Oriental Coup

Plagued by staff resignations and soaring costs, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art might not have seemed in the best shape for heavy buying. But last week it announced a spectacular plunge. For $5.1 million the Met purchased the Harry Packard collection of Japanese art. In all, there are 412 objects, ranging from neolithic pots, clay Haniwa figures and 11th century Heian bronzes to screens and scrolls by some of the most revered figures in Japanese painting--Korin, Sotatsu, Mitsunobu. The amount was not quite the $5.5 million the museum paid in 1971 for Velasquez's portrait of Juan de Pareja, but it was its largest and costliest single collection ever purchased en bloc. In fact, before the ink had dried on the check, concern was rising over the fact that the purchase had massively depleted the Met's acquisition budget for the next five years.

The Packard collection was valued by Japanese art experts at $11.3 million. The difference, $6.2 million, was in effect Packard's tax-deductible gift to the museum. "It was one of the few great historical collections of Japanese art in private hands," says the Los Angeles County Museum's curator of Oriental art, George Kuwayama, "and the Metropolitan has scored a tremendous coup." Kuwayama's sentiment is particularly sporting, since the Packard collection had been under offer to Los Angeles since 1965 as a gift (if the museum made it the nucleus of a Japanese study center, which it lacked the funds to do) and half of it had been in storage there since 1966. It is surmised that the Japanese government granted the export permits for the other half because of the diplomatic advantages of having a major Japanese collection in the Metropolitan. The advantage to the museum is that in one grand scoop it has enhanced a section of its permanent collection that for decades had been seriously neglected. But the most intriguing aspect of the deal was Packard, a somewhat mysterious U.S. citizen who has lived in Japan since 1946. Until the Met bought his collection he was not rich. His Nisei wife still works as a proofreader in Tokyo with the U.S. Army's newspaper Stars and Stripes. But nobody in the tight world of Japanese art studies doubts the scholarship or acquisitive acumen of the man who is described as looking like a cross between Peter Lorre and the Buddha. Packard has traveled all over Japan in quest of objects for his collection--or for sale to U.S. buyers--and he knows every cranny of a society still opaque to most Americans. "He's the most relentless collector I've ever met," marvels one New York orientalist. "He's totally committed. There's nothing he won't do to get a piece he wants. He'll mortgage his house to raise the money for a 13th century carving and tell his family to get ready to move out."

Packard, now 56, arrived in Japan with the U.S. Navy as part of the occupation forces. By some reports he was a repatriation officer. Others say he was a sewerage expert. All agree that he cannily used his official status to detach works of art from their impoverished Japanese owners. "He could do anything--including walking away with valuable objects in exchange for some chocolate," recalls a Kyoto dealer. In 1950 he began studying (in Japanese) at Waseda University and slowly built up a formidable reputation as a scholar and historian.

These postwar years were the last "golden age" of low Japanese art prices. They were almost comparable to the Meiji period after 1868, when, in a paroxysm of cultural self-abasement before the West, the Japanese started junking their national art treasures and the great American collections of Japanese art--the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Freer Gallery in Washington--were assembled for a pittance. Packard's hoard may not, as the Metropolitan's spokesman exuberantly suggests, raise its Japanese holdings to the level of either Boston or Washington. But then it is most unlikely that today any museum--let alone a private orientalist--could start from scratch and form a collection as fine and as encyclopedic as Packard's.

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