Who was Avery Brundage?
An industrialist based in Chicago, Avery Brundage made most of his fortune in construction. A former athlete, he was also president of the United States Olympic Committee, a post he held for decades. He began collecting Asian art in the late 1930s, and soon had amassed a sizeable and important collection. Mr. Brundage attacked collecting ferociously. “Anything Brundage did, he did 110 percent,” recalled Alexander D. Calhoun, a former Commissioner of the Asian Art Museum and member of the Asian Art Museum Foundation. “He was a 110-percent athlete, a 110-percent chairman of the Olympic Committee and a 110-percent art collector.” Before long Mr. Brundage’s residence in Chicago, a hotel he owned there, and the new house he had built in Santa Barbara were all crammed with Asian art. Visitors have described invaluable ancient works overflowing beneath beds and out of cabinets and closets. There were bathtubs filled with netsuke and shoeboxes containing objects like the famous rhinoceros vess
