Detroit Institute of Arts history

By 1888, Scripps and Brearley had incorporated Detroit Museum of Arts, filling it with over 70 pieces of artwork acquired by Scripps during his time in Europe.

Ullin, which involved a claim concerning Vincent van Gogh’s "Les Becheurs (The Diggers)" (1889), the museum successfully asserted that Michigan's three-year statute of limitations precluded the court or a jury from deciding the merits of the case.

Another decision in 1919 that would have a lasting impact on the future of the museum was transferring ownership to the City of Detroit with the museum becoming a city department and receiving operating funds.

The DIA became the first United States museum to acquire a van Gogh and Matisse in 1922 and Valentiner's relationship with German expressionist led to significant holdings of early Modernist art.

The present DIA building on Woodward Avenue debuted on October 7, 1927.

Valentiner organized them by nation and chronology, this was recognized as being so revolutionary that the 1929 Encyclopædia Britannica used an illustration of the main floor plan of the DIA as an example of the perfect modern art museum.

Edsel Ford, the only son of Henry Ford, commissioned Mexican artist Diego Rivera to paint hisDetroit Industry frescoes for the DIA in 1932.

In 1949, the museum was among the first to return a work that had been looted by the Nazis, when it returned Claude Monet's The Seine at Asnières to its rightful owner.

A 1976 gift of $1 million from Eleanor Ford created the Department of African, Oceanic and New World Cultures.

By 1990, 70 percent of the DIA's funding was coming from the State of Michigan, that year the state facing a recession and budget deficit cut funding by more than 50 percent.

In 1998, the Founder's Society signed an operating agreement with the City of Detroit that would have the Founder's Society operating as Detroit Institute of Arts, Inc take over management of the museum from the Art Department with the city retaining ownership of the DIA itself.

In 2000, the DIA established the General Motors Center for African American Art as a curatorial department in order to broaden the museum's collection of African American art.

In 2002, the museum discovered that Ludolf Backhuysen's A Man-O-War and Other Ships off the Dutch Coast, a 17th-century seascape painting under consideration for purchase by the museum, had been looted from a private European collection by the Nazis.

The painting was valued at $1.5 million in 2005, and is one of Frankenthaler's most important works.

The museum's director is Salvador Salort-Pons, who arrived in 2008 from the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.