The China Collectors

ChaPter Seventeen

The meT’s maraThon

america’s century-long museum boom has no equal else-where and is only partially matched by the post-2000 surge in museum construction in the People’s Republic of China

(as described in our epilogue). The ascent of the public art gallery peaked in 1900–50, when the social, cultural, and political elites in every self-respecting U.S. city gave birth altogether to more than 1,500 museums (mostly devoted to the fine arts, but including history and science mu-seums). As early as 1923 the French art dealer René Gimpel, while stop-ping in Toledo during a coast-to-coast tour, remarked in his diary that this devotion to art museums was “found throughout the United States, and gives an idea of the fervor that convulsed the Middle Ages when its churches were erected.” Thirty-three years later, another French visitor, then minister of culture André Malraux, was asked whether he agreed with Rebecca West that America’s cathedrals were her railway stations. “No,” he responded, “her cathedrals are her museums.”

The mother church in this Great Awakening was, and remains, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Founded in 1870, the Met long ago be-came the most popular tourist destination in New York City, nowadays drawing upward of six million visitors annually. The museum’s impressive growth was foreseen by Henry James during his American visit in 1905, the novelist’s first extended homeward journey since 1883. By 1905, the Met no longer occupied an eccentric mansion on West Fourteenth Street but had moved grandly uptown to Fifth Avenue and Central Park. “It is a palace of art, truly that sits on the edge of the Park,” James observed

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in The American Scene. Here “[a]cquisition, if need be on the highest terms,” could bask “in a climate it has never before enjoyed.” Here money was in the air, “ever so much money,” available for “all the most exquisite things,” James wrote, adding with qualified approbation, “In short, the Museum was going to be great.”

Yet initially, the arts of Asia were at best a sideshow at the Metropoli-tan. True, the museum was pleased to exhibit Chinese porcelains from the Benjamin Altman and J. Pierpont Morgan collections, but there was no department of Far Eastern art until 1915. That same year, the Morgan trove vanished when the deceased financier failed to leave his porcelains to the Met, even though he had been its president for a decade. The Great War then provided an unexpected opening for a change of course. Spurred in part by rivalry with Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which had taken a commanding lead in this field, the Met’s trustees had for years sought to expand the Asian collection. The problem was to find a recognized authority to launch the Met’s new department. Now such a paragon became available: Sigisbert Chrétien Bosch Reitz, an outstand-ing Dutch scholar whose brother was chamberlain to Queen Wilhelmina (a connection that didn’t hurt the Met).

Already known in Munich and Paris as both a scholar and an ac-complished painter, Bosch Reitz (or, as we shall alternatively call him, BR) early on was fascinated by East Asian art. He studied major museum collections in Europe and spent a year delving more deeply into Chinese and Japanese art. In 1914, the Asia-smitten Hollander was engaged by the Louvre to care for its Grandidier collection of Far Eastern art, reputedly among the best in the West. (It is now housed in the Musée Guimet.) But with the outbreak of the European war, so The New York Times reported, “the French authorities found this inexpedient,” and BR instead crossed the Atlantic to study major American collections (the Netherlands being neutral during the Great War). The Metropolitan opportunely invited him to become founding director of its first Department of Arts of the Far East, centering on China and Japan but also exhibiting the allied arts of Korea and the Himalayas. Bosch Reitz immediately accepted, and his arrival at the Met in September 1915, as The Times noted, happened to coincide with the final sale of the Morgan porcelains, then a stellar attrac-tion at the museum, giving his department “an entirely new lease of life.”

From the first, BR impressed with his disciplined management skills, his exacting eye, and his obsession with order and cleanliness. He quickly earned the nickname “Old Dutch Cleanser” and sometimes ex-asperated his less-focused colleagues. Yet he strove to make sense of a


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very miscellaneous realm. Initially, Asian works had been consigned by the museum to the Department of Decorative Arts. As summarized by Calvin Tomkins, the Met’s unofficial historian, in 1915 the museum’s large and heterogeneous Asian collection consisted of “objects that had been accumulating since 1879, the year that several trustees and other subscribers banded together to buy a group of thirteen-hundred Chinese ceramics selected by Samuel P. Avery [a Met trustee, an engraver, a con-noisseur and dealer in art].”

Yet the most interesting segment of BR’s inherited legacy consisted of works purchased in China for the museum by John Calvin Ferguson, the Canadian-born Methodist missionary, scholar, Shanghai newspaper publisher, and Qing dynasty advisor. Ferguson at one point was the sec-retary of the Imperial Chinese Railway Administration, and along with his mandarin friend Duanfang, mixed his official duties with collecting art. In 1912, the Metropolitan shrewdly (so it proved) named Ferguson a fellow in perpetuity and provided him with a $25,000 budget as its pur-chasing agent. This was renewed a year later, with a matching additional credit.

Bronzes, jades, and, most notably, Ming and Qing paintings flowed to New York, where Ferguson’s purchases were received with more baffle-ment than praise. The Met’s new director, Edward Robinson, who had defected from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, termed the initial shipment “rather disappointing,” a judgment shared by William R. Valentiner, the new curator of decorative arts, just arrived from Berlin’s Kaiser Friedrich Museum. The shipment’s press reception ranged from negative to a yawn. The New York World ’s art critic singled out Chinese scroll paintings as “monotonous and nearly formless,” their colors faded and uninspiring; the author expressed surprise that “real money was paid” for what seemed to him a patently mediocre collection. For its part, The Times offered a poker-faced description of “an exhibition said to be the most noteworthy ever seen in this country,” bestowing praise only on the cases (yes!) en-closing scroll paintings and on a Chinese war drum.

plainly The problem Then,� as in years ahead, was that Oriental painting was being judged through Occidental eyes, and found wanting. (Who are those old men in nightgowns gazing at pines, rocks, and streams?) For his part, Ferguson strongly defended the quality and authenticity of the paintings he had purchased, which he maintained would put the Metropolitan ahead of its major rival: Boston. Prudently, the museum invited Charles Lang Freer, the country’s foremost collector


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of Asian art, to appraise Ferguson’s offerings, particularly the scrolls, before it ratified its purchasing agent’s choices. Creditably, Freer em-phasized at the outset that “the Occident contains no expert sufficiently informed to speak authoritatively on these matters.” He then recom-mended purchasing some, but not all, of the paintings, prompting Fer-guson’s counteroffer: pay $40,000 for Freer’s choices and take the rest as a gift. (Ferguson’s acumen is still in dispute, especially regarding paint-ings, one of many measures of the slippery slopes on these contested peaks.)

Overall, the Met’s new Department of Far Eastern Art acquired a solid footing under its founding curator, even though he had but one as-sistant and limited funds. Bosch Reitz weeded out dubious works from the museum’s miscellaneous holdings, and he took care to feature Fergu-son’s scrolls; he installed Benjamin Altman’s porcelain collection around the Met’s grand staircase, thereby honoring the donor’s stipulation that his Asian collection should be adjacent to the European artworks that formed his principal bequest. In a prescient but unconventional decision, BR purchased four hundred Japanese prints from Frank Lloyd Wright in 1918–22, a period when the architect was dogged by marital scandals. (During these lean years, Wright sold thousands of prints, netting him $300,000, in the estimate of Julia Meech, the Met’s associate curator of Japanese art.)

In one stunning acquisition, Bosch Reitz in 1926 secured for the mu-seum a life-size gilt-bronze sculpture of Buddha Maitreya, dated 486 CE (see color plates, figure 11), whose kindly demeanor, welcoming gesture, and impressive physique have riveted gazes ever since. It is the largest-known early Chinese bronze sculpture, and to define its identity we turn gratefully to the Met’s own exegesis: “He is worshiped both as a bodhisat-tva and a Buddha, for it is believed that once the current, cosmic era has destroyed itself, he will be reborn as the teaching Buddha of the next great era.” All this can be said because the statue’s identity is specified in a long inscription on the statue’s base, stating that it was made to honor Dowager Empress Wenming, who governed the Northern Wei dynasty during the last three decades of the fifth century CE.

As the Met’s holdings grew, BR’s mellow humor and disarming man-ner became renowned in New York’s club culture. “The only remem-bered instance of a lapse of tolerance on his part,” a fellow member of the Century Association recalled, “was a painful occasion when his own private brand of tea was not served to him as usual at the Club.” Upon his retirement in 1927, thirty members of the Century arranged a farewell


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dinner at a table “decorated with a miniature Dutch scene suggestive of the delightful little studio-house, with its minute tulip-garden, which he had prepared for himself in Laren [his home town] with its exquisite ori-ental porcelains and masterpieces of Dutch art.”

Yet the epitaph BR would likely have most prized was two words chanted years later by Cleveland’s Sherman Lee, renowned for his exact-ing eye. As recalled to us by James C. Watt, the emeritus curator of the Met’s Asian collection, he was once early in his career taken by Lee on a sweep through the department’s holdings. Sherman Lee then pointed at the very best works, including the tall bronze Buddha, and exclaimed, “Bosch Reitz!” “Bosch Reitz!” “Bosch Reitz!”

having reTired,� the Old Dutch Cleanser lived in Holland until his death in 1938 (after being struck by an automobile) at the age of seventy-eight. The actuarial figures are relevant, because his successor, Alan Priest, who was hired while still a graduate scholar at Harvard, in-sisted that he had a lifetime appointment. He angrily protested, brought suit, and even appealed to New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller, to intervene when the museum in 1963 instituted a mandatory retirement policy for staff professionals at age sixty-five. Both his litigation and ap-peal proved in vain but provided an appropriate finale to a curatorial career in which Alan Priest seemed to view himself as an operatic hero besieged by jealous knaves and dunces. Neither before nor after did the Met employ a curator as brashly egocentric (or, alternatively, “eccentric,” to use the milder euphemism favored by his superiors).

His self-dramatizing talents were evident from his boyhood in Fitch-burg, Massachusetts, where his father and grandfather had prospered in the lumber trade. A childhood friend, Joseph M. Upton, recalls the ado-lescent Alan arriving at a high school dance wearing a long curly blond wig, a black gown, a veil, and a peaked hat. Another longtime friend, C. Edward Wells, a dealer in Chinese antiquities, thus describes Priest’s demeanor during and after his Harvard years: “He was a slim young man with rather shaggy blonde hair. He walked with a gait somewhere between a slouch and a swagger,” with a manner that could be “discon-certingly abrupt.” He divided people into two camps: “on the one side were those people who were his friends and whom he believed could do no wrong”; on the other, those whom he disliked and “who could never do anything which could possibly please him.”

Priest came to the Metropolitan partly thanks to the warm com-mendation of Harvard’s Paul J. Sachs, whose “museum course” he had


The China Collectors

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