Exhibition dates: September 15, 2007 – February 10, 2008
Exhibition location: Galleries for Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy
An exhibition featuring 43 modern Chinese paintings and calligraphies assembled by the noted author Lin Yutang (1895-1976) and his family will go on view to the public for the first time at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 15. The collection was recently donated to the Museum by members of the family.
Lin Yutang moved to New York City in 1936 at the invitation of renowned author Pearl Buck and her husband and immediately established himself as one of the preeminent interpreters of Chinese culture in the United States. He was known especially for his lifetime devotion to building bridges of cultural understanding. By focusing on the collection of this acclaimed literatus and his family, Bridging East and West: The Chinese Diaspora and Lin Yutang will illustrate how traditional Chinese culture was sustained into the modern era. Among the leading artists featured in the collection are Xu Beihong (1895-1953), Zhang Daqian (1899-1983), Feng Kanghou (1901-1983), Qi Baishi (1864-1957), Zhao Shao'ang (1904-1998), and Yu Youren (1879-1964). These works will be complemented by 40 masterworks from the Museum's holdings that were collected by other members of the Chinese Diaspora – Zhang Daqian, C. C. Wang, Wan-go Weng, and the P. Y. and Kinmay Tang Family.
James C. Y. Watt, Brooke Russell Astor Chairman of the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Asian Art, has observed: "The Lin Family collection enriches the Museum's holdings with significant works by some of the leading Chinese painters and scholars of the 20th century. These paintings and calligraphies also form a coherent group that illustrates the social and artistic interaction among Chinese literati of early modern China. The artists and scholars represented in the collection belong to perhaps the last generation to carry on the centuries-old Chinese custom of social exchange by artistic means, and they were the first generation to experiment with new forms of artistic and literary expression."
The exhibition Bridging East and West will reflect Lin Yutang's personal involvement with some of the most prominent artists of his generation. On view will be Plum, Bamboo, and Rock (1942), Flying Magpie(1942), Heavenly Horse (1942), and Seventeen Letters (1938-48) by Xu Beihong, one of the towering figures in modern Chinese art, who is a leading exponent of integrating Western representational techniques with Chinese traditional brush painting. All of these works were presented to Lin or his daughter Taiyi Lin Lai (1926-2003) directly by the artist. Seventeen Letters, a unique handscroll consisting of Xu's letters addressed to Lin, preserves an extraordinary record of Xu's handwriting over a ten-year period (1938-1948). The letters, written in a tense, angular style with no concern for charm, seek Lin's help in organizing an exhibition of contemporary Chinese painting in America in support of China's war effort. (One of the letters even mentions the Metropolitan Museum and its curator of Chinese art at the time, Alan Priest.) Indeed, the Metropolitan did hold an exhibition of contemporary Chinese painting in 1943 and the above-mentioned works were included in it.
The exhibition will also feature six works that were dedicated to either Lin or his son-in-law Richard Lai by the painter-connoisseur Zhang Daqian. Among them are a colorful "splashed-ink" landscape, Mountains Clearing after Rain (ca. 1965), and a delightful group of works depicting humble vegetables – Radishes and Mustard Greens, Mountain Vegetables, and Mushrooms (all ca. 1965). The latter three works reveal the two men's shared passion for Chinese cuisine. In his inscription on Mushrooms, for example, Zhang bemoans his inability to enjoy the richly varied regional mushrooms of China since his move to the West. The light-hearted quality of these works also points up Lin's appreciation for the humorous. Although humor colors many Chinese expressions, Lin realized that there was no equivalent in the Chinese language that connotes all the nuances of the Western word. So in 1924 he coined what has become the standard Chinese term for humor (youmo) by combining the word for an obscure, ineffably profound quality (you) with a word that means voluntary taciturnity (mo).
Born under Qing imperial rule, Lin Yutang lived through the birth of the Republic in 1911 and witnessed China's subsequent split in 1949 into the rival polities of a Communist mainland and a Nationalist Taiwan. The son of a Presbyterian minister, Lin received a Western-style education in missionary schools and at St. John's University in Shanghai before he earned a Master's degree at Harvard and a doctorate at Leipzig University. In 1923 he returned to China to teach English at National Peking University and National Normal University, and then moved to New York City with his family in 1936, the year before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, at the invitation of Pearl Buck and her husband, the publisher Richard Walsh. Prevented from returning to China by the Sino-Japanese War, he remained in New York for nearly three decades before retiring to Taiwan in 1965. His first book in English, My Country and My People (1935), went through seven printings within four months and was translated into several European languages. His third book, The Importance of Living (1937), topped The New York Times' bestseller list for 52 weeks and was the most widely sold book in the United States in that year. Lin spent half of his lifetime in New York.
The exhibition is organized by Maxwell K. Hearn, Douglas Dillon Curator in the Museum's Department of Asian Art.
All 43 works from the Lin Yutang Family Collection will be published in the accompanying catalogue, Straddling East and West: Lin Yutang, a Modern Literatus, written by Dr. Shi-Yee Liu, Research Associate in the Department of Asian Art, and edited by Maxwell K. Hearn.
This publication and the related exhibition are made possible by The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Foundation.
A variety of education programs will be presented in conjunction with the exhibition, which will also be featured on the Museum's Web site (www.metmuseum.org).
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July 12, 2007
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