Word: sacklers
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...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, or thought of themselves as part of a particular...
...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...
JUDGING BY THE works in the exhibit, Dr. Sackler and his mentor, Professor Wen Fong, are connoisseurs par excellence. Each painting is a distilled essence, a jewel, a flower alone; each, by its particular excellence, isolates the viewer in a moment and place containing nothing but this eye and that painting. Artistic statement on paper becomes not only legible, in a calligraphic sense, but tangible. The bamboo leaves in groups of three in Tao'chi's work, "Orchid, Bamboo and Rock," form the ancient character "Ko" meaning bamboo--the painting is also a sort of poem. Cha Shih Piao...
...more accessible in his lovely album of "Flowers." It's not hard to see why Sackler, who is on intimate terms with these paintings, finds these his favorites. Sackler-the-connoisseur is a mysterious Howard Hughes-like figure. But his reputation and influence in Chinese art scholarship in the U.S. is such that the Metropolitan Museum's art department answers the phone: "Hello, Sackler enclave...
...began with the script. There were five in all. Benchley (grandson of Humorist Robert Benchley) says he "lost the ego problem" after completion of the second. He wrote a third draft, which was subsequently reworked by such diverse hands as Playwright Howard Sackler (The Great White Hope), Director John Milius (The Wind and the Lion) and Carl Gottlieb, an actor who had played improvisational comedy with the California-based troupe, The Committee, and who had a small role in the film. The last version was rejiggered nightly out on location...