Page 8 - Bonhams Sept 2016 CHINESE Furniture

John and Celeste Fleming at Bingling si, 1981
A TRIBUTE TO JOHN AND CELESTE FLEMING
John Fleming and his wife, Celeste, were among the most
generous and intellectually curious couples imaginable. Happily
for the denizens of Denver, Colorado, they settled there after John
completed his service as the radiologist for the Navy in Japan 1957.
By then, they were committed to Japanese aesthetics and a love of
South and South East Asian art. The Denver Art Museum profited
from their generosity, as did other organizations in Denver, including
the Asian Performing Arts of Colorado.
I first met Celeste and John Fleming at a symposium on Early
China organized by our mutual friend, Julia White, at the Denver Art
Museum. Celeste, ever hospitable, took us both to lunch. She was
overjoyed to hear that my husband, John Curtis, and I had recently
left China over the Karakorum Highway in May 1989. The term
“Karakorum Highway” was a serious misnomer in those days; the
road was a one-lane “highway” carved into the side of the canyon
formed by the Indus River, with a drop of the other hundreds of feet
on one side. It was prone to avalanches from the mountain side,
which usually stopped traffic for hours while the road was cleared
by bulldozers kept at the ready for that purpose. John and Celeste
had a particularly grueling trip up the Karakorum Highway from the
Islamabad at a time of frequent avalanches.
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Their underpowered bus could not always carry its passengers over
the cleared rock slides, so they would be forced to clamber over the
rocks and through the dust of the bulldozed areas. John and Celeste
were even then not young; I admire greatly the energy and bravery
with which they pursued their intellectual curiosity about Asian art
and culture in the face of such a perilous journey.
Their house also reflected their special spirit and character. It was
a relatively small house built in a style reflecting their love of the
Japanese aesthetic, gained during their early married life when John
served there in the Navy. The house was built of carefully crafted
wood and roofed with Japanese tiles applied by craftsmen brought
over for the construction. Automobiles were another passion of John
Fleming, and in order not to detract from the Asian aesthetic of the
house, John caused the housing of his collected cars to be enclosed
in berms covered with beautifully landscaped grass. The interior of
the house provided a perfect backdrop for their collection of prints
and paintings, Chinese metalwork and Ming furniture, which reflected
the aesthetic of their home. This same sensibility is present in the art
and artifacts they donated to the Denver Art Museum.