2012 Sammy Yukuan Lee Lecture on Chinese Archaeology and Art

Robert D. Mowry, the Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Chinese Art and Head of the Department of Asian Art at the Harvard Art Museums, and a Senior Lecturer on Chinese and Korean Art in Harvard's Department of the History of Art and Architecture, will give the 25th Sammy Yukuan Lee Lecture on Chinese Archaeology and Art.

From Mementos to Masterpieces: The Chinese Collections of the Harvard Art Museums

Harvard was the first university in the United States to offer courses in Asian art. First taught in the 1920s by Langdon Warner (1881–1955), a lecturer in Harvard’s Department of Fine Arts and the Fogg Art Museum’s first Curator of Oriental Art, those early courses focused on the arts of the Silk Route and on Chinese and Japanese Buddhist art, particularly sculpture. Edward Waldo Forbes (1873–1969), an early director, and Paul J. Sachs (1878–1965), Forbes’ long-time associate director, transformed the Fogg from a fledging college museum with modest holdings of European prints and plaster copies of classical Greek and Roman sculptures into a major museum with comprehensive holdings of world art. During more than forty years, Langdon Warner, as founding curator, oversaw the growth of the Asian collections from a meager array of Japanese prints and Satsuma ceramics to world-class holdings of Chinese and Japanese art. Over the decades and under the direction of successive curators, the museum collections grew in tandem with expanded course offerings in the Department of Fine Arts (now the Department of the History of Art and Architecture), so that the Harvard Art Museums’ Chinese collections now rank among the very best in the U.S., with world-class holdings of ceramics, Buddhist sculpture, and ancient bronzes and jades. This illustrated slide lecture will introduce the museums’ collection of Chinese art, trace its evolution and development over the past 100 years, and make clear the historically close ties between the museum and the art history department.

The favor of your RSVP is requested.

Parking on the UCLA campus is $11. Enter UCLA from Sunset Blvd. at Westwood Plaza. Parking attendants will direct you to Lot 4. There is an elevator at the southeast end of Lot 4 and a stairwell at the northeast end, closest to the museum.

The lecture and museum admission are free and open to the public.

A reception with refreshments will follow the talk.

The Sammy Yukuan Lee lectures are sponsored by the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies and funded by the Lee Family Foundation. The series was begun in 1982 in celebration of the eightieth birthday of Sammy Yukuan Lee, a noted collector and authority on Chinese art, particularly lacquers, textiles, and ceramics. Mr. Lee is now in his 104rd year and has retired, in excellent health, to the city of Qingdao, not far from the small town where he was born. The lectures have been held annually in recent years and this year's event is the 19th in the series. The lecture is cosponsored by the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History.