Page 129 - C.T. Loo A paper about his impact and activities in the Chinese art Market

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Chinese art, many Westerners looked westward, and ultimately found ancient Greece, the

fountainhead of Western civilization.

Loo was aware of the benefit of linking Chinese art to Greek art, the unquestioned

278
aesthetic paragon in America. Loo, for example, urged John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to see
“some 5 th Century black stone sculpture which is equal to the best Greek arts in

expression and from an artistic point of view.” 279 To connect Chinese art directly to

Greek art in origination, however, was not an easy task considering the enormous

geographical and cultural distance between these two traditions. Loo’s strategy was to

connect China to the West through intermediaries such as India and Siberia, as illustrated

by his dealing in Greco-Buddhist art and Sino-Siberia art.

Greco-Buddhist sculpture was a popular category in Loo’s collection. In Loo’s 1935

Exhibition of Chinese Bronze, Pottery and Porcelain, Greco-Buddhist art was noticed for

its Western lineage. The New York Times observed that the exhibition demonstrated the

not-so-well-known “widespread influence of Hellenic art in the Far East…Examples of

Graeco-Buddhist art include some very interesting second-century friezes, in which the

figures, while forming part of a unified design, maintain also a peculiar independence.

The observer might find it profitable to compare these pieces with similar themes from

the antiquity of Greece and Rome.” 280 The Greco-Buddhist sculptures at the exhibition

Loo organized at the Wildenstein Galleries in 1926 also provoked enthusiastic comments.

278 The prominent American collector William W. Corcoran believed that “…American
art stemmed ultimately from the sculpture of fifth-century Greece” (Weston 2004, 19).
279
C. T. Loo to JDR Jr, March 3, 1916, folder 1370, C. T. Loo 1916-1949, box 137,
OMR-RAC.
280 New York Times, January 15, 1935.