“Sherman Lee, an expert on Asian art who as director of the Cleveland Museum of Art for a quarter of a century elevated it to the top echelon of American museums, died Wednesday in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by his son-in-law William Chiego, who is director of the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio. Lee had several small strokes and suffered from Parkinson’s disease, Chiego said.”
By Bruce Weber / New York Times News Service
“Lee, who arrived at the Cleveland museum in 1952 as its curator of Oriental art, became director in 1958. It was shortly after the death of Leonard Hanna, a local industrialist and philanthropist who had served on the museum’s accessions committee and left more than $30 million to the museum as a capital fund for acquisitions.
Thus relieved of much of the burden of raising money, Lee set about improving the museum’s collections. He amassed a superb Asian collection and acquired dozens of major paintings by old masters like Velazquez, El Greco and Goya, as well as masterpieces like Frederic Edwin Church’s “Twilight in the Wilderness,” Jacques-Louis David’s “Cupid and Psyche” and “The Holy Family on the Steps” by Nicolas Poussin.
Lee, who viewed the museum as an educational institution, was wary of artistic fashion, eschewing the contemporary in favor of the time-honored, sometimes to the museum’s detriment; the museum did not purchase a Jackson Pollock until 1980 and passed on opportunities to acquire works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns.
“Sherman Lee had a very strong philosophy that you wait 20 years before you buy,” Evan Turner, his successor, said in 1984. “You wait until the first flush of enthusiasm is over.”
Similarly, Lee found the notion of the “blockbuster” art show anathema, preferring the tasteful, the high-minded, the scholarly. These qualities led John Canaday, writing in The New York Times in 1970, to call Lee’s Cleveland “the only really aristocratic art museum in the country.”
“Aristocratic, yes, but in a meritocratic way,” Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, said in an interview on Thursday. He added: “He carried a lot of weight in the community of museum directors. He bought in all fields, his own particularly brilliantly, but in many different fields. He really transformed the Cleveland museum from a regional museum to a major global museum.”
Sherman Emery Lee was born in Seattle on April 19, 1918. He grew up in Brooklyn, attended New York City public schools and went to American University in Washington, where he met his wife, Ruth. They were married 69 years. “He was a tennis player and she was a sorority girl,” said their daughter Elizabeth Chiego.
Besides his wife, who lives in Chapel Hill, and Chiego, of San Antonio, Lee is survived by two other daughters, Margaret Bachenheimer of Carrboro, N.C., and Katharine Lee Reid of Chapel Hill, who was director of the Cleveland museum from 2000 to 2005; a son, Thomas, of Raleigh, N.C.; and six grandchildren.”
