Bronzes scattered overseas– the pinnacle of art in the eyes of Westerners, Chinese cultural identity
Theme: The Circulation of Chinese Bronzes Overseas
Speaker: Professor Zhang Changping, School of History, Wuhan University
When: July 4, 2021
Venue: Shanxi Museum
Why are so many Chinese bronzes circulating overseas? This is because Chinese bronzes have a very prominent position in the history of Chinese and world civilization. Professor Zhang Changping, who has focused on the study of Chinese bronzes in the diaspora for many years, said that overseas Chinese bronze collections are a very complex issue. In this lecture, he shared the circulation, collection, research and protection of overseas bronzes.
The bronze ware of Zeng Boke's father who returned to China
Plate Katakata
Animal face pattern Fang Yi and its local close-up
The Fujita Museum of Art at Christie's auction in 2017 holds bronze sheep gowns
Zi Cha Lang Bird Zun
The bronze civilization represented the relatively high-level civilization of the society at that time
Bronze ware is closely related to China's history and culture, and even to the traditions and cultural patterns that have formed our present. Ancient rulers paid special attention to bronzes, because bronze civilization represented the relatively high-order civilization of society at that time. The Book of Han and the Chronicle of Emperor Wu of Han records that Emperor Wu of han "obtained ding on the fenshui river" and changed the era name to "Yuan Ding". This Ding should have been from the Western Zhou Dynasty, but Emperor Wu of Han still thought that this was a particularly big happy event, so he commemorated it in this way. Another emperor who attaches special importance to the art of ancient civilization is Song Huizong, the Song Dynasty attaches special importance to the etiquette system, but also set off an ancient wind boom, such as the Song Dynasty's famous Dasheng Bell is to imitate the Bronze Ware of the Shang Zhou, and now we go to the museum to see the names of bronze artifacts such as Yao, Jue, and Xue, which are also from the Song people, and the Song Dynasty also formed a kind of epigraphy.
The dynasties after the Song Dynasty did not interrupt the emphasis on bronze, including foreign tribes, such as the Yuan Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty. The Qianlong Emperor was very fond of antiquities, and he compiled the artifacts collected by the court into a catalogue called "Qianlong Four Classics", which were mainly bronze ware. At that time, there were many enamelware, porcelain, and wooden ware, which looked like the Qing Dynasty style, but the prototype of the Shang Zhou bronze ware shape could be found.
At the end of the Qing Dynasty, many antiquities collectors appeared among the scholars, and Pan Zuyin, the Shangshu of the Punishment Department, collected the very famous Da Lu Ding and Da Ke Ding, which were later donated to the Shanghai Museum by his descendants. Another big collector was the Manchu aristocratic Duanfang, who could be regarded as one of the major collectors at that time. Duan Fang was killed during the Xinhai Revolution and his family rapidly declined, which is also a representative event of the large loss of bronzes in the late Qing Dynasty. Because of the turbulent changes in the political landscape, a large number of collectibles were sold, which became very advantageous for the West to acquire bronzes. A set of Shang Dynasty bronzes collected by Duanfang was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for about 200,000 taels of silver. At that time, 200,000 taels of silver was equivalent to 200,000 US dollars, and the price of bronzes was generally 400 or 500 US dollars, so the museum decided to buy them after a long discussion. To this day, this set of bronzes is placed in the most important position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Why do chinese from China to the West attach so much importance to bronze? Bronze ware is a representative of the materialization of ritual system in early Chinese history, and the use of bronze culture to maintain social classes and stabilize rule has always run through ancient Chinese society. Therefore, the song emperor's love of antiquities is also the essence of this reason. The Warring States period's "Qingding Zhongyuan" and the "Three-legged Dingli" of the Three Kingdoms period both used utensils to represent the identity of the national community or a person, which has formed a profound identity in our traditional culture.
The "Boeing plane" of the 12th century BC
We have just talked about bronzes from the perspective of Chinese, so what is the perspective of Westerners? They emphasize artistry. Many of the collections of Westerners are from the perspective of art, so to what extent has bronze reached in art? A statue of Fang Yi in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, magnified to 20 times, shows a very high sense of beauty, which is impressed by Westerners. A famous scholar in the West commented on Chinese bronzes and said that this was a Boeing aircraft of the 12th century BC. He believes that Chinese bronzes at that time reflected the highest industrial level and the most complex social labor in the world at that time.
Everyone knows our "ping-pong diplomacy" in the early 1970s, and in fact there was a "cultural diplomacy" later, and we organized a lot of exhibitions of excavated cultural relics, the most popular of which was bronze. Among the outstanding cultural heritage of the past, bronze ware can be said to be the first to reach the peak in the world. At that time, Westerners themselves also organized such a series of exhibitions, such as the "Great Chinese Bronze Age" exhibition in the United States, which was displayed on the east and west coasts, which had a great impact on the American people, and even students in the United States, Europe, and Japan began to be interested in China's ancient culture at that time. Now a number of overseas scholars have been influenced in that period. It's also understandable why Westerners are so fascinated by bronzes.
In addition to artistry, bronze ware itself has a difference in Chinese and Western civilizations. From the perspective of material culture, the early development of human beings can be divided into stone age, copper and stone combined era, bronze age, iron age, this division is a way for Westerners to try to distinguish the development of material culture before the emergence of archaeology. However, through observation and comparison, it can be found that only China is a country with particularly developed bronzes in the Bronze Age, and there are not many bronzes in the West in this period. In particular, Chinese bronzes mainly use the "model casting method" in casting technology, which is completely different from the Western lost wax method and forging method. The "model casting method" has two major advantages, the first is that it can present a very exquisite ornament, and the second is that it can be mass-produced. As we all know, Chinese bronzes are copper, lead, and tin ternary alloys, while Western bronzes contain only copper and tin. In 2015, 3.3 tons of lead ingots were found in the north of Liujiazhuang, Yin Xu, and according to the calculation that the proportion of lead would not exceed 10%, this place could produce 33 tons of bronzes. From this, it can also be deduced that the scale of Chinese bronze production at that time was large.
The largest outflow of bronzes from China was before the outbreak of the War of Resistance
When it comes to Chinese cultural relics circulating overseas, we generally think that they were stolen by the Eight-Power Alliance. Of course, they robbed a lot of cultural relics, but the main reason for the loss of Cultural Relics in China is not this channel. The loss of Chinese bronzes is a particularly complex issue. In the West, a Chinese artifact can be exchanged for many collectors, so it is particularly difficult to trace its origins. Especially in the early days, we often can't know where a bronze was unearthed and by which path it was sold, and only when we entered the museum in the West could we have archival materials to recover.
The largest outflow of bronzes was before the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in 1937, which was a period of particular turmoil in the social and political situation at the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the People's Republic. Some of the outflow paths are illegal smuggling, and some are seemingly legal transactions, such as a merchant named Lu Qinzhai in Shanghai, who opened a business in Foreign Countries specializing in selling Chinese art, and a company set up by the Japanese Takujiro Yamanaka, which at that time flowed out a large number of Chinese art in a seemingly legal form, which was absolutely dominant in quantity. Lu Qinzhai even built a very high Chinese-style building called Tonglou in France, which shows the great influence of this industry he formed overseas.
In Europe and the United States, a very early contact with Chinese cultural relics was a man named Senucci, who himself was very fond of antiquities, collected a large number of European art, and bought a lot of ancient art when he traveled to the East, but he did not recognize these works of art at that time. After returning to China, he asked scholars who studied the Orient to identify them, only to find that many of them were Chinese bronzes. Since then he has become interested in Chinese art and has built a personal museum, which is now the museum of the city of Paris.
The most famous chinese bronze collector overseas is the nobleman Freer, who made his fortune in producing trains. Most of his collection of Chinese bronzes was purchased from Lu Qinzhai and was known for its exquisiteness. Lu Qinzhai often sold him fine products because he was willing to pay 10 times more. In the 1920s, Freer donated his collection of Chinese bronzes to the U.S. government.
It can be said that before World War II, the Collection of Chinese Art in the West has formed a rough pattern. Overall, the United States became a growing collection of Chinese bronzes as they produced super-rich people like Freer, and more so after World War II. Bronzes also flow with the flow of wealth.
There is also a very famous collector in the United States, Sackler, is a dentist, by selling patents for drugs to obtain a lot of wealth. He became the collector with the largest collection of Chinese bronzes after World War II, and later gave his collection of bronzes to the U.S. government in the form of the Sackler Museum. Sackler himself also attached great importance to the study of bronzes, publishing a set of books on his collection of Chinese bronzes, which are still the highest level and most influential among western books on Chinese bronzes.
Another climax of the circulation of Chinese bronzes is that after the reform and opening up, stimulated by economic development, tombs in many places have been stolen, and the path of circulation is domestic on one side, and overseas on the other. There was a rich man in Chicago named McCaryn, and in the building where he stored his collections, both walls were bronze, of course, except for China and Southeast Asia. There is also a well-known Belgian antique dealer, whose lots often have some small bronzes in her lots, which are suspected of being lost from Wenxi County. I also know of a deeply hidden collector, Leon Blake, whom I have never seen myself, but who once wanted to ask someone to make a catalogue of his bronze collection. When he heard about China's recourse to lost overseas cultural relics, he did not dare to publish a catalogue, for fear of being pursued by the Chinese government after showing his face.
The identification of bronzes is still a very important work
Bronzes that have been handed down overseas since the end of the Qing Dynasty first involved some work of identifying counterfeits, which was once a very large activity in Europe and the United States. The Freer Museum of Art in the United States has a sub-bird statue, which is the size of a real bird, with a mouth that can be opened, and there is a snap on the neck that can be rotated 90 degrees to take down. Because the details are so beautiful, even Americans can't believe that it is real, and have always regarded it as a forgery.
From the 1930s onwards, scholars began to analyze artifacts from the metal composition, and in the 1950s it was recognized that Chinese bronzes were made of copper, lead, and tin ternary alloys, while many forged bronzes in the late Qing Dynasty used zinc-containing brass. Between the 1950s and 1960s, the Friar Art Gallery set up its first museum-based laboratory, and one of the big things they did was to test the composition of bronzes, and if the ingredients were copper-lead tin, then the thing was real, very simple and effective. When they examined the Zi Cha Lang Bird Zun, they finally dared to believe that it was a real cultural relic.
In addition, it is to distinguish from the casting method. Previous Western scholars, especially the British, believed that Chinese bronzes were so complex that they must have been made using the lost-wax method, which is well known to Westerners, so this was also the mainstream view in the West before the 1960s. However, after many laboratory studies, American scholars found that Chinese bronzes were cast using the block model method.
The identification of bronzes is still a very important work. There is a Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in the middle of the United States, which in the 1940s housed a square grate decorated like a human face. The museum's operator sent the photograph to Chen Mengjia, a scholar who was very prominent in chinese bronzes, who saw the same ornaments as human faces and thought that the artifacts were fake, but said that the inscription on them was good. Therefore, the museum believes that this artifact is from the Song Dynasty. Until around 2010, a Chinese scholar named Lai Guolong, who was investigating the song and gourd distributed around the world, heard that the museum had a song and went to investigate. He x-rayed the artifact and performed a thermally vented test on the soil inside the vessel. He also sent the photograph to some scholars in China, who felt that such a strange thing must be fake. When I saw it at the museum, I said it was true, but the director of the China department at the time didn't believe me because I was a young man at the time. I judged it to be true because there was a bell at the bottom of the utensil, and the bell had to be repeatedly cast to become an instrument, and the casting technology was not well imitated by modern people. From the X-ray photos, you can also see that there are also casting marks on the ears of the artifact. Eventually, thermal emission testing also determined that the grate was genuine, and it was finally placed in the display case.
I personally believe that the identification of bronzes should be mainly understood from a technical level, especially some decorations. Another piece of praise studied by Professor Lai Guolong, judging from the ornamentation is the late Western Zhou Dynasty, he also sent me X-ray photos, I judged from the casting process and ornamentation is true, and he told me that it was fake. Because the heat emission test of the fan soil in the ear is only more than 100 years, it is just the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the People's Republic. However, after laboratory composition analysis, the lid and body of this gui were alloys of copper, lead and tin. Therefore, there is still no definite judgment on whether this artifact is true or not.
There is a phenomenon in the identification of cultural relics, that is, there are some more special types of instruments, and the appraisers have never seen it, which is considered to be fake, such as the guise that looks like a human face. Once it is found to be false, it means that it is possible to cause the loss of a very important, even priceless, state property.
Take home artifacts that have been lost when the time comes
Nowadays, the circulation of works of art is no longer antique dealers, but auction houses. There are two major art auction companies in the world, one is Sotheby's, founded in 1744, it is one of the oldest auction houses in the world. In 1988, Sotheby's went public in New York and became the first auction company to go public. The other is Christie's, founded in London in 1766, where Christie's once sold many important Chinese artifacts.
A very famous auction in recent years was Christie's 2017 auction of four Pieces of Chinese bronze from the Fujita Museum of Art. Since the 1990s, japan has experienced two financial crises, and many museums have difficulty maintaining their operations, so they have adopted auction methods. The Fujita Museum of Art auctioned four Pieces of Chinese Bronze at the auction for 900 million yuan.
On 14 November 1970, unesco at its Sixteenth Session adopted the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property in Paris. As long as the Convention is signed, it means that the importation of cultural objects after this date can be considered illegal. Therefore, auction houses like Sotheby's and Christie's will pay special attention to the orderly circulation of auctioned cultural relics and ensure that they are legal under the legal framework of the West.
The U.S. Department of State also issued a decree in 2008 and continued to sign a decree prohibiting the illegal import of Chinese cultural relics in 2013 and 2018, and both the U.S. and Chinese governments signed a memorandum of understanding on restricting the import of Chinese cultural relics the following year. I was personally fortunate to participate in the 2008 research and signing of the contract, when we repeatedly stressed with the US State Department that if the United States prohibits the illegal import of Chinese cultural relics, it will have a very great inhibition effect on the excavation and circulation of Chinese cultural relics. Later practical results also proved this. Although American scholars at that time were very supportive, museums and some rich people were reluctant to do so, especially the latter, and many of their collections would therefore not be converted into property.
There are different paths for the return of cultural relics, such as the Hunan Provincial Museum's collection of the Dish Fangmu, which has set several auction records for Chinese cultural relics. In 2001, The Dish sold a whopping $11.5 million (including tax) at Christie's in New York; in 2014, the Hunan Provincial Museum called it back to China.
When another group of Zeng Boke father bronzes appeared on the Tokyo auction market in March 2019, public opinion in China was in an uproar, because this batch of bronzes had never appeared and was apparently smuggled out recently. In September of that year, our country returned the bronzes. The return of recourse is completely different from the return of purchase, our country through diplomatic and legal means, came up with a lot of ironclad evidence, proving that these cultural relics were smuggled out from China, let the Japanese government freeze the auction company's cultural relics, and then send people to escort the cultural relics back to China, the process is very difficult.
For our Chinese, Chinese bronzes circulating overseas have long attracted public attention because of their national feelings and their high artistry. At the same time, the study of overseas Chinese bronzes should also become an important research direction for Chinese scholars in the future. In the future, we must first protect our own cultural relics and not let them be lost, and secondly, when the time is ripe, we will take home the cultural relics that have been lost. (Finishing/Yan Jing)
Source: Beijing Youth Daily