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of Design Museum, had developed comprehensive or representative Chinese collections
(March 1929a). Chinese objects in American museums had been admitted into the
pantheon of fine arts, as Benjamin March observed, “Both China and Japan have now
passed out of the stage of strangeness and strictly ethnological interest, and throughout
the museum world their arts are increasingly collected, appraised and appreciated in full
equality with the great arts of all time and peoples.” (March 1929a, 19)
The burst of energy in the field of early Chinese art and archaeology was also indicated
by new developments in academia. From the mid-1920s onwards, Chinese art scholarship
in the Euro-American world made remarkable strides. There was a parade of monographs
on Chinese jade, bronze, sculpture, ceramics, and painting (Pope-Hennessy 1923, Laufer
1927; Koop 1924, Bishop 1927; Ashton 1924, Siren 1925; Hetherington 1922, Hobson
1923, 1925; Waley 1923, Ferguson 1927, Siren 1928). There also appeared a series of
important survey books on Chinese art including Gaston Migeon’s L'art Chinois (1925),
Robert L. Hobson’s Chinese Art (1927), and Osvald Siren’s Histoire des arts anciens de
la Chine (1929), Burlington Magazine Chinese Art (Binyon et al 1925) and the Romance
of Chinese Art (Binyon et al 1929). The last two books coauthored by authorities in the
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West were particular influential.
The rising status of Chinese art in America was signaled by four landmark events in the
1920s. One was the International Conference on Oriental Art in 1926. The conference
was acclaimed as “the most important Congress of this sort ever held in America” with
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These books were available both in Europe and America. While most contributors of
the Burlington Magazine Chinese Art (1925) were Europeans, American
scholars/curators Carl W. Bishop, Kojiro Tomita, Benjamin March played a significant
part in the Romance of Chinese Art (Binyon et al 1929).
