FEATURES ARCHIVE

“Quite an unforgettable character” is how Lee, as I knew him, was described by the friend who first introduced us in 1966 in Busan, Korea. I was serving there in the army and he was working as a civilian for the army as Director of the Crafts Shop. Having little to do in the evenings, I went to the Crafts Shop to learn how to develop and print my own photographs. Lee became my teacher. He was a natural; charming, warm, friendly and fun to be around. He was also very knowledgeable about photography as pottery, woodworking and metalworking. He had majored in Fine Arts in college back in the United States near his hometown of Arp, Texas.

Within a few days of our first meeting, he invited me to join him “antiquing.” Every weekend and every free hour he spent making the rounds of the antique shops in and around Busan and nearby Daegu. As this became our routine, we became good friends.

When Lee Musslewhite came to Korea in 1965, he began collecting unglazed stonewares from the Three Kingdoms period, as they were readily available. He was a good potter himself and recognized their extraordinarily beautiful forms and technical perfection. Lee soon branched out into paintings of all kinds, chests, metal locks, boxes and calligraphy. He especially liked orchid and butterfly paintings during his early years of collecting.

Lee introduced me not only to all his dealer friends but also to many Buddhist monks at the local temples. His engaging manner and ready sign-language overcame his minimal abilities with the Korean language. He could, and did, carry on extended conversations with the monks. Over his 20-plus years in Korean, he developed lasting personal friendships with many of the monks from the temples Bulguksa and Haeinsa, to name two. He also became a follower of the Buddha in his own way, by seriously collecting Korean Buddhist paintings, mostly during the late 1960s.

I witnessed his unparalleled bargaining skills with dealers; often he was able to obtain items at fort-sixty percent discounts. He was merciless, but always charming, in his drive to get the best price. Among the dealers “Mr. Lee” was famous for these skills. It helped that he was thrifty. I always knew I was going to have to pay for the taxi and lunch, but it was well worth it. He loved the game of acquisition. It became his driving passion throughout his life.

Lee and I remained close friends for the remainder of his life until his untimely death at the age of seventy-two in November of 2009. I visited him in Texas several times, the last being a few years before his death when he told me quite “out of the blue” that he had assembled the largest collection of Korean Buddhist paintings outside of Korea! I asked to see some examples and he showed me the “two that he had unwrapped. One of these is lot 693 in this sale.

“They are indeed fine,” I responded, “but where are the rest?” He took me to another apartment and showed me several bedrooms completely full of wrapped paintings. I begged him to open a few, but he declined, saying they were too difficult to rewrap. After he passed away, his family found his collection filling two houses, three apartments, and several storage units, all of it still in its original wrappings from the time it had been shipped from Korea. Lee wasn’t exaggerating about the extent of his Buddhist painting holdings, and over the next three or four years, if you watching the Korean sales at Christie’s, New York, you, too, will be able to see what I recently have had the pleasure of examining.

Cheers to you, my friend Lee,

Richard L. Mellott
Former Curator of Education, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco
Larkspur, California