range of media that span 13 centuries of Islamic art-making,” Anderson said.
The rich Keir collection comprises 2,000 Islamic pieces, including ceramics, weaving and miniature paintings, textiles, carpets, lusterware, as well as the rare Fatimid-period rock crystal vessels from the 10th to the 12th centuries.
The precious collection presents a wide range of geographic territories from the western Mediterranean to South Asia.
The new collection will give Dallas, which has only a few dozen Islamic pieces, the third most important Islamic collection in the US, after the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington.
Placed for years at a mansion southwest London, the collection was designated to be secured the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin.
Yet, the administration of Dallas Museum has convinced the trustees of the collection to place the collection in Texas where it will reserve high protection.
“They were looking for really a larger commitment for the whole collection and we could give them that,” Anderson was quoted by The News York Times.
Source: Islam Online
