Jill and John Avery Lecture in the History of Art: Craig Clunas, University of Oxford, “Chinese Art and the Cosmopolitan”

Jill and John Avery Lecture in the History of Art: Craig Clunas, University of Oxford, “Chinese Art and the Cosmopolitan”

Craig Clunas is Professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford, the first holder of the chair to work on art from outside the European tradition. He began his career as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and has taught at the University of Sussex and SOAS, University of London. He is the author of numerous books on Chinese art and culture, and in 2012 gave the A.W. Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, on “Chinese Painting and its Audiences,” now forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

Art in China has never been quite the same as “Chinese art,” and throughout history there have always been present in China works from other parts of the world, whether Sassanian silverware or Japanese lacquer screens. In the twentieth century, the intensified interaction with art from elsewhere, and the sheer numbers of surviving artworks, means we need new models for a more cosmopolitan or transnational type of history. Looking at a series of conjunctions drawn from the art of the Republican period in the 1920s, this lecture examines the challenges and possibilities for art history in an expanded field.

Yun Gee, The Flute Player, 1928