Palace Coup

‘Splendors of Imperial China: Treasures From the National Palace Museum, Taipei”--opening Monday at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco--was conceived as nothing less than the greatest show of Chinese art ever to come to the West. The only precedents are distant shadows: the “International Exhibition of Chinese Art” in 1935-36 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and “Chinese Art Treasures,” which toured the United States in 1961-62.

Those landmark, though considerably smaller, events offered Europeans and Americans a taste of the artistic riches assembled by China’s emperors since the 10th century that were spirited off to Taiwan by Chiang Kai-shek, the head of the Chinese Nationalist government, who fled the Communists in 1949. Chiang gave the collection a new home at the Palace Museum, which opened in 1965, but during the last 30 years, it has been necessary to travel to Taipei to see examples of the 600,000-piece holding.

By 1991, when talks about “Splendors” began in earnest, a major traveling exhibition from the Palace Museum seemed long overdue. Organized by the Taiwanese institution and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York--during five years of sensitive international negotiations--the show shaped up as a $6.5-million survey of 4,000 years of Chinese art in paintings, bronzes, porcelains, enamels, calligraphy, lacquer work and objects carved in jade and bamboo.

“Splendors” was slated to open at the Met in March, move on to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and close at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in January. It was also agreed that delicate paintings would be rotated during the long tour while more durable objects remained on view. Although visitors couldn’t see all the paintings in one visit, the exhibition seemed certain to be a blockbuster.

And indeed it is, but the whole thing nearly blew up in a political volcano in January, just two weeks before the artworks were to be packed for shipping to New York. In a display of emotion that probably had less to do with art than with Taiwan’s struggle for identity--and tenuous relations among Taiwan, China and the U.S.--Taiwanese protesters vigorously objected to sending their cultural patrimony to the United States. Items that had been placed on an officially “restricted” list because of their fragility, rarity or importance were a particularly sore point.

The protest heated up as politicians joined the fray, sponsors backed out and efforts at cultural diplomacy met with frustration. But finally, on Jan. 23, the organizers reached a compromise, withdrawing 23 items from the show--including Fan K’uan’s “Travelers Amid Streams and Mountains,” considered by scholars to be the premier masterpiece of Northern Sung Dynasty landscape painting, and “Early Spring,” a scroll by Kuo Hsi, already printed on the exhibition catalog’s cover.

Under terms of the new agreement, fragile paintings would be limited to 40 days of display at any one site. The Met and the National Gallery would show the entire selection of 425 pieces, rotating the paintings midway in the exhibition’s run. Chicago would show only one group of paintings, and San Francisco would display another group, in presentations of about 350 objects.

Despite losses, critics hailed the New York exhibition as a triumph.

“In terms of sheer quality, this show can claim to be the greatest conspectus of Chinese art ever held in America,” Robert Hughes raved in Time.

New York Times critic Holland Cotter called the exhibition “a huge, once-in-a-lifetime immersion in the art of a great civilization over much of its tumultuous history, and also a show of subtle but surpassing beauty. . . . A must-see, in short, and a must-see again.”

Many people have done exactly that.

“We had an amazing response. About 430,000 people came to see the show in 10 weeks,” said Maxwell K. Hearn, an Asian art curator at the Met who wrote the catalog for the traveling exhibition. Hearn also worked with Wen Fong, consultative chairman of the museum’s department of Asian art, and senior curator James Watt in organizing the show.

That attendance figure falls short of the million or so who attend immensely popular attractions in New York such as the Museum of Modern Art’s Picasso and Matisse retrospectives, but it’s in a league with MOMA’s recent “Picasso and Portraiture,” which packed in 500,000 visitors in 20 weeks.

The reception, Hearn said, has been immensely gratifying: “For us in New York, it made clear the kind of blockbuster shows we tend to disparage can serve a very important purpose of opening up a whole field that our audience may not be aware of. Presenting the very best of the cultural patrimony of China to an American audience raises awareness of the significance of that culture.

“We know that Impressionist paintings always draw a crowd,” he said, “but for the West to become more sophisticated about the East and come to terms with Asia, it is terribly important to understand the roots of that society and culture.”

The show also serves an important function for art historians, he said. Just as the exhibition in the early 1960s inspired an entire generation of Western scholars of Chinese art, the current show is likely to create new interest in scholarly circles.

“Long after the political brouhaha has faded, it will be clear that the exhibition has reinvigorated the field,” he said.

And now “Splendors” has come to the West Coast. The Asian Art Museum has cleared its entire first floor to install the exhibition, which has already attracted enormous interest. The museum’s telephones ring constantly, opening events are oversubscribed, and school tours have been booked for weeks.

Part of the excitement is due to publicity about the controversy, said Michael Knight, a specialist in early Chinese art who joined the Asian Art Museum’s curatorial staff in January. Also, the show has a special appeal for San Francisco’s large Asian population, and the museum’s marketing department has done a good job of getting the word out, he said. But the main attraction is the art itself.

“There are a lot of shows from China that have ‘splendors’ or ‘imperial’ in their titles, but they are not imperial. This is a real representation of imperial taste,” he said. Fundamentally, the show reflects the preferences of Ch’ien-lung, who reigned from 1736 to 1795 and added thousands of objects to those he had inherited from earlier emperors.

Among the paintings visitors will see are unique, full-length portraits of sumptuously dressed emperors, poetically evocative landscapes, a portrayal of “Khubilai Khan Hunting” and an 85-foot-long scroll of “The Imperial Procession to the Ming Mausoleums,” as well as smaller works depicting flowers or fluffy kittens. The array of sculptures and other objects includes rare ancient bronzes, elegantly refined ceramics from the Sung Dynasty and bamboo carvings, such as a miniature statue of a Buddha taming a tiger.

In addition to their beauty and craftsmanship, the artworks are steeped in the drama of Chinese history. The collection was passed along from one imperial ruler to the next until the last emperor was evicted from the Forbidden City in 1924. Beijing’s Palace Museum was established the following year, giving the public its first look at the art. But when the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, the collection was sent to Shanghai for safekeeping, then transferred to Nanjing and later to Han-chung. At the end of World War II, the art was returned to Nanjing. Chiang Kai-shek took most of it with him to Taiwan in 1949 and stored it in mountain tunnels until the new Palace Museum opened in Taipei.

The San Francisco appearance of “Splendors” is a landmark event for the Asian Art Museum, said Emily Sano, the museum’s director.

“The imperial collection encapsulates all the brilliance of Chinese culture and bestows a sense of legitimacy on whoever owns it,” she said. “We are thrilled to be the West Coast venue for the exhibition because it highlights the role we play in the city, emphasizing Asian culture and raising awareness of our place in the Pacific Rim.”

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“Splendors of Imperial China: Treasures From the National Palace Museum, Taipei,” Asian Art Museum, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Tuesdays to Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m; Wednesdays, 10 a.m. to 8:45 p.m. Ends Dec. 8. Admission: $3.50, plus museum entry fee. (415) 379-8800. Timed and dated tickets are available locally through Ticketmaster, (213) 480-3232.