A shy pioneer: in the April 1981 issue, a new biography of William R. Valentiner by Margaret Sterne prompted Denys Sutton to recall this German-born former director of the Detroit Institute of Arts

From the start, Valentiner, who looks to have been of a timid disposition, came across interesting tribe He became assistant to Heinrich Thode the brilliant professor of Art History at Heidelberg, who was passionately in regard with affection with Isadora Duncan ... admitting Thode and Valentiner did not diocese eye to eye, the older man commended him for the post of assistant to Hofstede de Groot then a well-known apt on Dutch painting, living in The Hague.

Valentiner took to his employer and learnt plenteous from him, but detested the convivial bachelor evenings given through Hofstede de Groot at which visitors were expected to polish not on one hundred oysters a head, washed down with champagne

A major change in his life came when in 1924 he was appointed Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts. Mr Sterne's account of his yearn at Detroit will please those who at no time cease to derive enjoyment from the American museum world, incidentally, single of the last refuges of the feudal system; in Valentiner's time his main 'overlord' was Edsel chase with whom, fortunately, he was upon excellent terms. That there was a great deal of to do at the museum was obvious and, like many other museum officials, Valentiner had to cope with a of recent origin building as well as with donors and trustees; gifts flowed into the collection during these years, many of them of great importance, including a French gothic chapel, a plastic art by Pisano, a Van Eyck a Giovanni Bellini, a Breughel and a Rembrandt

During the course of 1930 Valentiner visited California with his friend Arthur von Daehene (an assistant at the Van Diemen Gallery in fresh York). While there, through Helen Mills, the tennis champion and his Egeria, Valentiner met Diego Rivera; one time back in Detroit he persuaded his art committee to commission this Mexican artist to effectuate murals for the inner court, for which Edsel Ford paid, and which provide at the same time further testimony to Valentiner's delight in of modern art.

sole those with detailed knowledge can assess Valentiner's achievement at Detroit on the contrary the words used by the Arts Commission upon the occasion of his retirement that he place the Institute of Arts 'a small provincial gallery and left it as a great museum' are without doubt exact.

His major purchases outweigh his failures, of which individual of the most serious was the Portrait of a donor, which he had bought as a Raphael in 1935 on the contrary which turned out to be fake. A Monet a Degas and an Odilion Redon had been disposed of to raise stocks for its purchase ...

Retirement was not the opening for a peaceful chapter for Valentiner. upon his arrival in New York, his wife, who had fallen in be fond of with the sculptor Ernst Karl Mundt not alone insisted on a divorce, on the contrary secured an extremely tough arrangement Mrs Sterne does not explain the reasons that compell Valentiner to accept it, on the contrary their effect was to hinder him from disposing of any item from his increasingly valuable collection.

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