November 15, 2015

Asian Art Museum: Pure, No Fusion

By roads-rus

As I reported on November 3, Looking East, a very fine show that clearly demonstrates Japanese influence on Western Art, will be at the 5 Compass Asian Art Museum in San Francisco until February 7, 2016, and then be gone forever.   Several new and used copies of the show’s catalog are available on Amazon, for now.

Ruth and I spent most of a day in the Asian Art Museum. Its 2nd and 3rd floor are devoted to its purely Asian, unparalleled permanent collection.  On its 1st floor is Cafe Asia, a highly recommended but rather expensive restaurant.  Hey, it’s San Francisco! The beauty of the permanent collection is that it encompasses all Asian cultures over many millennia.  It was a chance to see stuff from cultures I had only heard of, like Bhutan.   If I lived in the Bay Area, I would pay many visits to absorb what one man and several gifted art acquisitors amassed slowly over time.

Over time, Chicago construction executive Avery Brundage donated his entire Asian art collection to this museum.  It contained 7,700 objects, many of which are on display along with the other 10,000+ items the Asian Art Museum has added from other sources. Brundage was an Olympic decathlon athlete and, later, head of the International Olympic Committee for 20 years.  He had excellent taste and among his gifts is the rarest piece in the collection, a seated gilded bronze Chinese Buddha, the oldest in the world, crafted in 338 AD.

DSC02504

I asked the lady at the information desk what her favorite part of the museum was and, after a brief ponder, she said “the Korean collection”.  I now know why.  My favorite was a Korean wide-eyed, paper tiger seen next to a mountain spirit with long fingernails.  By the time I got to that, I had seen an Indian Elephant throne howdah, Pakistani warriors, Vietnamese drums, Burmese ceremonial bowls, etc.  One of the unusual items that I kept circling back to was a curious Philippine burial urn made in 600 AD.  It was rather plain, but on its lid was a cute head popping upward like a Pixar cartoon figure.

DSC02471

Ruth was especially into the fabrics.   She searched for and finally found the five-clawed dragon design men’s robe she saw in a video.

Hank

About roads-rus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roads-rus
This entry was posted on Sunday, November 15th, 2015 at 11:28 pm and posted in California. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Comments are disabled.

%d bloggers like this: