DuPont gives hotel art to 3 area museums, United Way
The DuPont Co. announced Wednesday it has donated key pieces of its hotel art collection to three area museums and is giving 400 other works to United Way of Delaware to sell as a fundraiser.
The move ensures that paintings by area artists such as N.C., Andrew and Jamie Wyeth as well as Frank Schoonover and Ed Loper will remain in Delaware, on view, for generations to come.
Splitting the major paintings are the Delaware Art Museum, which took 13 pieces; the Hagley Museum and Library, which chose six; and the Brandywine River Museum of Art, which chose three.
DuPont, which began buying art for the hotel in 1937, did not disclose the collection's value and would not discuss terms of the donations. But museum spokesmen said one of the requirements was that while the art could be stored and undergo conservation treatments, it must be displayed for the public to see, not sequestered in private rooms.
Delaware Art Museum director Sam Sweet praised DuPont's sense of community responsibility, pointing out that during the past 80 years the paintings essentially have been guests at thousands of family dinners and parties at the hotel.
"So many people have personal connections to the work," Sweet said. "We were just delighted to be able to work with DuPont to make sure these pieces stay in the community and make sure they are part of people's lives. This is a great way to strengthen our collection, not just to the works and the artist, but to the individuals who have had these works as part of their family celebrations at the hotel."
“People have the availability to visit their old friends,” added Jill MacKenzie, Hagley’s director of audience engagement.
The donation follows last month's announcement that DuPont had sold its hotel business to Buccini/Pollin, a Wilmington-based developer. Under the agreement, Buccini’s Washington, D.C.-based management affiliate, PM Hotel Group, assumes control of the 217-room hotel’s operations. A price was not disclosed.
DuPont had owned and operated the 12-story Italian Renaissance building for much of its 104-year existence. “The Hotel” has been considered Wilmington’s “front door” ever since it opened in 1913. Its internationally known Green Room restaurant and stately Gold Ballroom will continue to operate, according to Buccini officials.
Separately, DuPont is exploring the sale of its 525-acre country club on Rockland Road in Rockland ahead of a proposed $130 billion merger with the Dow Chemical Co. later this year.
“DuPont is pleased to make this significant gift to the Wilmington community,” Richard C. Olson, senior vice president, DuPont Corporate Services, said in a press release. “These outstanding museums will ensure the care and conservation of important works from our collection so that the public can enjoy them for generations to come. Our gift to United Way of Delaware continues a partnership that spans more than 70 years and will help support programs that benefit more than 100,000 Delawareans each year.”
DuPont is following a different path than Wilmington Public Library, which in 2009 put a series of N.C. Wyeth's "Robinson Crusoe" paintings on sale to help fund a restoration and renovation. The paintings eventually sold for about half of what the library hoped they would bring.
Key among the Hotel du Pont art pieces is "Island Funeral," painted by N.C. Wyeth using blue-green pigments created by DuPont Co. It hung on the wall in the Brandywine Room at the hotel. It will go to the Brandywine River Museum of Art. The museum also will receive Andrew Wyeth's "Master of the Fox Hounds" and Jamie Wyeth's "White House."
Hagley, which specializes in collecting business records and functions as the DuPont archive, chose first among the works, selecting pieces of historical importance to the company and the area. The site of the gunpowder works founded by E.I. du Pont in 1802, Hagley picked “Eleutherian Mills” and “Brandywine Village” by Andrew Wyeth, “Brandywine Valley Industries Hagley Yards” by Bayard Taylor Berndt, “The Brandywine” by Frank Jefferies, “Rockland Houses” by Charles Colombo and “Three Brothers, Three Presidents: Pierre du Pont, Irenee du Pont and Lammot du Pont” by an unknown artist.
The Delaware Art Museum will get Andrew Wyeth's "The Big Chimney," among others including Andrew Wyeth’s “New Castle Ferry,” “Buttonwood Tree” and “The Crystal Lamp”; N.C. Wyeth’s “'Stand away from that girl!’ repeated de Spain harshly, backing the words with a step forward”; Carolyn Wyeth’s “Wild Tiger Lily”; Harvey T. Dunn’s “When the Whaling Fleet Cleared for the Caribes”; John Koch's “Garden at Wilmington”; John W. McCoy’s “Small Craft Storm Warning (Electrical Tower on a Hill)”; Frank Earle Schoonover’s “October Comes”; “Edward Loper Sr.’s “Elfreth’s Alley”; Ann Wyeth McCoy’s “The Overhang”; and Helen Coolidge Woodring's “The White Unicorn.”
The 400 paintings donated to the United Way of Delaware come from the hotel collection, the Chemours building and other properties. Those works are expected to be sold for fixed prices at an event in late April or early May. The first hours of the sale will be open exclusively to DuPont and Chemours employees, before the general public is invited in, said Michelle Taylor, United Way's president and chief executive officer.
The United Way, which has never before received an art donation of this magnitude, is still working to appraise individual pieces, valued at a couple hundred dollars to more than $1,000 apiece, Taylor said. Some of the most expensive pieces, which Taylor did not immediately identify, could be auctioned online if they don't sell locally. The United Way hopes to raise $100,000 from the sale, Taylor said, with proceeds benefiting elementary school reading programs.
One of the most famous and visible pieces of art, a Howard Pyle painting of a powder wagon and DuPont gunpowder called "Conestoga Powder Wagon" that hung in the hotel lobby, was not offered to the museums and will be taken to DuPont headquarters because of its historical connection, museum directors said.
Artist Jamie Wyeth on Wednesday praised DuPont for keeping the works that represent the Brandywine School tradition in the area. Wyeth said the company never approached him about taking some of the paintings. But he was most excited that N.C. Wyeth’s “Island Funeral,” depicting his beloved Maine seascape, would join the Brandywine River Museum of Art’s core collection.
“This is wonderful,” Wyeth said. “I thought they’d go on the auction block."
“My only sadness is that I always enjoyed going to the Brandywine Room and looking at the paintings," he said. A collection by three generations of the Wyeth family previously was displayed in the Brandywine & Christina rooms.
By donating the paintings, DuPont will save millions of dollars in taxes. A donation spares the company from paying corporate income tax on a sale's proceeds and also provides DuPont with deductible donations to charity. DuPont, a $66 billion company, would have had a sale taxed at the United States' top corporate tax rate of 35 percent. Because the paintings don't generate any income for DuPont, donating the collection was a smart move, according to Jordon Rosen, a Wilmington accountant who specializes in business taxes at Belfint Lyons & Shuman.
"Basically, they are saving on the capital gains tax, and they are getting fair market value for their deduction," Rosen said.
Because the United Way and the museums are tax-exempt organizations, they don't have to worry about taxes on sales, either.
"It's win-win for the organizations," Rosen said.
DuPont officials declined to comment on the size of the current hotel collection, but it was large enough for a special exhibit at the Delaware Museum of Art in 1981.
Washington-based historian and museum consultant Redmond Barnett said hotels are not as well known for art collections as are banks. Corporations such as Deutsche Bank and UBS have amassed tens of thousands of artworks. Locally, Bank of America, Wilmington Trust Co. and Christiana Health System all have used fine art to grace their lobbies, office corridors and executive suites.
When WSFS Bank sold its downtown Wilmington building, for instance, the bank in 2007 donated a massive mural by N.C. Wyeth, "Apotheosis of the Family," to the Delaware Historical Society.
DuPont epitomized corporate support of arts and culture for a century until the company's contraction in the 1990s. Today, many of Delaware's arts organizations, including the Delaware Art Museum, the Playhouse and the Delaware Symphony Orchestra, credit their success to DuPont family members' ardent support.
The latest round of DuPont donations still came as a big surprise to the museums, directors said.
They were first approached in February, said Thomas Padon, executive director of the Brandywine River Museum of Art.
Hagley made its selections based on the historical significance of the paintings’ subject matter and their ties to DuPont corporate history, MacKenzie said.
“Those six are really six gems for Hagley," she said. "They give such a wonderful window into what this area was like.”
The works will be evaluated by Hagley conservators later this month. Then, they may be put on display as a group on the second floor of Hagley’s Visitor Center, MacKenzie said.
After Hagley made its choices, the Brandywine River Museum and Delaware Art Museum worked together to look through 65 possible choices, Padon and Sweet said.
They found the process easy. Each wanted pieces that extended the collection of their artists or filled gaps in those collections.
Padon wanted "Island Funeral," for example, because of the time period it was painted by N.C. Wyeth, because it was painted in his studio now on museum property and because of its story about its connections to the chemistry of the DuPont Co.
N.C. painted the work at a time when he was taking fewer illustration commissions and working more on fine art.
"I think it’s certainly the masterpiece of N.C.’s later period in his career," Padon said. "It's stunning." With this acquisition, the museum now has about five of the late Maine works, Padon said.
Jamie Wyeth also noted that the donations would help the Delaware Art Museum rebound from one of its most tumultuous periods. In 2014, the Delaware museum board approved selling four seminal works of art to retire the museum’s $19.8 million debt. The move resulted in sanctions from national museum groups, compromising the Delaware museum’s ability to receive loaned works from other institutions.
Sweet is currently working with the American Alliance of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors for reaccreditation and to lift the sanctions, a Delaware Art Museum spokeswoman said.
Sweet said DuPont's donation honors the museum's role in the community and recognizes that it can "steer these works into the future for the community and care for them and keep them here."
Sometimes, the works will bring the museum double benefits. The Delaware Art Museum took Loper’s “Elfreth’s Alley." Loper was a prominent African-American artist. His work will hang near Andrew Wyeth's painting of the same street scene, Sweet said.
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