Behind the scenes: How ‘American Made’ art collection came to life at Jacksonville exhibit

Diane DeMell Jacobsen’s husband Tom, lying in his hospital bed, had written some notes on a yellow legal pad, notes that detailed a plan he hoped would become his legacy.

How would you feel, he asked, if we donated a gallery to a museum in both our names?

How about in just your name? she replied. His eyes lit up: He liked that idea.

On his yellow notepad, he had other plans: He asked if she, after he was gone, would be able to build a collection of American art — a “transformative” collection — that the public could see in museums? She thought that sounded like a fine idea.

The first part of his wish came true in 2004, about two years after he died of acute lymphoblastic leukemia at 62, when the Thomas H. Jacobsen Gallery of American Art opened at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville.

The second part took longer, but Jacobsen doggedly set about adding to the couple's collection of American art, working with curators, conservationists, frame experts and art dealers to buy and display works from the colonial era to today.

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The result is now on display until Sept. 24 at the Cummer: "American Made: Paintings and Sculpture from the DeMell Jacobsen Collection," 104 works of art drawn from 270 in the collection.

Many of the works have been shown in other museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. But "American Made" is the first time they’ve all been together in one place.

The show opened at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, N.C., before going to the Dixon Gallery & Gardens in Memphis, Tenn., and then Jacksonville. After the Cummer, it travels to San Antonio, Texas, and Huntsville, Ala.

It was brutally hard deciding which works to include in the exhibition and which ones to leave out. And as she takes a visitor from piece to piece, she marvels anew at the brush strokes, the colors, the drama, the humor, the humanity of the works.

It's clear she loves each piece. "Yeah," she said, laughing. "Maybe I'm going on too much."

Stories for every painting

Jacobsen, who lives in Ponte Vedra, was an IBM executive who got to know her husband in Jacksonville when he, an executive for Barnett Bank, was a client.

She can tell stories about each painting in the DeMell (her maiden name) Jacobsen collection.

Consider William Bradford's "Ship Trapped in Ice" from 1871. It was a scene of the artist's own journey to the Arctic when the 325-ton sailing bark on which he sailed became stuck in an ice pack.

The painting was in rough shape, and she spent two years with a conservator, who gradually took off decades of cigar smoke and heating oil residue and yellowed varnish. Underneath was Bradford's glorious, ominous painting, and for the first time Jacobsen could see that he had painted crew members on the ice and on the ship, dwarfed by the vast Arctic vista and finally revealed by the conservator's work.

"I’ve never been to the Arctic — I'll have to go someday — but when you look at that you say, 'I’m there!' And he went on the expedition," she said. "That's how he painted it, from life.”

Then there's William Merritt Chase's 1910 painting "A Memory: In the Italian Villa" that features the artist's mistress, who was also a protégé, in a contemplative pose. The work used to belong to Frank Sinatra; Jacobsen bought it from his estate.

And she chuckled as she told of showing Mary Cassatt's 1900 painting "Baby Charles Looking Over His Mother's Shoulder (No. 3)" to a friend's precocious 5½-year-old grandson. The boy wondered how the artist made the image three-dimensional. He liked the mother's orange dress. He liked that you could see the baby's face and his bare bottom in the mirror behind him. And he noted that the painting needed a new frame, which it did.

Jacobsen's love of art was born, she says, in childhood trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She hopes children will come see "American Made" and, like her friend's grandson, perhaps find a similar spark. She suggests making a game of it: Have the child count all the dogs and cats in the exhibition.

There are more than a few cats and dogs there.

Choosing the right piece

Jacobsen looks for just the right works to add to her collection, and only the best make the cut.

“I counted one time: I looked at 1,100 paintings on one trip to New York. With magnification, with black light, ultraviolet light. I turned them over, looked at the back of the canvas to see what kind of lining it had. On that trip, I bought one painting. One! This is hard work, hard, hard work.”

She works with curators and conservators, but the final decision, she said, is hers.

Ties to Jacksonville

The exhibition has several Jacksonville ties, beyond Jacobsen’s home in Ponte Vedra.

Elizabeth Heuer, a University of North Florida art history professor, took a sabbatical to write most of the collection’s catalog, a hardbound 400-page volume. “I’m not bragging,” Jacobsen said. “But it really is pretty special.”

And Jacksonville fine-art photographer Doug Eng, whom she calls "the best photographer I've ever worked with," took photos of most of the pieces for the catalog. And one of his works, a three-dimensional self-portrait made largely of corrugated cardboard, is part of the exhibition.

In the introduction in the catalog, Heuer notes that most private American art collections are focused on “an individual collector’s interest in a specific region, theme, genre, era or medium.” Not Jacobsen’s.

“In contrast,” she writes, “this collection was designed to provide a broad — yet in-depth — understanding of America’s rich heritage ... The goal is not to define American art, but rather to acknowledge and celebrate the extraordinary diversity of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives that comprise America’s cultural history, growth and transformation.”

A diverse country, diverse art

Jacobsen says she wants to showcase the diversity of America, and the exhibition features several works by Black painters such as Lois Mailou Jones, a longtime Howard University professor. Like numerous other Black artists, she found inspiration in pre-World War II Paris, and her work "Paris le Soir," circa 1948-1950, is featured in the collection.

After the "American Made" exhibition has had its run, "Paris le Soir" is going to Paris to the renowned Centre Pompidou museum. Jacobsen couldn't be more thrilled.

"They have asked to borrow it for a major exhibition that they’re doing, and they’re going to make it their frontispiece. Yes. Look at it: It’s got the Seine, it’s got Sacré Coeur, it has the Dôme, it has Moulin Rouge, it has the Folies Bergère, it has all of the big symbols, and it’s going to Paris.”

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Jacobsen admits that when she started collecting seriously, she wasn't a big fan of modernism and abstract art, but that changed as she got to know more about it.

She tells the story of how she got one piece of abstract art from the 1940s, painted by a little-known artist named Flora Crockett. Jacobsen was at her home in New York City in 2015 when she got a morning phone call from a friend, alerting her to a New York Times article on Crockett that said the artist had created "a body of work that could hold its own in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art or the Museum of Modern Art and in the history of American abstract painting."

The story went on to say her work was being shown at a gallery owned by Meredith Ward, an art dealer Jacobsen knew.

Jacobsen didn't waste a minute. "I put on my jogging shoes, I jogged to the gallery," she said. "I was the first one in, knocking on the door. I said, ‘I want to buy a painting.’ Meredith said, 'You’re not going to negotiate on the price?' I said, 'I'll buy it.' First thing in the morning. Practically in my pajamas.”

Jacobsen said when she finds the right piece of art, she doesn't wait. This project — of building that transformative collection of American art masterpieces — is, she said, too important.

She knows what the collection needs. "At the end of the day, for me, it’s when you go, 'Aaah.' It kind of takes your breath away. The more you look at it, a masterpiece, the more you see — not just the details, but the more reaction you get, the more feeling you get, the more excitement you get.”

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Woman honors husband with American art at Jacksonville Cummer Museum