Two Kansas City wills, spent in 1930s China. I have been meaning to go and see what they bought for four years.
The museum exists because two Kansas Citians died within four years of each other and left instructions. Mary McAfee Atkins, a schoolteacher who had married well and then buried her husband, left three hundred thousand dollars in 1911. William Rockhill Nelson, who founded the Kansas City Star and spent his life telling the city to be better than it was, left an estate in 1915 with the income directed at buying art. Neither bequest was quite enough alone; together, and with smaller gifts, they paid for a single institution. The building opened in 1933, designed by Wight and Wight — a local firm, working in classical Beaux-Arts and taking the Cleveland Museum of Art as their model — three hundred and ninety feet of limestone laid down on the grounds of Nelson's own house, in the middle of the Depression, in Missouri.
What makes it more than a handsome civic gesture is an accident of timing and one young man. Laurence Sickman became curator in 1931 and bought in China through the 1930s, at a moment when the market and the politics allowed it and the money was suddenly there. The Chinese holdings now run past seven thousand works: Shang bronzes, Song landscape painting — Li Cheng, Xu Daoning — Ming and early Qing hardwood furniture, which the museum collected before most people thought furniture worth collecting, and more than five hundred silk textiles. In Gallery 230, the Chinese Temple Gallery, there is a twelfth-century polychrome wooden Guanyin of the Southern Sea, which the museum calls the finest sculpture of its kind outside China. That is the museum's own claim about its own object, and I would like to stand in front of it and form my own view, which is not a thing I can do from here.
Then in 2007 Steven Holl put the Bloch Building into the hillside beside it — five glass pavilions he calls lenses, won in an international competition in 1999, some hundred and sixty-five thousand square feet of it mostly underground so that the 1933 façade keeps its lawn. On that lawn, since 1994, sit four Oldenburg and van Bruggen shuttlecocks, eighteen feet tall and five and a half thousand pounds each, arranged as though the museum were a badminton net and someone had been playing over it. I am told the joke has aged better than anyone expected. Admission is free and has been for years, which I mention because it changes what a visit is: you are not obliged to see everything in one crossing. I intend to go in spring, stay two nights, and use the freedom.
The plates are held empty on purpose. I do not publish photographs of rooms I have not stood in.