Page 130 - C.T. Loo A paper about his impact and activities in the Chinese art Market

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An Art News review observed, “The most interesting objects in the collection to Oriental

and Occidental alike are the Greco-Buddhist stone sculptures in which the art of the east

and west are completely merged with a harmony which has never been duplicated in any

other period.” 281 The review further observed that the Gandhara area, where Greco-

Buddhist art was produced, served as the bridge between China and Greece, “It was from

this Bactrian source by way of Gandhara and Chinese Turkestan that China received the

282
distant influence of Greece.”

The idea that South Asia, especially the Gandhara area, acted as the bridge between

China and Greece was well illustrated by the chart by Okakura Kakuzo, the leading Asian

art authority in America in the early twentieth century (Fig.34). In this chart Greece was

placed firmly in the center and its influences spread by way of Bactria to Gandhara,

283
where it infiltrated into Buddhist art in India, Chinese Turkistan, and finally China. In

the 1920s the role of India as the bridge between China and Greece was known to art

collectors such as Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who wrote to her sister Lucy Aldrich, “You

probably already have a lot of books on Indian art and know all about it, but it is a brand

281
Art News, January 2, 1926.
282
Ibid.
283 In Okakura’s chart, Asian art was evaluated by its affinities to Greek art. He
maintained that the finest expressions of Indian art were not those in the native Indian art
but those produced “…in Gandhara where the influence of the Bactrian Greeks
survived.” Ananda Coomaraswamy, the prominent scholar and curator of Indian art,
offered a different interpretation of Gandhara sculpture. In the essay entitled The
Influence of Greek on Indian Art, Coomaraswamy noted that the influence of Greco-
Roman art on Indian art has been misunderstood and exaggerated. He argued that it was
the transforming power of Indian philosophy that gradually Indianised Greco-Roman art
(Coomaraswamy 1981,91). Okakura Kakuzo. “The Development of the Department of
Chinese and Japanese Art,” May 9, 1908.” Part II p. 2, folder: Okakura Kakuzo, 1908,
Chinese and Japanese Department Business, box: Okakura Tenshin, Sorted Papers,
AAOA-MFA.