Diane DeMell Jacobsen Assembles ‘Transformative’ American Art Collection She Promised Her Dying Husband

As death bed promises go, this one was particularly beguiling.

Twenty-one years ago, Tom Jacobsen, a successful banking executive, was succumbing to leukemia. He knew he wasn’t going to make it.

In his final days, he had a request for his wife Diane DeMell Jacobsen: “Do you think you can build an American art collection that can be transformative?”

She’s spent every day since trying to do so.

Her efforts are on view now through September 24, 2023, during the exhibition “American Made: Paintings and Sculpture from the DeMell Jacobsen Collection,” at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, appropriately, in Jacksonville. The couple met there.

New Yorker Diane DeMell moved to Jacksonville in 1978 when she was hired as the local IBM branch manager. She continues residing in the area.

Though many objects from the DeMell Jacobsen Collection have been on view at other museums ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, “American Made” marks the first comprehensive display of the collection. More than 100 artworks are featured, masterpieces spanning the Colonial-era through about 1950 in this presentation.

The Collection is comprised exclusively of American art, artists born, or who have lived, in America.

“Most of America doesn’t know about the great art that we have,” DeMell Jacobsen said at a press preview for the Cummer exhibition. “They don’t know about all of artists. They certainly don’t know all about the women artists, the people of color. They don’t know about the full range of the diversity of America, and American art.”

Substantial representation of female and African American artists distinguishes the Collection. DeMell Jacobsen has an entirely separate collection of Native American art.

“I have a family member who is from Korea and when she was a little girl, I took her to the museum and she looked around at all the portraits and said, ‘how come there’s nobody here that looks like me?’” DeMell Jacobsen told Forbes.com. “Part of my job is to make sure we represent all of America.”

Staring back at visitors from the museum walls are a cross section of American people. George and Martha Washington, Black laborers, a circus worker. And a beautiful Asian girl in Robert Henri’s 1914 Chow Choy.

Further distinguishing the Collection, and the foundation DeMell Jacobsen set up to support it, is its public nature. DeMell Jacobsen doesn’t have a single item from the Collection in her home. As soon as items are acquired, she and her staff are looking to place them in museums.

Such was the case with one of the Collection’s crown jewels: Thomas Cole’s The Arch of Nero from 1846.

This painting was the source of considerable controversy in 2021 when the Newark Museum of Art chose to deaccession the artwork and send it to auction. Newark was taking advantage of a COVID-era loosening of American Alliance of Museums rules requiring member institutions use any and all funds generated through the sale of artwork only for the acquisition of new items. Selling artwork and applying the money to operating expenses had always been strictly prohibited by AAM, but latitude was being given during COVID as museums were closed and revenues dried up.

In cases where institutions deaccession and sell items from their collection, a common practice, the great danger is beloved masterpieces long enjoyed by museum goers vanishing from public view into the third homes of modern-day robber barons. The DeMell Jacobsen Foundation saved the day, acquiring The Arch of Nero for $988,000. It was almost immediately put back on public view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“My goal when I set up the foundation was to create a collection that will not only honor (my husband’s) legacy, but that will be a gift to America,” DeMell Jacobsen said. “I want Americans to know how great the art is.”

What’s in a Name?

DeMell Jackson visited art museums including The Met as a child and carried her interest in art over to adulthood, but her deep immersion into American art came only following her husband’s death. She actually has a Ph.D. in international affairs with a specialty in peace negotiations–the ending of civil wars and ethnic conflicts.

“I wanted to learn about how the world worked,” she said.

Her expertise in American art comes via self-study and visiting museums, galleries, fairs, auctions and the counsel of experts she’s met along the way including a pair of art history professors at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.

Inadvertently, this unconventional path to connoisseurship has given her an advantage. She is not beholden to the canon and its rigid indoctrination into a narrow definition of American art: white, patriarchal, strictly descended from European masters and movements.

“I try to buy masterpieces, but not necessarily the most well-known artists because I want people to know the full depth and breadth of our artistic and cultural heritage,” DeMell Jacobsen explains.

While the Collection surely has its share of “well-known artists” from American art history–Cole, Henri, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Grant Wood, a knockout Loïs Maillou Jones Paris scene that will be spotlighted in an upcoming exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris–it’s in the mostly unknown figures where DeMell Jacobsen’s eye shines and the exhibition soars.

Bror Nordfeldt’s exhausted Summer Dusk (Solitude) from 1920, a moody-blue nocturne of a weary rider and burro trudging under a harvest moon through the mountains of northern New Mexico. American landscape painting gets no better. Period.

Robert Gwathmey’s 1955 Clearing. Sharecroppers cutting pine and splitting wood under a sun so oppressive it has turned the entire sky yellow. The scene could have come from north Florida. Linear. Spare. Feel the weight of the hammer overhead.

Irene Rice Pereira’s blocky, bold, textured, heavily impastoed Still Life of 1932. Another still life, Peinture/Nature Morte (1924) by Patrick Henry Bruce–vibrant, geometric, bursting with visual interest.

Walt Kuhn’s 1939 Lady in Vest, painted with every ounce of empathy for working people as Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergére.

Gold stars for anyone acquainted with these artists previously. Similar discoveries occur over and over and over again throughout “American Made.”

“People who come here are blown away, and it’s not just the famous people, it’s all of America and really ferreting out the great, great, great artists,” DeMell Jacobsen said.

An early lesson she continues carrying with her when buying new pieces is how artists became famous. In the 20^th century, that was largely through critics–mostly in New York–writing about them. They couldn’t write about everyone, everywhere, and these previously unknown masterpieces by previously unfamiliar artists are the one’s Jacobsen most relishes sharing.

“My definition (of a masterpiece) is, it’s not how detailed the painting is, how many objects are in it, it’s what it does to me. It takes your breath away,” DeMell Jacobsen said. “With a true masterpiece, you see more and more and have a greater reaction every time.”

When collecting, she’s looking for items from an artist’s best years in the style for which the artist is best known, and then, of course, “what kind of impact it has.” Condition, likewise, is critically important.

As are the frames. She and her team place extraordinary emphasis on appropriately framing their acquisitions. Her passion for discussing frames is as great as her passion for discussing the artworks–she makes no distinction between the two.

Transformative

“American Made” debuted at the Mint Museum in Charlotte and stopped at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis before arriving at the Cummer. After leaving here, it will travel to the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Huntsville Museum of Art in Alabama.

Since DeMell shares her treasures with museums shortly after purchase, she’s never seen this much of her handiwork together. Just like the public, the Mint presentation was the first time she had a comprehensive overview of what she’s been able to achieve with her collecting over the past two decades.

Taking it all in, what did she think?

“I think its transformative.”

NOTE: Visitors to the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville from outside of Florida should be aware that the NAACP has issued a travel advisory for the state noting, and warning, that under its current governor, Ron DeSantis, Florida has “engaged in an all-out attack on Black Americans, accurate Black history, voting rights, members of the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, women’s reproductive rights, and free speech, while simultaneously embracing a culture of fear, bullying, and intimidation by public officials.”