Khmer Art Overseas 1/2:

Khmer Art Overseas 1/2: The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, USA, is home to one of the world’s finest collections of Asian art, bolstered when collector Avery Brundage donated nearly 8,000 outstanding Asian artworks including the husband and wife sculptures of Shiva and Parvati, from the 11th century Khmer Empire. There are few private collectors of Asian art as well-known as Avery Brundage. Perhaps John D. Rockefeller III or Jim and Marilyn Alsdorf were just as insatiable as Brundage in acquiring some of the finest examples of art for his personal collection, but it was the former American athlete & Chicago industrialist who had wide public name recognition, serving as the President of the International Olympic Committee from 1952 for the next twenty years. In 1959 Brundage agreed to donate his vast collection of Asian art to San Francisco on the condition that the city build a new museum to house it, which they did. In total, he donated more than 7,700 Asian art objects to the City of San Francisco - all housed at the Asian Art Museum (AAM), before his death in 1975. Now the legacy of Brundage is facing severe scrutiny, both for his personal views on race and his connections to art dealers with alleged links to looted antiquities from Cambodia and Thailand. In fact, the AAM has recently repatriated two sandstone lintels to the Thailand government after it found they had been stolen in the 1960s. Now many more questions are being posed about the works of art donated by Brundage to the museum as well as their links to people like Douglas Latchford and gallery owners Doris & Nancy Wiener and the art dealers Spink and Son. These are my top fifteen picks from the AAM collection of Khmer art, with more artifacts to follow.https://www.facebook.com/andy.brouwer.71