CINCINNATI, OHIO.- The Cincinnati Art Museum today announced a major gift from the corporate art collection of The Procter & Gamble Company in anticipation of the Museum’s new Cincinnati Wing set to open May 17, 2003. This donation of 78 paintings representing 46 artists from the Procter & Gamble Historic Cincinnati Collection includes important works by James Beard, Robert Blum, Robert Duncanson, Edward Potthast, Elizabeth Nourse and John Twachtman. This is the second largest gift of paintings by Cincinnati artists to the Museum in its 121-year history. Artist Frank Duveneck donated the largest gift of Cincinnati paintings to the Museum in 1915. "The superb group of paintings assembled by Procter & Gamble over the past two decades will   immeasurably strengthen the Museum’s own holdings of works by Cincinnati artists," said Timothy Rub, director of the Cincinnati Art Museum. "It will also encourage others to help the Museum develop the finest collection of this type at a time when significant national attention will be focused on the city and its artistic heritage with the opening of the Cincinnati Wing in 2003."
This generous gift will be celebrated in an exhibition of works that will go on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum Saturday, February 15, 2003 on the first day of the P&G Fine Arts Fund Sampler Weekend. The 2003 Fine Arts Fund campaign will be chaired by A.G. Lafley, president and chief executive of Procter & Gamble.
The exhibition will feature a selection of paintings from the donation and will be on display in the Director’s Gallery until August 2004 at which time a number of works will be incorporated into the galleries of the Cincinnati Wing.
"This is a terrific opportunity for the Cincinnati Art Museum to help audiences discover and enjoy great art while allowing P&G to live up to its desire to enhance the communities in which our employees live and work," said Bruce L. Byrnes, vice chairman of the board, Procter & Gamble, and a member of the board of trustees of the Cincinnati Art Museum.
The Procter & Gamble donation also includes paintings by several artists that are not represented in the Museum’s collection or are represented by lesser examples of their work. Herman Wessel’s Gloucester Fishermen, (about 1925), for instance, is one of this artist’s most powerful paintings and will serve as a fine companion to a work recently donated to the Museum: an oil sketch of Gloucester by Frank Duveneck that was painted at Wessel’s side.
Among the most remarkable paintings from the Procter & Gamble donation, and one which has the richest relationship with the Museum’s collection, is Robert Blum’s dramatic composition The Silk Merchant, Japan, (1890-93). The Cincinnati Art Museum has the foremost collection of works by this important artist, but does not own a major oil painting from the extended visit he made to Japan in the early 1890s-arguably the most significant phase of his career. The piece will be displayed alongside the watercolors, drawings and oil studies Blum made in Japan, his collection of Japanese prints and photographs and paintings made on other occasions. Blum’s paintings will also be exhibited with the work of his contemporaries such as William Merritt Chase, who was also influenced by the taste for Japanese art and culture but never traveled there. By installing the painting in a variety of contexts, Museum audiences will come to understand Blum better as well as his cultural milieu more thoroughly.
According to William H. Gerdts, professor emeritus of art history, Graduate School of the City University of New York and a nationally recognized American art authority, "The P&G donation represents a wonderful group of works by artists associated with Cincinnati, some superb painters of local or regional reputation and others who are nationally celebrated."