or nearly 60 years, Doris Duke quietly built a large and significant private collection of Islamic art for display at Shangri La. Her interest dates to at least 1935, when she began to purchase textiles, costumes, and metalwork during her honeymoon around the world. What began as a youthful passion, however, became a lifelong endeavor. Upon her death in 1993, Duke’s collection totaled about 3,500 objects, predominantly from diverse regions, time periods, and cultures of the Islamic world.
Duke amassed her collection during her repeated travels in the Islamic world, from dealers, and from auction houses. Although she had the resources to collect whatever was available, her vision of Shangri La was not limited to whatever happened to be for sale. Indeed, her approach to creating Shangri La was remarkably active. What she could not buy ready-made, she commissioned from Muslim artists. As a patron of Islamic art, Duke participated in the design process of her commissions to ensure they suited her aesthetic sensibilities. She was even a creator of Islamic-style art, crafting in Hawaii such Islamic-style art and architecture as the Mughal Garden, marble floor panels in the Private Hall and Syrian Room, and a painted ceiling in the Playhouse.
Unconventional, eclectic, idiosyncratic: these words could all be applied to Doris Duke not only as a collector, but also as a displayer of Islamic art. Whereas a museum curator often displays objects in cases, sometimes in isolation to show their individual merits, Duke saw relationships among objects and positioned them at Shangri La to reveal those relationships.
For example, even in her earliest installations, Duke created a context for such admired arts as luster star tiles by grouping them with their more banal partners, turquoise cross tiles. She favored installing star and cross tiles together directly on the wall, mimicking “wallpaper-like” arrangements seen in 13th-century Iran, rather than succumbing to 20th-century Western preferences for displaying only the best examples in cases.
Since Shangri La was her home, Duke was not bound to follow academic classifications typically used in museums, where object groupings might be determined by chronology or by region. She was more inspired by aesthetic relationships, and the resulting assemblages of Islamic cultures are ones that successfully capture the vibrancy, dynamism, and tactility that are so characteristic of Islamic arts.
Doris Duke never explicitly stated why she collected Islamic art, yet she seems to have been particularly drawn to its materials and ornamentation. She was not compelled to collect what others deemed worthy. Instead, her primary concern was to create Shangri La as a home first and foremost, a haven within which she could comfortably retreat from the unwanted publicity that came with being one of the world’s wealthiest individuals. In some deeply personal way, the beauty of Islamic art contributed to her vision of a peaceful refuge. She collected works of art for the pleasure they gave, not for their potential social prestige or monetary value.
In addition to Islamic art, Duke also formed other collections, including Southeast Asian art, jewelry and European fine and decorative arts. Visit the Duke Family resources page to find out more.