Miyeko Murase, Takeo and Itsuko Atsumi Professor Emerita (1924–2025)

Miyeko Murase, Takeo and Itsuko Atsumi Professor Emerita, died peacefully on February 11, 2025, just two months shy of her 101st birthday.

Born on April 26, 1924 in Toyohara in the Japanese territory of Karafuto (present-day Sakhalin), she was the daughter of a colonial judge and spent much of her youth in Japan’s South Pacific territories, including Palau. Her family returned to Japan during World War II, where she witnessed firsthand devastation from the American firebombing of Tokyo. After the war she attended Tokyo Women’s University, where she majored in English literature, and in the early 1950s was among the first group of Japanese students to study in the United States on a newly established educational exchange program between the U.S. and Japan (the future Fulbright program) with funding from the U.S. She earned a second bachelor’s degree from the University of Oregon in 1954. Following her graduation, she moved to New York to pursue doctoral studies at Columbia University.

Initially intending to study Italian Baroque sculpture under Professor Rudolf Wittkower, Murase realized that she could make a greater contribution to the field by concentrating on the history of Japanese art, a decision she reached after taking a seminar on medieval manuscripts taught by Professor Meyer Schapiro. This experience inspired her to focus on medieval Japanese handscrolls, a topic that would become a touchstone for her entire career. Her discovery of a set of scrolls depicting the life of the ancient courtier Sugawara Michizane (Tenjin engi emaki) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s small collection of Japanese art, led to her doctoral dissertation on the same subject. Her analysis and genealogy of the Tenjin engi story of Michizane’s life, exile, and deification, resulted in the full restoration of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s handscrolls, whose pictorial and textual sections had been mixed up in prior conservation attempts. After earning her doctorate in 1962, Murase spent several months in Haifa, Israel, as Acting Director of the newly established Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art, but returned to New York City after receiving an offer (by telephone) to teach Japanese art history in Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology.

Murase’s encounter in the 1960s with Mary Griggs Burke and her husband Jackson Burke would help define her career, as the Burkes actively sought her advice for their nascent collection of Japanese art. Acting as an informal adviser, accompanying the Burkes on trips to Japan for acquisitions, Murase would curate several exhibitions of their expanding collection, starting with a seminal exhibition in 1975 (at The Metropolitan Museum of Art), followed by the three-venue Jewel Rivers: Japanese Art from the Burke Collection in 1994, and culminating with Bridge of Dreams: The Mary Griggs Burke Collection of Japanese Art in 2000 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. An exhibition of the Burke collection held at the Tokyo National Museum in 1984 was the first to feature a private collection of Japanese art from overseas. Murase continued to advise Mary Burke until her death in 2012, after which the collection was divided between The Metropolitan Museum and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

An authority on Japanese narrative painting on handscrolls and folding screens, Murase published a number of groundbreaking books, articles, and exhibition catalogues in Japanese and English, including Iconography of the Tale of Genji (1984), Japanese Narrative Scrolls (Asia Society, 1985), Tales of Japan: Scrolls and Prints from the New York Public Library (1986), and Masterpieces of Japanese Screen Painting (1990). An indefatigable scholar, she also maintained deep interests in Rimpa, the arts of the early modern painters Tawaraya Sōtatsu and Ogata Kōrin, publishing essays on them in English and Japanese well into her tenth decade.

At Columbia University, Murase taught the history of Japanese art to generations of undergraduate and graduate students from 1962 until her retirement in 1996. Her pedagogy stressed direct engagement with works of art, an element of her teaching for which the Burke Collection of Japanese art was crucial. In 1993 she was appointed the first holder of the Takeo and Itsuko Atsumi Chair in Japanese Art at Columbia University, whose establishment guarantees that the history of Japanese art will be taught there in perpetuity. Murase was also instrumental in the establishment of The Mary Griggs Burke Center for Japanese Art at Columbia University. Her former students have served as museum directors, curators, and university professors, and have also pursued careers as art dealers and art consultants.

After retiring from Columbia University, Murase became Special Consultant for Japanese Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and curated several exhibitions including, Turning Point: Oribe and the Arts of Sixteenth-Century Japan (2003) and The Written Image: Japanese Calligraphy and Painting from the Sylvan Barnet and William Burto Collection (2013). In recognition of Murase’s outstanding contributions to Japanese art and culture the government of Japan conferred upon her in 2010 the “Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon.” During her centennial year, Murase curated the exhibition, Kotobuki: Auspicous Celebrations of Japanese Art in New York Private Collections, at Japan Society in March–April, 2025.