Short Takes : Japanese Pledge Funds for Art

A Japanese consortium has pledged $1.5 million toward renovation of the Freer Gallery of Art, a national museum of Asian art and the Smithsonian Institution’s first art museum, gallery officials announced Monday.

The gift is the largest received by the gallery since it opened in 1923 with a bequest from Detroit industrialist Charles Lang Freer, who gave the Smithsonian his art collection, a building fund and an endowment.

The Japanese gift will be used to finance reinstallation of the original Freer collection of 13,000 objects, most of them Asian art but also including the world’s most important collection of works by American painter James McNeill Whistler.

A $21-million renovation and expansion of the Freer museum began in late 1988 and is scheduled for completion in late 1992. The Japanese gift leaves $4.5 million still to be raised, officials said.