Page 39 - C.T. Loo A paper about his impact and activities in the Chinese art Market

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government turned the International Exhibition of Chinese Art in London into a stage to

glorify Chinese art, history and civilization. From the late 1930s to the mid-1940s,

Chinese art became a tool for war relief and cultural diplomacy between China and the

U.S.

The mid and late 1930s marked a watershed in the reception of China, its history and

art in the world. In 1937 Carl W. Bishop remarked on the changing attitudes toward

China in the U.S.: “China is now a subject of interest to everyone. Recent books about

her have attained the rank of “best sellers.’ Her history, her civilization, her language-all

that concerns her, in fact-are receiving a steadily growing amount of attention in our

universities, our colleges, and our high schools. We find collections of Chinese art in all

our larger and many of our smaller cities…No longer, in short, do we think of the

Chinese people, when we think of them at all, as quaint, curious, and somehow different

from the rest of the civilized mankind; as doing everything backward, and with manners

and costumes unchanging, stereotyped, fixed for all time. On the contrary, we are

beginning to realize that the development of China has been as eventful and variegated

and picturesque as that of any country on earth.” (Bishop 1937, 7) World-wide interest in

Chinese art was marked by a series of important exhibitions and publications in the late

1920s and 1930s. In 1929 the first comprehensive exhibition of Chinese art was staged at

the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin (Turkel-Dero 1929). In 1933 Bernhard Karlgren

organized an Exhibition of Early Chinese Bronzes Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in

Stockholm. In 1934 an exhibition of Chinese Bronzes was organized by the Louvre. In

the same year another exhibition of Chinese bronzes was held in the Musée de