Doris Duke and Mary Crane

Abstract

Abstract Doris Duke, one of the most avid twentieth-century collectors of Islamic art, spoke little about her motivation for building a remarkable collection of Islamic art for her Hawaiian home, Shangri La, and the processes whereby she did so. However, the correspondence between her and Mary Crane, a young art-history graduate student, who had travelled in the Middle East with Duke and then was her buyer in New York in 1940–41, illuminates these questions. The letters present exciting evidence, especially about the acquisition of a stunning thirteenth-century mihrab from Kashan, Iran. Moreover, mapping of the sites that Mary Crane visited in pursuit of objects reveals the network of the numerous people involved in the Islamic art market in New York. And, finally, the letters make possible an analysis of Duke’s individual manifestation of Orientalism, enabling an examination of how and why she collected works from Middle Eastern, North African and Indian cultures.