The Keir Collection of Islamic Art at the Dallas Museum of Art
The Keir Collection of Islamic Art
April 18, 2017 — December 31, 2022
The life story and career of Edmund de Unger is a remarkable tale from which novels are made. As a refugee starting life anew in Britain, he rose from a manservant to a prominent property developer. Over the course of a fascinating life and robust career, he became an avid collector. The resulting Keir Collection is a textbook of topological passion, vision, and sweeping excellence.
De Unger once opined that "my love of Islamic art began with carpets," where the majority of his rich holdings were kept in an 18th-century manor house in London. Keir material has appeared in many museums, and a portion of his classical carpets from Turkey, Persia, Mughal India, along with a large loan from the Keir collection, was for many years on display for public edification and enjoyment at Berlin's Pergamon Museum of Islamic Art.
In 2014, nearly 2,000 objects from the Keir collection were transferred from the Pergamon to the Dallas Museum of Art for a fifteen-year loan. As the DMA's former curator of Islamic art, Dr. Sabiha al Khemir, noted at the time, "It transforms Dallas as a center of Islamic art overnight." The collection includes carpets, ceramics including rare examples of Abbasid lusterware (9th-11th century) as well as pottery from every major historical horizon, calligraphy, miniature paintings, and a vast array of utilitarian objects from the mundane to the magnificent. Commenting on the latter, there is a rock crystal ewer there, one of only seven in the world of its caliber and the only one of its type in the United States. The thousand-year-old vessel was bought in 2008 at auction for the princely sum of 5.6 million dollars and is certainly the public's favorite jewel in the crown of this collection.
What the Keir Collection does, beyond expanding the Dallas Museum of Art's Islamic art purview, is to further embrace multiculturalism in a major art museum. The DMA has one of the most outstanding Meso-American and Pre-Columbian, African, and, as our readers know, one of the finest small Indonesian collections extant — all making the DMA a worldly destination for our collective art history and mutually shared heritages.
— Steven G. Alpert, founder of Art of the Ancestors
