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네이버 공유 카카오 공유 트위터 공유 페이스북 공유

Korean Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Minnesota's love affair with Asian art began as early as 1878 when the American designer and interior decorator John S. Bradstreet helped organize one of the Minneapolis' first Asian art exhibitions. Held in the Brigham House, the show displayed mostly European oil paintings and watercolors, but also featured an "Oriental" room with Asian works of art. Following the Arts and Crafts Movement's mania for things Asian, Bradstreet traveled regularly to China, Japan, and Korea, bringing back a wide range of art s, including sculpture, ceramics, woodblock prints, bronze altar vessels, and architectural elements, which he sold to well-heeled Minneapolitans. At the height of his career, Bradstreet owned and operated a grand studio-showroom called Crafthouse, where he employed a team of carpenters to produce his Asian-inspired designs. When he died in 1914, Bradstreet bequeathed his personal collection of Asian art to the recently constructed the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

From this early beginning, the Institute's collection of Asian art has grown to more than 9,500 s representing 17 Asian cultures. As is the case with most American public museums, the early collections were comprised of s initially amassed by private collectors who then donated them to the museum. Augustus L. Searle (1863-1955), whose Searle Grain Company owned hundreds of grain elevators in northern Minnesota and Canada in the 1910s and 1920s, collected 18th century Chinese jade, carved rhinoceros horn cups, snuff bottles, and gold works. By 1928, Searle had donated over 300 s to the museum.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Alfred F. Pillsbury (1876-1950), a member of one of Minnesota's great milling families, collected ancient Chinese jades and bronzes, as well as Qing dynasty monochrome porcelains and Islamic pottery. Prior to his death in 1950, he bequeathed over 900 s to the museum. Thomas Barlow Walker, who made his fortune in logging and lumber, first collected Western prints and paintings, but eventually accumulated nearly 1,000 Asian art s, including many spectacular examples of Chinese jade. In 1880, Walker built a small gallery next to his house where he staged exhibitions - free and open to the public - featuring s from his collection. He established a separate museum called the Walker Art Center in 1927, a year before his death. As the Walker Art Center changed its focus to contemporary art, most of Walker's jade collection was sent to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts on extended loan.

In 1992, these s became part of the museum's permanent collection. While the Chinese collections grew substantially through the generosity of these three early collectors - Searle, Pillsbury, and Walker - the Korean and Japanese collections lacked a major patron until the 1970s. Politics and humility conspired to keep the first great patron of Korean and Japanese art at the Institute, Louis W. Hill, Jr. (1902-95), from being better known in that capacity. The grandson of the railway and lumber baron James J. Hill, he lived in St. Paul, where he worked as president of First National Bank while overseeing the Hill family's charitable foundations. Hill also served in the Minnesota House of Representatives between 1937 and 1951. His generosity toward the Institute, however, was virtually unknown during his lifetime. He insisted on absolute anonymity, to the point of forbidding mention of his name, even among museum trustees. He also demanded that the director cease sending him letters acknowledging his gifts to the museum. In truth, he was an intensely private individual with a clear sense of philanthropy and public duty. As a third-generation St. Paulite, he also did not want it known that he was patronizing a museum in the neighboring city of Minneapolis.

It is likely that Louis Hill Jr. developed his appreciation for Korean art while visiting the Japanese art dealer Hisazo Nagatani in Chicago. During the 1970s, Hill donated nearly 40 Korean s to the museum, many of which he originally purchased from Nagatani. Some of these s are now highlights of the Institute's Korean collection. A Silla period standing gilt bronze Buddha, for instance, is a noteworthy example of early Buddhist art in Korea (Plate 1). Because such small, votive bronzes were so portable, they played an important role in the transmission of iconography and style from China to Korea, and onto Japan.

Hill also donated many examples of Korean ceramics. Two of the most notable pieces include a Goryeo dynasty celadon ewer (Plate 2) and a buncheong ware bowl (Plate 3). The ewer's shape is reminiscent of a persimmon, with the gently undulating mouth suggesting the fruit's stem cap. The body of the ewer is luxuriously covered with beautiful designs of lotus leaves and flowers. Goryeo craftsmen skillfully carved the surface of the clay in such a manner as to produce delicate gradations of celadon green.

In contrast to the refinement of this ewer, Hill also donated a robust buncheong bowl. This example shows a dense design of "rope patterns" on the interior walls of the bowl, and large chrysanthemum patterns in the well. The potter's casual (and likely rapid) application of stamped designs contrasts nicely with his obvious skill at inlay, which resulted in astonishingly consistent and crisp porcelain patterns against the gray stoneware body.

Perhaps the most famous ceramic given to the museum by Louis Hill is a Joseon period maebyeong jar with a spirited dragon painted in underglaze iron (Plate 4). Typical of this type of ware, the potter exercised great freedom in rendering the dragon, which has a comically long snout, large doe eyes, and abstractly applied dabs of pigment for its scales. The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright once owned this jar and used it to decorate his suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York.

While these gifts entered the museum's collection in the 1970s, they languished in storage until the early 1990s when the museum hired its first curator for Korean and Japanese art. Even so, lack of gallery space limited the Korean display to a single case. In 1998, the museum embarked on a substantial building and remodeling program. The Asian galleries were expanded from three rooms to 22. In addition to expanded displays of Chinese and Japanese art, several new galleries were d to permanently exhibit the museum's collections of Islamic, Himalayan, S.E. Asian, and Korean art.

About a year prior to the opening of the new Korean gallery, the museum's first true champion of Korean art emerged from the local business community. Fredrick B. Wells III was a member of one of the United States' largest grain conglomerates, F. H. Peavey Company, based in Minneapolis. As the young vice-president for Peavey's International Development Division, Wells traveled often to Seoul in the early 1970s, helping to revitalize the animal-feed industry after the Korean War. At that time he fell in love with the Korean people, their history, and culture. He was particularly impressed to find that Korean art museums always were crowded with Korean families. He discovered that Korean parents and grandparents firmly believed that an awareness of - and pride in - their own cultural achievements was an important part of every child's education. As a tribute to this experience, and to help Americans better understand the beauty and uniqueness of Korean art, Fred Wells was passionate about building the museum's collection. Traveling to New York and Tokyo with the curator, he helped the museum acquire many important s in the year leading up to the opening of the Korean gallery in 1998.

A delicate round-bottomed jar with horn-shaped handles is the oldest acquired by Wells for the museum (Plate 5). This thin-walled jar is an early example of wheel-turned pottery in Korea, and represents significant advancement over the rough, coil-built vessels produced earlier. Such jars with flaring necks, round bottoms, and distinctive "ox horn" handles have been discovered among funerary remains. In contrast, a particularly impressive storage jar, from the Gaya confederation of kingdoms in the 5th century (Plate 6), illustrates early Korean potters' ability to large jars and fire them to watertight stoneware hardness - a technical advancement that Korean potters introduced to Japan around the time this vessel was d.

Other significant gifts from Frederick Wells include a magnificent Goryeo-era double gourd ewer (Plate 7). While the beautifully formed, undecorated shape was influenced by Chinese imperial Ru ware, the thinner, more translucent blue-green glaze is an excellent example of the luminous celadon glaze developed by Goryeo potters. Such wares became famous throughout Asia, and even prompted one Chinese official to proclaim that the "secret color" of the Goryeo celadon was "first under Heaven." While Wells was fond of Korean celadon, he also understood and admired the vigor of buncheong ware, particularly those pieces with spontaneously painted designs. He was delighted to discover a buncheong rice-bale-shaped bottle (Plate 8) with a boldly painted design of arrowhead leaves, probably produced in the Gaeryong Mountains in the 15th century. The vessel's unusual shape and decorative technique provides museum visitors with an interesting contrast to the stamped and carved buncheong bowl mentioned earlier.

Prior to his interest in Korean ceramics, Frederick Wells had collected Chinese wares, and so he was confident in his "eye" for quality. He had less experience, however, when it came to Korean painting. Nevertheless, he understood the importance of representing this aspect of Korean artistic in the museum's collection and was determined to add at least a few examples. Perhaps the most impressive painting that he helped the museum acquire is a ten-panel folding screen representing a birthday banquet for the famous Chinese general Guo Ziyi (697-781; Plate 9). Over the course of his long and distinguished military career, Guo served under four emperors, and was thus considered a paragon of Confucian virtue, having devoted his entire life to his lord and country. Guo became a stock theme among Chinese painters and, during the Joseon period, Korean artists adopted the subject, producing many screens to decorate the palaces and homes of high-ranking Korean aristocrats.

When Fredrick Wells passed away in 2005, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts lost a great friend and longtime patron who had significantly contributed to building the museum's Korean art collection. The museum remains committed to maintaining a permanent gallery of Korean art and plans to add important examples as they become available on the art market, thus building on the foundations provided by its generous donors.

He was particularly impressed to find that Korean art museums always were crowded with Korean families. He discovered that Korean parents and grandparents firmly believed that an awareness of - and pride in - their own cultural achievements was an important part of every child's education. As a tribute to this experience, and to help Americans better understand the beauty and uniqueness of Korean art, Fred Wells was passionate about building the museum's collection.

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