Local remembered through Tibet exhibition

BY ERIC LINDBERG
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

Seventy years ago, two young American men ventured from the small Indian town of Kalimpong, crossing through the Himalayas into western Tibet to document religious art unveiled during a sacred festival in the city of Gyantse.
What they returned with — a melange of paintings, sculptures, photographs and journal entries — offered a then-rare window into the world of Tibetan religion that has since formed the core of the Tibetan collection at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

F. Bailey “Billy” Vanderhoef, Jr., a longtime Santa Barbara resident who went on that momentous adventure into Tibet with his friend and schoolmate, Wilbur L. Cummings, Jr., died on April 12 at the age of 94.
His death befittingly coincided with the unveiling of an exhibition at the museum chronicling the duo’s eventful trip, titled “A Tibet Expedition 1938: Selected Works from Two Explorers.”
“The trip meant a lot to him,” said Susan Tai, the museum’s curator of Asian art who designed the exhibition. “In his memoir, you can tell it made such a strong impression on the 24-year-old. It shaped him.”
Then young students at Harvard University, Vanderhoef and Cummings had a deep fascination of Asian studies and a yearning to glimpse beyond the mysterious veil that surrounded Tibet.
But with Cummings on the verge of graduation, the two appeared set to drift apart, their dream unrealized. In a stroke of serendipity, a museum offered them a freelance photography project, first in Indochina, then Tibet.
“So, with this legitimate excuse, and with Bill at loose ends, we jumped at the chance and were on our way almost before we realized it,” Vanderhoef wrote in his memoir.
In June 1938, they found themselves in British-controlled India, waiting six weeks to gain permits to enter Tibet before rushing across the Himalayas to Gyantse.
Their goal was to make it in time to view the Saga Dawa festival and the unveiling of a famous thangka, a massive painting mounted on rich silk brocades shown for only two hours each year.
Arriving in the fertile valley a few days before the unveiling, they wandered through the streets of the city, meeting and exchanging gifts with dignitaries before earning a glimpse into the city’s great Gompa, or monastery.
“Once inside the doors, we were indeed in another world: a world of dim shadows and mystery, and of things that echoed only out of the ages of the past,” he wrote. “Flickering flame-lit darkness revealed, as though in a trance, the whole weird picture of the Tibetan religion, the religion of demons and black magic over which only a veneer of Buddhism clings.”
A few days later, in the early morning hours, Vanderhoef climbed to a rooftop with his companion and set up his camera in anticipation of the thangka unveiling.
With the sun barely starting to rise, the massive painting hung hidden in shadow until the last moment, when sunlight finally lit the vast figure of Buddha in a blaze of brilliant color, the great banner soaring over a procession of thousands of chanting monks.
The images he snapped would later be immortalized as some of the first color photographs of Tibet shown in the American press, appearing in the June 12, 1939 edition of Life magazine.
On his journey away from the Tibetan city, Vanderhoef paused on the final mountain pass, the doorway back to India as the steep valleys of Tibet fell away behind him.
“We had, as if by some magic, been able to step across that dividing line and have a brief glimpse of what lay beyond,” he wrote. “And what we saw there was of such beauty and mystery that we cannot pretend to understand, but altogether an essence that we could take away with us, something like the sacred Amrita in Tibetan paintings, the liquid of immortality, that would add a richness to life in a thousand ways, and a better understanding of the world.”
Tai’s exhibit seeks to capture the spirit of that trip — to pay tribute to Vanderhoef while telling the story of how the objects he and Cummings collected and later donated to the museum had come to be.
“I think the trip to Tibet really inspired him and made him the person I came to know,” said Tai, who knew Vanderhoef as a mentor and friend for more than 30 years.
Along with sacred thangkas and objects Vanderhoef collected during the trip, the exhibition features quotes from his memoir and photographs of the people he received the artwork from.
“It’s a very satisfying exhibition on many fronts,” Tai said. “We felt we had done justice to the collection, telling the story of how it had come about.”
The exhibition runs through August 17. Many other Tibetan ritual objects and artwork donated by Vanderhoef are also on display in the Asian galleries on the museum’s upper level.
This Sunday, Jose Ignacio Cabezon, a professor of Tibetan Buddhism and cultural studies at UC Santa Barbara, is presenting an illustrated lecture on Vanderhoef’s journey viewed through his writings and photographs.
The event will take place from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. in the Mary Craig Auditorium and admission is $5 for museum members, $7 for non-members and free for Friends of Asian Art members. Tickets are available at the museum or by calling 884-6423.
Cabezon also worked extensively with Vanderhoef and Tai in recent months to coordinate the online publishing of Vanderhoef’s memoir, “A Glimpse of Another World: A Journey Through Western Tibet,” at www.religion.uscb.edu/tibetjourney1938, along with many photos taken during the trip and maps of the route.
Rather than a typical unveiling of the exhibition, the museum chose instead to keep it low-key, Tai said, holding a memorial for Vanderhoef with friends, relatives and family members out of respect for the art connoisseur, longtime donor and honorary trustee of the museum.
Philip Heckscher, a cousin of Vanderhoef, paid tribute to his relative in a letter presented at the commemoration.
“His sincere devotion to his friends and to the causes he chose was at the heart of the man, a heart that enlivened his eye, that opened his hand, that expanded in the presence of beauty and art, and gave his presence charm and gravity at once … a modest, self-effacing kind of heart, too.”