Page 183 - C.T. Loo A paper about his impact and activities in the Chinese art Market

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them for America’s present and future. The logic that China’s past was to be preserved,

appreciated, and appropriated in modern America for America is evident in Eugene

Meyer’s comment on the significance of Charles Lang Freer’s collection of Asian art and

the building of the Freer Gallery under his patronage, “Our civilization will be the greater

for its ability to know and understand other civilizations and other cultures. You are

furnishing the Western world with the materials through which its first knowledge and

381
understanding of the East can be obtained.” C. T. Loo catered to this ideology in his

letter to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in 1926. He referred to Rockefeller’s family collection of

Chinese art, “…in preserving them for the posterity, you are doing a welfare for the

world. I hope (that?) rare works will be preciously kept in your great family for ten

thousand years.” 382

Ancient Chinese Art and Modernist American Art

By the late1920s, Chinese art had been integrated in art historical discourse in

American museums and academia. The rise of modernist aesthetics, the cosmopolitan

taste, and consumer culture in the 1930s and 1940s, raised new questions for C. T. Loo:

how to recontextualize ancient Chinese art to answer modern America’s new needs?

The New York Time review of the 1949 exhibition of the Ming and Qing paintings

organized by Loo’s son-in-law and business partner, Jean-Pierre Dubosc, observed, “ A

final note on the modernism of the work is contributed by M. Dubosc, who reports how

380 Parallels can be found in the reception of native American art in the U.S.(Rushing
1992).
381
E. Meyer to C.L. Freer, August 15, 1919, CLFP-FGA.
382 C. T. Loo to JDR Jr. March 5, 1926, folder 1370, C. T. Loo 1916-1949, box
137,OMR-RAC.