Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation acquires high-calibre collection of East Asian lacquer art
Press release from 12/02/2008
The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation recently acquired Klaus F. Naumann's lacquer collection for the Museum of Asian Art. It comprises 55 high-ranking East Asian lacquer works that exemplify a central art genre of Japan, the Ryūkyū Islands and China. At its core is Japanese lacquer art, which is particularly well represented with 49 works from the 14th to 19th centuries. For all their diversity, the objects are united by a specifically Japanese aesthetic, which is articulated in splendour, refined elegance or deliberate simplicity.
The acquisition makes the museum one of the internationally outstanding institutions in this field. For example, there is no comparable counterpart outside of East Asia for the Negoro lacquers of the 16th and 17th centuries, which were mainly used in Zen monasteries. The same applies to the lacquer works of the Ryukyu Islands. The new acquisition also closes one of the large gaps in the Berlin collection caused by the destruction of the war and the looted art of the Red Army after the Second World War. The newly acquired collection will be one of the attractions of the Humboldt Forum on Schlossplatz in future. The purchase was made possible by the financial support of the Stiftung Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin, the Kulturstiftung der Länder, the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung and private sponsors.
Most of the collection is already in the Berlin museum in Dahlem. Klaus F. Naumann gave it to the Museum of East Asian Art (now the Museum of Asian Art) as a temporary permanent loan when it reopened in 2000. To celebrate the museum's centenary in November 2006, important pieces were added to his lacquer collection and exhibited and published under the title "A Japanese Passion - The Lacquers of the Klaus F. Naumann Collection". It is one of the highlights of the Berlin museum.
As early as 1975, Klaus F. Naumann, encouraged by the then director of the Museum of East Asian Art Beatrix von Ragué, began to acquire mainly Japanese lacquerware. When purchasing the objects, he took into account the gaps in the Berlin museum's collection. He built up his collection almost exclusively in Japan, where he worked as a dealer for decades. All of the objects in the Naumann Collection left the country with the permission of the Bunkacho, the Japanese cultural authority, but with the background that they would serve as ambassadors of Japanese culture in a museum.
The East Asian Art Collection of the Museum of Asian Art was founded on 6 November 1906. Its main areas of collection are painting and writing, decorative arts, prints and archaeology. Despite the immense losses caused by the destruction of the war and the Soviet army's looted art campaign after the Second World War (even today, 90 per cent of the pre-war collection is still half in the collections of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and half in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow), it once again plays a leading role among museums of this kind in Europe.
The museum's lacquer collection, one of the most important in Europe before the war, also suffered painful losses during the war. Lacquer art has always been a focal point of the Berlin museum's research activities: Its first director Otto Kümmel dedicated the opening chapter of his seminal publication "The Decorative Arts in Japan" to it and Beatrix von Ragué (director from 1967 to 1985) was regarded as one of the leading scholars in the field with her internationally authoritative standard work "History of Japanese Lacquer Art". She acquired important Chinese and Japanese lacquer artworks. Although the funds were not sufficient to comprehensively cover this art genre, she was able to acquire masterpieces that today make up the fame of the Berlin collection, such as the footstool in red carved lacquer (Yongle era, 1403-1404) and the imperial throne ensemble inlaid with mother-of-pearl (Kangxi era, 1662-1722). With the purchase of the Naumann lacquer collection, the Museum of Asian Art has now regained a leading position in this field.