Talks & presentations: upcoming & recent
Surveying the Arts of China in Postwar America: Laurence Sickman, Sherman Lee, and Michael Sullivan
Lee and Sickman as part of the Art & Archaeology Delegation to the PRC, 1973
March 19-22, 2020
Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, Boston
Panel: New Approaches to the Historiography of East Asian Art in the Twentieth Century
Fellow panelists: Fletcher Coleman, Wei-cheng Lin (discussant), Seung Yeon Sang, Stephanie Su
Collecting Chinese Paintings in Postwar America: Sherman E. Lee, Walter Hochstadter, and Aschwin Lippe
Fish and Rocks, Bada Shanren (1626-1705), handscroll, ink on paper, Cleveland Museum of Art
November 9, 2019
Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin
Provenance Research on East Asian Art Workshop
This paper provides a glimpse into how Chinese paintings circulated in the changed—and charged—political and economic environment of the 1940s and 1950s. It looks into Lee’s acquisitions of paintings from Hochstadter during Lee’s early years at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Lee’s purchases from Hochstadter in the 1950s were also facilitated by the inability of other curators to buy works from the dealer. For instance, this study reveals the thwarted efforts of German Sinologist and Metropolitian Museum of Art curator Aschwin Lippe (1914–88), to acquire Chinese paintings from Hochstadter.
Sherman E. Lee and Chinese Art Collecting in Postwar America
Sherman E. Lee, 1952
November 14, 2018 at 6:00pm
Cleveland Museum of Art, Recital Hall
Chinese art scholar and professor Noelle Giuffrida presents the history of collecting and exhibiting Chinese art in post-WWII America through the lens of the career of renowned Cleveland Museum of Art curator and museum director Sherman E. Lee. Drawing upon artworks and archival materials, Giuffrida excavates an international society of collectors, dealers, curators, and scholars who constituted the art world in which Lee operated. From his early training in Michigan and his work in occupied Japan as a “monuments man” to his acquisitions, exhibitions, and publications for museums in Detroit, Seattle, and Cleveland, this lecture highlights how Lee shaped public and scholarly understandings of Chinese art. This is the Cleveland launch for Giuffrida’s recent book, Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee and Chinese Art Collecting in Postwar America (University of California Press, 2018).
Free, no reservation required.
Performing Zhenwu: Material and Immaterial Dimensions of Daoist Experience in an Early Ming Album
November 18, 2018 at 11:00AM
American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting
As one the most ubiquitous deities in the religious landscape of late imperial China, Zhenwu, the Perfected Warrior, inspired the creation of a rich corpus of images. While discovery, identification, and categorization of images remain fundamental aspects in the study of Zhenwu, Noelle Giuffrida’s paper moves beyond those concerns to explore the performative dimensions of Zhenwu images, elucidating the ways in which they evoked both the material and immaterial realms of Daoist experience for viewers. In particular, she focuses on paintings from an early Ming album known as Zhenwu lingying tuce 真武靈應圖冊 (Pictures of Zhenwu’s Numinous Responses). Her analysis of these pictures reconstructs the role of Zhenwu images not only as material objects deployed in external ritual practice but also as integral to Daoist priests’ internal meditative visualization bianshen neilian 變神內煉 (transformation into a divinity [through] inner refinement) as described in Ming liturgical texts.
Chinese Religions Unit and Daoist Studies Unit
Panel: Vision and Visualization in Art, Alchemy, and Ritual: Exploring Daoist Modes of Perception
Fellow panelists: James Benn (presiding), Natasha Heller (discussant), Anna Hennessy, Marc Meulenbeld, and Aaron Reich
Episodes in the history of Studying and Exhibiting chinese art in Postwar America
Gallery view, Chinese Landscape Painting, 1954
November 27, 2018 at 3:30PM
Brandeis University, Mandel Humanities Center
In the decades following World War II, the United States became an international hub for the study and presentation of Chinese art. Political, economic, and social changes affected individuals and the art market, prompting a new wave of collecting and, with it, the production of new scholarship and the organization of exhibitions by experts living in the United States. Among the individuals behind these developments, American curator and museum director Sherman E. Lee (1918-2008) stands out as one of the most important. Noelle Giuffrida’s talk uses Lee as a lens through which to explore several significant episodes in the history of studying and exhibiting Chinese art including debates about the relative merits of art historical approaches such as stylistic analysis and Sinological textual methods, discourses on connoisseurship, the roles of “Chinese” and “Japanese” taste in determining canons, and strategies for presenting Chinese paintings to American museum audiences.
Traversing Zhenwu's Sacred Terrain in Bronze
Zhenwu Cultivating Himself at the Wudang Mountains, bronze, early 17th century, Wudangshan Museum, Hubei Province, China
June 1, 2018 at 4:00pm
Beijing Normal University
12th International Conference on Daoist Studies
Concentrating on several surviving Ming period bronzes that encapsulate the apotheosis, ascension, and intervention of the Daoist God Zhenwu, Noelle Giuffrida’s paper argues that these bronze sculptures functioned as active agents for the transmission and maintenance of his cult while also serving as surrogate sites of pilgrimage that reinforced the authority of the god’s home in the Wudang Mountains. Visual and textual sources concerning imperial, court, and Daoist association patronage of temples and rituals dedicated to Zhenwu during the Ming and early Qing offer a rich repository for research. Cross-media comparisons with paintings, prints, woodblock-printed books, and scriptures facilitate the identification and analysis of scenes and locales implied in the sculptures, while inscriptions and texts provide clues about the patronage and journeys of the objects themselves. Examination of these bronzes demonstrates that the selection and arrangement of images of the god and episodes from his hagiography prompted active engagement among viewers and patrons of these sculptures, allowing them to visually and experientially traverse Zhenwu’s sacred terrain.