The China Collectors: America's Century-Long Hunt for Asian Art Treasures
432
The China Collectors: America's Century-Long Hunt for Asian Art Treasures
432eBook
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Overview
Thanks to Salem sea captains, Gilded Age millionaires, curators on horseback and missionaries gone native, North American museums now possess the greatest collections of Chinese art outside of East Asia itself. How did it happen? The China Collectors is the first full account of a century-long treasure hunt in China from the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion to Mao Zedong's 1949 ascent.
The principal gatherers are mostly little known and defy invention. They included "foreign devils" who braved desert sandstorms, bandits and local warlords in acquiring significant works. Adventurous curators like Langdon Warner, a forebear of Indiana Jones, argued that the caves of Dunhuang were already threatened by vandals, thereby justifying the removal of frescoes and sculptures. Other Americans include George Kates, an alumnus of Harvard, Oxford and Hollywood, who fell in love with Ming furniture. The Chinese were divided between dealers who profited from the artworks' removal, and scholars who sought to protect their country's patrimony. Duanfang, the greatest Chinese collector of his era, was beheaded in a coup and his splendid bronzes now adorn major museums. Others in this rich tapestry include Charles Lang Freer, an enlightened Detroit entrepreneur, two generations of Rockefellers, and Avery Brundage, the imperious Olympian, and Arthur Sackler, the grand acquisitor. No less important are two museum directors, Cleveland's Sherman Lee and Kansas City's Laurence Sickman, who challenged the East Coast's hegemony.
Shareen Blair Brysac and Karl E. Meyer even-handedly consider whether ancient treasures were looted or salvaged, and whether it was morally acceptable to spirit hitherto inaccessible objects westward, where they could be studied and preserved by trained museum personnel. And how should the US and Canada and their museums respond now that China has the means and will to reclaim its missing patrimony?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466879294 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/10/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 432 |
| Sales rank: | 821,182 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Shareen Blair Brysac has been an award-winning documentary producer for CBS News, the author of four books including Tournament of Shadows and Kingmakers, and a contributing editor of Archaeology Magazine. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, The Nation and Military History Quarterly.
Karl E. Meyer was a longtime foreign correspondent and editorial writer at The Washington Post and The New York Times and the Editor of the World Policy Journal. A Princeton Ph.D., he has taught at Yale, Princeton, and Tufts' Fletcher School. His fourteen books include The Plundered Past, on the illicit trade in antiquities; The Art Museum: Power, Money, Ethics; and The Pleasures of Archaeology.
Karl E. Meyer was a longtime foreign correspondent and editorial writer at The Washington Post and The New York Times and the Editor of the World Policy Journal. A Princeton Ph.D., he has taught at Yale, Princeton, and Tufts’ Fletcher School. His fourteen books include The Plundered Past, on the illicit trade in antiquities; The Art Museum: Power, Money, Ethics; and The Pleasures of Archaeology.
Shareen Blair Brysac has been an award-winning documentary producer for CBS News, the author of four books including Tournament of Shadows and Kingmakers, and a contributing editor of Archaeology Magazine. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, The Nation and Military History Quarterly.
Read an Excerpt
The China Collectors
America's Century-Long Hunt for Asian Art Treasures
By Karl E. Meyer, Shareen Blair Brysac
Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2015 Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair BrysacAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7929-4
CHAPTER 1
THE RULES OF THE GAME
An unusual commercial betrothal was proclaimed with sober understatement on September 21, 2012. Under the prosaic headline "Sotheby's Signs Deal with Beijing Company," a brief report in The New York Times explained that the world's premiere auction gallery had entered into a joint-venture agreement with a state-owned enterprise "to capitalize on the tremendous growth in the Chinese market." Thus in partnership with the Beijing GeHua Art Company, Sotheby's announced that it would shortly launch the first international auction house in mainland China. The two companies agreed to share tax-exempt storage facilities, with Sotheby's providing a $1.2 million investment as dowry. As a Sotheby's press release elaborated, "China and its growing class of collectors has been the single most attractive growth market for the company," leading to an agreement it described as "unique and groundbreaking."
It was indeed. Here was the nominally Communist People's Republic actively promoting the least proletarian of pastimes: auctioning fine arts to a proliferating breed of princely millionaires. True, the Sotheby's deal was but one more example of China's rightward leap from primal Maoism to state-promoted capitalism. Yet to those who professionally track the tectonic shifts in the Chinese art market—whether as collectors, dealers, or scholars—there were less obvious signals as well. For upward of a decade, Beijing has also sought the recovery of art treasures pillaged from China during chaotic times past. Simultaneously, the People's Republic has strengthened legal measures to curb wholesale looting and the illicit export of ancient art. To that end, in 2009 Beijing secured from Washington a largely unnoticed yet significant pact barring the importation of a wide range of antiquities, including monumental sculpture and wall art at least 250 years old.
So why would China also encourage a bull market in antiquities that most analysts contend also fuels the pillaging of its patrimony? What does all this say about the changing prism through which Beijing's leaders view the Maoist era and its once-scorned imperial precursors? And how will the People's Republic deploy its new and surprising leverage as host to an exploding art market (rivaling New York and London in 2011–12)? Taken together, Beijing's cultural strategy seems a compound of opposites: a thirst for profits, a strong bid for foreign applause, but also a determined effort to score domestic points with get-it-back populism.
Thus in approving the Sotheby's deal, Beijing may also be searching for an insider's advantage in its ongoing campaign to recover prized artworks that were seized in times past as the spoils of war. The campaign was presaged in 2000 by China's offstage role in a lavish "Imperial Sale" promoted in Hong Kong by Sotheby's and Christie's. Among the latter's major offerings were two bronze animal heads (an ox and a monkey), while by coincidence Sotheby's put on the block a bronze tiger head. These were three of twelve animal heads that once adorned a zodiac fountain in Peking's Yuanmingyuan, or Garden of Perfect Brightness, the Summer Palace of the Qing emperors, from which they were very likely filched by Anglo-French troops in 1860 during the looting that concluded the Second Opium War. China's Bureau of Cultural Relics formally asked both auction houses to withdraw the suspect bronzes, citing the UNESCO convention on cultural property.
Beijing's protest did not persuade executives at the two auction houses, whose press aides noted that the bronze monkey had been sold previously by Sotheby's in New York in 1987 without a murmur; ditto the ox in London in 1989. Yet in a token of changing times, Hong Kong residents otherwise critical of Communist rule joined in clamorous protests over the pending "Imperial" sale. Demonstrators shouted, "Stop auction! Return Chinese relics to Motherland!" But the sale went forward.
In a symmetrical finale, the three zodiac bronzes were repatriated in a bidding war won in 2000 by the China Poly Group, a corporate offshoot of the People's Liberation Army, also a dealer in arms and real estate. The monkey and ox fetched more than $2 million at Christie's, and the tiger went under the hammer for $1.8 million at Sotheby's. This was the first time that agents of the Chinese government competed at public auction to recover art and antiquities. "Historic events took place this week," Souren Melikian reported in The International Herald Tribune, "that will have incalculable repercussions in the international approach to cultural monuments." A long war over title to the zodiac relics was under way. As before, Melikian, a veteran monitor of the global art market, assessed its vibrations astutely.
Following their triumphal return to Beijing, the three heads were showcased in the newly created Poly Art Museum, thereafter the chosen refuge for trophy art recovered from private collections. This represented a sharp reversal of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–76), when roving gangs of Red Guards smashed vitrines and bullied curators with the encouragement of Chairman Mao. It was among many turnabouts in the contorted path of Sino-Communism. Who could have imagined that the world's largest standing army would become a champion of classical culture, one of the "Four Olds" reviled only yesterday? Or does the change simply confirm an old, shrewd peasant saying: "Be like the bamboo; it bends with the wind but stands straight after the storm passes"?
Thus even as screaming youngsters denounced the "Four Olds," the Great Helmsman himself extolled archaeologists for bearing scientific witness to China's glorious past. With Mao's support, a united China, no longer beset by foreign or domestic violence, could finally undertake extensive excavations. A thousand lawful shovels were loosed on the past, crowned in 1974 by the unearthing of an entire army of terra-cottawarriors. Accidentally discovered by a farmer near the ancient capital of Xi'an, the life-size soldiers proved to be the afterlife bodyguard of China's first emperor, an autocratic modernizer who reputedly burned books and dissident intellectuals and then gave his dynastic name (Qin, pronounced like chin) to a new empire. The discovery, with its sardonic overtones, fired instant interest at home and abroad. Specimen recruits from the frozen army were posted abroad to publicize a succession of exhibitions, arguably China's most benign foreign invasion.
Thereafter, excavations flourished. So did the market for Chinese antiquities. Abroad, collectors evinced a seemingly insatiable appetite for most genres of art originating in China (calligraphy excepted). More surprising was the vibrant demand within the People's Republic. By 2005, art and antiquities sales at China's eighty-odd domestic auction houses reportedly exceeded $1.5 billion, double the previous year's total. In the reckoning of James Cuno, head of the J. Paul Getty Trust, it was twenty-five times Sotheby's and Christie's combined U.S. sales of Chinese art the same year. (It later developed that the totals included buyers who did not pay for what they bid.) And Cuno's calculation did not include the local galleries and curio shops that sprouted everywhere in mainland China. By 1980, almost $2 billion worth of art had been sold at Chinese auctions, with starred works for the most part purchased by private bidders. As China's economy grew, so did the art market. In the reckoning of Forbes magazine, the number of Chinese billionaires rose from 64 in 2009 to 115 the following year, an 80 percent annual increase. Sales soared for fine arts in every category. In 2010, the People's Republic seemingly surpassed New York and London as host to the world's leading fine arts market, accounting for 33 percent of global sales, compared to 30 percent for the United States, 19 percent for the United Kingdom, and 5 percent for France (as calculated by Artprice, a Paris-based monitor). The news was blazoned by China Today, a glossy, quasi-official Beijing monthly. Indeed, the journal noted in March 2011 that of the ten highest bids ever recorded at auctions for Chinese art, only one was placed abroad (in London in 2005, for a Yuan dynasty sculpture)—an "epochal change" from leaner days past. The boom has since fluctuated, unpaid bids inflated totals, and in 2012 China slowed to a second-place finish behind the United States. Nonetheless, in ways Chairman Mao (who died in 1976) might not have imagined, his maxim that the past should serve the present has been richly realized.
Yet from an archaeologist's vantage, the enthusiasm for collecting antiquities among newly minted billionaires has a dismaying underside. As never before, thousands of remote sites have been subjected to "an unbridled wave of clandestine digging," in the words of Melikian. He was among the first to report (in November 1994) that "something funny" was happening in East Asian markets: "In the last few years, the flow of antiquities handled by 'clandestine' diggers who sell them in the Hong Kong art trade has not just been torrential, as it has been since the early 1980's. It increasingly includes works of art of a rarity that one expects to come out of the most important archaeological sites." True, this was a clandestine criminal enterprise. But Melikian took note of a Han-period bronze sculpture recently on the block in Hong Kong: "How 'clandestine' can you be, carting a 26-inch chunk of metal overland, all the way to the coast, in a state where policing is reputed to be vigilant?" (Note: both before and after the reversion of Hong Kong to China in 1997, auctioneers in the former British colony have operated with greater freedom than on the mainland.)
How then has the People's Republic responded to what Melikian two decades ago described as "the reckless rape of its past"? Chinese archaeologists have consistently echoed his alarm. "It really is devastating to see what is happening," Professor Wei Zheng of Peking University recently told a correspondent from The Guardian. "Archaeologists are simply chasing after tomb raiders." As elaborated by his colleague, Professor Lei Xingshan: "We used to say nine out of ten tombs were empty because of tomb raiding, but now it has become 9.5 out of ten." Chinese excavators pointedly cite a peasant catchphrase, "To be rich, dig up an ancient tomb; to make a fortune, open a coffin."
The reckless rape continues, notwithstanding a century of explicit prohibitions. In 1913–14, the newborn Republic of China introduced laws banning the removal of "ancient objects," followed by still stronger legislation in 1930. These measures were reinforced in 1950 by the People's Republic, which in its first years established a Bureau of Cultural Relics to ensure compliance. Even more stringent legislation in 1961 widened the definition of protected artworks to include objects "which reflect the social system, social production and the life of society in all periods." This was followed by a 1982 cultural relics law, designating all antiquities found in caves and tombs as national property and adding a new corollary: legal private ownership was henceforth permitted for works "handed down from generation to generation which belong to collectives or individuals." In effect, this constituted a tacit acknowledgment (as James Cuno and others have noted) that state-run auctions were already selling confiscated art from government warehouses to aspiring collectors, the way led by the privileged offspring of the party elite.
Granted, China's preservationist tasks are truly monumental. By official count (1993), the People's Republic possesses 350,000 historic sites—tombs, palaces, caves, and temples—mostly unexcavated, dating from the Bronze Age (circa 3500 BCE) through a succession of imperial dynasties until 1911. No soil anywhere harbors as rich a legacy. Creditably, Beijing has substantially increased funds for security, energized in part by cultural tourism, led by the surge of visitors to Xi'an and its terra-cotta army. True as well, indigenous looters are on occasion exposed and punished. It made headlines a decade ago when government agents identified a group of Buddhist statues pilfered from Chengde's historic temple complex (a World Heritage Site) that Christie's was about to auction in Hong Kong. The dealer owning the relics was detained; he insisted the looters had lied to him about their origin, and he was released after restoring the statues to state custody. Subsequently, the local official responsible for guarding the site was tried, found guilty, and executed for stealing 158 artifacts, said to be the largest relic heist since the founding of the People's Republic. Yet in a May 2003 dispatch on the aborted sale, John Pomfret of The Washington Post also took note of a wider scandal. An anonymous market hand told him that despite the heightened security, "The looting of cultural treasures in the past twenty years has exceeded the destruction of relics during the Cultural Revolution."
Looting is not solely responsible for this destruction. Preservationists contend that it stems as well from China's headlong drive to electrify, irrigate, and modernize. They cite the Three Gorges Dam, completed in 2009, which flooded some four hundred square miles, the goal being to provide new sources of energy to a distressed region while taming the erratic waters of the Yangtze River. Yet state-funded salvaging of doomed sites was so perfunctory (critics claim) that the soon-to-be-engulfed tombs became a pillagers' paradise. Elsewhere, in such richly layered urban centers as Beijing, Shanghai, Kashgar, Lhasa, and Xi'an, historic shrines and neighborhoods have been razed with relentless zeal to make way for high-rise housing, soulless office buildings, and stereotypical stadiums.
As these episodes suggest, it is less ideology than opportunism that informs Chinese cultural policy. From Deng Xiaoping's tenure onward, Beijing's cultural cadres have discreetly diluted Maoist dogmas with the modernist views of a younger generation, along with the claims of a buoyant art market and the bonus of favorable foreign opinion. This amalgam seemingly accounts for Beijing's changing attitude to Western-influenced paintings, films, photography, architecture, and music. Few foreigners have tracked the transition more closely than Michael Sullivan (long the doyen of British Sinologists prior to his death in 2013), who from the 1940s onward befriended, wrote about, and collected the works of living Chinese artists. This was his judgment as of 2001 (in Modern Chinese Art): "Much of the best work of the 20th century has political resonance, overt or oblique, that gives it a particular edge or vitality. ... New, if erratic, freedoms, the birth of free enterprise, commercialism, and the interest of foreign critics and art galleries, began to create an art world, chiefly in Beijing and Shanghai, that looked more and more international—in style, if not in content—while new forms of art, such as performances, installations, happenings, were a stimulus to hundreds of young artists clamoring for attention."
Moreover, overseas fascination with China's effervescent art world proved an unexpected asset in post-Maoist diplomacy. With palpable symbolism, Beijing in 2002 opened its first cultural center in a Western capital: in Paris, on the banks of the Seine. The new center's offerings, from Bronze Age sculptures to conceptual art, proved so popular that its stone building (once home to Napoleon Bonaparte's descendants) acquired a modern annex in 2008, tripling floor space from 1,700 to 4,000 square meters. Other countries courted by China have likewise been awarded Confucius cultural centers. In 2011, nine such centers sponsored 2,500 activities for 600,000 visitors (by Chinese count). Ten more centers are planned. So recounted the Beijing-published China Pictorial (October 2012) in a thematic issue titled "A Booming Cultural Decade." The journal lauded China's recent discovery of such "soft power," explaining Beijing's tardy entry into cultural diplomacy with an egregious understatement: "After a long period of isolation, China lacked elements to represent modern culture beyond its borders."
Yet China's cultural offensive has a second, less commonly publicized front. Commencing in the 1990s, Beijing's arts officials turned afresh to long-standing grievances concerning the illicit removal of perceived art treasures. Here, finally, was a cultural issue on which the People's Republic could rise above profit-tainted pragmatism to loftier grounds of principle. Nationalists and Communists alike look back indignantly to a "Century of Humiliation"(1840–1949), when China was bullied by foreigners, forced to submit to unequal treaties, sliced into zones that privileged Western traders and missionaries, and, upon losing the two Opium Wars, compelled to permit the legal importation of a soul-destroying drug.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The China Collectors by Karl E. Meyer, Shareen Blair Brysac. Copyright © 2015 Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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Table of Contents
PART ONE
Chapter One: Rules of the Game
PART TWO
Chapter Two: Pacific Overtures
Chapter Three: The Crimson
Chapter Four: Barrels of Glue
Chapter Five: Lament for Longmen
Chapter Six: Penn Corrals the Tang Horses
Chapter Seven: Mad for Ming
PART THREE
Chapter Eight: Art on the Rails
Chapter Nine: The Porcelain Bubble
Chapter Ten: Romancing the Rockefellers
Chapter Eleven: The Mandarin: Duanfang
Chapter Twelve : Canada's Tryst with China
Chapter Thirteen: Threads of Heaven: Charlotte Hill Grant, Sarah Pike Conger, Lucy Monroe Calhoun (May be dropped if we need the time)
PART FOUR
Chapter Fourteen: The Authenticator: Berthold Laufer, the American Museum of Natural History and Chicago's Field Museum
Chapter Fifteen: The Eye: Sherman Lee
Chapter Sixteen: Old Scrolls: Wen Fong and the Metropolitan Museum
Chapter Seventeen: Alien Property: Eduard von der Heydt,
Chapter Eighteen: The Shoppers: Avery Brundage and Arthur Sackler
Epilogue: Portals Through the Great Wall
Endnotes (sources)
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index