On Thursday night, the National Museum of Asian Art — celebrated its 100th anniversary with a black-tie dinner for 200 donors, celebrities and diplomats at the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industry building.
A New York industrialist who made his fortune building railway cars, Freer traveled the globe and donated more than 9,500 pieces of American and Asian art to the Smithsonian. But he is best known for his patronage of artist James McNeill Whistler — and the gallery’s famed Peacock Room, which holds one of Whistler’s most famous paintings, “The Princess from the Land of Porcelain.” Freer was an unusual collector for his time, mixing Western and Eastern art into one, cohesive aesthetic.
The Freer grew over the next decades, but it was psychiatrist Arthur Sackler who made headlines in 1982 when he donated more than 1,000 pieces of Asian art valued at $50 million — and another $4 million for a building to showcase it. TheSackler died suddenly four months before the celebration. Eight years later, his younger brothers began selling OxyContin through their company Purdue Pharma.
“His contribution has never been as respected as it should have been,” she said in an interview at the event. “Arthur was an extraordinary, great American and now he’s being lumped in with the Oxy-Sackler side of the family. It’s just so stupid and lazy and inaccurate.” “We live in a time of reckoning, which, as a historian, I think is a good thing,” Robinson said. “To me, the absolute crucial response is candor and transparency.”
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