PORTLAND.- Typh Tucker of The Associated Press reported that the Portland Museum is the first in the country to host “From Fra Angelico to Bonnard”, four years after its triumphant premiere in France. "It is a real blockbuster," Bruce Guenther, chief curator for the Portland Art Museum, said. "There are up to 1,500 people a day coming into the museum on weekdays and up to 5,000 on the weekends." The exhibit, he said, is "like excavating 500 years of painting history."
The late Gustav Rau began assembling his collection in the 1960s, and it eventually grew to about 800 paintings and sculptures. The only child of a wealthy German industrialist, Gustav Rau was born on January 21, 1922 in Stuttgart. In his twenties, he joined the family business and eventually earned a doctorate in economics. At the age of forty, however, he decided to abandon his role in the family business to devote himself to humanitarian activities in Third World countries. He returned to school to become a doctor, graduating with a medical degree from Munich University. In 1971, he sold the factories he inherited from his father and uncle to set up the Fondation Médicale du Docteur Rau, whose purpose was to diminish misery and disease in the Third World through preventative practices and the distribution of medication and food.
Dr. Rau selected each work in his collection personally without professional advice, and unlike most private collectors, he did not focus on a single area of art or attempt an academic survey of period or theme. Each individual work triggered his personal esthetic response, and each acquisition was bought not for investment, but for the pure pleasure of looking at it.
It is hardly surprising that a preponderant subject of the paintings in the collection of a great humanitarian is the human face. One feels the humanity in the characters in his collection: the lady with pink by Renoir, the young woman by Greuze, the elderly cook by Gerard Dou, St. Jerome by Ribera, the Algerian woman by Corot and the child Rebecca Watson by Reynolds. But the Rau collection also stands out for its historical breadth and offers a remarkable stroll through six centuries of European painting as seen through one man’s appreciative eye.
In 1999 Dr. Rau 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. At its initial presentation at the Musée du Luxembourg, the exhibition of the collection drew record attendance and was declared by the French press to be the best art exhibition of 2001. Making its national premiere at the Portland Art Museum, Masterpieces from the Rau Collection is truly a rare opportunity to view one of the world’s largest and most visually appealing collections of European painting.
Works in the first chamber focus on faces and figures. Characters in "Portrait of Francois-Henri, Duke of Harcourt," painted by Jean-Honore Fragonard, and August Renoir’s "Woman With a Rose," model kindness and gentility.
Throughout the show, grand pieces such as Guido Reni’s "David Decapitating Goliath" and Frederic Bazille’s "Fisherman With a Net," lure people from across the room.
"It is like music. There is a dominant theme, and then there is a dominant note and rhythms inside of it," Guenther said of the show’s layout. "Fisherman With a Net" introduces visitors to a postimpressionist room. It is a large painting of a nude fisherman about to cast his net, his skin contrasting against bright green grass and trees.
Among paintings in the next room are early modernist works by Giorgio Morandi, Edouard Vuillard and Raoul Dufy.
The show also boasts six Monets, which sum up the artist’s evolution as an impressionist painter. Such works as "The Wooden Bridge," "The Port-Coton Pyramids" and "Snow" show Monet asserting his own style and independence.
At the end of the exhibit are paintings illustrating Rau’s love for children. Among the paintings in this grouping are Maurice Denis’ "Mother and Child With a Yellow Bed" and Mary Cassat’s "Louise Feeding Her Child." For the Cassat work, the frugal Rau ended up paying twice what he had planned because it touched him so deeply.
