Page 37 - C.T. Loo A paper about his impact and activities in the Chinese art Market

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The Golden Age: 1929 -1941

Despite the Great Depression, Chinese art gained new impetus in the world in the

1930s. By the end of the 1920s Chinese art had become entrenched in American

museums. In the 1930s, while pioneer collectors of Chinese art continued their earlier

efforts, Chinese art interest spread from national, encyclopedic, and more established

museums to regional, smaller, and newer museums, including the William Rockhill

Nelson Gallery of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the City Art Museum of St. Louis, the

Toledo Museum of Art, and the Worcester Art Museum. The popularity of Chinese art

also resulted from the increasingly internationalized art scene in the U.S. From the 1930s

onwards non-Western art was collected and displayed in the U.S. with growing

28
enthusiasm.
The soaring energy in the field of Chinese art was also manifested in the academic

world in the West. In the late 1920s and 1930s, new art journals such as the Eastern Art

(1928-1931) and the Parnassus (1929-1941) became forums to advocate Chinese art in

America. Art magazines with international scope, like the Art New, significantly

increased their coverage of Chinese art (Fig.4). On the foundation that scholars laid in the

1920s, the study in Chinese art and archaeology broadened and deepened in this decade.

28 The 1930s and 1940s saw a parade of exhibitions of non-Western art in America,
including the Mexican Art exhibition (1930) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York, the Exposition of Indian Tribal Art (1931) at the Grand Central Galleries in New
York, American Sources of Modern Art (1933), African Negro Art (1935), Prehistoric
Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa (1937), Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (1940),
Indian Art of the United States (1941) Art of the South Seas exhibiting cultural materials
of Polynesia, Micronesia and Australia (1946) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
(Rushing 2002). In 1936 the exhibition of Art Treasures from Japan was organized by
Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.