Page 7 - Sotheby's New York Chinese Jade Auction September 13, 2018

Property from the

WILLIAM S. ARNETT COLLECTION

orn and raised in Columbus, Georgia, William Arnett grew up Chinese jade collection—some 250 pieces—spent several years on
Bin the American South during its era of racial segregation. In the loan to Atlanta’s High Museum of Art.
early 1960s, shortly after graduating from the University of Georgia,
he left the US for London, to work as the European representative When a health condition curtailed his travel in the 1980s (he had
of an American manufacturer. He traveled widely in Great Britain been to more than sixty countries in his collecting life), Arnett began
and the Continent, spending his personal time at major museums to look closely at art forms in his native region. Soon, primarily
and other sites of historical, cultural, or religious signifcance. through word of mouth, he was encountering African American
An irrepressible collector in childhood (butterfies, comic books, artists throughout the Southern states who shared themes, styles, and
baseball cards, marbles, etc.), Arnett developed a similar fervor for media—and all had thrived with limited artistic and formal education.
the visual arts while living abroad. Eventually he quit his job and Struck by the range and quality of such art-making within Southern
ventured further afeld, traveling and collecting antiquities around the African-American culture, Arnett gradually concluded that racial
Mediterranean Basin—Greek and Roman at frst, then relics from the prejudices in the American South existed in ignorance of a fourishing
ancient civilizations of the Middle East. visual-art tradition among its African American population; and that
ignorance perpetuated itself, in part, by enforcing social conditions
During the mid-1960s he was drawn more eastward, to India, to that regulated or eliminated cultural space in which to experience and
Southeast Asia, and to the art of China. From 1966 to 1970, Arnett appreciate powerful African American art.
made six extended trips to Asia to study and acquire art—sometimes
accompanied by his brother and business partner, Robert—with Arnett spent the ensuing three decades supporting and promoting
repeated visits to Hong Kong and Singapore to purchase Chinese jade this emerging feld of art. For the frst time, he found himself
and porcelain. His interest in the totality of Chinese civilization, and involved with living artists, in environments where art and cultural
his inclusive approach to aesthetics, meant he did not restrict his jade politics were inseparable. Despite the obstacles he encountered, he
acquisitions to a single epoch or style. If anything, he was most interested always maintained that the African American creative expression he
in artistic continuities across time, from the Shang to the later dynasties. championed—much like the art of other civilizations he had collected
throughout his adult life—would live on to represent its makers, its
As a devotee not only of art, but also the beliefs and traditions that culture, and its times. As he put it in a New Yorker profle from 2013,
inform it, Arnett sought to explore and understand the diversity, as “Metaphorically speaking, I am betting on art.”
well as the commonalities, of the world’s civilizations. He came to
believe art occupies a central place in the self-conception of every To play his part, Arnett found it necessary to assume roles far beyond
culture. As he would later write, “Art, with its ability to unify and those of collector or dealer: as patron, archivist, documentary
transform a population, could be as much a cause as an effect of a photographer, writer, publisher, and ultimately, philanthropist.
great civilization.” With Jane Fonda, he founded a publishing company to produce
books and catalogs about this genre, most notably Souls Grown Deep:
By the early 1970s, Arnett had married his high-school sweetheart, African American Vernacular Art of the South (two volumes) and a series
Judy Mitchell, had four sons with her and settled in Atlanta, and was of publications on the now renowned patchwork quilts of Gee’s
making his living buying and selling art from all over the world— Bend, Alabama. He also started the Souls Grown Deep Foundation
even as he built a private collection of art from fve continents. and endowed it with more than 1,200 works by self-taught African
Through the 1970s his enthusiasms turned toward art from sub- American artists. Among its activities, the Foundation advocates for the
Saharan Africa, Oceania, and the pre-Columbian Americas. He art, and places works in the permanent collections of leading museums,
prioritized educating his fellow Southerners about non-western art. including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the de Young
He regularly loaned to museums and lectured; he also produced Museum; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts,
several exhibition catalogs and organized shows of African and Boston; and others. The Los Angeles Times has compared Arnett to John
Southeast Asian art for museums in the Southern United States. Lomax, the pioneering chronicler of American folk music, while the
(His African art collection was later acquired by Emory University’s New York Times has likened his philanthropic vision to that of Samuel
Michael C. Carlos Museum.) Beginning in September 1973, his Kress and the Kress Foundation.