INSPIRATION

Asian art expert and pioneer of the blockbuster exhibition

Jan Fontein, a scholar of Asian art who oversaw an ambitious expansion of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as its director in the 1970s and ‘80s, died on 19 May in Newton Upper Falls, Massachusetts. He was 89. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Yoko, said.

Fontein had served for nearly a decade as curator of Asian art at the Museum of Fine Arts when he was named acting director in 1975. He became director a year later.

It was a turbulent period in the museum’s history. Finances were shaky, morale was low, and the board had just dismissed its director, Merrill C Rueppel, whose two years in the post were marked by acrimonious relations with the curatorial staff. Fontein, a renowned scholar who had organised the important exhibitions Zen Painting and Calligraphy in 1970 and Unearthing China’s Past in 1973, put the museum on a new course almost immediately.

Under his leadership, the museum presented a canny blend of challenging, specialised exhibitions and crowdpleasers such as Pompeii AD79 (1978), Pissarro (1981) and Renoir (1985). Renoir alone drew more than half a million visitors, a record for the museum.

At the same time, Fontein embarked on a building and renovation programme, raising $60 million to realise it. The new West Wing, designed by IM Pei, opened in 1981. Fontein also oversaw the renovation of the museum’s storage facilities as well as 26 galleries devoted to the Asian art collection, one of the most extensive in the world.

He brought an affable, unpretentious style to the job, consistent with his down-toearth personality and sense that museums needed to lose some of their stuffiness to attract new audiences. One of his first acts was to install John Singleton Copley’s painting Watson and the Shark in a prominent position just as Jaws opened in cinemas.

“Museums can be monumental structures,” Fontein said in 1985. “That can be intimidating.” He added: “Today people should be relaxed in a museum so that they are open to new impressions, new ideas. I believe guards who stand at museum doors should be nice.”

Jan Fontein was born on 22 May 1927 in the Netherlands, in Naarden, about 15 miles east of Amsterdam, to Leonardus Hendrikus and Aaltje. His father was a Montessori teacher and later the director of a rehabilitation centre for prisoners near the German border. Both parents became active in the resistance during the Second World War and as a precautionary measure sent Jan to work on a farm in Friesland, in the northwest.

As a boy, he was fascinated by antiquities. A trip to see Roman artefacts made a deep impression, in particular a glass case displaying flint arrowheads. “That sounds dull,” he said later. “But I saw the arrowheads as direct messages to me. I envisioned a battle in all its mad glory.”

He studied Chinese and Japanese literature at Leiden University, earning an undergraduate degree in 1945. When he learned of a curatorial opening at the Museum of Asiatic Art in Amsterdam, he shifted his focus to fine arts. In 1953 he passed his doctoral exams in Chinese and Japanese art and the art and archaeology of Southeast Asia.

He spent a year studying the tea ceremony in Japan before becoming an assistant curator at the Museum of Asiatic Art. As curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, he acquired South Indian Buddhist bronzes, Korean works in gold and bronze, courtly objects from the ancient kingdoms of mainland Southeast Asia and Javanese masterpieces. He also initiated reciprocal exhibitions to send the museum’s Japanese art to Japan and bring the best art from Japanese collections to Boston.

Fontein’s time as director coincided with the nationwide rise of the blockbuster exhibition, and he embraced the concept. “There was such a thing as a contemplative museum, but I don’t think that can survive anymore,” he said in 1978.

Before he retired as director in 1987, the museum played host to such large-scale touring exhibitions as Treasures of Early Irish Art (1978) and organised its own touring show, A New World: Masterpieces of American Painting, 1760-1910 (1983).

After retiring, Fontein was named Matsutaro Shoriki curator of Asiatic art, a position he held until 1992. He was also a consultant to the Asian art collection at the Royal Ontario Museum, 1990-1995.

Fontein’s first wife, Suzanne, died in 1998. In addition to Yoko, he is survived by two sons, Arnout and Ruurd, and a brother, Dick. © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service

“I saw the arrowheads as direct messages to me. I envisioned a battle in all its mad glory”