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De la Cote d'Azur au Texas
| Article
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10739 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1986 |
1,627 Words |
| Author
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David Dillon
F. Scott Fitzgerald might have created Wendy and Emery Reves,
but it's questionable whether he could have written a better
ending to their story than the one now being played out in
Dallas. |
Wyn-Nelle Russell, born 1916 in Marshall, Texas, heart of the states's deep piney woods, leaves home in the late 1930s for New York City. Hits it big as a runway model, appearing in the pages of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. Marries and divorces band leader Paul Baron, then meets émigré businessman and anti-fascist publisher Emery Reves in the late Forties. Returns with him to Roquebrune on the Cote d'Azur, where they buy Coco Chanel's Villa La Pausa, transform it into a popular rendezvous for Winston Churchill, Konrad Adenauer and other public figures, and in their spare time collect art frenetically--carpets, crystal, Chinese porcelain, Renaissance iron work, Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings and drawings. When Emery Reves dies in 1981, Wendy and her collection are pursued by museums on both sides of the Atlantic. After months of pondering and negotiating, she finally anoints the new Dallas Museum of Art, which she has never seen but which is only 150 miles from her old hometown. "Dallas has the growth possibilities, the money, and I'm from Texas," Wendy explained in announcing the gift. "Also, the museum isn't as filled with meat and matter as museums in other big cities. I cannot think of a more wonderful place to give it."
On November 29, the Reves Collection opened to the public, housed in six recreated rooms from Villa La Pausa that form the centerpiece of the DMA's new $6 million Decorative Arts wing. Appraised for $35 million, the collection doubled the value of the museum's holdings, and launched it into the (for Dallas) entirely new field of decorative arts.
"Dallas was quite weak in Impressionist paintings," said DMA Director Harry Parker. "We had not one painting by Cézanne, and in this collection there are two. We didn't have a Renoir, and this collection has eight. We had one Manet, and this collection has three more. These are improvements in just the area in which the public is turned-on."
If the Reves Collection has dramatic peaks and valleys -the peaks being the Impressionist paintings and drawings and much of the porcelain, the valleys the eccentric collections of fans, Renaissance ironwork, and other expensive decorative bric-a- brac--the saga of how its 1429 pieces ended up in Dallas is worth at least several episodes of Dynasty, maybe even a short suspense novel.
A group of Dallas Museum Associates was scheduled to visit the Reves Collection during a museum-sponsored trip to France. The visit was canceled at the last minute because of Emery Reves' poor health, and it wasn't until January
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