Art: Gift to the West

In recent years the task of educating New Yorkers in the history and subtleties of Eastern art has mainly been shouldered by two institutions: the Japan Society, founded in 1907, and the Asia Society, both of which have an impeccable track record of succinct, informative exhibitions. The concerns have a trustee in common: John D. Rockefeller III, 67, who became a collector of Oriental art after a trip to Japan with John Foster Dulles in 1951 and in 1956 founded the Asia Society. Last week it was announced that Rockefeller, in stepping down from the society's chairmanship, had given it his collection and promised to foot the bill for housing it in a new and larger Asia House in Manhattan. Says Rockefeller, "there is a particularly useful role for the small, specialized museum of high quality." Eventually, it is hoped, the expanded Asia House, with its nucleus of Rockefeller objects, will become an Oriental equivalent to New York's small, specialized Frick Collection of European paintings or its Morgan Library of European manuscripts and prints.

The collection is small-300 items -but discriminating. It is especially strong in Nepalese bronzes, sculpture from India and Southeast Asia, and ceramics and lacquer from Japan, Korea and China. The rationale behind the collection, explains Dr. Sherman Lee, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, who frequently advised Rockefeller on what to buy, "is one that insists on the highest possible quality in the objects acquired and on their capacity to be understood and enjoyed by the interested layman." Included in the gift are some of the most striking South Indian bronzes and stone carvings of the 8th to 11th centuries left in private hands, such as a 10th-llth century figure of Krishna dancing on the hood of the cobra-demon Kaliya, holding up the creature's tail in a ripple of bronze like a Malay kris, and the majestic, decapitated Female Torso from llth century Cambodia, an image as silent and epigrammatic as any archaic Greek kouros.