Word: connoisseurship
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...poets, painters and professors--have claimed Originality as a blessing and curse unique to Western creativity. The Western world commonly thinks of Chinese painting as a matter of historical course, a succession of repeating patterns and traditions. But the exhibit of Chinese master paintings at the Fogg: Studies in Connoisseurship: Chinese Paintings from the Arthur M. Sackler Collection, is a spectacular demonstration that this stereotype is as false as any other. The paintings, spanning 600 years (1300-1900) show that while many Chinese painters of these ages conceived of their works as being in the idiom of a particular school...
...magnificent opus of scholarship and reproductions, strives bravely to do so and comes up with some hilarious erudite observations: "the particular hose-like configuration of the branches presupposes the influence of a follower of Wang Shih-sin.") The art of learning to recognize these subtleties is perhaps what "connoisseurship"--a word scented with elegant perfume, fine wine and elitism--is all about...
...still standing in front of the painting repeating, to those passing by, Sackler's comparison of Tao'chi's flowers with a Mondrain painting of chrysanthemums "that he has at home." The point of the anecdote seemed to have vanished, however, somewhere in this chic game of telephone. Real connoisseurship is not cocktail conversation...
Studies in Connoisseurship is an exhibit which amply repays critical examination and scholarly research (the catalogue is a brief but almost complete education in Chinese painting from 1300 to 1900). But, unlike some exhibits of this caliber, it does not insist that one be either a student or a connoisseur to appreciate it. After looking at these paintings for a few hours, however, anyone might seriously want to be both, to contemplate such things forever in Oriental tranquillity...
...15th and 16th century drawing-Dürer, Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo-was not uncommon. Today one would hardly be more surprised if a live dodo waddled into the Parke-Bernet auction room. Drawings also are not a young man's hobby; they demand a degree of patient connoisseurship (tinged with philatelic mania) that only the old usually have. But late last month a remarkable disproof of the rule went on show at Manhattan's Pierpont Morgan Library: a group of 115 works from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene V. Thaw...