Acquisition Makes LACMA a Stronghold of Korean Art

In a multimillion-dollar move that establishes the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a stronghold of Korean art, officials Wednesday announced the acquisition of 250 works spanning 2,000 years of Korean history.

The ceramics, paintings, textiles, furniture, bronze statuary and gold jewelry are a combined sale and gift from Robert W. Moore, a Los Angeles-based collector and dealer. Museum officials declined to reveal the amount paid to Moore or the market value of the collection, but Korean art has become a hot item on the auction scene in the past decade, with collectors paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for special pieces and $1 million or more for extremely rare, top-quality items.

The museum has pursued the collection for six years. George Kuwayama, the former head of Far Eastern art at LACMA who ended his 37-year tenure in 1996, launched an effort in 1993 to raise $5 million to buy 100 works from Moore. After Kuwayama’s departure, his successor, J. Keith Wilson, continued the courtship.

Wednesday’s announcement furthers the museum’s efforts to make its collections relevant to the community. In 1997 the institution acquired 1,800 pieces of Mexican art from collector-dealers Bernard and Edith Lewin, instantly raising LACMA’s profile in the field.

The Moore collection gives a major boost to the museum’s Korean holdings, which consisted of about 75 objects and 800 pottery shards from historic kiln sites, used to identify and date Korean ceramics.

Among the Moore items LACMA acquired are a wide range of devotional, ritual and everyday objects, including Buddhist sculpture, decorated ceramics, earthenware jars and a bronze mirror that may have been used to cast out evil spirits. Among the highlights are rare screen paintings, portraits of Korean officials meticulously painted on scrolls, a lacquered box inlaid with mother of pearl dragons and two pairs of gold earrings with leaf-shaped pendants.

The Moore collection--about half of which goes on display today in new galleries in the Ahmanson Building--is the most visible aspect of a much larger Korean art initiative, according to Andrea Rich, president and director of the museum. The goal is to build the finest Korean art collection outside Asia, develop partnerships with educational institutions and Korean organizations, promote scholarship and reach out to the local Korean community, she said.

As part of the initiative, the museum and UCLA have jointly hired Burglind Jungmann, a German scholar of Korean art. While serving as the museum’s first curator of Korean art, she will also launch the nation’s first doctoral program in Korean art history at UCLA.

The museum has entered into partnerships with the Korea Foundation in Seoul, which will serve as a liaison between LACMA and the Korean government and scholars; the National Museum of Korea, also in Seoul, which has loaned artworks to the Los Angeles museum and will continue to do so; and the Asia Society in New York, which is developing educational programs for LACMA.

“We are thrilled that we have been able to do all this, with the collection as the cornerstone,” Rich said. “For an institution strategically placed on the Pacific Rim with deep investments in Asian art--in our Chinese, Japanese and South Asian collections--the Korean piece ties our collections together in a very meaningful way and really makes us a world center for Korean art. And that relates to our physical location, our surrounding community, our academic relations with UCLA and the study of Korean art history that is being developed there.”

America’s museums are not rich in Korean art, so LACMA’s acquisition lays a foundation to place it among the major players, which include the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, with 1,250 Korean works; the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, with 600 pieces; and the Cleveland Museum of Art, with more than 400 works.

Emily Sano, director of the Asian Art Museum, hailed LACMA’s acquisition. “It is certainly something that L.A. can be proud of, to get a body of material like that in one fell swoop,” she said.

Moore has been buying and selling Korean art for 40 years and said that finding a public home for most of his pieces is the highlight of his career. “Secretly, every collector would like to show off his collection. It acknowledges your effort,” he said.

LACMA’s new commitment to Korean art places the museum “in the forefront of a burgeoning field,” Far Eastern art chief Wilson said. “What excites me most is that we now have the basis for writing the history of Korean art.”

Wilson suggested two reasons for the dearth of Korean art in museums outside Asia: “One is the surviving material culture of Korea is relatively small, both because they didn’t bury people with riches, like in China, and because Korea has suffered more invasions and more plundering than virtually any other country in Asia.

“The other reason is that Westerners were not exposed, through colonialism and economic interests, to Korean culture as we were exposed to other cultures in Asia. Westerners first became interested in Korean art through the Korean War and then the Peace Corps in the ‘60s, which took a lot of young American intellectuals to Korea. So it’s a very young field.”

Over time, Wilson expects Korea to gain as strong a presence in American minds as Japan and China. “I have always been reluctant to pigeonhole the different artistic traditions of Asia,” he said. “I think that a lot of people who know very little about Korea and may not be Korean themselves will find the Korean art in our new galleries to be very inspiring. At least that’s my hope.”

In celebration of the Korean art initiative, a Festival of Korea is set for Sunday, noon to 4:30 p.m., at the museum. Gallery tours, classical Korean music and dance, storytelling, a tea ceremony and art-making activities will be featured.