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ink painting, reproductions of which seem to have been widely distributed in the West (the great Ameri- can specialist James Cahill would also comment on it much later, in 1980), appears as number 133 in the catalogues held by the Japanese Diet in Tokyo. In 1927, this work, like the three others, was held in the collection of Baron Kawasaki, Kawasaki Shozo (1837–1912), the founder in 1878 of the shipyards at Kobe, the forerunner of today’s group Kawasaki Heavy Industries and an emblem of the dynamism and industrialization of Japanese society during the Meiji Era (1868–1912). He had a private museum, the Choshunkaku, built for his property at Kobe. This “Pavilion of the Eternal Spring” was inaugurated on September 6, 1890.1 Unfortunately, less than half a century later, this remarkable success story took a tragic turn: in the very year when Salles published his article, the financial crisis of the late 1920s reached Japan, forcing the Baron’s heirs to sell many of their treasures. Some years later, in 1939, at a time when Japan had been waging war intensely in China since 1937, the municipality of Kobe bought up Kawakasi’s museum and the works it contained. But this new lease on life was short-lived: in 1945 American bombs destroyed everything. There may still be a Kawasaki Museum today, but all you will see there are exceptional motorbikes, not the paintings that once attracted art lovers.
In 1928, issues five and six of Cahiers d’Art continued its presentation of masterpieces of Chinese art by inviting Alfred Salmony (1890–1958), then director of the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst in Cologne, to present his thoughts on some Chinese archaic bronzes. Salmony was a highly respected German specialist, known particularly for his work on the so-called “Steppe Bronzes,” that is to say, the ones produced by the nomadic peoples living close to China’s north and northwest frontiers. After leaving Germany for France in 1933, Salmony continued on to the United States in 1938, where he went on to teach at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York University. Between the wars, “archaic” Chinese bronzes were fashionable with art lovers. Chinese forgers, serious antiques dealers and collectors of all nationalities circulated large numbers of them—including copies—through the West, while in China, again in 1928, the first scientific archaeological excavations were beginning. Organized on the Anyang site in Henan Province, this dig served to validate certain fortuitous discoveries as well as the oracular descriptions identified at the very end of the nineteenth century and confirmed that this was the location of the last capital and of the royal cemeteries of the Shang dynasty (about 1700–1050 BCE). Large numbers of ritual bronzes used in the ceremonial banquets offered to ancestors, some of them bearing inscriptions of varying lengths, were dug up, and it became possible to compare them with the ones that art lovers had turned up over the years in their searches.
Experts now dream of establishing an incontestable chronology, going beyond the typology to which they had been reduced in the catalogues produced by their learned ancestors since the eleventh century. This was the scholarly context in which Salmony was writing, although he still ventured some strange interpretations. While he understood that over the years certain bronzes became “commemorative monu- ments,” he continued, like the eighteenth-century European connoisseurs, to compare China with Egypt, and did not sufficiently stress the religious meaning of these objects that, given their ritual function, were not concerned with originality. Limited by the vision of the European academies, he did not realize that he was dealing with symbolic representations, with “signs” produced by a very different kind of society and, above all, with genuine masterpieces of bronze working.
To reread these three texts critically some ninety years after their original publication is to be promp- ted to reflect on the best way to write about art and about other civilizations. What emerges from these three archive documents is that the specialist (in this instance, Salmony) is not necessarily the one who best understands the works that in theory come within his field, and that the sensitive enthusiasm of youth (Rivière), and extensive but not overly specialized culture (Salles) are better able to convey to the public the significance of objects whose meaning will necessarily remain uncertain.
Danielle Elisseeff Center of Studies on Modern and Contemporary China, EHESS, Paris
1 Its catalogue can be consulted on the Diet library website, http://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/2591918/54?tocOpened=1
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