Loan program a source of
By Tim Ryan
prestige as academy collection travels
around the world
Star-BulletinSAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- Julia White chuckled for a brief moment when she saw the line of cars pulling in front of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Then White, Honolulu Academy of Arts' Asian art curator since 1996, quickly recomposed herself for the event she and the academy had been working on for months.
A few hundred of the Asian Art Museum's major contributors had gathered in September to see some of the finest woodblock prints ever exhibited. "Hokusai/Hiroshige: Great Japanese Prints" from the Academy's James A. Michener Collection. It is the largest loan of Japanese prints to a mainland museum in the academy's history.
The "Hokusai" exhibit ended Nov. 15, attracting tens of thousands of people; the 100-print Utagawa Hiroshige exhibit opened Saturday at the museum and continues through Jan. 17.
The Hiroshige exhibit showcases his famous series, "53 Stations on Tokaido Highway," in its entirety; also included are works from the series "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo," reportedly the greatest influence on the European Impressionist movement. (Both exhibitions will open at the Honolulu Academy of Arts in March.)
There's a tremendous amount of effort that goes into any loan, White says later.
In the case of the Hokusai and Hiroshige exhibitions, not only were each of the 200 prints specifically selected, there was a year's worth of conservation work performed by print conservator Susan Sayre Batton in Los Angeles.
Some prints were re-framed, rehinged; and finally all were meticulously packed for the flight to San Francisco. (United Airlines donated a large portion of the cost of the shipment, said Sharon McDonald-Tiknis, the academy's director of development.)
In San Francisco, the art was unpacked, checked for damage during shipping, hung in the museum and lit to minimize fading.
Safety of the art is always paramount when considering a loan, White said. Traveling artwork is accompanied to and from its destination by an administrator, a curator, or the museum's registrar.To eliminate unnecessary handling by unfamiliar staff from other museums, the paintings or prints are almost always framed prior to departure and packaged in custom-built containers.
Condition inspections are performed at various stages of the loan process by qualified personnel. Curators like White visit the museum requesting a loan prior to approving the request and also during the exhibition to confirm appropriate procedures are being followed, she said.
The academy never announces dates of loans to prevent theft, White said. In the history of the academy's loan program, not a single piece has returned damaged or been stolen, officials said.
More than a thousand loans have been made from the academy's permanent collection to museums throughout the world in the last several years: including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; and the Ueno Royal Museum in Tokyo. Currently, Claude Monet's "Water Lilies" is on loan in Europe.
The Academy receives hundreds of requests annually from museums wanting to borrow specific works, with its renowned Asian collection at the top, said White.
In 1995, an exhibition, "Japanese Treasures from the Honolulu Academy of Arts," with 100 paintings and prints, debuted at the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum and toured five other venues in Japan.
In 1995 and 1997, the Academy made loans to London's Royal Academy of Arts for exhibitions on Japanese artists, Katsushika Hiroshige and Kitagawa Utamaro.
In 1998, 24 prints traveled to Nagano, Japan, (and three other Japanese venues) to be featured in "Hokusai: Bridging East and West," an exhibition that attracted more than 108,000 visitors.
Other pieces, including Chinese furniture and Chen Hongshou's painting, "The Life of Tao Yuanming," recently went to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the China Institute in New York City.
Loans are rarely a one-way street.
"It's an excellent way to introduce important elements of our collection to other communities, it develops and promotes professional cooperation between our colleagues worldwide, and it allows us to share portions of our collection which are not always on view," White said.
"The educational and cultural exchange loan opportunities it creates have a tremendous impact not only on our museum, but on the museum profession as a whole. The loan process encourages us to look at our collections from a more global perspective."
With the loan of the Japanese prints to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, there were also financial gains, White said. It allowed for "sophisticated and expensive restoration" that was partially funded by exhibit sponsor the Robert F. Lange Foundation.
