Over 150 masterpieces of traditional Japanese art from the Klaus F. Naumann Collection for the Berlin Museum of Asian Art: donation and purchase
Press release from 04/02/2009
The Museum of Asian Art at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin is today receiving the most important donation of traditional Japanese art in around a hundred years in a festive ceremony. Klaus F. Naumann, a native of Berlin who lives in Tokyo, is giving the museum more than one hundred works, including around 75 scroll paintings, numerous screens, around two dozen ceramics and a kimono. Together with the purchase of Klaus F. Naumann's lacquer collection in 2008, which was made possible by funding from the Stiftung Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin, the Kulturstiftung der Länder and the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung, this is one of the most extensive and high-quality acquisitions in the museum's history.
The donation includes works from the 6th to the early 20th century. In the field of Japanese ceramics, the museum, whose collection was previously limited to items for the tea ceremony from the 16th to 18th centuries and export porcelain, has acquired several objects that represent the earlier Japanese pottery tradition. These include, for example, the oldest work in the donation, a fully preserved female figure made of clay that served to protect the tombs of the elite, a haniwa. In the field of painting, the donation primarily strengthens the collection of paintings from the early modern period (Edo period, 1600-1868). A wide range of motifs can be found on the hanging scrolls, horizontal scrolls and large-format folding screens: sacred themes, illustrations of classics of Japanese literature, portraits of beautiful women and landscapes as well as depictions of animals and flowers. The purchased collection of 55 high-quality lacquer works, a central genre of Japanese art, mainly comprises objects from the 14th to 19th centuries. To mark the donation, the museum is presenting a selection of the works.
Most of the objects, which will be on display at the Humboldt Forum in future, have already been in the museum in Berlin-Dahlem for some time. Klaus F. Naumann gave the Museum of East Asian Art (since 2006 the Museum of Asian Art) around one hundred works on permanent loan for an initial period of ten years when the museum reopened in 2000. Over the years, he expanded this Berlin collection to over 150 items. In addition to the quality of the works, he always took care to complement the museum's holdings in a meaningful way when purchasing the objects. In this way, his collection closed significant gaps that had arisen as a result of the Second World War.
The East Asian Art Collection of the Museum of Asian Art was founded by Wilhelm von Bode on 6 November 1906 and was one of the first museums of non-European art in Germany. Its central collection areas are painting and writing, applied arts, prints and archaeology. Despite the immense losses caused by the destruction of the war and the looted art of the Soviet army after the Second World War (even today, 90 per cent of the pre-war collection can still be found in the collections of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow), today it once again plays a leading role among museums of this kind in Europe, not least thanks to the commitment of Klaus F. Naumann.
The collector and patron Klaus F. Naumann, born in Berlin in 1935, has lived in Tokyo since the 1960s, where he worked as an art dealer. He has been associated with the Museum of Asian Art for a long time. Over the years, he has supported the reconstruction of the museum's collection after the serious losses suffered during the war, both with donations and sales. His offer of a permanent loan in 1998 provided the decisive impetus for the refurbishment and redesign of the museum, and he also contributed financially to the planning costs. The museum honoured this extraordinary commitment when it reopened in 2000 by naming a room after the collector. Rooms in the Humboldt Forum will also bear his name.
Klaus F. Naumann's commitment follows on from the patronage of private sponsors, to whom the East Asian Art Collection owed its importance before the Second World War. The donations from Ernst Grosse and Marie Meyer in 1915 and Gustav Jacoby in 1919 had a lasting impact on the collection's profile. The museum's support organisation, the Society for East Asian Art, had more than a thousand members by 1930. Shortly after the Second World War, the writer couple Weiskopf and Gerd and Lotti Wallenstein contributed to the reconstruction of the collection. Numerous other donations, including those from Rose Hempel, who donated a collection of more than 50 Japanese paintings to the museum in 2006, and from Anneliese and Wulf Crueger, from whom the museum received four hundred contemporary Japanese ceramics at the beginning of 2008, have in recent years cemented the international reputation that the Collection of East Asian Art in Berlin has regained.