Organizers: Susan N. Erickson, University of Michigan; Katharine P. Burnett,
Independent Scholar
Chair: Susan N. Erickson, University of Michigan
Discussant: Ellen J. Laing, University of Michigan
During the early years of the 20th century, Chinese and Japanese art was the focus of purposeful collection and intellectual inquiry by a group of private collectors, museum curators and critics in the United States. The panel considers several individuals instrumental in bringing Chinese and Japanese art into American culture during the opening decades of this century: the Chinese collector Pang Yuanji (1864-1949), the American collector Charles Lang Freer (1856-1919), the American curator Berthold Laufer (1874-1934), and two members of the Japan Art Institute (Nihon Bijutsu-in); Yokoyama Taikan (1868-1958) and Hishida Shunso (1874-1911).
A broad concern addressed by the panel involves the reception of Chinese and Japanese art in America. Specific issues to be explored include some of the motivations of these promoters of Asian culture, their preferences for particular types of artifacts or styles of art, and their views of value and quality in Asian art. Many collections in the United States utilized by scholars and the consequent studies based on these collections bear the imprint of these early figures. The goal of the panel is to have a better understanding of the roles these individuals played during the early stages of Asian art history in America.
Pang Yuanji, Charles Lang Freer, and the Shaping of Chinese Art Collections and
Scholarship in America
Katharine P. Burnett, Independent Scholar
Pang Yuanji (1864-1949) was one of a number of late Qing collectors whose activities helped shape early 20th-century appreciation for Chinese art in the West. Active as a collector, dealer, connoisseur, philanthropist, and member of art associations primarily in Shanghai, Pang had significant links to art circles involved in promoting Chinese art in Japan and the United States. He methodically catalogued his large collection of paintings and ceramics in a number of publications used by American collectors as they purchased works from his collection during the early 20th century. He also exhibited objects from his collection to promote sales in America. Many important private collectors and public museums acquired paintings from Pang in these ways, most notably Charles Lang Freer for the new Freer Gallery of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, the nation's first fine arts museum on the Mall. It is worth considering what constituted the contents of Chinese painting collections like Pang's, and equally significantly, what was left out of their catalogues. Pang and Freer are representative of Chinese and American collectors of the period. Analyses of their collections provide a basis for understanding the canon of Chinese painting as it was perceived at that time and as it has been continued since.
Forging New Directions in Art Collecting and Research: Berthold Laufer's
Expeditions to China
Susan N. Erickson, University of Michigan
Berthold Laufer directed two expeditions to China sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History in New York (1901-1904) and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago (1907-1910). Anthropological expeditions were popular at the turn of the century, and the mission of Laufer and the individuals who supported his expeditions was that of facilitating a greater understanding of China in America through the public display of material culture. Laufer's collections were envisioned to be ethnographic in nature, but during both expeditions, his personal preferences led to significant acquisitions of fine art: bronzes, jades, pottery, and paintings. From a historiographic viewpoint, Laufer's acquisitions not only indicate the type and quality of art available on the art market in China during the early twentieth-century but also reveal his personal preferences. Laufer's taste was informed by books he collected in China and also by the Chinese scholars he met during his travels. Laufer acknowledged that in collecting Chinese art, particularly ancient art, he was within terra incognita, but he recognized the importance of collecting these artifacts for his own research and for that of future generations of American scholars. Laufer's collecting practices, his authentication methodology and the reception of this art in the United States are some of the issues to be explored. His subsequent writings make apparent his participation in the scholarly discourse at the turn of the century which involved broadening the study of art to include the art of non-western people.
Selling Japanese Art in America: The Nihon Bijutsu-in, Morotai and Issues of
Cultural Identity
Victoria Weston, University of Massachusetts, Boston
In 1904 leading members of the Japan Art Institute (Nihon Bijutsu-in) Okakura Kakuzo, Yokoyama Taikan, Hishida Shunso and Rokkaku Shisui traveled to the United States. Okakura was to take up curatorial duties for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Lacquer artist Shisui was to assist Okakura as a restorer. Taikan and Shunso had no official duties; they came to sell their paintings. In this period, Taikan and Shunso were painting in morotai style, a style of their own invention based upon traditional painting but much transformed. They took inspiration from European-style oil painting, and eliminated the precise line drawing used in Asian traditions in favor of blended, shaded colors. Japanese critics dismissed this type of painting as oil painting in Japanese materials, and they dubbed it "morotai," meaning "hazy" or even "muddled form." In contrast, when morotai paintings were exhibited in Boston, New York and Washington, D.C., American critics praised them without reserve for what they saw as their quintessential Japanese beauty. Morotai provides a clear case of the malleability of interpretation. In this case, the context shapes the reading of national or cultural identity in the elements of style. This paper will consider how the Nihon Bijutsu-in group presented themselves and their work as the embodiment of contemporary Japanese culture, and the critical response that supported this claim.