Museums Special Section | Art
At Met, New Leadership (and Direction) for Asian Art
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
SHIFT IN STEWARDSHIP Maxwell K. Hearn, in the Astor Court at the Met, is the new head of the museum’s Asian art department.
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: March 16, 2011
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LinkedinDiggMixxMySpacePermalink. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Asian art galleries are some of the most reposeful spaces in New York City. It’s hard to imagine that they were banged into place, room by room, from practically nothing over the last 40 years, though they were. Or that they continue to mirror changing times, a changing museum and a changing Asia, though they do.

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art
QUIET HIT The Chinese calligraphy show, in 1972, asserted a new Asian presence at the museum.
A few months from now they’ll be the scene of another change, a shift in stewardship, when the museum’s longtime curator of Chinese art, Maxwell K. Hearn, replaces James C. Y. Watt as head of the Asian art department.

Mr. Watt, 74, who was raised in Hong Kong and had a classical Chinese scholar’s at-home education, came to the Met as a curator from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1985 and has led the department for the last 10 years.

Mr. Hearn — everyone calls him Mike — is 61 and a native of Salt Lake City. He arrived at the Met fresh out of college in 1971, when there barely was an Asian department and the Asian collection consisted of a room of Buddhist sculptures and a bunch of ceramic pots.

Both men, but Mr. Hearn in particular, witnessed and participated in an astonishing phenomenon: a catch-up act of acquisition, construction and exhibition-making on a grand scale.

From the early 1970s to the late ’90s, under the direction of the art historian Wen Fong, who was Mr. Hearn’s mentor, a room of sculpture gradually and laboriously turned into 50 galleries. Thanks to the beneficence of a generation of gift-giving New York collectors, a bunch of pots became many thousands of objects representing every major Asian culture. And thanks to the prestige its new Asian wing brought, the Met got some huge Asian loan shows.

Both Mr. Hearn and Mr. Watt refer to the period as a golden age. And both acknowledge that it is over.

Private collections of the kind that came to the Met can no longer be assembled in the West. China and India, now economic colossi, have a corner on the market. Museum loans from Asia are increasingly tricky to negotiate, and to pay for, now that the Met, like most museums, is economically pinched. And while Asia is constantly in the news, Asian art remains a hard sell. Foot traffic in the Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Southeast Asian galleries remains light.

Clearly, Mr. Hearn, in his new job as curator in charge of the Asian department, has confounding issues to contemplate when he takes over in July.

But at least he will hit the ground running. He knows his department inside out. The Met is home; he grew up in it. And he came to it through a kind of on-the-road Kerouacian saga of timing and luck that brought him into early contact with some of the top art historians of the day, and that left him both open to newness and optimistic of the future.

His introduction to Asian art was entirely accidental. He entered Yale in 1967, intending to study business. On a semester break he visited an aunt in Kansas City, Mo., and went with her to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. They wandered around and ended up in the Chinese collection. Something clicked.

“I don’t remember an individual piece I saw,” he said in a recent interview. “But I came out thinking, ‘I know nothing about this world.’ ”And he wanted to know more.

Back at Yale he took courses in Chinese art with the scholar Richard Barnhart. In his junior year he switched his major to art history and wrote an honors paper on Chinese scholar gardens. Driving back to Utah after graduation he stopped at the Nelson-Atkins, which had become a place of pilgrimage in his mind. He arrived on a Monday; the museum was closed. He figured he’d sleep overnight in his car, but on a whim walked around to the back of the museum and knocked on a door.

“What’s your business?” a voice from inside asked. He said he was a student and wanted to look at Chinese art. The door opened. Not only was he admitted, but he was also escorted to the office of the museum’s director, Laurence Sickman, a Chinese art historian who had written the textbook Mr. Hearn had used at Yale. Mr. Sickman took him on a tour of the Asian galleries and storage, invited him back to his house to see his scholar’s garden, and advised him to go to Taiwan and learn Chinese.
Around this time, on the advice of his Yale teacher, Mr. Hearn wrote to Mr. Fong, who was at Princeton, asking for career advice on museum work. When an invitation to meet came, he drove back East from Indiana, where he had a summer job on a farm. Mr. Fong, dressed in tennis whites, talked with him for half an hour, then asked, “How would you like to work at the Metropolitan Museum?” He had just been hired by the Met with the title of special consultant, and a mandate to revivify a tiny Asian art department that had been languishing for decades.

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A GOLDEN AGE Chen Hongshou’s album of 12 paintings, “Miscellaneous Studies,” from 1619.
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In his 40 years at the Met, Maxwell K. Hearn has witnessed and participated in the acquisition of works like the hanging scroll “Dragon Pine.”
Mr. Hearn drove the long drive back to Salt Lake City, packed his things, and headed to New York. He had no place to live yet, so Mr. Fong arranged for him to crash for a night or two with a friend in the West Village. Mr. Fong’s friend was John B. Elliott, a major collector of Chinese art, who was at that point amassing fabulous examples of painting and calligraphy.

A night or two at Mr. Elliott’s turned into a six-month stay. And a full-time Met job as curatorial assistant to Mr. Fong — who was there just one day a week and teaching at Princeton the rest — plunged Mr. Hearn into the museum world head-first.

To assert a new Asian presence in the museum and to attract donors, Mr. Fong presented a calligraphy show, and managed to get prime placement for it in what was then the Met’s single special exhibition gallery, referred to in-house as “the bowling alley” or “the airplane hanger.” (South and Southeast Asian galleries occupy the space now.)

There was competition for the space. Mr. Hearn recalled that “one curator tried to have the calligraphy shunted off to the Great Balcony.” But the show went on. Cleanly installed but with decorative touches (bamboo, Ming furniture) and a supplementary display of Islamic and Western calligraphy put together by Mr. Hearn, it was a quiet hit. A group of patron-collectors took notice. The golden age began. Mr. Hearn was part of its history.

The collectors were an extraordinary generational ensemble, led by C. Douglas Dillon, who was president of the museum’s board of trustees at the time. Mr. Dillon took it as a personal brief to support Asia at the Met. He bought art in bulk for the collection, starting, in 1973, with 25 pieces sold by the renowned connoisseur C. C. Wang. And he gave money to build new galleries to show it.

New galleries prompted more donations. John M. Crawford Jr., who in the 1950s had formed what Mr. Hearn called the most important private ensemble of Chinese painting and calligraphy in the West, lived virtually across the street from the museum, but had never exhibited his art there.

“When the Crawford collection was shown in New York in 1962,” Mr. Hearn said, “it was at the Morgan Library. That’s how out of it the Met was.”

When the museum’s Chinese painting galleries were finally finished in 1991, Mr. Crawford was invited to take a look. “At last you have a space big enough to hold my collection,” he said, and gave the Met everything.

Mr. Hearn speaks with a still-astonished delight about such acts of largess, and he played a part in some of them. In the late ’70s, he and Mr. Fong conceived the idea of creating an indoor version of a Chinese scholar’s garden as a centerpiece for the expanding Asian galleries. Mr. Hearn clambered up into a crawl space and discovered a covered-up skylight. That was what they needed, and the garden plans seemed set until Thomas Hoving, the museum’s director, said no: the museum had just installed a million dollars worth of air-conditioning ducts up there. Nothing could be changed.

At that point, Mr. Fong deployed a secret weapon: Brooke Astor, a Met trustee, who as a child spent time in Beijing. When Mr. Hoving explained to her the impossibility of moving the ducts, her reply was simple: “Well, how much would it cost?” The skylight was soon exposed, and 26 Chinese craftsmen, accompanied by a personal cook, were imported from the garden city of Suzhou to create the Astor Court.

One by one, the galleries that now form the Asian wing — China, Japan, India and Southeast Asia, Korea — were carved out and built in what Mr. Watt refers to as “the last major event in the development of the museum.” Mr. Hearn, despite time out for language and graduate school, was there for every step.

“It took 27 years,” he said. “Now we have the most comprehensive collection of Asian art anywhere.”
The flush moment has passed. Collection-building is done. Prices are out of sight. “Until the early 1980s no Chinese painting had sold on the auction market for more than $100,000,” Mr. Hearn said. “Before that, in the 1960s, you could buy paintings for a couple of thousand dollars.” He remembered Mr. Dillon exclaiming that for the price of one Impressionist landscape he could build a whole Chinese collection.

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Zhan Wang’s “Artificial Rock No. 10,” also acquired during Mr Hearn’s tenure.
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.Today, Mr. Hearn said, even if something important were to come up for sale, “it’s unlikely we’ll be able to afford it.” But he sees the problem as a general one. “I think of the Getty. How can they ever match what East Coast museums have in European painting? It’s the wrong time.” There may never again by a right one.

One still-viable buying area is contemporary art, and it’s very much on Mr. Hearn’s mind. “China, Japan, Korea, India, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam — all these places are creating wonderful things, and at the Met we have the opportunity to give this work an historical context.” He already introduced contemporary photography into the Chinese painting galleries a couple of years ago; now he plans to add video.

Within the still deeply conservative field of Chinese art history, these are radical steps. But they are of a piece with the impression he gives of wanting to alter audience expectations of what exhibitions can be. “The big blockbusters aren’t going to go away,” he said. But what they buy in box-office figures, they cost in time, cash and nerves. The Met’s big Chinese offering last year, “The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty,” organized by Mr. Watt, was a cliffhanger, with the delivery of some items coming right down to the wire.

The general rule is that if you want to borrow from more than two Chinese museums for a show, all the loans have to be negotiated through that government’s Cultural Relics Bureau. In the past, that bureau could demand whatever it wanted from provincial museums, without necessarily sharing paid loan fees, and sometimes without returning objects.

With the economic boom of recent years, however, provincial museums have become powerful entities, largely independent of central authority. Many treat their art as a meal ticket and drive tough bargains to extract money, and for fringe benefits like courier trips abroad, in exchange for loans.

One way to finesse the difficulties is to deal with only one Chinese museum at a time. China Institute Gallery in Manhattan bases most of its shows on single museum collections, as in its current exhibition of bronzes from the Hunan Provincial Museum. By contrast, the Met’s Yuan exhibition had objects from 27 Chinese lenders, some of whom held back while asking, “What’s in it for me?”

One common way for all museums to manage expenses is through quid pro quo exchanges of loans: you send your Picasso, I’ll send my van Gogh. But at this point, most provincial museums in China, while impressive-looking, are ill-equipped with protective resources like climate control, making reciprocal loans inadvisable.

Mr. Hearn expects that continuing archaeological discoveries in China will still give the West spectacular scholarly shows, focused on individual sites. But, like many curators and administrators now, he’s beating the drum for small permanent collection shows that may or may not incorporate some choice loans. And he envisions those shows changing frequently.

“In Asian art, we’re used to rotating our collections of Chinese and Japanese paintings and Indian miniatures all the time,” he said. With wall space at a premium — the Met is pretty much maxed out — and acquisitions still coming in, he suspects that the European painting galleries will want to start regularly changing what’s on view, perhaps taking the Chinese painting gallery rotations, which for years Mr. Hearn has turned into unfailingly interesting theme shows, as a model.

Of course, the major rotation in the Asian department at the moment is its leadership. As of this summer, Mr. Watt, with a series of superb historical shows at the Met behind him, will settle down to a long-planned stretch of reading and research. For Mr. Hearn, the heat is already on. A top priority will be to hire some new staff members, including a curator to replace himself, though this will take time as, he said, there aren’t a lot of candidates around.

“There’s been a real shift in the field, and I think it is across the board in art history. We’re all seeing that young students are more and more interested exclusively in contemporary. Anything that’s old is a hard sell.” For non-Westerners, languages are a barrier. And he says that people are interested in the kind of high-paying jobs available in areas of contemporary art. “Art history is not known for its big salaries,” he said.

And despite the anticipated effects of the multicultural surge of the ’80s and ’90s, and of the global presence of Asia now, for many Westerners, Asian art is still an arcane subject to pursue.

“How many places can you study Indian art? Or Korean art?,” Mr. Hearn asked. “There are more programs for Chinese art, but my colleagues are telling me that although there’s an uptick in Chinese-born applicants, over all there are fewer and fewer graduate students. The number of talented people who are in the field for the future is diminishing.”

What has not diminished — though surely it has been tested — is the optimism and embrace of the excitements of newness that he brought to the field 40 years ago. Both he and Mr. Watt speak of art history as a process of connecting, over time and space, people and cultures who would otherwise never know that they were related, were family. A universalist institution like the Met gives those links visual form. It’s also a place where happenstance is destiny.

“I discovered Asian art by walking through a museum,” Mr. Hearn said. “I think people go to Asian museum because they want to see Asian art. But I’m counting on someone coming into the Met because he wants to see Greek or Egyptian sculpture, and getting lost, and finding himself in the Indian painting gallery and thinking, ‘What’s this?’ ” Connection made. Big change.