The New York Times reviews the new exhibit at the Metropolitan, “Bridging East and West: The Chinese Diaspora and Lin Yutang“:
The collection, acquired by the Met in 2005, is unostentatious, with some 40 examples of painting and calligraphy, all but two dating from the 20th century. Although it has fine things, it is not a masterpiece ensemble. A poem hand-copied by a father for his daughter in the 1960s, a letter proposing an exhibition of Chinese art in New York during World War II: such things are more memorabilia than art. But they are precious documents. And they fit right into a collection that exists between aesthetic lines like high and low, public and private.
About a third of the work was originally owned by the Chinese writer and scholar Lin Yutang (1895-1976), who is best remembered, and was at one time widely known in the United States, for his 1937 book “The Importance of Living,” an early wisdom-of-the-East self-help guide aimed at a Western audience. [Full text]
[Image: “Flying Magpie” (1942) a hanging scroll by Xu Beihong, via NYT.com]
