CPAC – Building A Wall Against Art Part I: How the Executive Branch Controls US Access to Art and Artifacts

"The art world is dominated today by stories about spectacular multi-million dollar sales of contemporary artworks at shows and auction houses. Yet the market for ancient and ethnographic artworks has no such lofty expectations. There are far fewer important ancient artworks offered at auction in the US than just a decade ago, and there are fewer foreign exhibitors (or even American galleries) willing to show at major antique fairs in New York.

Already, US authorities’ aggressive seizures of artworks from long-held collections and the unprecedented number of prosecutions based upon foreign laws that nationalize virtually all antique artworks have made art dealers, collectors, and museums hyper-cautious. These enforcement actions threaten to end the once-dominant New York market in global antique and tribal art....Objects that can be proven to have been collected before 1970 are categorized as “good” for marketing, collecting and museum acquisition purposes. Objects without proof of collection date or collected post-1970 are “bad.”"
Quoted from this article, please read: Click here.

Provenance and Plunder at Museums

Aljazeera recently reported on an interesting story of interest to Asian art collectors of antiquities.
Provenance and plunder: What museums won't tell us. On how Western museums encourage and abet the smuggling of antiquities.
For the article, click here.
The next time you visit museums, consider what the labels do not say about where the art came from. As the article notes, "Museums fight against having to reveal the provenance of objects precisely because they know that many of the objects in their vast collections have illicit histories behind them."
That being said, it is important to remember that decades ago when museums began acquiring Asian pieces, the world was a different place and removal to a museum often saved pieces from ruin.

CT Loo, Famed Prewar Chinese Art Dealer, Son of a Peasant Opium Addict

The Financial Times has an interesting article today: CT Loo: champion of Chinese art ... or villain?

Among the many famous pieces he sold to museums worldwide is this mural at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, that I and my friends who studied at Kansas have studied and admired for decades.

Chinese Art Stolen from Cambridge Museum

BBC Radio reported that a group of 18 Chinese artifacts, mainly jades, were stolen from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge on April 13, 2012. Professor and popular art crime author Noah Charney wrote a blog post about this. Not too surprising a development given the booming Chinese art market.

Museums with Significant Korean Art Collections

see worldwide list compiled by the Korea Foundation: http://www.clickkorea.org/arts/features/e_feature_0.asp

North America
Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (has curator; excellent recent catalogue of the collection)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (has curator; excellent recent catalogue of the collection)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Cleveland Art Museum
Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto
Portland Art Museum (catalogue of this and other Portland area collections)
Brooklyn Museum (1987 catalogue of the collection)
Art Institute of Chicago
Seattle Asian Art Museum
Museum of Fine Arts Boston
Freer-Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama
Peabody-Essex Museum, Salem, MA

Europe
Musee Guimet, Paris (excellent catalogue of the collection)
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
catalogue recently written
British Museum

Korea
Suk Joo-Sun Memorial Museum of Korean Folk Arts, Dankook University
National Museum of Korea, Seoul
National Folk Museum of Korea
Kyongju National Museum
Onyang Folk Museum, Asan, S Korea
Ho-Am Art Museum, Youngin, S Korea

Japan
Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka (catalogues exist, especially of the famed Ataka collection of Koryo era celadons)
Tokyo National Museum
Old Buddhist temples throughout Japan have extensive collections of Korean Buddhist statues and paintings; catalogues exist in Korean and Japanese only)

North American Museums with Significant Chinese and Japanese Art Collections

Regional antique stores and estate sales are often full of Asian antiques, especially later Chinese and Japanese decorative arts made for export in the later 19th and early 20th century but their quality varies considerably. The best way to learn to identify quality is to see fine pieces in person. This list contains names of many, but not all, North American museums that collect and regularly display Asian arts. The largest and most comprehensive are marked with an astirisk (*)

*Art Institute of Chicago

*Asia Society, NY (Rockefeller collection & special loan exhibitions)

*Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL

Brooklyn Museum of Art

China Institute Gallery, NY (traveling exhibitions only, no permanent collection)

Cincinnati Museum of Art

*Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture, Hanford, CA

*Cleveland Museum of Art

*Denver Art Museum

*Honolulu Academy of Arts

*Japan Society Gallery, NY (traveling exhibitions only, no permanent collection)

Herbert F. Johnson Art Museum, Cornell University

*Los Angeles County Museum of Art

*Minneapolis Institute of Arts

*Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Morikami Museum & Japanese Gardens, Delray Beach, FL

*Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

*Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City

New Orleans Museum of Art

*Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, CA

*Philadelphia Museum of Art

Phoenix Art Museum

Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR

Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto

*Arthur M. Sackler Museum for Asian Art, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Saint Louis Art Museum

Santa Barbara Museum of Art

*Seattle Asian Art Museum

*Smithsonian Institution Freer and Sackler Galleries, Washington, D.C.

Trammel & Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art, Dallas

University of Michigan Museum of Art

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond

Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore