Page 4 - Korean Art, Bonhams March 2017 RObert Moore Collection

ROBERT MOORE

Robert Moore has for the last 50 years been a collector, consultant
and dealer of Asian art with an emphasis on Korea. Bob bought his
first Korean ceramic in the late 1950s for a modest price from Cost
Plus in San Francisco. It was a footed bowl with cover produced in
the Silla Dynasty, some 1500 years old. After that initial purchase
Bob spent the next 5 decades searching high and low for Korean
objects. The hunt has taken him in and out of countless antique
shops, galleries and shows; into the homes of retired GIs and
diplomats; down to the basements and up to the attics of collectors
all over the United States.

William B. Honey describes Korean wares as unaffected. Soetsu
Yanagi writes that Korean craftsmen are “quite free from the conflict
of the beautiful and the ugly… they just make what they make
without pretension.” Robert P. Griffing, Jr. states that “Korean
ceramics are sturdy straightforward and unassuming. They have
neither China’s supremely rational classicism nor any of Japan’s
studied artifice.” Bob simply says “For me, Korean arts are quiet and
directly satisfying”.
The following institutions have either purchased or borrowed
material from the Robert W. Moore collection: The Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The
Crocker Museum of Art, The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco,
The Korean Culture Service, The Craft and Folk Art Museum, The
Seattle Art Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art, California
State University, Northridge, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Asia
Society, The Idemitsu Collection, Tokyo.

2 | BONHAMS