Word: fogg
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OCCIDENTAL ARTISTS--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...
...Sackler collection has a Western bias in that the paintings were selected with an eye to the most "original work of the scholar-amateurs." Hung in the Fogg next to examples of the first-rate copies they spawned, the masters' works shine all the more distinctly. Comparing original with copy, qualitative differences emerge--things that you can put your finger on, figuratively and physically, in the painting but that are hard to verbalize. (The catalogue, a magnificent opus of scholarship and reproductions, strives bravely to do so and comes up with some hilarious erudite observations: "the particular hose-like configuration...
...Fogg's opening reception on Valentine's Day, Sackler was elusively sociable, passing from group to group and pausing in each just long enough to make an appropriate comment. These conversational pebbles rippled through each social pool they were tossed into; returning to Tao'chi's peonies half an hour after first passing them, you heard those 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...
...crowd forced Boggs to move the class to Fogg Norton Lecture Hall...
...Fogg two exhibits are in progress: Art of Mughal India and Ottoman Turkey (through January 23) and Italian Drawings of the Renaissance and Baroque (through January...