Page 214 - C.T. Loo A paper about his impact and activities in the Chinese art Market

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urban collectors’ home interiors, “It is interesting that all of Mr. Loo’s sculpture here is

small sized. Apartment house dwellers have not space for anything else, and their lack of

ceiling room is affecting the Chinese trade as much as it affecting English portrait market

where many a full length gentleman has had his extremities removed so he might fit

under a low ceiling.” (Roberts 1936, 21) This shift in the size and display context of

Chinese art was imbued with gender implications. If the monumental objects acquired by

American museums in the previous decades signified the public and masculine, the

miniatures for individual collectors’ home decoration signified the private and feminine

(Steward 1993). The 1946 exhibition of Figures in Chinese Art at Loo’s galleries, for

instance, highlighted a group of small feminine statues; the height of the majority of the

objects fell into the range of five to fifteen inches. Although the text indicated that a

considerable portion of the exhibits were statues of males, all the plates were devoted to

pieces representing women. 415

With the rise of prominence of Chinese art in the West in the 1930s and the1940s, the

acquisition and display of Chinese objects by elite American women in a domestic setting

was increasingly associated with social prestige and fashion. The Art News report of

Loo’s 1947 Song ceramic exhibition offers a case in point. As an advertisement for this

exhibition, the report showed that Loo’s major clients were aristocratic, cosmopolitan

American women. In the first case, Mrs. Byron C. Foy, wife of the vice-president of

Chrysler Corporation, placed her Chinese porcelain collection in her French eighteenth-

century room with a Renoir masterpiece (A.B. L.1947, 36). In a rather dramatic

415 Based on the text, about half of the 44 catalogue entries can be identifiable as women.