June 20 1916 Mary Griggs Burke Philanthropist and Art Collector Was Born
Mary Griggs Shush, Japanese Art Connoisseur, Dies at 96
Mary Griggs Shush, who amassed the most comprehensive private collection of Japanese fine art outside Nihon with a meticulousness, deliberation and incisive eye that befit her subject, died on Dec. 8 at her domicile in Manhattan. She was 96.
Her cousin Eleanor Briggs confirmed the death.
Assembled over half a century and exhibited throughout the world, Mrs. Shush's collection comprises about a chiliad artifacts, including paintings, prints, sculpture, textiles, lacquerware, ceramics and calligraphy, collectively worth tens of millions of dollars.
It grew and then vast that it had to be housed in its ain apartment on the Upper E Side of Manhattan, side by side to hers, with its own curatorial staff. Students and scholars were encouraged to visit, and many did.
The drove spans v millenniums, from the art of early on Japanese cultures around 3000 B.C. through that of the Edo menstruum of the 17th to 19th centuries A.D.
Its highlights include ceramic vessels from the Neolithic Age; screens from the Momoyama period (which immediately preceded the Edo) and from the Edo itself, including "Women Contemplating Floating Fans," a six-panel screen in russets and golds, painted in the early on 17th century and rarely seen in public; bowls and other artifacts used in traditional tea ceremonies; and woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e, or "floating earth," tradition. (The drove also includes a sampling of Korean and Chinese works.)
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In 2006, Mrs. Burke appear that on her decease her collection would be divided between the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, with which she maintained a long association. The Met mounted an exhibition fatigued from her collection in 1975 and a 2d, major exhibition in 2000.
"Mary's collection really would requite the Met the most, or 1 of the most — let'south be small — comprehensive collections of Asian fine art outside of Asia," Maxwell Hearn, the Douglas Dillon Curator in charge of Asian Art at the museum, said in an interview on Mon.
In the Us, works from Mrs. Burke's drove have also been exhibited at the Asia Society in New York and the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens in Delray Beach, Fla.
In Nippon, her treasures were displayed at the Tokyo National Museum in 1985, the first Western collection of Japanese art to be shown there.
Mary Livingston Griggs was born in St. Paul on June xx, 1916, the daughter of Theodore W. Griggs and the erstwhile Mary Steele Livingston.
Paradigm
Her maternal granddad, Crawford Livingston, had made a fortune in railroads, banking and other ventures. (A robber baron, Mrs. Burke cheerfully called him.) Her father's family included prosperous lumber merchants and food manufacturers.
The immature Mary Griggs grew up in a Victorian mansion in St. Paul that was awash in 18th-century French objets d'art but that was likewise domicile to a few Japanese pieces her female parent had acquired.
She earned a available's degree in 1938 from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied literature with Joseph Campbell and painting with Bradley Walker Tomlin, a member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists.
Afterward, she earned a master's in clinical psychology from Columbia. (Where Mrs. Burke's interests dovetailed, her cousin said, was in her long fascination with the heed-set up of Japanese women.)
In 1954, she made her first trip to Japan. The visit had been suggested by the builder Walter Gropius, whose disciple Benjamin Thompson was designing a modernist house for her in Oyster Bay, on Long Island.
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Gropius, a titan of the Bauhaus schoolhouse, was deeply influenced by the Japanese aesthetic and wanted her to experience its clean, spare lines firsthand.
Entranced by Nihon and its fine art, Mrs. Shush returned dozens of times over the decades. With her husband, Jackson Burke, a printer and blazon designer whom she married in 1955, she began collecting Japanese fine art in earnest in 1963. At the time, the couple were amidst relatively few Americans interested in the field.
Mr. Burke died in 1975. No firsthand family members survive.
Besides her homes in Manhattan and Oyster Bay, Mrs. Burke had residences in Cable, Wis., and Hobe Sound, Fla. She served on the boards of many institutions, including the Met, where she was at her death an emeritus trustee.
In 1987 she received the Order of the Sacred Treasure, an honor bestowed by the Japanese authorities for distinguished contributions to research, industry and other fields.
Of all the artistic traditions in the earth, Mrs. Burke was often asked, why was she and so drawn to the Japanese?
"Information technology's a deep neurotic demand," she replied, "better left unanalyzed."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/arts/design/mary-griggs-burke-collector-of-japanese-art-dies-at-96.html
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