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The search for an object to purchase in honor of the soon-to-be-retired Curator of Asian Art began more than eight months before I arrived at the Brooklyn Museum, so I’m a little foggy on all the details of the earliest phases, but basically, the Curator and her supporters started contacting all the most respected dealers and auction houses they knew to see if they had anything really special available that might suit our purposes. Of course, no one said no. The local dealers said, “come on over, I have some wonderful things to show you.” The dealers in other countries sent images of their best holdings. The team was shown a wonderful array of objects, but as in any shopping experience, there were lots of pieces that weren’t quite right for the collection, some wonderful things we couldn’t afford, and a fair number of things that weren’t up to par.

Had we made these inquiries only fifteen years ago, we would have been offered a much richer variety of objects. Everybody knows that the supply of Asian antiquities has largely dried up, and dealers have been very hard pressed to find good material. That is, of course, kind of a good thing: it means that not as much material is being looted and/or exported illegally from Asia. And it means that a lot of the best material has already made its way into museum collections, where it is shared with the general public. But it also means that if one wants to buy something beautiful, one has to look a lot harder, and one has to sift through more B-level objects than one used to. And the A-level things are getting more expensive.

Shopping for antiquities is always a bit of a minefield, with issues of authenticity and provenance at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Nowadays, prices for Asian art are high enough that it’s worth it for skilled craftsmen to take the time to make good facsimiles. Certain types of Asian art have been forged for centuries. There are a lot of fakes out there. Scientific testing is a relatively good way to get answers about an object’s age, and the best dealers will have things tested before they offer them to their clients. Testing is most reliable for ceramics and some bronzes. But certain materials, most notably stone, are very difficult to test for age (one can analyze the surface of stone for patterns of wear and patination, but it’s an inexact science), and even testable objects can be faked, by creating a mostly new object using old materials.

People who spend a lot of time looking at specific types of Asian art develop a laundry list of telltale signs of forgery, as well as a strong sense of what an authentic object should look like. But the visual cues can be misleading, especially since the best forgers have been looking, too. Not everyone has the same laundry list, so there can be lots of debate, especially surrounding flashy new “finds.” (Some of this debate is clearly a matter of sour grapes: people who missed out on the find saying that it can’t possibly be real.) I’ve seen objects that I strongly suspected were forgeries at some of the best museums and galleries in the world, but I am well aware that my opinion of what is “fake looking” and what isn’t is just that: an opinion. Sometimes an object that looks slightly wrong is simply the authentic product of a provincial workshop or a quirky artist.

The other concern nowadays is provenance, or where the object has been. This is an issue that has received a lot of press lately, but the truth is that the vast majority of museums stepped up their level of caution long before the news coverage began. Certainly, most American museums once participated in phases of happy-go-lucky acquisitiveness, and they once subscribed to imperialist notions that Western collectors were “rescuing” artifacts from developing countries. They didn’t realize that they were doing something that future generations would consider inappropriate; they simply thought that they were bringing great art to the masses (and of course, they were…). But those days have been over for quite a while. Today, museums know that they must serve as models of good collecting behavior: if there’s nothing clean on the market, then you don’t buy anything, even if it would be fun to tout a new acquisition.

The very best way to determine that an object has not been stolen, looted, or removed illegally from its country of origin is to examine its history of ownership. For European and American paintings, that history can often be traced back to the moment when the artist made the painting. For antiquities and non-Western art of all types, the history is never that complete. The very best way to acquire an antiquity is to excavate it scientifically in a government-authorized dig. This is how many of the older Western museums acquired great collections of Egyptian and ancient Near Eastern art. But today, governments rarely allow removal of excavated artifacts to another country, and properly excavated materials almost never enter the market.

As much as it pains me to admit it, most antiquities that have entered the market (ever!) were unscientifically removed from the ground or from ruins, with no documentation of a find site or of the other objects that may have accompanied them. The responsible collector’s role today is to discourage further looting by refusing to buy anything that appears to have left its country of origin in recent years. The longer an object has been out of the ground, the better. Most countries passed laws in the early 1970s that made it illegal to export any object that was more than 100 years old. Museums aim to acquire objects that were exported before the laws were passed.

For museums, the ideal objects on the market are those that we know have been residing in a living-room or gallery since the mid-20th century or earlier. Ideally, one can get written documentation of the object’s recent history: the original bill of sale, maybe, or an old exhibition catalog with an image of the piece. Unfortunately for museums, this sort of documentation adds enormously to an object’s monetary value, and sometimes one sees rather ugly works of art selling for high prices because they have really good provenance. But aside from offering the collector a rare opportunity to acquire an antiquity without too great a dose of guilt, good provenance also offers a degree of reassurance about the authenticity of the object, because people weren’t making as many forgeries in the early 20th century as they are today (they were making some, but often not very well).

So all of this brings up the question of the provenance of our new Shiva. We were definitely looking for an object with an unimpeachable history of ownership, and the Shiva image satisfied our requirements. I can’t tell you the precise details, because some of the people involved are still living and have asked to remain anonymous. But suffice it to say that Brooklyn’s Shiva has provenance back to the mid-1960s, when a very well known Asian art collector purchased the piece from a reputable New York dealer. The bronze was in his collection for a short time, and then he gave it to a friend and colleague, who kept it in her apartment for more than 30 years before a prominent dealer finally talked her into selling it to the Brooklyn Museum.

Armed with the “wish list” and approximate budget I described in my previous entries, the team of curators and trustees who were interested in finding a suitable object to acquire in honor of Amy Poster went out into the market. Every field of art has a slightly different market, so here’s a brief run-down of what it looks like for Asian art (I’m mostly talking about antiquities here, although the market for contemporary Asian art is remarkably similar).

First, there are auction houses, mostly holding sales in New York, London, and Hong Kong, although there are some regional houses in Europe and other American cities that also get good things. These are pretty straight-forward selling venues, with prices made public and almost everything trading hands out in the open. One doesn’t need to be in the “in crowd” to buy at an auction, but there are some vaguely secretive elements, such as the reserve (or minimum acceptable price) for any given object and the fact that many buyers choose to bid by phone or through agents, so you don’t always know who’s buying what.

Museums often have trouble buying at auction because lots of people have to sign off on a museum purchase ahead of time and of course when you head into an auction you don’t know what the final price will be. Auction houses publish catalogs listing the objects in an upcoming sale about a month in advance, and then those objects are on display for about a week before the sale. That’s barely enough time for most curators to secure the permission they need before buying something. Savvy curators will often arrange to preview select objects from a sale long before the catalog is available. Really savvy curators will take a conservator along with them to see a potential purchase so he or she can assess its condition and look for tell-tale signs of reconstruction or forgery. Of course, if the auction is in a distant city, then going to see things in person is either costly or impossible. Sometimes, curators will ask someone they trust to check out the object for them, but that’s frankly a little nerve-wracking.

On those somewhat rare occasions when a museum pursues an object through auction, they often send an outside agent (maybe a dealer, maybe just a friend) to do the bidding. There are several reasons why they might want to do this, but the main concern is that if everyone sees a curator bidding on something, they might think “it must be a really good object because a museum wants it; maybe I should bid on it, too” and of course one doesn’t want too much competition. But whoever is doing the bidding on the museum’s behalf, they have been given strict instructions about the absolutely highest amount they can bid. I have lost objects by one bid because of these limits, but of course they’re necessary so the museum stays within its budget.

The other major source for Asian art is the many galleries and private dealers who are located all over the world, with particular concentrations in New York and London. Galleries have regular business hours when you can walk in for a casual browse. Private dealers are open by appointment only and are often located in less obvious places, like apartments. A particularly handy way for a novice to get to know these businesses is the pair of Asian art fairs that take place in New York in March, because the fairs attract dealers from all over the world. But there are plenty of galleries that are not represented at the fairs, so discovering them (and figuring out which ones are trustworthy) is often a matter of word of mouth.

Buying from a dealer or gallery can be much less stressful for curators because there is no set deadline for purchase and because one can negotiate and then set a price before presenting the potential acquisition to the administration for approval. It’s often possible to bring an object from a dealer into the Museum for in-depth examination by the curator and conservators prior to purchasing it, which is another luxury that auction houses cannot offer. Museums are famous for moving at a glacial pace in almost everything they do, and making acquisitions is no exception, but I do try to be considerate by pushing the decision process along: dealers have bills to pay like everyone else.

Whether you visit a gallery or a private dealer, there is a good chance that what you see when you visit is only a fraction of what they have in their inventory. And this is one of the major ways that these businesses differ from auction houses: dealers will often save special objects for their best clients. I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen a fabulous object in a collector’s home and wondered “where did they find THAT?” only to be told that they got it recently from a well-known dealer who never showed it to anyone else.

The bad news for curators is that most of us can’t afford to be regular or top-dollar customers, so we are often shown things after they’ve been passed by private collectors. The good news for curators is that dealers like to see their objects go to museums. And this is another way that a wish list can help a curator. If you tell a dealer that your museum is looking for a really nice Chinese Buddhist sculpture, then there’s a much better chance that they will contact you as soon as they have one. Sometimes they even contact you before they have it, saying “I think I can get a collector to part with this, if you think the Museum might be interested.” And this is where dealers can be your greatest allies when searching for an acquisition: they have seen more objects than any of us, and they’ve made careful note of where those objects were, how much they sold for, and how willing the current owners might be to sell.

It turns out that we found our Shiva through just such assistance from a dealer, but more on that front later…

I have been discussing the process of acquiring a new masterpiece for the collection, and in my first installment, I introduced the object, a bronze image of Shiva from southern India. This sculpture was cast by the master artisans who created numerous temple icons in bronze under the patronage of the Chola dynasty, which ruled southern India from the 9th through the 13th century. In my previous entry, I noted that a Chola-period bronze was one of the types of objects we were targeting for the purchase we hoped to make in honor of my predecessor.

Chola bronzes have long been considered the apex of Indian sculptural achievement. These images feature outrageously sensuous figures, with soft, curving bodies and long, languorous limbs, usually only minimally clothed but with plenty of jewelry that drapes to accentuate the contours of the torso. The males have impossibly broad shoulders; the females have enormous round breasts. They don’t look like real people, but they’re not supposed to: they’re gods, and as such, they are supposed to be more beautiful, more relaxed, and more powerful than any human could ever be. To see what I’m talking about, please have a look at our image from behind.

Shiva as Chandrashekhara, view of reverse. Southern India, Chola period, c. 970 A.D. Bronze. Height 25 inches. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Asian Art Council and other donors in honor of Amy G. Poster, 2007. 2.

Nice, huh?

Chola bronzes have been the darlings of collectors since they were first “discovered” by Western art historians in the late 19th century. As a result, most of the really great examples have already made their way to museums in India, Europe, and the U.S. (there are still quite a few being worshipped in temples in southern India as well). Any museum wishing to boast a good collection of Indian art should have at least one Chola-period bronze. Some museums have rather large holdings of these beautiful figures; the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena has dedicated an entire room to their exquisite collection of South Indian bronzes – leaving curators from other museums feeling green with envy. Several museums with otherwise fine collections of Indian art, like Brooklyn, have a few minor Chola pieces but would really like to find one show-stopper. Hence, the appearance of a Chola bronze on our “wish list.”

Actually, we really can’t say that Brooklyn only had minor examples of Chola bronzes. The truth is that we were given an important bronze in 1992 by a donor with a very good eye. The image is of the Hindu goddess Durga, and I am illustrating her below.

Durga. Southern India, Chola period, c. 970 A.D. Bronze. 57.2 x 20 cm. Brooklyn Museum. Gift of Georgia and Michael de Havenon in memory of William H. Wolff, 1992.142.

She isn’t as curvy or as sensuous as most female figures produced by the Chola-period craftsmen (most of the goddesses stand with one hip thrust dramatically out to the side and the rest of the body swaying back to compensate). Nor is she as large as many images of the period. As a result she is a bit of a sleeper. However, she was included in both of the big, splashy Chola bronze exhibitions that took place recently in the U.S. and London because it turns out that images of Durga are extremely rare, and she is quite early in date. So Brooklyn can actually boast one very important Chola bronze.

So why were we looking for another one? Well, a museum collection isn’t just a trophy cabinet, it’s a teaching tool. When using our collection to teach people about the history of Indian art, it is nice to be able to point to specific objects and talk about how they reflect major themes and trends in taste or aesthetics, religious belief and practice, or patronage of the arts. And the truth is that our Durga does not do a great job of reflecting the major themes and trends of her period because she is simply too unusual. If you really want to illustrate the important art-making period of the Chola kings, you need an image of the Hindu god Shiva, who was far and away the most prominent deity of the time, or possibly an image of his wife, Parvati. So in looking for a Chola bronze, we were really looking for an object that could stand in for the tradition as a whole. This was not going to be an easy thing to find.

Next time, the curator and her supporters begin their hunt…

Last time I wrote about how we happened to have the money and the initiative to look for a major new acquisition for the Asian collection. This time, I’m going to talk about how we developed a shopping list before hitting the market.

All curators keep a mental list of types of objects they would love to find for their museum’s collections; some museums require their curators to compile written lists every few years so the Director and Development staff can help keep an eye out for good candidates. Usually these lists are populated by types of art that aren’t well represented in the museum’s collection. The categories can be as broad as “Cubist painting” or as specific as “a fish knife to replace the one that’s missing from the flatware set we already have.” But generally the categories are cited because they would complement or round out the existing collection.

The Brooklyn Museum’s Asian art collection is quite good, with most major cultures well represented. But the gaps were pretty clear: Chinese painting, Chinese stone sculpture, Japanese Buddhist sculpture, and Indian bronze sculpture, preferably of the Chola period. We already have some very nice Chinese and Japanese sculptures, but they’re all a little on the small side, or else they’re fragments of something much larger. (I’m illustrating our best Japanese sculpture here, the head from a painted wood figure of a guardian deity – really a fabulous thing, but think how great it would be to have the whole figure.)

Head of a Guardian Figure. Japan. Kamakura period, 13th century. Hinoki wood with color, inlaid rock-chrystal, and metal. 22 1/6 x 10 1/4 x 13 15/16 in. (56.1 x 26.1 x 35.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alastair B. Martin, the Guennol Collection. 86.21.

I know that looking for a big object sounds kind of petty, like buying a painting because it goes with your couch, but the sad truth is that size matters. When putting together a gallery, it’s really nice to have one large, important, eye-catching object that draws people in and anchors the whole gallery, both visually and conceptually. It’s certainly possible to highlight an exquisite little object in a gallery, but if you have lots of exquisite little objects, the impact of each object diminishes. And we already had quite a few exquisite little objects. So we were hoping to buy an object with some serious physical presence.

In addition to something of size, we were looking for something we could exhibit pretty much permanently. For this reason, we decided early on not to go after a Chinese painting, even though it’s the area where the collection could use the most help. Chinese paintings are made with materials that react poorly to exposure to light. The silk used for early paintings darkens over time, and the inks used even today are very susceptible to fading. Museums must protect their objects, so we keep most of our Asian paintings in storage, bringing them out on a temporary basis so they don’t spend too much time under the spotlights. We decided that we didn’t want to spend all our funds on an object that we could display only occasionally, so we turned our attentions to sculpture.

I haven’t yet mentioned Indian bronze sculpture, the last category on our shopping list (and the one we eventually bought). I will address that in the next installment, because it’s a more complicated situation. Next time: why one masterpiece isn’t necessarily enough…

In my previous entry, I introduced a wonderful object, an Indian bronze of Shiva from the tenth century. I am tracing the way that this work of art entered the Brooklyn Museum’s collection in 2007, offering an introduction to the various concerns curators address when determining what objects a museum should buy. Today I’m going to talk about the very important issue of backing, both financial and administrative.

If you’re going to consider buying a major work of art for a museum, the first thing you need is cash, or a sense of where to get it. The Brooklyn Museum is not known for spending large sums of money on works of art. Unlike many other American museums, Brooklyn does not have particularly large endowments for art purchases. The Museum has done very well over the years, but primarily through gifts of works of art and very judicious purchases of lower-cost objects in areas that have not yet been “discovered” by the market.

So it was pretty unusual when I was set to the task of finding a major (read: high-priced) Asian work of art to purchase in honor of Amy G. Poster, my predecessor. Amy retired from the Museum in the summer of 2006 after more than 35 years of service. During her long tenure, Amy had attracted a large following of collectors and donors, many of whom had made contributions over the years. A while ago, the Museum received as a bequest a large collection of Indian and Southeast Asian art that contained a lot of objects that were not up to our standards (as well as some good things). We sold off the minor pieces and kept the proceeds for future acquisitions. As a result, there was some money in our coffers, and Amy’s retirement was such a momentous event that we felt inspired to spend it all on one object. After a quick tally of available funds, we had a good sense of how much we had to spend. Suffice it to say that it was less than $1 million. In other fields, that would be chicken feed, but luckily most types of Asian art are still relatively affordable and we were confident of our ability to find something great within our budget.

Throughout my discussion of the acquisition of this object, I will be using a lot of “we.” It’s not a royal we, believe me. It’s plural. First of all, the process began before I even arrived, and even before Amy’s last day. I came in on it after a period of searching but before the perfect work of art was found. Amy really led the search, which might sound a little presumptuous given that the object was supposed to honor her, but it actually made loads of sense because Amy knows the market better than almost anyone, and she certainly knew what sorts of objects the collection needed. Her involvement guaranteed that she wouldn’t be disappointed by the object that bears her name. The idea to purchase a work of art came from several of our Trustees, who are ardent supporters of the Asian art collection and its activities. They were involved in all the discussions and decisions. They also presented the idea to our Director. It’s really a good idea to make sure that the donors and administrators are behind you before embarking on a search for a major acquisition. As in any aspect of life, you’re far more likely to get better results if you involve your funders in big decisions, rather than suddenly plunking some really expensive object in front of them and saying “buy this for me now.”

On that sage note, I will sign off for now. Next time: the curatorial shopping list…

I have been an art museum curator for almost eight years now, and I can tell you that the one aspect of my job that has consistently offered the headiest mixture of fun and stress has been the search for new acquisitions, especially those purchased using Museum funds. Spending other peoples’ money on beautiful art sounds like a ball, and there is a certain vicarious thrill that comes from shopping in a much higher price range than my wallet will ever allow. But I’m not buying for an individual, I’m buying for an institution, and I’m not buying something that someone will discard when they’re finished with it, I’m buying something that will be saved for posterity. The most pressing question, when suggesting a potential purchase, is not “will the Director like it?” or even “will the public like it?” but “will my successors twenty or one hundred years from now like it?” Every museum can point to a few objects in its storage rooms that some past curator convinced the institution to buy for a very high price, only to have his or her successors discover that the object is flawed in some very significant way (maybe a fake, maybe just heavily restored, maybe in a style or by an artist that is now considered insignificant or just plain tacky). No one wants to leave that sort of embarrassing burden for subsequent generations.

Luckily, no curator shops alone. There is a complex network of people and processes that the curator works with (and through) in order to make sure that the institution stands behind every new acquisition. The purpose of this series of blog entries is to explain how museums arrive at the decision to buy the objects they do. There are lots of different ways that works of art enter museum collections. Obviously, many museum objects are given by private collectors, and there’s a whole different set of issues that comes with the process of attracting gifts, assessing their appropriateness to the collection, and then graciously accepting or rejecting them. Maybe I’ll get to that later. But for now, my task is to describe, through one particular masterpiece that was purchased for the Brooklyn Museum collection in the spring of 2007, the many steps and precautions taken by museums and curators when acquiring a work of art.

It’s a little bit like spoiling the surprise, but I am going to begin by introducing you to the object in question. It is a bronze image of the Hindu god Shiva, about two feet high. It was made in southern India, probably in the modern state of Tamil Nadu, during the reign of the Chola kings, around 970 C. E. Its picture appears here. I’ll get a reverse shot of the image for you shortly, because it’s even more handsome from behind. I’ll offer more information about Chola bronzes and the god Shiva in future entries, but for now let me just tell you that this sculpture is extremely rare, of a date and quality that simply does not appear on the market anymore. And that is precisely the sort of object that we were looking for.

To be continued…

Shiva as Chandrashekhara. Southern India. Chola period, c. 970 A.D. Bronze. Height 25 in. Brooklyn Museum. Gift of the Asian Art Council and other donors in honor of Amy G. Poster, 2007.2.