Page 5 - Avery Brundage Ancient Bronzes and Collecting Biography

a vessel. The vessel would originally have had a lid, one probably modeled to conform to
the contours of the rhinoceros’s body. 10
The Asian Art Museum’s object file does not contain the sales invoice specifying the
price of the bronze rhinoceros, the source, or the date of its acquisition. I cannot locate
similar information in the museum’s library archives, either. However, circumstantial
evidence is strong enough to suggest that the vessel was purchased by Brundage in 1952,
the year when it was published for the first time in English by Archibald Gibson Wenley
(1898–1962), the first American curator of East Asian art solidly grounded in Asian lan-
guage and culture. Wenley had become director of the Freer Gallery of Art in Washing-
11
ton, D.C., in 1943. He began his paper by stating, “Some time ago Mr. Avery Brundage
of Chicago was kind enough to show the writer an extraordinary Chinese ceremonial
12
bronze vessel of the type hsi tsun representing a rhinoceros.” On this evidence, Brund-
age had bought the vessel by 1952.
Clarence Shangraw (1935–2004), who began working for the Brundage Collection
in 1964 as a research associate, narrows down the date and price of the purchase: “the
[Wenley] article appeared the same year [1952] that Mr. Brundage had purchased that figure 8.4a. J. T. Tai in his gallery at 810
internationally renowned, 10th century B.C. vessel commissioned by Zhou Xin, the last Madison Avenue, 1956. Sotheby’s Hong Kong
Shang king; Mr. B had acquired the masterpiece from a globally-connected, Madison press release, August 2010.
Avenue-based Chinese dealer. ‘That rhino vessel,’ Mr. B once said in a rare private mo-
ment, ‘cost me the equivalent price of buying five Cadillacs.’ ” 13
The “globally-connected, Madison Avenue-based Chinese dealer” was evidently Dai
Fubao, or Jun Tsei Tai, more commonly known in the West as J. T. Tai (1910–1992, fig.
8.4a), a well-known dealer in Chinese antiquities in Shanghai in the first half of the twen-
tieth century, and then in New York in the second half. Terese Bartholomew, a veteran
curator at the Asian Art Museum who started to work at the museum in 1968, wrote,
“In 1953, J. T. Tai sold Mr. Brundage the Shang-dynasty rhinoceros for $20,000. In those
days, the price was equivalent to three Cadillacs.” That the vessel was purchased from
14
J. T. Tai was independently confirmed by Jeffrey Moy, a Chicago art dealer who worked
with Brundage, with whom I discussed this topic in San Francisco on February 5, 2009.
15
J. T. Tai apparently moved his gallery several times: It was located at 40 West 55th Street,
figure 8.4b. J. T. Tai’s advertisement in
between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, in 1951, and was four blocks uptown at 36 Central Park Apollo, August 1966, xxxvi.
16
South in 1953. It appears that he had moved to 810 Madison Avenue by 1956 and stayed
there for a considerable number of years, as an advertisement for his firm in a 1966 mag-
azine shows (fig. 8.4b). 17
There is also an interesting contradiction between “five” and “three” Cadillacs in
characterizing the rhinoceros’s price. The most expensive Cadillac in the early 1950s was
the 1953 Eldorado (fig. 8.5), a stunning convertible that arrived as Cadillac’s style leader
and its ultimate prestige car, with a towering price tag of $7,750; other Cadillacs ranged
18
from $3,500 to $5,500. Compared to the gigantic Cadillac, and to other ancient Chi-
nese bronzes he purchased, the diminutive bronze rhinoceros was exceedingly expen-
sive for Brundage, whose stated motto for purchase was “Top quality, low price,” as he
often liked to repeat to dealers. Allegedly, Brundage once commented facetiously that figure 8.5. A 1953 Cadillac Eldorado.
19

A Unique Pair: The Bronze Rhinoceros and Its Collector, Avery Brundage 205