Page 38 - C.T. Loo A paper about his impact and activities in the Chinese art Market

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Herrlee Glessner Creel published The Birth of China: A Study of the Formative Period of

Chinese Civilization in 1937. Bernhard Karlgren developed a system to date ancient

Chinese bronzes (Karlgren 1936). There emerged a new generation of American

scholars/curators, including Laurence Sickman, Archibald G. Wenley, and Carl W.

Bishop, who were solidly grounded in Chinese language, culture, and archaeology

(Cohen 1992, 87). New energy in the field of Chinese art in America was injected by

several distinguished European émigré or visiting scholars, such as Alfred Salmony

(Salmony 1938), Ludwig Bachhofer, and Paul Pelliot. Chinese art study in the West also

benefited from contributions from leading Japanese and Chinese scholars. From the

1930s onwards, Umehara Sueji (Umehara 1931,1933-5, 1936), Guo Moruo (Guo 1935),

Li Ji (Li 1929-33), Rong Geng (Rong 1941), Chiang Yee (Chiang 1935,1938), received

growing international recognition. It is also during this period that courses on Chinese art,

language, and culture were integrated into the American university curriculum. From

1927 onwards Langdon Warner began to train Asian art specialists at Harvard (Mowry

1996). In 1932 the first Far Eastern Seminar, an intensive and integrated study of

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philosophy, literature, history and language, was offered at Harvard University.

Though the 1930s was a decade of devastating wars and upheavals in China,

antiquities received increased attention. Facing economic crisis, civil war, and escalating

conflicts with Japan, the Chinese government employed art and archaeological objects to

spur nationalistic fervor and to garner international support. In the 1930s a series of

excavations on the ruins of ancient dynasties were conducted. In 1935-6 the Chinese

29 “Notes and Comments,” Parnassus (January 1939): 31.