MacLean, J. Arthur (1879-1964)
Dates
- Existence: 1879 - 1964
Biography
J. Arthur MacLean, a specialist in Asian art, was the CMA’s first curator. He was responsible for the entire museum collection until 1919 when he became curator of Asian art. It has been said that the success of the museum in its first sixteen years, as an educational and recreational site, rested largely upon the tremendous amount of attention paid, by director Frederic Allen Whiting and J. Arthur MacLean, to art objects and antiquities from East Asia.
MacLean was with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for fourteen years before joining the CMA staff in 1914. In 1922 MacLean left the CMA to serve as assistant director and curator of Oriental art at the Art Institute of Chicago. He left Chicago after one year to accept the directorship of the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis. With curator Dorothy L. Blair, he published an exhibition catalogue of Oriental rugs from a private collection. By 1926 he was the director of the Art Association of Indianapolis. In the summer of that year, he participated in an excavation of Albee Mound in Indiana, and published a book with “a description, catalog, and illustrations” of that project.
MacLean authored three articles, one with Blair, in the American Magazine of Art in 1927, 1929 and 1930. These concern Japanese prints, East Indian paintings and printmakers of the 1920s. Letters by MacLean as curator of Oriental art at the Toledo Museum of Art in 1929-35 establish him there. While at the Toledo Museum, MacLean contributed an article on a stone terminal in Cambodia to Parnassus in 1933. In 1940 another of his articles appeared in Parnassus, “Some Oriental Exhibitions,” also written while at Toledo.
In 2013 the Toledo Museum of Art revisited a landmark 1930 exhibition of Japanese prints curated by MacLean and Blair. The museum had produced an authoritative catalog credited to Blair that accompanied the 1930 exhibition on a nationwide tour of ten museums.
Readily available sources on the life of J. Arthur MacLean do not extend beyond 1949, when he was still with the Toledo Museum of Art.
-Biography by Anne Cuyler Salsich, 2025