Man Sleeping on a Bamboo Couch Paint Metropolitan Museum of Art
Museums Special Department | Fine art
At Met, New Leadership (and Direction) for Asian Fine art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art'southward Asian fine art galleries are some of the most reposeful spaces in New York City. It'southward hard to imagine that they were banged into place, room by room, from practically zippo over the last forty years, though they were. Or that they continue to mirror changing times, a irresolute museum and a changing Asia, though they do.
A few months from now they'll be the scene of another modify, a shift in stewardship, when the museum'southward longtime curator of Chinese art, Maxwell G. Hearn, replaces James C. Y. Watt as head of the Asian fine art department.
Mr. Watt, 74, who was raised in Hong Kong and had a classical Chinese scholar'due south at-home education, came to the Met as a curator from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1985 and has led the department for the last x years.
Mr. Hearn — everyone calls him Mike — is 61 and a native of Salt Lake Urban center. He arrived at the Met fresh out of college in 1971, when there barely was an Asian department and the Asian collection consisted of a room of Buddhist sculptures and a bunch of ceramic pots.
Both men, but Mr. Hearn in item, witnessed and participated in an astonishing phenomenon: a catch-up act of acquisition, structure and exhibition-making on a g scale.
From the early 1970s to the belatedly '90s, nether the direction of the art historian Wen Fong, who was Mr. Hearn's mentor, a room of sculpture gradually and laboriously turned into 50 galleries. Thank you to the beneficence of a generation of gift-giving New York collectors, a agglomeration of pots became many thousands of objects representing every major Asian culture. And cheers to the prestige its new Asian wing brought, the Met got some huge Asian loan shows.
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Both Mr. Hearn and Mr. Watt refer to the menstruum as a golden historic period. And both acknowledge that it is over.
Private collections of the kind that came to the Met can no longer exist assembled in the Westward. China and Bharat, now economic colossi, have a corner on the market. Museum loans from Asia are increasingly tricky to negotiate, and to pay for, now that the Met, similar most museums, is economically pinched. And while Asia is constantly in the news, Asian art remains a hard sell. Foot traffic in the Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Southeast Asian galleries remains light.
Clearly, Mr. Hearn, in his new job as curator in charge of the Asian department, has confounding problems to contemplate when he takes over in July.
But at least he will hit the ground running. He knows his department inside out. The Met is habitation; he grew upward in it. And he came to it through a kind of on-the-road Kerouacian saga of timing and luck that brought him into early on contact with some of the pinnacle fine art historians of the solar day, and that left him both open up to newness and optimistic of the future.
His introduction to Asian art was entirely accidental. He entered Yale in 1967, intending to report business. On a semester break he visited an aunt in Kansas City, Mo., and went with her to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. They wandered around and ended up in the Chinese collection. Something clicked.
"I don't remember an individual slice I saw," he said in a contempo interview. "Simply I came out thinking, 'I know zero virtually this world.' "And he wanted to know more than.
Back at Yale he took courses in Chinese fine art with the scholar Richard Barnhart. In his junior year he switched his major to fine art history and wrote an honors paper on Chinese scholar gardens. Driving back to Utah after graduation he stopped at the Nelson-Atkins, which had become a place of pilgrimage in his listen. He arrived on a Monday; the museum was airtight. He figured he'd sleep overnight in his car, but on a whim walked around to the dorsum of the museum and knocked on a door.
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"What's your business?" a voice from inside asked. He said he was a student and wanted to look at Chinese art. The door opened. Not only was he admitted, only he was also escorted to the office of the museum's director, Laurence Sickman, a Chinese fine art historian who had written the textbook Mr. Hearn had used at Yale. Mr. Sickman took him on a tour of the Asian galleries and storage, invited him back to his house to run into his scholar's garden, and advised him to go to Taiwan and learn Chinese.
Around this time, on the advice of his Yale teacher, Mr. Hearn wrote to Mr. Fong, who was at Princeton, asking for career advice on museum work. When an invitation to meet came, he collection back East from Indiana, where he had a summer job on a farm. Mr. Fong, dressed in lawn tennis whites, talked with him for half an hr, then asked, "How would you like to piece of work at the Metropolitan Museum?" He had simply been hired by the Met with the title of special consultant, and a mandate to revivify a tiny Asian fine art department that had been languishing for decades.
Mr. Hearn drove the long drive back to Salt Lake City, packed his things, and headed to New York. He had no identify to live yet, so Mr. Fong bundled for him to crash for a nighttime or ii with a friend in the West Village. Mr. Fong'southward friend was John B. Elliott, a major collector of Chinese art, who was at that signal amassing fabulous examples of painting and calligraphy.
A dark or 2 at Mr. Elliott's turned into a six-month stay. And a full-time Met job as curatorial assistant to Mr. Fong — who was there just one day a week and teaching at Princeton the rest — plunged Mr. Hearn into the museum earth head-kickoff.
To assert a new Asian presence in the museum and to attract donors, Mr. Fong presented a calligraphy show, and managed to get prime placement for it in what was then the Met'southward single special exhibition gallery, referred to in-house as "the bowling alley" or "the plane hanger." (Due south and Southeast Asian galleries occupy the space now.)
There was competition for the space. Mr. Hearn recalled that "one curator tried to have the calligraphy shunted off to the Bully Balustrade." But the prove went on. Cleanly installed but with decorative touches (bamboo, Ming furniture) and a supplementary display of Islamic and Western calligraphy put together past Mr. Hearn, it was a quiet striking. A group of patron-collectors took find. The aureate age began. Mr. Hearn was part of its history.
The collectors were an extraordinary generational ensemble, led by C. Douglas Dillon, who was president of the museum'southward lath of trustees at the time. Mr. Dillon took it equally a personal brief to support Asia at the Met. He bought art in bulk for the collection, starting, in 1973, with 25 pieces sold by the renowned connoisseur C. C. Wang. And he gave money to build new galleries to show it.
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New galleries prompted more donations. John M. Crawford Jr., who in the 1950s had formed what Mr. Hearn called the about important private ensemble of Chinese painting and calligraphy in the West, lived virtually across the street from the museum, simply had never exhibited his art there.
"When the Crawford collection was shown in New York in 1962," Mr. Hearn said, "it was at the Morgan Library. That's how out of it the Met was."
When the museum's Chinese painting galleries were finally finished in 1991, Mr. Crawford was invited to accept a await. "At concluding yous take a space big enough to hold my collection," he said, and gave the Met everything.
Mr. Hearn speaks with a still-astonished delight about such acts of largess, and he played a part in some of them. In the late '70s, he and Mr. Fong conceived the idea of creating an indoor version of a Chinese scholar's garden every bit a centerpiece for the expanding Asian galleries. Mr. Hearn clambered up into a crawl space and discovered a covered-upwardly skylight. That was what they needed, and the garden plans seemed fix until Thomas Hoving, the museum's director, said no: the museum had simply installed a million dollars worth of air-conditioning ducts up there. Aught could be changed.
At that point, Mr. Fong deployed a surreptitious weapon: Brooke Astor, a Met trustee, who as a child spent time in Beijing. When Mr. Hoving explained to her the impossibility of moving the ducts, her reply was simple: "Well, how much would it price?" The skylight was before long exposed, and 26 Chinese craftsmen, accompanied by a personal cook, were imported from the garden city of Suzhou to create the Astor Court.
One by one, the galleries that now class the Asian wing — China, Nihon, Bharat and Southeast Asia, Korea — were carved out and built in what Mr. Watt refers to as "the terminal major event in the development of the museum." Mr. Hearn, despite time out for language and graduate school, was there for every step.
"It took 27 years," he said. "Now we have the well-nigh comprehensive collection of Asian art anywhere."
The flush moment has passed. Collection-building is done. Prices are out of sight. "Until the early 1980s no Chinese painting had sold on the auction market for more $100,000," Mr. Hearn said. "Before that, in the 1960s, y'all could buy paintings for a couple of thousand dollars." He remembered Mr. Dillon exclaiming that for the price of one Impressionist landscape he could build a whole Chinese collection.
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Today, Mr. Hearn said, even if something important were to come up for sale, "it'south unlikely we'll exist able to afford it." But he sees the problem as a full general one. "I think of the Getty. How can they e'er match what East Coast museums have in European painting? It'southward the wrong fourth dimension." At that place may never again by a right one.
One yet-viable buying area is contemporary art, and it'south very much on Mr. Hearn'southward mind. "China, Nihon, Korea, India, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam — all these places are creating wonderful things, and at the Met nosotros accept the opportunity to requite this work an historical context." He already introduced contemporary photography into the Chinese painting galleries a couple of years agone; now he plans to add video.
Within the all the same deeply conservative field of Chinese art history, these are radical steps. But they are of a slice with the impression he gives of wanting to alter audition expectations of what exhibitions tin be. "The big blockbusters aren't going to go away," he said. But what they purchase in box-office figures, they cost in fourth dimension, cash and nerves. The Met'southward big Chinese offer last year, "The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty," organized past Mr. Watt, was a cliffhanger, with the delivery of some items coming correct down to the wire.
The general rule is that if you desire to infringe from more than two Chinese museums for a show, all the loans accept to be negotiated through that government's Cultural Relics Agency. In the past, that bureau could need whatever information technology wanted from provincial museums, without necessarily sharing paid loan fees, and sometimes without returning objects.
With the economic boom of contempo years, however, provincial museums have become powerful entities, largely independent of central authorization. Many treat their art as a meal ticket and drive tough bargains to extract money, and for fringe benefits like courier trips abroad, in commutation for loans.
Ane way to finesse the difficulties is to deal with only one Chinese museum at a fourth dimension. China Institute Gallery in Manhattan bases most of its shows on single museum collections, equally in its current exhibition of bronzes from the Hunan Provincial Museum. Past dissimilarity, the Met's Yuan exhibition had objects from 27 Chinese lenders, some of whom held back while request, "What'southward in information technology for me?"
I mutual mode for all museums to manage expenses is through quid pro quo exchanges of loans: you transport your Picasso, I'll send my van Gogh. But at this bespeak, most provincial museums in Mainland china, while impressive-looking, are ill-equipped with protective resources like climate control, making reciprocal loans inadvisable.
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Mr. Hearn expects that continuing archaeological discoveries in Mainland china volition nonetheless give the W spectacular scholarly shows, focused on individual sites. But, like many curators and administrators now, he's beating the drum for small permanent collection shows that may or may not contain some choice loans. And he envisions those shows irresolute frequently.
"In Asian art, we're used to rotating our collections of Chinese and Japanese paintings and Indian miniatures all the time," he said. With wall space at a premium — the Met is pretty much maxed out — and acquisitions notwithstanding coming in, he suspects that the European painting galleries will want to start regularly irresolute what's on view, perhaps taking the Chinese painting gallery rotations, which for years Mr. Hearn has turned into unfailingly interesting theme shows, as a model.
Of course, the major rotation in the Asian department at the moment is its leadership. Every bit of this summertime, Mr. Watt, with a series of superb historical shows at the Met behind him, will settle down to a long-planned stretch of reading and enquiry. For Mr. Hearn, the heat is already on. A acme priority will be to hire some new staff members, including a curator to supercede himself, though this will have time equally, he said, there aren't a lot of candidates effectually.
"There'due south been a existent shift in the field, and I think information technology is across the board in art history. We're all seeing that immature students are more and more interested exclusively in contemporary. Annihilation that'south quondam is a hard sell." For non-Westerners, languages are a barrier. And he says that people are interested in the kind of high-paying jobs available in areas of gimmicky art. "Art history is not known for its big salaries," he said.
And despite the anticipated effects of the multicultural surge of the '80s and '90s, and of the global presence of Asia now, for many Westerners, Asian art is still an cabalistic bailiwick to pursue.
"How many places tin can you lot written report Indian art? Or Korean art?," Mr. Hearn asked. "There are more programs for Chinese art, but my colleagues are telling me that although at that place's an uptick in Chinese-born applicants, over all in that location are fewer and fewer graduate students. The number of talented people who are in the field for the futurity is diminishing."
What has not macerated — though surely it has been tested — is the optimism and cover of the excitements of newness that he brought to the field 40 years ago. Both he and Mr. Watt speak of fine art history as a process of connecting, over time and space, people and cultures who would otherwise never know that they were related, were family. A universalist institution like the Met gives those links visual form. It's also a place where happenstance is destiny.
"I discovered Asian fine art by walking through a museum," Mr. Hearn said. "I think people go to Asian museum considering they want to see Asian art. Just I'm counting on someone coming into the Met because he wants to see Greek or Egyptian sculpture, and getting lost, and finding himself in the Indian painting gallery and thinking, 'What's this?' " Connection made. Big change.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/arts/design/at-met-new-leadership-and-direction-for-asian-art.html
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