East Asian Art and American Culture: A Study in International Relations.

AuthorThorp, Robert L.

East Asian Art and American Culture: A Study in international Relations. By WARREN I. COHEN. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1992. Pp. xxi + 264. $32.50.

Warren 1. Cohen's volume might be better titled, A Narrative History of the Growth of East Asian Art Collections in America. The author's major concern is how the arts of China and Japan came to have a place in many museum collections in this country. The text is given over primarily to stories of the men who made the collections, with some attention to the historical circumstances in which they operated. This history spans the greater part of a century, from the origins of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to the activities of post-war academic art historians.

Three themes tie the book together, although they are not equally well developed. Cohen, an historian of America's relations with China, sees "East Asian art as a central element in contemporary American culture, as evidence of Asian culture being integrated into American life" (p. xiv). As positive evidence for this optimistic view, he cites magnificent museum collections of Asian art, the wide distribution of ordinary Asian objects in American homes, the impact of Asian aesthetics on contemporary definitions of beauty, and the like. But beyond those brief assertions, Cohen does not defend or elaborate this rationale for his inquiry. Practitioners of East Asian art history, like this writer, could surely mount a counter-argument: that Asian art is still marginalized in most contexts in the contemporary art world and public press, that general knowledge of Asian civilizations--including their arts--is still depressingly thin among college students or museum visitors, that few images of Asian art beyond the most hackneyed (Hokusai's "Great Wave" or the Zen garden in an American Express ad) are really a part of the American public's visual memory.

Cohen's strongest passages are his brief narratives of remarkable men (they are all men) who collected, curated, and studied the arts of China and Japan. As a China specialist, Cohen emphasizes that culture. Stories of collectors and curators such as Edward S. Morse (pp. 23-29), Okakura Kakuzo (consistently misspelled Kazuko; pp. 38-49), Charles Lang Freer (pp. 49-64), John Ferguson (pp. 64-71), John Ellerton Lodge (pp. 77-87), Langdon Warner (pp. 87-100), Laurence Sickman (pp. 111-16), and their associates dominate the first four chapters and carry the history to the war years. Their...

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