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Also this issue: Unbecoming: The Private as Public Spectacle From Good Evening to Good Night Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris Webber, Wildhorn and Weill! Making Porn |
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August 8-14, 2002
art
A day trip to Princeton reveals a trio of compelling exhibits of Asian art.
 Pair of painted tomb guardian figures (circa mid-8th century), Chinese, Tang Dynasty. |
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Three Asian Art Exhibitions: "Immortals, Deities, and Sages in Chinese Painting," (through Sept. 29); "Japanese Woodblock Prints: Gifts from Anne van Biema," (through Sept. 1); "Guardians of the Tomb: Spirit Beasts in Tang Dynasty China," (through Sept. 1), Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, N.J., 609-258-3788
Local art lovers may not automatically associate the Princeton University Art Museum (a wonderful museum that’s only a short drive from Philadelphia) with Asian art, but the museum boasts an especially fine collection. Princeton’s Asian art collection was begun in the late 19th century with several large gifts (mainly from alumni) of Chinese export ceramics, including dinnerware, teapots and snuff bottles. Export ceramics were created by Chinese artists and craftsmen according to how they perceived Western taste and were enthusiastically collected in the U.S. and Europe. In the early 20th century, art and objects created in Asia for the local economy, for tombs, palaces and ordinary homes, began to attract admirers, and donations in these areas have increased the size and scope of the collection over the years. An especially interesting early collection, donated to the museum in 1947, was created by DuBois Schanck Morris as a teaching aid when he was a Presbyterian missionary in China.
These pieces, along with some of the newer gifts to the museum’s collection, form the basis of the three new exhibitions of Asian art now on display at the museum. "Immortals, Deities and Sages in Chinese Painting" is a research exhibition with 14 examples of figurative painting from China that represent legendary and mythic models of virtue. The paintings, many from the Morris collection, are just beginning to be researched and studied in depth. Questions remain about the paintings' origins and meanings, and the goal of the exhibition is to collect input from informed viewers that will add to scholarship on these works. For example, Luohan and Dragon, an anonymous hanging scroll painted between the mid-18th to early 19th centuries, shows one of the legendary guardians of Buddhist law subduing a dragon with an enormous pearl. This painting is wonderfully energetic and powerful, painted with ink and color on paper with bold brush strokes, thin lines and subtle ink washes. The artist, stylistic influences and religious significance are still unresolved. Another work, a small album of delightful ink and color on silk paintings titled Twenty-four Exemplars of Filial Piety (18th-19th centuries), illustrates the Chinese virtue of life-long duty to one's parents. Again, the artist, as well as the exact origin and date of the album, is unknown.
A second show, "Japanese Woodblock Prints: Gifts from Anne van Biema," highlights 16 color woodblock prints from a collection of 41 prints given to the museum over the past decade. The museum's associate curator of Asian art, Cary Liu, has selected prints that demonstrate the evolution of prints in Edo period Japan, and he is rotating the display of the prints because of their numbers as well as their fragility. One of the early prints, The Keya Jewel River, was made by Suzuki Harunobu in about 1765. Featuring the harmonious color layers of the earliest "brocade pictures" (nishiki-e), this print shows two girls dressed in matching pink and brown outfits with bows and billowy trousers. The girls stand near each other, but somehow oblivious to each other, and gaze at a nearby churning brook, surrounded by pine trees, ravine, sky and clouds. The landscape is so compressed that it seems like an interior -- indicating Harunobu's mastery of intimate indoor scenes. Many of the later prints on display lack the restraint and subtlety of early Edo prints, but they are just as beautiful in their own way. Most have intense colors, more special effects such as gradated, shifting tones and an interesting incorporation of Western influences like perspective.
Last but not least, a very small research exhibition, "Guardians of the Tomb: Spirit Beasts in Tang Dynasty China," highlights two extraordinary tomb guardians from the middle of the eighth century. They are functional objects -- traditional decorations that were placed in the extravagant tombs of important individuals. Made of earthenware, these spirit-beast guardians have splendid three-dimensional modeling and wonderfully detailed features. One has a human face with large bulbous eyes, a thick brow and a heavy jaw with delicate, black curving lines for whiskers and eyebrows. He stands with one taloned foot atop a wriggling deer-demon and holds a snake in each fist, with his biceps flexing. The second, with a face like a lion and strong brushwork suggesting a mane, is shown attacking a spotted green boar-demon with wings. Both figures are painted with gold and silver, mint green, black, brown, red and cream and, down their chests, have a vertical band of stripes, stylized peonies and foliage.
These two marvelous tomb guardians alone were well worth the jaunt to Princeton. (And they may even draw me back again before the fall!) But with the added attraction of the art and objects in the other Asian art shows, along with the permanent collection and several other special exhibitions, the Princeton University Art Museum makes an excellent choice for a short day trip this summer.
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