page_title: Onya La Tour
hierarchical_section_title: Onya La Tour
caption_attribution_description: English: Cropped from a photo by User:Eric Martz in 1963. Photo taken at La Tour's home which she called Saint Blue Cloud's House, at the top of Bryson's Lane in Nashville, Indiana. Ceramic bird sculpture in foreground is by Becky Brown, wife of w:Karl Martz. Uncropped original photo is image 36 from Roll 98, available from the Indianapolis Museum of Art Archives.
context_page_description: Onya La Tour was an American art collector and dealer, artists' model, manager of art galleries in Puerto Rico, New York City, and Indiana, and an advocate for modernism and the appreciation of modern art. In the 1930s to 1960s, La Tour acquired hundreds of paintings and graphic art works by modernist artists, many of whom later became notable. During the Great Depression, she was Director of the Federal Art Gallery in New York City, which supported artists under the auspices of the Work Projects Administration. She also operated her own private Onya LaTour Gallery in New York. In 1939, she brought her collection of more than 400 works of art from New York City to the artists colony in rural Brown County, Indiana, where she founded a short-lived Indiana Museum of Modern Art. From 1948 to the 1960s, she designed and built three unusual and creative homes where she displayed her collection, often inviting diverse groups of people to mingle and experience modern art.
context_section_description: Onya La Tour (1896–1976) was an American art collector and dealer, artists' model, manager of art galleries in Puerto Rico, New York City, and Indiana, and an advocate for modernism and the appreciation of modern art. In the 1930s to 1960s, La Tour acquired hundreds of paintings and graphic art works by modernist artists, many of whom later became notable. During the Great Depression, she was Director of the Federal Art Gallery in New York City, which supported artists under the auspices of the Work Projects Administration. She also operated her own private Onya LaTour Gallery in New York. In 1939, she brought her collection of more than 400 works of art from New York City to the artists colony in rural Brown County, Indiana, where she founded a short-lived Indiana Museum of Modern Art (see #Homes). From 1948 to the 1960s, she designed and built three unusual and creative homes where she displayed her collection, often inviting diverse groups of people to mingle and experience modern art. In 1972, a few years before her death at age 80, she donated over 100 paintings and graphic art works as well as her lifetime collection of papers to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where an exhibit of selections from her collection took place October–April, 2014. La Tour was "a woman of contradiction and mystery, some of which she created herself" and "a woman ahead of her time". "While Onya, strictly speaking, was not an artist, her life was her art."
caption: Onya La Tour in 1963 (age 67)
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