Hearn Maxwell, Smith Judith. Arts of the Sung and Yüan

New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996. — 375 p. — ISBN: 0-87099-806-4In 1961-62, the exhibition "Chinese Art Treasures" brought a selection of 231 works from National Palace Museum, Taipei, to five American museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, establishing a new benchmark in Chinese studies and introducing a whole generation of Americans to the highest artistic achievement of Chinese Culture.While many of the masterworks included in the present exhibition were also shown in the earlier selection, the goals and methods of this exhibition are considerably different.Issues of authenticity and connoisseurship were central concerns in the earlier exhibition, which arrived in the West at a time when ascertaining the date and authorship of Chinese paintings through stylistic analysis was still a hotly debated topic. While connoisseurship remains essential to the art historical endeavor, scholarly interest today has shifted to more interpretative approaches that seek to place art objects within their broader cultural context. Questions of patronage, the artist's status, and the shifting social functions of artworks are now being meaning- fully explored within the Chinese cultural tradition.The present exhibition, and its accompanying publication, Possessing the Past, is organized thematically and chronologically in order to narrate in as comprehensive a manner as possible the complex history of Chinese art and culture. It traces the foundations of Chinese civilization from the Neolithic and Bronze Ages through a selection of ritual and decorative objects created from the quintessential materials of these ages: jade and bronze. Cultural paradigms established in the Medieval era of Chinese history, brush writing and landscape painting, are introduced with key
masterpieces of calligraphy from the fourth to the eighth centuries and monumental landscapes of the tenth and eleventh centuries. The evolution of imperial portraiture is examined in a series of nearly lifesize depictions of Sung, Yuan, and Ming monarchs never before shown outside China. The tension between court-sponsored art and the self-expressive works of scholar-artists is traced through the Sung, Yuan, Ming, and Ch'ing dynasties with major examples of scholar painting and calligraphy of the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries juxtaposed with monuments of court patronage from the same eras. In the installation, different categories of objects are frequently placed in Counterpoint to one another to suggest how diverse media or different forms of expression may share a similar aesthetic or reflect a common social context. The full-length portrait of Sung emperor T'ai-tzu (r. 960 — 76) is juxtaposed with a monumental landscape in the style of Fan K'uan to underline the idealization of both man and nature in Sung China in accord with Confucian principles of a hierarchically ordered society.