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ART on view THE DEPARTMENT OF INDO-PACIFIC ART AT THE Yale University Art Gallery 102 FIG. 1 (right): The Kubler- Thompson Gallery of Indo-Pacific Art at the Yale University Art Gallery, opened November 2012. The gallery is named after George Kubler and Robert Farris Thompson, two of Thomas Jaffe’s art history professors at Yale. FIG. 2 (below): Funerary effigy, tau-tau. Sa’dan Toraja, Sulawesi. 17th–18th century. Wood. Promised gift of Thomas Jaffe, Yale University Art Gallery, inv. ILE2012.30.732. Photo: Johan Vipper. In December 2012, the Yale University Art Gallery celebrated the completion of a major renovation and expansion of the three historical buildings that make up its display space, dedicated to the arts of four continents. The event featured the opening of the Kubler- Thompson Gallery for Indo-Pacific Art, the permanent display for the museum’s newest department (fig. 1).1 Almost two years after the opening of the Indo-Pacific gallery, a major temporary installation titled East of the Wallace Line: Monumental Art from Indonesia and New Guinea is also on display. This exhibition is an opportunity to show some of the department’s large-scale works of art, both sculpture and textiles, which are too big to be displayed in the permanent gallery space. As the curator for this collection, I want to take this occasion to present the history and scope of the department’s collection and its role in the Yale Art Gallery in general. Yale’s Art Gallery and Indo-Pacific Art The Yale University Art Gallery was founded in 1832 as a museum within the university explicitly for the teaching of art and its history. This makes it the oldest university art museum in the western hemisphere. The founding collection came from the American painter John Trumbull, who gave more than 100 paintings with scenes from the American War of Independence. The collection quickly grew to include ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean material, European and American paintings and decorative art, Pre-Columbian art and artifacts, and a superb collection of prints and drawings. Arts from Asia and the Islamic world are now also prominently represented, and Yale’s collection of coins and medals was eventually transferred to the gallery. The Department of Modern and Contemporary Art has a renowned collection of twentieth- and twentyfirst century works as well as an outstanding photography collection. A Department of African Art was added in the early 2000s and, most recently, the Department of Indo-Pacific Art was inaugurated, which is the focus of this article. In 2009 I was appointed as the first curator for this new department, and I took up my post in January 2010 after working for twenty years at the Ash- By Ruth Barnes molean Museum at Oxford. The department’s name of “Indo-Pacific Art” is intentionally broad: At present its holdings are based on the cultures of maritime Southeast Asia, but eventually the collection will also include the arts of the Pacific. The department was the inspiration of Thomas Jaffe, who was an undergraduate at Yale (B.A. ’71). Among his best memories were the classes he attended in the gallery, with the opportunity to learn from the actual handling and close inspection of objects in the collection. Since leaving Yale he has worked as a journalist, specializing in business reporting. He started collecting non-Western art in the 1970s, first concentrating on Southeast Asia and, in recent years, on the Pacific. By the early 2000s, he had amassed one of the finest collections of its kind, with particular highlights from Borneo, the Batak of North Sumatra, the Philippines, and eastern Indonesia, the latter including Sulawesi, Timor, Flores, and the Southern Moluccas (figs. 2 and 3). It was around this time that he began to make longterm plans for his collection. Jaffe wanted to give his collection to an institution where it would be accessible to students, visitors, scholars, and amateurs (in the true, best sense of the word), to be studied and appreciated. The clear choice for him was the Yale University Art Gallery. Jaffe realized that his own collection, which concentrated on sculpture, was not broad enough to be the sole foundation of a department with a viable regional focus. If he were to found a new department based initially on maritime Southeast Asia, he would need to add a substantial textile component. He did not have a particular interest in textiles, but he had friends who did. He approached Robert J. (Jeff) Holmgren and Anita Spertus, who in the 1970s and ’80s had brought together a significant collection of Indonesian textiles that excelled in its breadth and consistently high quality. In 2002 they had divided the collection and sold half of it to the National Gallery of Australia but kept


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