Page 42 - C.T. Loo A paper about his impact and activities in the Chinese art Market
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think the collection of Chinese sculptures is nearly at its end” (Loo 1940, Preface). China
was entangled in the anti-Japanese war and civil war. The sources for Chinese antiquities,
especially large-scale monumental sculptures, were drained due to years of war,
plundering, and tightened government control. In 1941 America was plunged into World
War II. Subsequently, Loo’s major rival in the U.S., Yamanaka & Co. was out of
business because of the Japanese-American conflict. The Asian art authority John E.
Lodge passed away in 1942. The tycoon collector of Chinese antiquities Grenville
L.Winthrop dies in 1943. The age of ambitious museums and magnate collectors were
gone.
On the other side of the picture, the 1940s saw new opportunities in the field of
Chinese art. With America’s entry into the Pacific war, its involvement with Asia was
intensified. In the 1940s the band of American collectors of Chinese art broadened, and
Chinese art infiltrated into the popular consciousness and daily life in America. It is in
this decade that Chinese art and archaeology scholarship in America came of age,
signaled by Carl W. Bishop’s Origin of the Far Eastern Civilizations (1942), and Grace
Dunham Guest and Archibald G. Wenley’s Annotated Outlines of the History of Chinese
Arts (Guest and Wenley 1946). American scholars of Chinese art became more
specialized, and devoted more attention to the knowledge and methods in the native
context (Waterbury 1942, Bachhofer 1946, Pope 1947). Chinese art study in this decade
became more institutionalized, as indicated by the formation of the Chinese Art Society
of America. Consisting of a group of collectors, curators, scholars, and dealers, the
