NEW YORK – Thomas P. Campbell, director and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced today that the museum has received four landmark gifts of art and funding from longtime donors and supporters, in celebration of the centennial of its Department of Asian Art.
These transformative gifts include nearly 1,300 Asian works of art from Florence and Herbert Irving; more than 300 Japanese and Korean masterworks and a $12.5 million endowment to fund Japanese art initiatives from the collection of Mary Griggs Burke; $15 million from Oscar L. Tang for new curatorial and conservation staff appointments and programming; and $4 million from Mary Wallach to endow a conservatorship of Japanese painting.
Campbell also announced the launch of a $70 million fundraising initiative to enhance the department’s staff, programs, collections, and facilities. Nearly half of that goal has already been achieved through the gifts from Oscar L. Tang, Mary Griggs Burke, and Mary Wallach.
Throughout its centennial year, the Department of Asian Art will present 19 exhibitions and installations that chronicle the changing tastes, benefactions and purchases that have contributed to the formation of the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of Asian art, one of the most comprehensive in the world.
The gift presented to the Metropolitan Museum this month by Florence and Herbert Irving, who have been avid collectors of Asian art for more than 50 years, is a group of 1,277 works of art from their collection. The Irvings’ gift encompasses all of the major cultures of East and South Asia and virtually every medium explored by Asian craftsmen over five millennia. Areas of particular strength are Chinese, Japanese and Korean lacquers, South Asian sculpture, Chinese jades and hardstones, scholars’ objects of ivory, rhino horn, wood, metalwork and bamboo, Japanese ceramics, and Chinese and Japanese painting. Taken together, this transformative gift fills gaps and adds to the Met’s existing strengths in ways that will further elevate the Museum’s stature as one of the world’s premier collections of Asian art.
The Irvings have been major supporters of the Met’s Department of Asian Art for more than 25 years. In addition to having already donated 19 major works, they have been major funders of galleries. In April 1994, the Florence and Herbert Irving Galleries for South and Southeast Asian Art opened to the public, due to their support. This suite of 20 galleries covering 13,500 square feet presents more than 800 works of art, including a number of Irving gifts. In recognition of their ongoing generosity to the department, the entire Fifth Avenue Asian wing on the second floor of the museum was named the Florence and Herbert Irving Asian Wing in 2004.
The Metropolitan Museum and Minneapolis Institute of Arts announced jointly today that they are both recipients of transformative bequests of masterworks of Japanese art from the Mary Griggs Burke Collection. With objects spanning more than five millennia, the collection is widely regarded as the finest private collection of Japanese art outside Japan.
Burke (1916-2012), who assembled her formidable collection of East Asian art over five decades, announced in 2006 that she would bequeath her Japanese and a smaller collection of Korean works to the two institutions. Overall the Mary Griggs Burke Collection comprises around 1,000 works in various media—more than 850 Japanese works, some 90 Korean pieces, and about 65 Chinese works of art. The core of the collection is Japanese painting, consisting of 450 works in screen, hanging scroll, handscroll, and album formats, and around 40 works of Japanese calligraphy, as well as a small number of ukiyo-e prints and woodblock printed illustrated books. Burke’s discerning collecting interests also extended to Buddhist and Shinto statuary, ceramics and lacquerware.
In addition, each institution will receive a generous cash endowment of $12.5 million, to be used primarily for the purchase of Japanese art and also for the funding of exhibitions, programming and fellowships.
The Met’s collection of early medieval Buddhist art will be greatly enhanced by powerful sculptures of the Buddhist protective deity Fudō Myōō and the bodhisattva Jizō by the master sculptor Kaikei (active 1185–1223). Ink paintings of the Muromachi period (1391–1573)—an area of particular strength within the Burke Collection—is represented by Sesson Shūkei’s (1504–89?) deftly brushed Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove.
Coinciding with the official acceptance of the bequest, on March 10, the Met’s Board of Trustees named John T. Carpenter the Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese art.
A major exhibition of works of art from the bequest to the Metropolitan Museum, “Celebrating the Arts of Japan: The Mary Griggs Burke Collection,” will be on view at the Met from Oct. 20 through July 31, 2016. The exhibition will showcase more than 150 masterpieces—including paintings, sculpture, ceramics, calligraphy, lacquerware and ukiyo-e prints—that reveal the remarkable range and quality of Burke’s activities as a collector over the course of nearly 50 years.
Met Trustee Emeritus and Benefactor Oscar L. Tang—who has been a dedicated major supporter of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Asian Art since 1984—has given $15 million to establish an endowment fund in support of new curatorial and conservation staff appointments and programming, as well as the continued growth of the department, on the occasion of its centenary.
A Met volunteer specializing in Japanese art since 1987, Mary Wallach donated $4 million in late 2014 to endow the new position of Mary and James Wallach Family Conservator of Japanese Art.