Like any worthy object in a museum collection, a book deserves a provenance. The seed for ours was a fortuitous discovery in the Harvard archives during the 1990s. We were researching Tournament of Shadows, an earlier book recounting the Russo-British-American struggle for dominion of Central Asia. A key figure was Sir Aurel Stein, the Hungarian-born explorer of ancient Silk Road sites, whose ill-fated fourth and final expedition in 1930 was underwritten by Harvard’s Fogg Museum. While sifting through the Harvard archives, Shareen came across a folder of anguished letters from a youthful Laurence Sickman to his mentor Langdon Warner at the Fogg. She called my attention to their correspondence, especially about the monumental sculpture in the vast limestone grottoes of Longmen in northern China, a sacred destination for Buddhist pilgrims a millennium ago (and now a UNESCO World Heritage site).
Larry Sickman was troubled and sought advice. He was on a shopping trip for Asian art for the recently opened (1933) and richly endowed ($11 million) Nelson Gallery in Kansas City. Longmen’s maze of a thousand caves was unguarded, gangs of robbers abounded, local peasants were stealing to order, and its art treasures were surfacing in the back-alley shops of Peking (today’s Beijing). What should he do? Specifically, should he try to collect fragments of a frieze depicting a royal procession led by a dowager empress? The freewheeling and engaging Langdon Warner had himself faced a similar dilemma a decade earlier at the same massive Buddhist cave complex. His considered advice was direct and urgent: go for it, with expenses to be shared by the Fogg and the Nelson (where the procession eventually arrived).
Was it looting or preservation? During chaotic times in China, its ancient sites proved an easy target for thieves, vandals, and rival collectors. Indeed, Sickman’s chief competitor, Alan Priest (also Harvard-bred), would remove a companion frieze from the same cave at Longmen portraying an emperor and his courtiers (a starred highlight at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). So what were the rights and wrongs? The question was posed afresh for us when we visited the Buddhist Silk Road site of Dunhuang, where Warner himself had attempted to remove wall paintings with the aid of primitive glue for the Fogg Museum. Our local guide pointed to the holes in the wall and sternly excoriated the “foreign devils” whom he held responsible.
This was not an alien realm for us. After obtaining a degree in art history, Shareen had a career as a producer of prime-time documentaries on cultural themes for CBS News and more recently was a contributing editor of Archaeology magazine. For myself, while a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, I was granted a book leave to write The Pleasures of Archaeology and followed up as a freelancer with The Plundered Past (serialized in The New Yorker) and The Art Museum: Power, Money, Ethics (a 20th Century Fund Report). While writing editorials on foreign affairs for The New York Times, I periodically regressed into the same sphere.
Then, in 2011, having coauthored three books on global politics, Shareen and I were fortuitously discussing new projects when we were jointly invited to be Senior Associate Members at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, for the fall 2012 term—an offer that nobody with our interests could possibly refuse. (Our interlocutor was Professor William Roger Louis of the University of Texas.)
Yet there was a condition: we needed a research project. Remembering the Harvard files and our own visits to archaeological sites in China, we decided to explore how and why Western collectors became captivated by Chinese art, to the lasting benefit of American museums. The project was approved, and on arriving at Oxford we began test-drilling our proposal: meeting with scholars, auditing courses, attending conferences, and immersing ourselves in the ample shelves of the aptly named Sackler Fine Arts Library.
When we lunched with Margaret MacMillan, the Canadian-born Warden of St. Antony’s College, she asked if we were familiar with the Royal Ontario Museum’s Asian collection in Toronto. No, but we would investigate, and it became a chapter. By term’s end, we were persuaded that our chosen project was multilayered, mined with surprises, and featured a largely forgotten but wholly intriguing cast of obsessive collectors, ardent curators, and canny dealers. Equally important, we could find no books written for a lay audience dealing with the growth of Asian art collections in America or with China’s booming art market and museum culture. So we forged ahead on our two-year quest, culminating in the volume you now hold.
Prior to arriving at St. Antony’s, we asked academic friends, in particular the art historian John Onians and Frances Wood, the retired head of the Chinese Department of the British Library, to recommend Oxford authorities we should seek out. Two names recurred: Craig Clunas, the university’s first professor of art to specialize in Asia; and Michael Sullivan, the veteran analyst of Chinese art. When we met the Scottish-born Craig Clunas, he said we were welcome to sit in on his course on the Ming dynasty, his favored era. A fluent lecturer, he corroborated with words and images the central theme of his widely read Art in China (1997), that is that the term “Chinese art” is a misnomer. In his view, the prevailing tendency to group calligraphy, sculptures, ceramics, and painting in a “homogenous totality” is a Western invention that overlooks the sheer size, antiquity, and diversity of Chinese civilization. Both in his course and in our conversations, he stressed the need for fluidity and specificity in evaluating each genre of art from China, citing his own scholarly work and his experience as a former and influential curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
No less interesting was Michael Sullivan. Canadian-born, British-bred, a Red Cross volunteer in wartime China, and a Harvard PhD, he chaired Stanford University’s Asian art department for two decades before becoming an emeritus fellow at St. Catherine’s College. We dropped a note at St. Catherine’s, explaining our project and requesting a meeting.
A few days later, the head porter at our own college gave us his handwritten reply. Yes, indeed, Sullivan wrote, why didn’t we join him for dinner at his flat in outlying north Oxford? He was then ninety-four years old and still mourning his Chinese wife, Khoan, to whom he had dedicated all his dozen-odd books. Over the years, the Sullivans acquired some five hundred modern Chinese artworks, of which the choicest were then on loan in a special gallery at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. Hence we were not surprised that his walk-up apartment was crammed with Chinese objects, centering on a portrait of Khoan. We were welcomed by two lively Asian women, his assistants, who were busily preparing a Sino-Italian pasta. Michael Sullivan bounded into view, an elfin fireball whose rising white hair formed a crown. Then he spoke of his sixty-year struggle against Western clichés about Chinese art, ancient or contemporary. Regarding today’s avant-garde works, his special interest, the typical contradictory complaint he encountered was that it was either too imitative of Western postmodernism or too repetitious of musty traditional genres. It was altogether a memorable, and timely, evening. In October 2013, Michael Sullivan died at age ninety-six, having bequeathed the last of his cherished treasures to the Ashmolean.
From our vantage, our Oxford interlude afforded a salutary alert about the minefield that lay ahead. Our book, it needs stressing, is neither a history nor a critical analysis of art in China, although we do speculate on its allure for improbable wealthy collectors. We have no aesthetic axes to sharpen or to grind. Instead, our focus is on people, the curious catlike herd of North Americans and Europeans who have been captivated by Chinese art, however defined. Just as Napoleon favored lucky generals, we have preferred lucky collectors, curators, and dealers who have made the most of the years that were fat (1900–1949), notably the Walters father and son, Charles Lang Freer, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his wife Abby, Denman Ross, Arthur M. Sackler, and Avery Brundage among collectors; Langdon Warner, Laurence Sickman, Sherman Lee, S. C. Bosch Reitz, Alan Priest, and Wen Fong among curators; and C. T. Loo, Yamanaka & Co., and Otto Burchard among dealers. But we also describe the less fortunate: the multitalented George Kates, who died unknown; the lamented mandarin Duanfang, who literally lost his head; and the authenticator, Berthold Laufer, an apparent suicide. We also came upon the idiosyncratic mystic, card-holding Nazi Eduard von der Heydt, who donated substantial collections to Zurich’s Rietberg Museum and Wupperthal’s Von der Heydt Museum. Four Canadians get their due: the founding Royal Ontario Museum director Charles Currelly, the Anglican bishop William C. White, the fur trader–turned-dealer George Crofts, and the Presbyterian clergyman James Mellon Menzies, who specialized in oracle bones.
In our Acknowledgments, we express our gratitude to the host of scholars, young and old, and to the curators, dealers, and archivists without whose essential help our research would have taken another decade. At every point in our narrative, we have tried to take account of relevant global and economic forces, to tariffs, taxes, and caprices of a volatile art market. Yet we are also highly conscious of omissions in a necessarily selective narrative. Among major collectors whose treasures deserved more attention than we could manage are Charles Bain Hoyt, whose ceramics are a highlight of the Asian galleries at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts; “Chicago’s Grandest Spinster,” Kate Sturges Buckingham, who donated hundreds of objects to the city’s Art Institute in memory of her sister Lucy Mauce; Alfred F. Pillsbury, whose bronzes shine at the Minneapolis Institute of Art; and more recently the gifts of Bruce and Ruth Dayton to the same institution. As to the other limitations of our book, the reader has already been warned—and we welcome corrections from the innumerable denizens of a fascinating world to which we have only a tourist’s visa.
Karl E. Meyer