Rubin Museum Finds a New Focus

The new chief curator of the Rubin Museum of Art, Martin Brauen, arrived at the museum this past June, at an important moment for the institution.The museum, founded by Donald and Shelley Rubin and dedicated to art of the Himalayas, has been open for four years. It has been praised for its exhibitions, focusing on such subjects as Sikh art and images of siddhas, or holy madmen, in India and Tibet.But the museum has taken a while to find a management structure that works. It started out with a relatively conventional system, with a single director. Later, it switched to a system of three directors. Now, Mr. Brauen is responsible for everything related to programming, while Mr. Rubin, the retired founder of a managed-care company, serves as the museum’s CEO.Mr. Brauen, one of the world’s leading experts in Tibetan art, spent the first 35 years of his career at the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich. Now he has to focus on the sustainability of the Rubin Museum’s exhibition program and its audience. He said he wants to expand the programming with more comparative exhibitions and more loan exhibitions.“It cannot be the future of the museum to concentrate only on Tibetan and Himalayan art, or only on our own collection,” he said in a recent interview. The museum’s collection includes some 3,000 objects, of which 1,500 or 2,000 are truly exceptional, Mr. Brauen said.Among the first exhibitions Mr. Brauen will curate at the Rubin is a show of mandalas — the Buddhist paintings that serve as aids to meditation. He said he would also like to do shows of contemporary Tibetan and Indian art, as well as comparative shows about Buddhist and European medieval cosmologies, and views of death.In 1992, Mr. Brauen organized the first exhibition on mandalas in the world in Zurich. Many Westerners, he explained, don’t understand that most mandalas are two-dimensional representations of a three-dimensional concept: a palace full of deities, on which the practitioner is supposed to meditate. There are a small number of three-dimensional mandalas in the world: highly ornamented sculptures, frequently made of wood and brightly painted.For the mandala exhibition at the Rubin, which will open in August of 2009, Mr. Brauen is hoping to borrow a three-dimensional mandala either from the collection of the Russian Ethnography Museum in Saint Petersburg or from a monastery in North India.Going forward, the museum’s challenge will be to find a way to sustain itself after the Rubins are no longer around. In addition to donating the majority of the collection, the Rubins spent $22 million to buy the building, a former Barneys, and created an endowment, which is now at $80 million. Last year, of the $17 million the museum raised, the Rubins donated $7.5 million, or 40%.In an interview, Mr. Rubin, 73, acknowledged that his and his wife’s support would not “go on forever.” He said that the succession plan would be up to the museum’s board. “I have a [chief operating officer] who has 25 years of experience, a great fiscal director, and a great staff,” Mr. Rubin said. “We hope that the public will want this museum to continue a long time.”He also said it was natural that it would take a while to find the right management structure.“You have a different culture for just about every chief executive and chairman that exists,” he said. “Jack Welch’s style is different from mine and from the 100 other top CEOs in the country,” he continued. “When my time [here] is up, there will be somebody with a different personality, a different organizational structure, and a different corporate culture.”Mr. Brauen’s commitment to Tibetan culture extends beyond his professional life. In the early 1960s, the Swiss government accepted 1,000 Tibetan refugees, who were fleeing persecution in China. While he was still in high school in Zurich, Mr. Brauen collected money for the refugees and made several Tibetan friends. He also became fascinated by Tibetan art. In 1969, when he was a student at the University of Bern — studying medicine, not art history — he organized one of the first major European exhibitions of Tibetan art, at the public exhibition hall in Zurich.After the exhibition, he decided to quit his medical studies and go to New Delhi for a year to study Buddhism. He fell in love with a Tibetan woman, who had fled Tibet with her family in the winter of 1959-60. (Her sister died on the journey.) After consulting with a lama, or priest, Mr. Brauen’s future mother-in-law decided that the couple could marry, but only after waiting for two years.Mr. Brauen and his wife went back to Zurich, where he returned to school to study cultural anthropology. Because it was still uncommon to see Asian people in Switzerland, his wife often found Swiss people she met to be cool and reserved — that is, until they learned where she was from.“They would say, ‘Oh, you’re from Tibet, how wonderful — we thought you were from the Philippines or Thailand,'” Mr. Brauen said. “I mean, they didn’t say it so clearly, but it was obvious that when they heard that she was from Tibet they were completely different.”Mr. Brauen’s curiosity about why Europeans reacted in such a positive way to Tibetans led to an exhibition in 2000 called “Dreamworld Tibet,” about Western myths and fantasies of Tibet.Politically, Mr. Brauen has to tread a fine line between his professional and his personal views. The museum does not take a position on the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and it has at different times attracted criticism from both the Chinese government and Students for a Free Tibet.Personally, however, Mr. Brauen and his family are critical of China. His daughter, the actress Yangzom Brauen, was arrested in Moscow in 2001, when she and a group of other people tried to unfurl a banner opposing Beijing’s Olympic bid. Mr. Brauen said he, too, had been skeptical about the benefits of having the Olympics in China, where, he said, “eight to ten thousand people are sentenced to death each year.”Mr. Brauen said that the Rubin’s collection was a strong draw when he was considering the job. The museum is still acquiring pieces, though slowly. Prices for Tibetan art have risen significantly in recent years — partly because of interest from wealthy Chinese collectors, Mr. Brauen said. “Before, you could get exceptional pieces for $100,000,” he said. “Now, a good piece can be more than a million dollars.”

Rubin Museum Finds a New Focus

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