Friends and staff of the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are mourning the loss of longtime Ackland friend, adviser and benefactor Sherman Emery Lee, who died Wednesday (July 9) in Chapel Hill. He was 90.
Recognized as one of the outstanding scholars of his generation in the field of Asian art, Lee chose to live in Chapel Hill after retiring as director of the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1983. For many years, Lee was an adjunct professor of art history at both Carolina and Duke University. He also was on the Ackland’s National Advisory Board.
A committal service will be at 10 a.m. July 19 at the Church of the Holy Family, 200 Hayes Road, Chapel Hill. The Ackland is planning a tribute of its own for the near future to celebrate Lee’s life and contributions to the museum.
In a long and distinguished career, Lee was director and curator of the Cleveland museum, associate director of the Seattle Art Museum, curator of Far Eastern art at the Detroit Institute of Art and a professor of art history at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Lee’s book, “A History of Far Eastern Art,” was first published in 1965 and had gone through five editions by 1994. It remains a standard text in the field. The Emperor of Japan made Lee a member of the Order of the Sacred Treasure. He also was a member of the French Legion of Honor and received the North Star medal from the Swedish government.
In Chapel Hill, Lee worked to bring appreciation of non-Western art to the area. Most important to the Ackland, however, was Lee’s role as friend and adviser. For close to two decades, Lee advised the Ackland on the creation of its Asian art collection, now considered by many to be the premier such collection in the Southeast.
“The Ackland could not be what it is today without the irreplaceable friendship, support and connoisseurship of Sherman Lee,” said Ackland Director Emily Kass. “We will miss him as a friend, and the art world will miss him not only as a key Asian art specialist, but as one of the great museum directors of all time.”
In 1992, when the University awarded Lee an honorary degree, the Ackland’s director at the time, Charles Millard, said, “Sherman’s expertise has perhaps been the single greatest factor in shaping the Ackland’s collections during the last five years.”
Timothy Riggs, Ackland curator of collections, emphasized the role Lee played in advising the Ackland on the purchase of works now included in the museum’s Asian art collection, calling him the Ackland’s unofficial curator of Asian art. Riggs said that rarely would any piece be acquired without being either suggested by or vetted by Lee. “The Asian collection as it exists today is a monument to his scholarship,” said Riggs.
Lee also was involved in several of the museum’s exhibitions. In 1985, he organized “Southern Sung Painting and its Legacy,” a major exhibition of 13th-century Chinese painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art, at the Ackland. In 1997, he produced the exhibition “Screens and Scrolls: Japanese Art from the Ackland Art Museum and Local Collections,” and wrote the accompanying catalog.
In 1998, Lee worked with Riggs on a revised installation of the entire Asian collection, selecting works to be shown and advising on arrangement. “I learned just about all I know about Asian art from Sherman, beginning with that installation,” said Riggs.
Over the years, Lee was instrumental in developing important relationships with many of the Ackland’s most significant donors. He worked with the late Gilbert Yager and Clara Yager of Getzville, N.Y., to build the museum’s collection of Indian art.
He also helped establish a link between the Ackland and the collectors Herbert and Eunice Shatzman of Durham, leading to the exhibition “Dark Jewels” and the gift of much of the Shatzman collection to the museum. He assisted Gratia and Osborne Hauge of Falls Church, Va., in their gifts of important Middle Eastern carvings and ancient Iranian pottery.
The Ackland’s collection has benefited not only from Lee’s expertise, but also from gifts of artworks. Over the years, Lee and his wife, Ruth, donated more than 80 works of art from their own collection to the museum. The works include Japanese, Chinese and Tibetan painting, Buddhist sculpture from Japan and Southeast Asia and significant examples of European art.
Born in 1918 in Seattle, Lee spent his childhood in Brooklyn, N.Y. He received bachelor’s and master’s of arts degrees from American University in Washington, D.C., and a doctorate from Case Western University. Lee served in World War II in the Pacific as a naval officer and navigator. After the war, he spent time in Japan as what was called a monuments man, retrieving and cataloging the imperial art collection.
Lee is survived by his wife, Ruth, who supported him and to whom he was devoted during 70 years of marriage; his daughters, Katharine Lee Reid, a former curator at the Ackland and former director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Margaret Gray Bachenheimer of Carrboro and Elizabeth Lee Chiego of San Antonio; a son, Thomas Weaver Lee of Raleigh; six grandchildren and two step-grandchildren.
The Ackland is on the UNC campus near the corner of Franklin and Columbia streets. An academic unit of Carolina, the museum serves broad University, regional and national constituencies. The Ackland collection comprises more than 15,000 works of art, featuring significant collections of European painting and sculpture, Asian art, works of art on paper (drawings, photographs and prints), African art, North Carolina pottery and folk art and 20th-century and contemporary art.
Ackland Web site: www.ackland.org
Ackland contact: Nic Brown, (919) 843-3675, nic_brown@unc.edu
News Services contact: LJ Toler, (919) 962-8589