One year ago now, in November of 2021, one of our great teachers and mentors, John Huntington, passed away. For those of us who trained in Asian art history at the Ohio State University, this was a monumental loss. Though his health had been poor for these last few years, the news still came as a shock. I think part of me might have believed that someone so big and powerful couldn’t really ever die.
I immediately reached out to friends and colleagues for support. While I was only officially at Ohio State for two years, from 2004-2006, it was at Ohio State that I met some of my closest friends and colleagues in the field. Becoming John’s student in Ohio was, truly, one of the great course-changing things that happened for me in my life, and I am sure there are others who feel the same way. I was just one of his over 80 graduate students whom he supervised or co-supervised in his more than four decades of teaching at Ohio State. In addition, there must also be countless students who took his undergraduate classes who he must have made a lasting impression on with his big booming voice, his jokes, and his intense knowledge.
John’s classes were lively and detailed, and his lectures would easily present a virtuosic catalogue of over one hundred slides in an hour often without any notes needed. You could not be bored and you could barely keep up. We scribbled our class notes furiously as he directed our eyes to the telling details of crown ornaments and scarf twists that differentiated one era or region’s art from another. Swept away and impressed by his knowledge, there was no way not to learn.
It’s a fascinating thing to ponder, the impact of a scholar like John, one who gets to build something, overseeing a long lifespan of a program in one place. When and how did The Ohio State University, usually famous for giant football parties, also became an (unlikely?) hub of Asian Art History studies in North America? Certainly, much of that story has to do with the hiring of John, and his wife Susan, a veritable dream team of academic partners who would transform Ohio State’s art program into a serious place for the study of South Asian and Himalayan Art History. Over the decades from his start there in the late 1970s up to the near present, the Huntingtons, very often together, trained many early career scholars.
I was but one of these lucky students — and a later one — but I do like to imagine us all as tendrils out from the hub — or the spokes of a giant wheel. Those of us who trained with them are now spread out all over the globe, in all sorts of teaching and museum positions among surely plenty of other things. I am sure that each of us was enriched and changed by the direct and practical knowledge of art, history, Asia, photography, digital media, didactic illustration, field research, and the plethora of other topics he would impart passionately to his students. Even students who may have only had him in undergrad Asian survey classes must also be walking around with the language of “ritual transformation;” “visualization practices;” and “the Mount Meru world system” easily rolling off their tongues.
Being trained by John came with a detail-oriented, object-based, practical and always generous supervisory relationship. This not only included his incredibly vast knowledge of the content of many thousands of years of Asian art history, but also a real attention to training us in the skills that we would need to do it: how to take good photographs, document sights “in the field,” and clean and store images in databases. Many of us would also be so lucky as to get financial support as graduate students through working in the Huntington archive, when it was still located at Ohio State (now housed at the University of Chicago), and working there, scanning and cleaning slides, entering database information, learning to use Photoshop to improve old photographs, was also all excellent training for us budding art historians.
While we can still visit and entreat Susan for writing or research advice, I must admit I felt a panic at his death last year and, admittedly, this was for a thoroughly selfish reasons. Hot on the heels of the sadness I felt from realizing my great teacher was gone, was a distinct and succinct fear: who would I turn to the next time I found a weird mystery, a sculpture I couldn’t date or a painting with unusual iconography? John would have always had an opinion, a lead, and be able to point me to something else similar from his near-photographic memory of the Asian art collections he knew the world over. “Grab that big yellow book over there. In a collection in Hong Kong there is a similar painting…” he would say from the throne in his office. And he would have been right.
John Huntington was a towering bear, a funny smart man. He was generous and kind, possibly to fault, and was dedicated to his work, his teaching, his family (Susan and Eric), and to all of us, the extended family of his students. He made a community out of those he trained, and we are, many of us, so indebted to what and how he taught us. He inspired in me a creativity, a joy in research, and a fearless love of pushing back against easily received notions and easy answers. He told us all that in the relatively young field of Asian art history, there will still be many big and important questions that need to be worked out, reminded us that the record was spotty and ever-changing with new information, and encouraged each of us to fearlessly do so.
By my time at Ohio State, to be an “Asianist” in the Art History department meant to be trained by John and Susan and Judy (for they had been joined on the faculty by Julia Andrews, an important scholar of modern Chinese art). In the early 2000s, to be a grad student of Asian art there meant to be their student, and to receive training from all three of them. What a gift! We (grad students) lived at Hayes hall, and in John’s seminars we were given large impossible projects (like find and compare every image of Amitabha- ever!) and we worked in the photo archive scanning slides. Joining them was like being inducted into a family — generous advanced grad students taught me how to toast mustard seeds before adding the lentils for dahl and gave advice about how to write and survive grad school. Our group of (occasionally) happy grad students, often living on cheap beer and pizza slices, were even so lucky as to sometimes enjoy Friday night dinners with the Huntingtons at the always wonderful Restaurant Japan.
I am not sure I will ever be able to train cohorts of students the way he did, but I want to reflect on how that happened and how its ripples are still felt in the world.
I recently found my notes from one of John’s classes, his “Buddhist Art Theory and Development” that I took as a new MA student in the fall of 2004. This was a Buddhist art class, that as he described in the syllabus would give students an “understanding of the History of Buddhism, the evolution of its soteriological methodologies, and both the historical continuities and the discrete roles that art plays in the religion.” The topics of that 11-week course demonstrate some of the depth and breadth of teaching. The binder tabs include: “Indus Valley;” “Pre-Buddhist Texts;” “Important Buddhist Concepts;” “The Life of Shakyamuni;” “Relics;” etc. On exams he asked us to answer skillful yet also broad and difficult questions like “Explain the presuppositions of Buddhism;” “Describe the Kriya, Charya, Yoga, and Annutara Yoga typologies;” or “Describe the methodologies of Pureland Buddhism.” We were doing so with reference to art, but he was also sure to be teaching us about art in a holistic way: as a cultural element, as an expression of ritual and practice, as participant in an ethos and worldview.
When I look through these notes again I am astonished at how much he said and taught in a short time; and at how clearly and succinctly much of this was communicated. At the time, much of it even made little sense to me — for all these names were new: Vasabhandu; Yogachara; devayoga, all of this was novel and heady stuff. But he gifted me that framework, like a substructure, of what he considered to be the most important concepts for really understanding Asian and Buddhist art, one that has served me well as I kept learning. 18 yrs later, now teaching myself there are things I understand anew here. So I have tried to make a short list of the top things I learned about being an academic and a teacher from JCH:
- Be generous with your knowledge — tell anyone who will listen, in exacting detail, what you know, and perhaps more importantly why you know what you know. (SO much of what I learned from him came from follow-up questions, for he would talk to us for hours in his office if we had a question.)
- Always look for the everyday objects, not just the high art, if you want to understand a time and place. When you can’t see them, imagine them (John would often talk about “the things that must have been made of wood at that time that we can’t see anymore” and this is an enduring and helpful idea).
- When teaching: hook people with humour and be unafraid of unresolved mysteries. They’re usually the best stuff. (John and Susan both loved talking about early images and ongoing debates around these, and John also loved asking sleuth-like questions about which of the existing stupas might be from the “original” ten of Ashoka’s time).
- Always take great photos. Always photograph sites in the same order. The quality of your images will always matter.
- See as much art in the flesh as you can.
- Research and repatriate: John was passionate about lost and stolen objects, especially from Nepal.
- Pay attention to the smallest details. They almost always matter.
- Compare compare compare. Then spot the difference and try to explain it.
Intellectually, there was much that John also made sure he trained into us. He made us attend to the idea of all the people involved: The traders, the monks, the patrons, the craftsmen. He would comment about the hands of small children and their resulting blindness when talking about ornate silk brocades or carpets. He thought of art objects as the results of whole webs of people, and made us think about all of them.
As we, some of his students, now continue to work in Himalayan or other areas of art history, or museums or art, I love to imagine what having this formidably large but secret army of folks who had courses in an unassuming midwestern state school about Tantric transformations has had on the greater world. May we all continue to do good work in his memory and his name.
Sarah Richardson, PhD
Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream
Department of Historical Studies
University of Toronto Mississauga
For more than 40 years, John C. Huntington served as a Professor of Art History at The Ohio State University, teaching students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels about Asian art. With his broad interests spanning Buddhist art and architecture across Asia, he leaves behind a legacy of training many of today’s scholars who work and teach in Asian and related arts.
Parts of this essay were written for a conference presentation. In October 2022, some of us from among his former students had a chance to start to reflect on his impact on our research and teaching during a dedicated double panel session at the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies Conference hosted at the University of Toronto. Myself, along with six others of his past students (Kerry Brown, David Efurd, Sarah Magnatta, Christina Wei-Szu Burke Mathison, Kimberly Mastellar, Rebecca Twist, and Tianshu Zhu) presented papers in which we reflected on John’s approaches and methods and how they have shaped our research and teaching today. We found that in numerous ways the research that we all continue today is indebted to core questions and interests he encouraged in many of us in our early training with him. For the Association for Asian Studies in March 2023, Christina Wei-Szu Burke Mathison organized a panel in John’s honor entitled “Perspectives on Asian Art – In Memory of John Huntington.” Those participating are former students, including David Efurd, Anning Jing, Sarah Magnatta, Rebecca Twist and Christina Burke Mathison.
