Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

By Patrick Totty

On March 20, the second day of the war in Iraq, San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum celebrated its long-awaited grand re-opening at its new venue on Civic Center Plaza. As hundreds of celebrants gathered in front of the city’s converted old main library, a beaux-arts gem built in 1917, hundreds of anti-war demonstrators surged nearby, seriously attempting to shut down business as usual.  

Some members of the anti-war groups that day were self-proclaimed anarchists, people who philosophically recognize no authority outside themselves and who historically have never been reluctant to destroy property or cultural symbols to make their point.

Yet none of them made any attempt to disrupt or crash the ceremony at the Asian. It was as though there were an invisible barrier between the shouting and running going on elsewhere on the plaza and the proud speeches and introductions taking place in front of the new museum.

The day was a haunting converse to later events in Baghdad, where mobs looted the National Museum of Archaeology and carted away almost one-third of earth’s ancient Sumerian and Mesopotamian antiquities. Even though the anti-war demonstrators in San Francisco saw themselves as acting under great provocation and were running high on emotion, there was never a serious worry that some of them might bolt over to the dedication ceremony to vandalize the building or disturb the gathering there.

That context – robust and even disruptive demonstrations going on – and that restraint were typically San Franciscan. The city’s populace is an amalgam of ethnicities, liberal to radical politicos, young strivers, old money and bohemians who argue among themselves endlessly but agree on the need for art and a civic duty to nurture it. The new Asian is a perfect example of that sensibility.

The museum contains arguably the best collection of Asian art in North America. At its core is a vast collection acquired over several decades by the late Avery Brundage, the powerful former head of the U.S. Olympic Committee. Brundage, deeply smitten by Asian Art, was a knowledgeable collector who acquired thousands of significant pieces of sculpture, paintings vases, furniture, jade objects, screen paintings, textiles and furniture. In 1964, he donated his collection to San Francisco. The city housed it in a wing of the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, an already cramped collection of European and American art that now had to accommodate and juxtapose a very different type of art.

Concerns with space grew over the years as the museum grew Brundage’s core collection. Barely 20% of the collection could be shown at any time, and the condominium arrangement with the De Young caused its share of strains and tensions.

In the early 1990s, San Francisco decided to build a new main library on Civic Center Plaza. The fate of the old library, a beaux arts masterpiece that had a magnificent grand staircase, was up in the air until the mayor suggested that the old building, if properly retrofitted, might make a splendid site that the Asian could relocate to.

His suggestion led to a public/private partnership that raised $160 million for the Old Main’s renovation. Starting in 1995, planning for the new Asian got underway. A key element in the process was the hiring of Italian architect Gae Aulenti, an older architect who had achieved fame when she took an abandoned Parisian railroad station and converted it into the magnificent Musée d'Orsay.

Her boldest stroke was to open up the Old Main’s notoriously gloomy interior by constructing huge light wells along its axes. San Francisco’s light, whether it’s the “oyster light” of cloudy days or the pastel Mediterranean brilliance of sunny days has a special quality. Artists have always considered it a distinctive light and Aulenti’s decision to find a way to bathe the museum’s interior with it resuscitated the Old Main and gave it magnificent new life.

The new location’s 40,000 square feet of exhibition space now allows the Asian to exhibit up to 40% of its collection (which now numbers 15,000 objects), double what it could display before. That’s a crucial matter given that the museum divides its vast holdings among eight distinct cultural areas of Asia: India, China, Japan, Korea, West Asia (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan), Southeast Asia (Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, the Philippines), the Himalayas and Tibet and contemporary Asian art.

Located within walking distance of the city’s major hotels and transportation hubs, the Asian Art Museum is particularly easy for out-of-town visitors to access. It also has a beautiful web site that’s easy to navigate and gives a quick overview of the museum’s treasures: http://www.asianart.org/index.html