The Dallas Museum of Art, established in 1903, has an encyclopedic collection of more than 23,000 works spanning 5,000 years of history and representing all media, with renowned strengths in the arts of the ancient Americas, Africa, Indonesia, and South Asia; European and American painting, sculpture, and decorative arts; and American and international contemporary art. The Dallas Museum of Art is among the top six museums in America with encyclopedic collections and an emphasis on art of the modern era. in 2009 the Museum celebrates its 25th anniversary as anchor of the Dallas Arts District.
When visiting the Dallas Museum of Art for Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, we recommend that you take extra time to spend in our galleries. To preview your visit to our collections, we have compiled the following list of masterworks. We indicate levels and galleries that are also listed on museum maps to help with locating these works of art.
Level 1, Atrium Cafe
By using popular culture images and commonplace materials and processes, Robert Rauschenberg captures the complex conditions of contemporary American life. In Skyway, which hung on the exterior of the U.S. pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, the artist juxtaposes a number of disparate images that relate to the recent tragedy of John F. Kennedy’s assassination as well as the vitality and promise of the NASA space program and expanding physical infrastructure of the American landscape.
This work is the largest of Rauschenberg’s silkscreen paintings. Like pop artists who followed him, Rauschenberg was interested in responding to the existential claims of his abstract expressionist predecessors and turned to pictures found in the popular arena for his subjects, marking a decisive shift in aesthetic sources from nature to culture.
Robert Rauschenberg
(American, 1925–2008)
Skyway, 1964
Oil and silkscreen on canvas
Dallas Museum of Art, The Roberta Coke Camp Fund, The 500, Inc., Mr. and Mrs. Mark Shepherd, Jr. and General Acquisitions Fund, 1986.8.a–b
© Rauschenberg Estate/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Level 1, Center for Creative Connections
This small sculpture represents Mexico’s earliest highly developed civilization, the archaeological culture called Olmec. Colossal stone heads and other large figural sculptures established a tradition of portraits of rulers. This figure shows the ability of Olmec sculptors to express monumentality on a small scale. The polished green stone signifies the preciousness of that material, while virtually invisible incised lines on the right cheek suggest a specific identity, the Lord of the Double Scroll.
Seated ruler in ritual pose
Mexico: State of Puebla, Texmelucan, Highland Olmec culture
Middle Formative period, c. 900–500 B.C.
Serpentine and cinnabar
Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Eugene McDermott, The Roberta Coke Camp Fund, and The Art Museum League Fund, 1983.50
Level 1, Center for Creative Connections
This figure is one of eight that originated in a single workshop on the Chiloango River. The characteristics of this highly skilled and imaginative unknown master include an ornate chief’s hat on the figure’s head, staring eyes, a beard as well as an abdominal cavity to hold magical substances, the realistic modeling of the body with its massive shoulders and hands-on-hips pose, the placement of the feet on separate rectangular blocks, a large cowrie shell covering the medicine-filled belly, and a knotted fiber skirt.
The magical substances or “medicine” contained in the figure empowered it to protect, heal, or destroy. When activated by a ritual specialist hammering a nail or blade into its body, the nkisi assured that oaths sworn before it were honored.
Standing male figure with nails
(nkisi, Mangaaka type)
Democratic Republic of the Congo:
Chiloango River Valley, Yombe people
Late 19th century
Wood, iron, raffia, ceramic, pigment, cowrie shell, kaolin, red camwood (tukula), resin, magical ingredients (graveyard dirt and leaves), and animal skin
Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, gift of the McDermott Foundation, 1996.184.FA
Level 2, Classical Art
Eros, the Greek god of love, is shown as a beautiful youth with both male and female characteristics. The figure was originally part of a lamp holder and would have had an oil lamp on the tendril he holds in an outstretched hand. The sculpture shares in the expressive, dynamic qualities of later Greek Hellenistic art; it appears to be flying on the rich, beautifully detailed wings. The lamp from which the figure came was probably made in the eastern Mediterranean for a wealthy house or villa in Italy. The bronze has been associated with a trove of Greek luxury goods recovered from an ancient shipwreck near the town of Mahdia on the coast of Tunisia.
Eros lamp holder
Greek: perhaps from Asia Minor
Early 1st century B.C.
Bronze
Dallas Museum of Art, The Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund, Inc., 2005.12.a–b.McD
Level 2, Classical Art
This splendid mosaic with an image of the poet/savior Orpheus was part of a tomb decoration in Roman Syria. In the late 2nd century, the cult of Orpheus was very popular, as the singer and magician, a son of Dionysos, the wine god, was believed to bring immortality to his followers. A number of Orphic texts survive, describing this belief. According to Greek myth, Orpheus could tame wild animals with his music, which explains the animals in the scene. Orpheus was from Thrace, a barbarian land to the Greeks, and so is shown in an Asiatic cap, sitting on a rugged rock. In the best-known story about Orpheus, he tried to save his dead wife, Eurydike, from Hades, but he turned to look at her and she remained in the world of the dead. Orpheus himself was murdered but his head survived, floating down a river to the Aegean Sea, still singing.
Orpheus Taming Wild Animals
Eastern Roman Empire: near Edessa
A.D. 194
Marble; mosaic
Dallas Museum of Art, gift of David T. Owsley via the Alconda-Owsley Foundation, and two anonymous donors, in honor of Nancy B. Hamon, 1999.305
Level 2, Classical Art
This nobly restrained figure of a woman, from the middle of the 2nd century, fully embodies the dignified status of an aristocratic lady. The heavily draped figure suggests the virtuous character of the commemorated woman. The portrait head used with this standard body type is graceful and pensive. The complete figure radiates a gentle nobility that embodies the best traditions of Roman family life and the high value accorded to distinguished Roman women. In appearance, the lady recalls imperial Antonine women such as the younger Faustina, wife of Marcus Aurelius, though the figure is not sufficiently close to either her or her daughter, Lucilla, to be an actual royal portrait.
Figure of a woman
Roman
2nd century
Marble
Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Cecil H. Green, 1973.11
Level 2, European Painting and Sculpture
Combining a dramatic treatment of light, atmosphere, and setting with a delicate handling of surface and detail, Mountain Landscape with Approaching Storm shows Claude-Joseph Vernet at the height of his powers. The drama of this large-scale landscape with thundering waterfall, craggy coast, and ominous storm clouds anticipates by a generation the emotional intensity of romanticism, which reached its height in the first half of the 19th century. The painting was originally paired with another work by Vernet, a contrasting view of a calm and luminous harbor scene, but that canvas is now lost.
Claude-Joseph Vernet
(French, 1714–1789)
Mountain Landscape with Approaching Storm, 1775
Oil on canvas
Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, Mrs. John B. O’Hara Fund, 1983.41.FA
Level 2, European Painting and Sculpture
Claude Monet executed The Seine at Lavacourt while living in Vétheuil, outside Paris, during the 1880s. This relatively large-scale composition was completed in the studio, based on smaller paintings and oil sketches that Monet made outdoors, and was intended expressly for submission to the official Salon of 1880. Monet had not submitted any work to the Salon since 1870, and his fellow impressionists regarded his participation as a betrayal of the independent stance they had taken for that decade. Monet himself admitted that in this painting he had attempted to "do something more judicious, more bourgeois.” The radical writer Emile Zola, however, admired the painting’s "exquisite note of light and open air." The view of Lavacourt across the water was Monet’s own, seen from the end of his property at Vetheuil.
Claude Monet
(French, 1840–1926)
The Seine at Lavacourt, 1880
Oil on canvas
Dallas Museum of Art, Munger Fund, 1938.4.M
Level 2, European Painting and Sculpture Galleries
The Museum has several examples of Piet Mondrian’s work, including Place de la Concorde, a final summation of the artist’s long creative effort to embody universal principles in an austere pictorial geometry. Beginning in the late 1930s, and especially after Mondrian moved from Europe to New York in 1940, he was able to achieve a new level of artistic freedom, giving his later works a subtle dynamism and freer color rhythm that animate the restrained severity of his earlier rectilinear style. Place de la Concorde is fully representative of this development. This linear network, neither rigid nor static, constitutes an animated and energetic pattern with irregular sequences. Though the painting was completed in New York, its title refers to one of the busiest urban spaces of Paris, and the composition seems to pulsate with the energy of the city it celebrates.
Piet Mondrian
(Dutch, 1872–1944)
Place de la Concorde, 1938–1943
Oil on canvas
Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, gift of the James H. and Lillian Clark Foundation, 1982.22.FA
© 2004 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust, c/o hcr@hcrinternational.com
Level 2, European Painting and Sculpture Galleries
When the Dallas Museum of Art received Jackson Pollock’s Cathedral as a gift in 1950, it was one of only three museums anywhere in the world that owned work by this figure who would become the most important American artist of the 20th century. Dating from the very first year of Pollock’s breakthrough period of 1947 to 1950, when he perfected his (perhaps misnamed) “drip” technique, Cathedral is a masterpiece of abstract expressionism and contains references to everything from the inside of an atom to the farthest reaches of the universe, all done in a wholly abstract language that forever changed the way art is made and thought about.
Jackson Pollock
(American, 1912–1956)
Cathedral, 1947
Enamel and aluminum paint on canvas
Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Bernard J. Reis, 1950.87
© Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Level 3, Arts of Sub-Saharan Africa
Olumeye hold kola nuts offered to visitors or deities in a hospitality ritual. Unlike conventional olumeye, this one by the sculptor Olowe of Ise not only celebrates Yoruba aesthetic ideals of feminine beauty but also focuses attention on the bowl. In addition to being supported by the large female figure, the bowl is elevated on the upraised hands of female caryatids kneeling along the edge of the base. The dome-shaped lid is decorated with a cluster of feeding birds, and incised geometric patterns with natural and imported oil paints cover the entire form. Except for the lid, Olowe carved the sculpture from a single piece of wood, as is usual in African art.
Kneeling female figure with bowl (olumeye)
Southwestern Nigeria: Ekiti Yoruba people, Olowe of Ise (c. 1875–1938), sculptor
Early 20th century
Wood, pigment, and paint
Dallas Museum of Art, The Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund, Inc., 2004.16.McD
Level 3, Arts of Sub-Saharan Africa
This sculpture of a standing female figure was used in funerary rites for elderly members of the Poro society, which functioned as the governmental, educational, and economic system in the traditional Senufo culture. As the corpse is carried to the grave, several such figures are struck against the ground. This thumping in time to the dirge of large horns and drums gives them their common name of “rhythm pounder.” Most important, the act purifies the earth and calls forth the ancestors to participate in the ceremonies.
Standing female figure
Southeastern Mali: Sikasso district, northern Senufo people
19th–20th century
Wood, resin, red abrus seeds, and cowrie shells
Dallas Museum of Art, The Gustave and Franyo Schindler Collection of African Sculpture, gift of the McDermott Foundation in honor of Eugene McDermott, 1974.Sc.15
Level 3, Arts of Southern Asia
In the Hindu tradition, music and dance are a pathway to divinity. The Hindu god Shiva is not only Lord of the Dance but also the deity of creation, destruction, and rebirth. In his most transcendent form as Nataraja, The Divine Dancer, he embodies the energy of the entire cosmos. Shiva dances the rhythm of the universe, surrounded by flames. With his drum he beats out the universal rhythm; in another hand he holds the flame of death. His lower hands promise release from the endless wheel of rebirth. His beautiful body, foot raised in rhythmic dance, and his sweetly expressive face are the incarnation of power and love.
Shiva Nataraja
India
Chola dynasty, 11th century
Bronze
Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Eugene McDermott, the Hamon Charitable Foundation, and an anonymous donor in honor of David T. Owsley, with additional funding from The Cecil and Ida Green Foundation and The Cecil and Ida Green Acquisition Fund, 2000.377
Level 3, Arts of Southern Asia
The god Vishnu, the Preserver of the Hindu Trinity (Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva), is shown as Varaha, a boar-headed man. When disaster or demons threaten the universe, Vishnu wakes from his sleep on the cosmic serpent, assumes a new incarnation (avatar), and preserves the world. Traditionally, Vishnu has ten avatars. The third is Varaha. When a demon tries to drown the earth goddess Prithvi, Vishnu, in boar form, dives under the water and brings her up to the air. In this majestic sculpture, he is shown surging upward, a beautiful, princelike man with a very sensitive and powerful boar head.
Vishnu as Varaha
India: Madhya Pradesh
10th century
Sandstone
Dallas Museum of Art, gift of David T. Owsley via the Alvin and Lucy Owsley Foundation and the Alconda-Owsley Foundation, E. E. Fogelson and Greer Garson Fogelson Fund, General Acquisitions Fund, Wendover Fund, and gift of Alta Brenner in memory of her daughter Andrea Bernice Brenner-McMullen, 2002.25
Level 3, Arts of Southern Asia
Siddartha Guatama, also known as Sakyamuni, was the founder of Buddhism. He preached his doctrines in northern India during the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. In this majestic sculpture from Thailand, he is shown in a monk’s robe, which is the way he appeared while preaching. His hand gestures convey calm, beneficence, and freedom from fear. His richly jeweled ornaments and crown indicate the Thai belief that the Buddha has ties with human kings and could be shown as a ruler as well as a Buddha (Enlightened One).
Sakyamuni Buddha
Thailand: Lopburi style
c. 13th century
Bronze with gold gilding
Dallas Museum of Art, gift of David T. Owsley via the Alvin and Lucy Owsley Foundation, Cecil and Ida Green Acquisition Fund, and Wendover Fund, 2006.21
