Displaying items by tag: chinese paintings

It has evolved into one of New York’s longest-running fights over an estate.

For more than a decade, the family of C. C. Wang, a collector whose name graces a gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been battling over a trove of classical Chinese paintings and scrolls that has been described as among the finest in the world.

Now, the feud has escalated. In the past month, two of Mr. Wang’s children, who have been fighting in Surrogate’s Court in Manhattan since his death in 2003 at 96, filed lawsuits in state and federal courts accusing each other of looting and deceit.

Art collecting has always been an international affair. Works made in one place are often sought after by people living in another.

Many of the greatest American Pop artworks of the 1960s are in German collections. French Impressionism from the end of the 19th century is superbly represented in the United States.

And going back hundreds of years, collections in Japan began to swell with paintings made across the sea in China. A magnificent show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art chronicles the phenomenon.

"Chinese Paintings From Japanese Collections" is something of a coup. It features 35 scrolls, some consisting of multiple panels, from the Tokyo National Museum and other collections in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. Japanese museums are often reluctant to allow important works to leave the country, even for temporary exhibitions. But LACMA curator Stephen Little has managed a remarkable group of loans — including some that are just now making their premiere abroad.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will grant the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries $1 million to help conserve Chinese paintings housed in the museum’s galleries of Asian art. The Smithsonian says that it is the only institution in the United States to offer a program that teaches conservators how to care for fragile Chinese paintings. The new grant will endow a position for an assistant Chinese painting conservator to provide support for the program.

While there are thousands of delicate Chinese paintings in American museums, there are only four expert conservators. Smithsonian officials said that the number of experts trained to care for Chinese paintings is dwindling, which is troublesome as these works are challenging to care for. Many Chinese paintings are very old and made up of layers of varying materials including paper, silk, fabric and paste, which all require different preservation methods.

The Mellon grant requires that the Smithsonian match the funds with an additional $750,000 by 2016 in order to endow the position.