Man Sleeping on a Bamboo Couch Paint Metropolitan Museum of Art
Museums Special Section | Fine art
At Met, New Leadership (and Direction) for Asian Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Asian art galleries are some of the most reposeful spaces in New York City. It's difficult to imagine that they were banged into identify, room by room, from practically zippo over the last 40 years, though they were. Or that they continue to mirror changing times, a changing museum and a changing Asia, though they practise.
A few months from now they'll exist the scene of another modify, a shift in stewardship, when the museum's longtime curator of Chinese fine art, Maxwell One thousand. Hearn, replaces James C. Y. Watt every bit head of the Asian art department.
Mr. Watt, 74, who was raised in Hong Kong and had a classical Chinese scholar'southward at-habitation instruction, came to the Met as a curator from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1985 and has led the department for the last ten years.
Mr. Hearn — everyone calls him Mike — is 61 and a native of Salt Lake City. 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 take hold of-up act of acquisition, construction and exhibition-making on a grand scale.
From the early 1970s to the late '90s, under the direction of the art historian Wen Fong, who was Mr. Hearn'south mentor, a room of sculpture gradually and laboriously turned into fifty galleries. Cheers to the beneficence of a generation of gift-giving New York collectors, a bunch of pots became many thousands of objects representing every major Asian culture. And thank you to the prestige its new Asian wing brought, the Met got some huge Asian loan shows.
Prototype
Both Mr. Hearn and Mr. Watt refer to the period as a gilt age. And both acknowledge that it is over.
Private collections of the kind that came to the Met can no longer be assembled in the Westward. Red china and India, now economical colossi, take a corner on the market. Museum loans from Asia are increasingly catchy to negotiate, and to pay for, now that the Met, like about 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 misreckoning issues to contemplate when he takes over in July.
But at to the lowest degree he will hit the ground running. He knows his department inside out. The Met is home; he grew up in information technology. And he came to information technology through a kind of on-the-road Kerouacian saga of timing and luck that brought him into early contact with some of the summit fine art historians of the day, and that left him both open to newness and optimistic of the futurity.
His introduction to Asian art was entirely accidental. He entered Yale in 1967, intending to report business organization. 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 effectually and ended up in the Chinese collection. Something clicked.
"I don't remember an individual piece I saw," he said in a recent interview. "Simply I came out thinking, 'I know nothing about this world.' "And he wanted to know more.
Back at Yale he took courses in Chinese art with the scholar Richard Barnhart. In his junior twelvemonth he switched his major to art history and wrote an honors paper on Chinese scholar gardens. Driving dorsum to Utah subsequently graduation he stopped at the Nelson-Atkins, which had go a place of pilgrimage in his heed. He arrived on a Mon; the museum was closed. He figured he'd sleep overnight in his car, but on a whim walked around to the back of the museum and knocked on a door.
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"What'south your business?" a voice from inside asked. He said he was a student and wanted to look at Chinese art. The door opened. Non only was he admitted, but he was also escorted to the office of the museum'due south director, Laurence Sickman, a Chinese 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 dorsum to his house to see his scholar'due south garden, and advised him to go to Taiwan and acquire 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 piece of work. When an invitation to meet came, he drove back Due east from Indiana, where he had a summer job on a farm. Mr. Fong, dressed in tennis whites, talked with him for half an hour, and then asked, "How would yous similar to work at the Metropolitan Museum?" He had but been hired past the Met with the championship of special consultant, and a mandate to revivify a tiny Asian art section that had been languishing for decades.
Mr. Hearn drove the long drive dorsum to Salt Lake City, packed his things, and headed to New York. He had no place to alive yet, so Mr. Fong arranged for him to crash for a night or ii with a friend in the Westward Village. Mr. Fong'southward friend was John B. Elliott, a major collector of Chinese art, who was at that betoken amassing fabulous examples of painting and calligraphy.
A dark or two 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 1 mean solar day a week and education at Princeton the residual — plunged Mr. Hearn into the museum world head-get-go.
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's single special exhibition gallery, referred to in-firm as "the bowling alley" or "the airplane hanger." (South and Southeast Asian galleries occupy the space now.)
In that location was contest for the space. Mr. Hearn recalled that "1 curator tried to accept the calligraphy shunted off to the Peachy Balcony." But the show went on. Cleanly installed simply with decorative touches (bamboo, Ming furniture) and a supplementary display of Islamic and Western calligraphy put together past Mr. Hearn, information technology was a quiet hit. A grouping of patron-collectors took observe. The gilt age began. Mr. Hearn was part of its history.
The collectors were an extraordinary generational ensemble, led past C. Douglas Dillon, who was president of the museum'southward board of trustees at the time. Mr. Dillon took it as a personal brief to support Asia at the Met. He bought fine 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 prove 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 most important private ensemble of Chinese painting and calligraphy in the West, lived virtually across the street from the museum, only had never exhibited his art there.
"When the Crawford drove was shown in New York in 1962," Mr. Hearn said, "it was at the Morgan Library. That's how out of information technology the Met was."
When the museum'south Chinese painting galleries were finally finished in 1991, Mr. Crawford was invited to accept a expect. "At last you have a infinite big plenty to agree my collection," he said, and gave the Met everything.
Mr. Hearn speaks with a still-astonished please most such acts of largess, and he played a office in some of them. In the late '70s, he and Mr. Fong conceived the thought of creating an indoor version of a Chinese scholar'due south garden as a centerpiece for the expanding Asian galleries. Mr. Hearn clambered upwardly into a clamber space and discovered a covered-upward skylight. That was what they needed, and the garden plans seemed gear up until Thomas Hoving, the museum's director, said no: the museum had just installed a million dollars worth of air-conditioning ducts up there. Nothing could be changed.
At that point, Mr. Fong deployed a secret weapon: Brooke Astor, a Met trustee, who as a kid spent time in Beijing. When Mr. Hoving explained to her the impossibility of moving the ducts, her respond was elementary: "Well, how much would it cost?" The skylight was soon exposed, and 26 Chinese craftsmen, accompanied by a personal cook, were imported from the garden urban center of Suzhou to create the Astor Court.
I by ane, the galleries that now form the Asian wing — Mainland china, Nihon, India and Southeast Asia, Korea — were carved out and congenital in what Mr. Watt refers to as "the last major consequence in the development of the museum." Mr. Hearn, despite fourth dimension out for language and graduate school, was there for every step.
"It took 27 years," he said. "At present we take the near comprehensive collection of Asian art anywhere."
The affluent moment has passed. Collection-building is washed. Prices are out of sight. "Until the early 1980s no Chinese painting had sold on the auction market for more than $100,000," Mr. Hearn said. "Before that, in the 1960s, yous could buy paintings for a couple of thousand dollars." He remembered Mr. Dillon exclaiming that for the price of one Impressionist mural he could build a whole Chinese collection.
Prototype
Today, Mr. Hearn said, even if something important were to come up up for sale, "it'south unlikely we'll exist able to afford it." Just he sees the trouble as a general one. "I recollect of the Getty. How tin can they ever lucifer what East Coast museums have in European painting? It's the wrong time." There may never again by a right one.
One still-viable buying area is contemporary fine art, and it'southward very much on Mr. Hearn'south heed. "China, Japan, Korea, India, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam — all these places are creating wonderful things, and at the Met we have the opportunity to give this piece of work an historical context." He already introduced contemporary photography into the Chinese painting galleries a couple of years ago; now he plans to add video.
Within the still deeply conservative field of Chinese art history, these are radical steps. Only they are of a piece with the impression he gives of wanting to modify audience expectations of what exhibitions tin can exist. "The large blockbusters aren't going to go away," he said. Only what they buy in box-role figures, they cost in time, cash and fretfulness. The Met'south big Chinese offering terminal year, "The Earth of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty," organized by Mr. Watt, was a bewilderment, with the delivery of some items coming right down to the wire.
The general rule is that if you want to borrow from more than than two Chinese museums for a evidence, all the loans have to be negotiated through that government's Cultural Relics Agency. In the past, that agency could demand whatever it wanted from provincial museums, without necessarily sharing paid loan fees, and sometimes without returning objects.
With the economic boom of recent years, withal, provincial museums have become powerful entities, largely independent of key potency. Many care for their fine art as a meal ticket and drive tough bargains to extract coin, and for fringe benefits similar courier trips abroad, in exchange for loans.
One mode to finesse the difficulties is to deal with only i Chinese museum at a time. China Plant Gallery in Manhattan bases almost of its shows on unmarried museum collections, every bit in its electric current exhibition of bronzes from the Hunan Provincial Museum. By contrast, the Met's Yuan exhibition had objects from 27 Chinese lenders, some of whom held dorsum while asking, "What's in information technology for me?"
One common way for all museums to manage expenses is through quid pro quo exchanges of loans: you transport your Picasso, I'll send my van Gogh. Merely at this signal, about provincial museums in China, while impressive-looking, are sick-equipped with protective resource like climate control, making reciprocal loans inadvisable.
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Mr. Hearn expects that continuing archaeological discoveries in China will nonetheless requite the West spectacular scholarly shows, focused on individual sites. Just, like many curators and administrators now, he's chirapsia the drum for small permanent collection shows that may or may not comprise some choice loans. And he envisions those shows changing frequently.
"In Asian fine art, we're used to rotating our collections of Chinese and Japanese paintings and Indian miniatures all the fourth dimension," he said. With wall infinite at a premium — the Met is pretty much maxed out — and acquisitions notwithstanding coming in, he suspects that the European painting galleries will desire to commencement 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. Equally of this summer, 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 research. For Mr. Hearn, the heat is already on. A summit priority will be to hire some new staff members, including a curator to replace himself, though this will take time equally, he said, in that location aren't a lot of candidates around.
"There's been a existent shift in the field, and I think it is across the board in fine art history. We're all seeing that young students are more than and more interested exclusively in contemporary. Anything that'due south old is a hard sell." For non-Westerners, languages are a bulwark. And he says that people are interested in the kind of high-paying jobs available in areas of contemporary art. "Art history is not known for its big salaries," he said.
And despite the predictable furnishings 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 arcane subject to pursue.
"How many places tin can yous report Indian art? Or Korean art?," Mr. Hearn asked. "At that place are more programs for Chinese art, simply my colleagues are telling me that although there'due south an uptick in Chinese-born applicants, over all there are fewer and fewer graduate students. The number of talented people who are in the field for the futurity is diminishing."
What has non diminished — though surely it has been tested — is the optimism and embrace of the excitements of newness that he brought to the field 40 years ago. Both he and Mr. Watt speak of art history equally 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 similar the Met gives those links visual form. It's also a place where happenstance is destiny.
"I discovered Asian art by walking through a museum," Mr. Hearn said. "I think people go to Asian museum because they want to see Asian art. Only I'yard counting on someone coming into the Met considering he wants to see Greek or Egyptian sculpture, and getting lost, and finding himself in the Indian painting gallery and thinking, 'What'due south this?' " Connexion 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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