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01.12.2020
Museum für Asiatische Kunst
The histories of collecting and the art market are essential to advancing provenance research. Art dealers play an eminent role in cultivating new tastes, desires, and market trends. Provenance research, therefore, is more than an effort to document an object’s different owners; provenance research includes the work of uncovering the mechanisms behind translocations, understanding the transformation of material culture, and exploring the production of knowledge within different worlds and meaning systems.
C.T. Loo was one of the most important dealers of Chinese and Southeast Asian art of the first half of the twentieth century, with branches in Paris and New York that supplied museums and private collectors worldwide. While he was most active between 1910 and 1950, Loo’s legacy lives on, as objects that he introduced to the West continue to circulate on the art market. Loo advanced the knowledge of Chinese and Southeast Asian Art in Europe and the United States by introducing new objects, such as archaic bronzes, ancient jades, Buddhist sculpture, and early pottery, to a new clientele. Despite his prominent role in the history of East and Southeast Asian collections, C.T. Loo and his activities have not yet sufficiently been researched and documented.
This online workshop will be a decisive step toward closing this gap. Speakers will include Chinese archaeologists, museum curators, academic art historians, and provenance specialists as well as the director of La Maison Loo in Paris. Ultimately, “C.T. Loo Revisited” will promote an exchange of new research, will highlight new resources, and will bring together the many professionals who are researching C.T. Loo.
This program is co-organized by the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art and the Museum Rietberg, Zurich.