COLECCIóN PATRICIA PHELPS DE CISNEROS TO GIFT 119 WORKS TO FIVE MUSEUMS
The Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) has announced that it will donate 119 pieces from its collection of colonial art, a broad representation of Venezuelan art from the middle of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, to five leading institutions committed to the conservation and study of Latin American art. The Blanton Museum of Art in Austin; the Denver Art Museum; the Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; and the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI) in Peru will all receive artworks.
“Gustavo and I have always considered ourselves to be temporary custodians of the objects in our care,” Cisneros told Maximilíano Durón of Artnews. “[We] decided that the collection would be best represented by being divided among different institutions. We looked at each museum’s existing collections and areas of interest, and chose works that we felt would deepen their collections.”
The University of Texas’s Blanton Museum of Art will receive eighty-three works, mostly paintings and furniture. The Denver Art Museum will receive twenty-five Venezuelan and Caribbean works. Boston’s MFA will receive seven works, including silver, furniture, and paintings, which were already on long-term loan to the museum, as well as two more gifts that are part of the touring exhibition, “Power & Piety: Spanish Colonial Art for the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros,” which will close in 2020.
The Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York will receive a significant piece of furniture, a golden armchair for the brotherhood of San Pedro of the Cathedral of Caracas. Made by the cabinetmaker Antonio Mateo de los Reyes around 1755, the armchair was used as the seat of a life-size sculpture of the patron saint of the brotherhood. MALI was gifted a portrait by the republican painter José Gil de Castro, Portrait of Don Juan Francisco de Izcué y Sáez Texada, 1834.
