1936
1965
1846 - 1935

Gold Rush and Boom

The Gold Rush brings a population boom — and international attention —  to California. A major earthquake and increased immigration shape the growing city of San Francisco.

    1936 - 1965

    Global Conflict and Collecting

    Rapid societal change and worldwide unrest in the wake of World War II gives collectors like Avery Brundage the opportunity to amass unparalleled collections of Asian Art.

    • Avery Begins Collecting Art

      Avery Begins Collecting Art
      Asian Art Museum
      Inspired by the first major exhibition of imperial Chinese art in the West—London’s 1935–1936 International Exhibition of Chinese ArtAvery Brundage, a Chicago real estate developer and president of the International Olympic Committee, begins collecting Asian Art. Here, Brundage admires some of his jades in the 1950s.

    • Unemployment

      Unemployment
      Library of Congress
      Unemployed men sitting on the sunny side of the San Francisco Public Library (now the Asian Art Museum) by Dorothea Lange. This area is still a magnet for the city’s distressed communities, and they are no longer just men.

    • World War II

      World War II
      Battleship USS IOWA in drydock at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, 1945. This ship served in the Pacific War and the Korean War. Library of Congress.
      World War II brings Asian countries closer to the attention of San Franciscans as foes, allies, and battlegrounds, and inspires a new cycle of Western interest in Asian art and culture.

    • Women War Workers

      Women War Workers
      Image courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.
      Written on back: "Representing twenty or more shipyard crafts. Women war workers at Marinship, shipyard at Sausalito on San Francisco bay..."

    • Japanese American Internment

      Japanese American Internment
      Japanese evacuation from San Francisco, 1942. National Archives.
      Internment of Japanese Americans displaces families throughout the West Coast from 1942—1946, such as these families in San Francisco (1942).

    • Wendy Welder and Shipbuilding

      Wendy Welder and Shipbuilding
      Library of Congress
      During the war, shipbuilding booms in the Bay Area, further enhancing the area’s importance on the Pacific Rim; American women break from traditional roles and work alongside men as technicians in Bay Area shipyards, such as this "Wendy Welder" in 1943 at the Richmond Shipyards.

    • Memorial Museum opens in Golden Gate Park

      Memorial Museum opens in Golden Gate Park
      Mid Winter Fair
      Repurposing the California Midwinter Memorial Exposition's Midwinter Fair Building, the Memorial Museum opens in Golden Gate Park (and eventually becomes the home of the de Young and Asian Art Museum).

    • The Society for Asian Art

      The Society for Asian Art
      Asian Art Museum
      The Society for Asian Art is incorporated in 1957 as a non-profit, raising $30,000 to appraise and catalogue the Brundage Collection. Since its beginning fifty-nine years ago, the Society for Asian Art has given more than $3 million to the Asian Art Museum, to help build the endowment, sponsor more than twenty exhibitions, establish and sustain the museum’s library, underwrite at least a dozen museum catalogs and purchase works of art for the Museum. Co-chairmen are Mrs. Roger Kent and Paul A. Bissinger. The society also has offered more than 1,300 lectures, including a thousand Friday morning Arts of Asia lectures given by leading international scholars and curators; has sponsored more than twenty symposia and 250 international and domestic travel programs; organizes annual study groups, literature courses, and visits to galleries and private collections; and publishes the well-respected Lotus Leaves scholarly journal. Here, Marjorie Bissinger, dancing with Avery Brundage in 1971, was one of the Society for Asian Art organizers who tried to sweep Brundage off his feet and convince him to give his collection to San Francisco.

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    • Sealing the Museum Deal

      Sealing the Museum Deal
      San Francisco Public Library. George Christopher and Justin Herman shaking hands
      After some negative communications from Brundage about reconsidering his offer to donate his collection to San Francisco, Mayor George Christopher, City Attorney Lawrence Mana, and museum supporter R. Gwin Follis fly to Brundage’s Santa Barbara home to seal the deal.

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    • Board Approved

      Board Approved
      One Hundred Objects from the Avery Brundage Collection, De Young, 1960.
      The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously adopts a resolution to provide funding to accept Avery Brundage’s vast and still growing collection of Asian art on the condition that the city build a new museum to house it. The first half, consisting of Chinese art, is to be donated upon completion of the museum; the rest is to be given over a period of twenty-five years.

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    • Voters Pass Proposition A

      Voters Pass Proposition A
      Asian Art Museum. Joseph Brotherton, San Francisco-based painter and collector, shown here pitching the museum to enthralled youngsters in a staged photo for the “Yes on A” campaign, around 1959.
      A Chinese tomb guardian from the Brundage collection serves as the mascot for the “Yes on A” poster encouraging voter support for the Society for Asian Art’s grassroots campaign to add a wing onto the de Young. From May 10 — June 12, the de Young Museum exhibits 137 selected objects from Brundage's collection, enabling citizens to view before the June primary election. Voters pass Proposition A, a $2.75 million bond issue to fund the new wing, which will house the first ten thousand objects from the collection.

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    • Laurence Sickman on Avery Brundage

      Laurence Sickman on Avery Brundage
      WarHistoryOnline.com

      “There is good reason to believe that the objects of Asian art offered San Francisco by Avery Brundage comprise the last comprehensive collection in this field that can be assembled in our time." Laurence Sickman, former “Monuments Man” deployed during World War II to rescue stolen artworks and director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, from the catalogue One hundred objects of Asian art from the Avery Brundage Collection, 1960.



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    • Docent Council

      Docent Council
      Storytellers and docents guided groups through to museum’s collection and the In Grand Style exhibition.
      The Docent Council is formed to select potential trainees to lead tours in the new museum.

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    • Brundage Collection Symposium

      Brundage Collection Symposium
      Asian Art Museum
      The Society for Asian Art sponsors a symposium on the Brundage Collection attended by more than two hundred scholars, including Laurence Sickman (right) and the renowned founding father of Chinese archaeology Li Chi (center).

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    • René-Yvon Lefebvre d'Argencé

      René-Yvon Lefebvre d'Argencé
      Asian Art Museum
      The soon-to-be first director of the museum, Frenchman René-Yvon Lefebvre d'Argencé, chats in storage with founding museum supporter Marjorie Bissinger. Bissinger aided in the initial cataloging of the collection before the artworks were installed. 

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    • The Immigration Act of 1965

      The Immigration Act of 1965
      Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library
      The Immigration Act of 1965 eliminates the national origin quota system that had favored immigrants from Europe to the exclusion of those from Asia, Africa, and southern and eastern Europe. The act allows for “family reunification” sponsorship of relatives by legal immigrants, transforming the demographics of the Bay Area from less than 3 percent Asian in 1960 to more than 23 percent Asian in 2010, according to Census data.

    1966 - 1975

    A Jewel in Golden Gate Park

    After opening as the Avery Brundage Collection in the M.H. de Young Museum, the museum soon establishes its reputation for groundbreaking exhibitions.

      1976 - 2002

      The Museum Comes of Age

      Following Avery Brundage’s death, the museum continues to grow its collection and solidify its status as one of the finest collections of Asian art in the world.

        2003 - Today

        The Heart of the
        City and Beyond

        In its new Civic Center home, the museum continues to change, in order to reach broader audiences by increasing focus on the visitor experience.