Collecting the New : Major Museum Collections of Twentieth-Century Chinese Painting in London and Oxford

In the first half of the twentieth century, members of the public in Britain were familiar with traditional Chinese painting, but not work produced by living artists from Republican China. Public museums did not become enthusiastic about acquiring twentieth-century Chinese pictorial art until the 1960s. Substantial gifts of modern Chinese painting and calligraphy presented by private collectors to the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in the 1990s have contributed to the proliferation of associated exhibitions, illustrated catalogues and scholarly activities.

This paper explores the visions and strategies of British museums in forming their collections of modern Chinese painting in the second half of the twentieth century. It focuses on the institutional histories, acquisition policies and the collections of Chinese pictorial art in the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in order to examine the impetus for initiating new collecting strategies in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It also investigates the contribution of individual curators in enhancing the British understanding of modern Chinese painting through acquisitions, exhibitions and publications from the 1960s to the 1990s, which laid a strong foundation for developing vigorous programmes of contemporary collecting and display.