Bank Funds Restoration of DMA’s Gem Encrusted Silver Vitrine

by Bill Davenport September 5, 2014

Czeschka-silbervitrine-1908In keeping with it’s policy of  “Corporate Social Responsibility,” Bank of America has given the Dallas Museum of Art funds  to restore a gem-studded silver display case the museum acquired last year. The Wittgenstein Vitrine, as it’s called, was designed by Carl Otto Czeschka, and will be the centerpiece of a show opening in November 15 in the DMA’s conservation gallery. Standing over five feet tall, this vitrine is the largest and most lavish example known of the silverwork of the Wiener Werkstätte.

This vitrine was purchased at the 1908 Vienna Kunstschau (Art Show) by Karl Wittgenstein (1847–1913), a Viennese iron and steel magnate and the leader of one of the most powerful families in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Wittgenstein’s family engaged in a series of artistic and architectural commissions in the following years, including paintings by Klimt and the remodeling and furnishing of a number of their homes by the Werkstätte. The vitrine, originally installed in the family’s palace in Vienna, remained in the Wittgenstein family’s possession until 1949, when it was sold at auction.

In 2013, the bank’s Art Conservation Project supported the restoration of Tudor portraits of Queen Elizabeth at the National Portrait Gallery in London; Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s “Diana” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; four portraits by John Butler Yeats at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin; three iconic Jackson Pollock paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and Rembrandt’s “Scholar in His study” at the National Gallery in Prague.

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1 comment

Michael Galbreth September 5, 2014 - 10:52

As if this needed to be stated: Karl Wittgenstein also happened to be the father of Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, whose ideas influenced many artists including de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, and many others.

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