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The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco holds more than 18,000 objects spanning 6,000 years, making it the largest museum in the United States devoted exclusively to Asian art. It opened in 1966 on the strength of a 7,700-object donation from Chicago industrialist Avery Brundage, and moved in 2003 into the city's former main library, built in 1917. The collection includes the Buddha dated 338, China's earliest known dated Buddha.
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The Library That Became a Museum
This museum lives inside the building that served as San Francisco's main library for most of the twentieth century. George Kelham designed it in 1917 in the Beaux-Arts style: granite columns, a grand staircase, reading rooms built for silence. The library moved out, and in 2003 the Italian architect Gae Aulenti converted the old halls into galleries. She added a seismic base-isolation system, so the whole building can shift slightly when the ground moves, which in San Francisco is not a decoration. Walk through the entrance hall and notice the building itself before the art. The marble staircase under your feet carried readers for decades before it carried museumgoers.
A Chicago Millionaire's Gift
Avery Brundage made his money in construction in Chicago and spent decades buying Asian art. In 1959 he agreed to give the city his collection on one condition: San Francisco had to build a museum to hold it. Voters passed a 2.75 million dollar bond, a wing went up beside the de Young in Golden Gate Park, and the Asian Art Museum opened there in 1966. Brundage, who ran the International Olympic Committee from 1952 to 1972, ended up donating more than 7,700 objects. Today the museum holds more than 18,000, spanning 6,000 years, from Neolithic jade to contemporary installation art, and it is the largest museum in the United States devoted exclusively to Asian art. Only about 2,000 objects are on the walls at once, so the place is different on every visit.
The Buddha Dated 338
The museum's most famous object is small. In the Chinese galleries sits a gilded bronze Buddha about sixteen inches tall, made in 338 under the Later Zhao kingdom in what is now Hebei province. The date carved on its base makes it the earliest known dated Buddha sculpture produced in China, roughly four hundred years after Buddhism reached the country from India. Few early Buddha images carry dates, which is why this small figure anchors the study of early Chinese Buddhist art. Start with that Buddha and read its inscription, then ride the escalator up to the second floor, where a teahouse built in Kyoto and rebuilt inside the museum by Japanese carpenters is waiting.