DAYTON, OHIO.- The Dayton Art Institute will be the only museum in the Midwestern United States to exhibit Masterpieces from the Rau Collection: From Fra Angelico to Bonnard. 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. From Fra Angelico to Bonnard: Masterpieces from the Rau Collection will be on view at The Dayton Art Institute through January 16, 2005.
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.
