SPECIAL STRENGTH
Chinese art collection adds appeal to US Rust Belt town
The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is near and dear to the heart of 86-year-old Anthony Yen as the US Rust Belt city institution houses one of the most distinguished Chinese art collections in the West.
“It’s the best attraction in Cleveland. It’s a perfect place to learn and appreciate Chinese culture. It means so much to me as a Chinese immigrant,” said Yen, 86, a prominent entrepreneur and inductee of the Cleveland International Hall of Fame.
Window into China
Located about eight kilometers east of downtown Cleveland, Ohio, CMA, which has nearly 45,000 pieces of artwork spanning 6,000 years, consistently ranks as one of the best comprehensive art museums in the US.
The museum, which marked its centennial in 2016, was founded as an institution dedicated to “the benefit of all the people forever,” William Griswold, director and president of the museum, told the Xinhua News Agency in a recent interview at the new West Wing galleries on Chinese art.
“We offer free general admission and our collection is encyclopedic in scope and so it spans all periods from the Neolithic to the present, it spans every corner of the globe,” he said.
The Chinese art collection is the CMA’s special strength, said Griswold.
“We have, from the outset, from even before we opened our door to the public, had works of Chinese art in our collection... We continue to add to that collection and we are extremely proud of the representation of Chinese art.”
From prehistory to today, the CMA’s Chinese art collection spans more than 5,000 years and embraces a diversity of art forms including jades, bronzes, lacquer ware, sculptures, paintings, calligraphy works, furniture, bamboo carvings and more.
“This museum is one of the few museums in the West that gives the Asian collections an equal standing among other collections, and in particular Chinese collections are known worldwide in quality in comparison to other museum collections,” said Clarissa von Spee, PhD, the museum’s curator of Chinese art.
Sherman Lee, CMA’s director from 1958 to 1983, established the core of its Chinese painting collection, which numbers roughly 500 objects, or about 10 percent of the museum’s entire Asian collection.
Chinese painting conservation
CMA steps forward as a leader among very few US museums to advance the field of Chinese painting conservation for all future generations as the museum announced in July the establishment of a center for Chinese paintings conservation.
“We have through generous donations from June and Simon Li matched the grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and we are starting a Chinese paintings conservation training center in 2020,” said Per Knutas, CMA’S chief conservator.
“There was a crisis in the community that we have currently four museums in the US with Chinese painting conservation. We are one of them,” Knutas said.
The other three are the
Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution; the
Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The senior conservators at the museums are about to retire and there is nobody taking over the profession in the US, so when the Mellon Foundation decided to fund a center for Chinese painting conservation in 2012, CMA decided to take on that task, Knutas recalled. The ancient Chinese paintings represent a major conservation challenge given the fragile nature of the materials used to create them.
The center is named after June Li, the retired founding curator of the Garden of Flowing Fragrance at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, and her husband, Simon K.C. Li, a retired former assistant business editor of the Los Angeles Times. The $1.5 million gift matches a $1.5 million endowment challenge grant awarded by the Mellon Foundation.
“This is an encyclopedic collection, so each object here fills a unique story about our common cultural heritage. So it’s important for us to take care of the objects to tell the story for future generations,” Knutas said.
The center, the second outside China after one established at the British Museum in London, will focus first on conserving paintings in the museum’s own collection and will then branch out to aid other institutions, Knutas said.
Digital museum
CMA is also known for using digital innovation to promote individual and social participation and open an enlightened public discourse to help people start a relationship with the museum’s collection.
“One of them is the Art Lens Gallery, which brings together technology and original works of art in an exciting way for visitors of all ages including those who may be unfamiliar with the experience of visiting museums,” said Griswold.
The multi-faceted ArtLens Gallery experience includes four components. Visitors can engage with masterworks through touchscreen-free interactive interfaces in the ArtLens Exhibition, create original artwork at the ArtLens Studio, connect with the museum’s world-class permanent collection using the ArtLens Wall and enhance their museum experience with the ArtLens App.
“We are all in the process now of developing a highlights tour specifically for the Chinese collection,” Griswold said.
CMA is expected to receive over 700,000 visitors this year and aspires to increase that number to 1 million over the next 10 years, Griswold said.
“We receive many Chinese visitors but far fewer than I would like. I hope that in the years to come we will see many more visitors from China and from other parts of the world.
“The world is shrinking and we share a culture history for humanity that is very very important... the more you understand each other the better we can communicate and understand our decisions for the future,” he said.