H.5.1 Collections within Collections: Japanese Art and UVic's Katharine Maltwood's Bequest

Cary Aileen Garcia Yero, Harvard University

The University of Victoria's Katharine and John Maltwood Collection includes Buddhist sculptures, paintings on silk, scrolls, kimonos, and an array of other objects from Japan. Katharine Maltwood is known to have studied Buddhism and travelled to Japan in 1926. Some of the work in the collection has clear provenance that links it to Katharine Maltwood and London art dealers from whom she acquired work.

The estate of Katharine Maltwood's Anglo-Japanese first cousin Elizabeth Yeend Duer-Gyokushō also makes up a significant portion of the Maltwood bequest, as Maltwood was the primary beneficiary of the artist cousin's estate. For example, Wildflowers Around Victoria Painted on Silk, a series of 50 watercolours painted by Duer after moving, in 1939, from Tokyo to Victoria, is one of the works within the Maltwood Collection with a more curious provenance. Did Maltwood commission this, or did Duer, herself, once own the Wildflowers series? Atomi Gyokushi, Duer's teacher, painted other paintings in the collection, suggesting Duer may have once owned them as well. The origins of screens, other ornaments, textiles, and objects with less clearly documented provenance in the Maltwood Collection may have also once belonged to Duer.

Excavating the provenance of Japanese objects in UVic's Maltwood Collection is a significant undertaking. It improves our knowledge about Maltwood and Duer and helps us to more clearly map the knowledge networks within which these two women artists moved. Moreover, more careful mapping of Maltwood's and Duer's connections to things Japanese help forward our understanding of the complex relations between English, Japanese, and Canadian ideas of Japanese art and collections of Japanese art in Canada.

H.5.2 Re-Orienting the Collection: Asian Art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Laura Vigo, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Established in 1860 as an art association, the Montreal Museum of fine arts is one of the oldest "encyclopedic" museums in Canada. In its over 150 years of existence, it has morphed into five pavilions with a large, eclectic collection of more the 43,000 objects, including over 6000 Asian artifacts.

The incipient museum was meant to provide a window on a new, exotic world and foster a wider appreciation of foreign aesthetics, following the pedagogical example of the then-called South Kensington Museum in London. As most Asian Art acquisitions date back to the first half of the 20th century, the collection provides an unexpected, yet fascinating time capsule on collecting tendencies and aesthetic preferences in Montreal at the time, connected with the larger North American network of early collectors of "oriental" art.

Our holdings were construed around a Canadian-specific perception of Asia, filtered through the colonialist lenses of the all-encompassing British Empire. The core, mostly Chinese and Japanese three-dimensional objects, was assembled by a tightly knit group of English-speaking businessmen, who responded eagerly to the craze for Japanese and Chinese arts at the turn of the century. Even more fascinating, most of these early collectibles were sought out for their tactility: they could be easily handled and hold, allowing the holder to experience hands-on a distant and fantasized "orient."

As our new galleries illustrate, the history of collections and their provenance, focusing on the objects' biography, trans-location and constant permutation of meaning, can contribute to better contextualize (and question) a collection's creation and its current pertinence. Furthermore, the adoption of a more inclusive, less authoritative framework allows for multi-layered stories, inviting a plurality of voices. This paper addresses the challenges (and joys) in this evolution and the use of digital mediation to achieve it.

H.5.3 Eccentric Visions, Modern Worlds: Exhibiting Chinese Paintings at the National Gallery of Canada

Victoria Nolte, Carleton University

In an annual review written at the end of her first year as Director of the National Gallery of Canada (NGC), Hsio-yen Shih 時學顏 reflects upon the challenges of guiding an institution with a mandate to serve "a widely dispersed population in a country which has had, until very recently, relatively few art or museum resources." Over the course of her four-year tenure, Shih, a specialist on a range of subjects in Chinese art history, carried out a dynamic vision to widen and pluralize the scope of the NGC's collections and exhibition programming while also grappling with budgetary restrictions (Shih resigned as Director in 1981 in protest against federal budget cuts). This paper will examine two exhibitions of Chinese ink paintings organized by Shih within the first two years of her tenure: Chinese Painting (1978) and The Suma Collection of Twentieth-Century Chinese Painting (1979). Applying Shih's scholarship, I complicate epistemological constructions of Chinese art in Canada by positioning the works in these exhibitions as relational texts illustrating longer, co-constituted histories of modern art.

Organized concurrently with economic reforms and efforts to establish foreign relations with the People's Republic of China, the exhibitions are distinct for their focus on ink paintings acquired by significant Canadian and Japanese collectors (notably, the R.W. Finlayson and Suma collections) centring works by eighteenth and nineteenth-century individualist and eccentric painters (such as Luo Ping 羅聘, Hua Yan 華嵒, and Gao Fenghan 高凤翰) as well as Republican-era works by artists such as Qi Baishi 齊白石. This paper thinks critically about practices of exhibiting and collecting Chinese painting in the context of Canada's national institution, questioning the impetus to read these works in response to the NGC's focus on establishing and expanding national frameworks and cultural diplomacy.

H.5.4 A Forgotten Collection? Some Reflections on Hsio-yen Shih and the Heeramaneck Collection of South-Asian Art at the National Gallery of Canada

Diana Nemiroff, Carleton University

Prior to the 1970s, Asian art at the National Gallery was represented by a very small collection of traditional Chinese paintings acquired mainly through gifts, which had been on long-term loan to the ROM on the grounds that there was no in-house expertise or context for its display. This changed with the arrival of Hsio-yen Shih as director in 1977. A scholar of Asian art, Shih was only the second woman, and the first Chinese-born person, to direct the Gallery. One of her main aims as director was to make the collection more representative of Canada’s diverse population. A major opportunity to broaden the scope of the Gallery’s collection arrived when she learned that the widow of an important collector of South-Asian art, Nasli Heeramaneck, wished to sell what remained of his collection, parts of which had already been acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Los Angeles County Museum, among others. Shih had the collection brought to Ottawa to be assessed and found a donor to purchase and give it to the National Gallery. After Shih’s departure in 1981 to pursue an academic career, the collection was not seen again until the opening of the National Gallery’s new building in 1988. For the next fifteen years, a changing selection of works was on view in two galleries at the end of the sequence of European and American galleries. But with the retirement of the curator responsible for its display, the Heeramaneck collection was again consigned to storage and has not been seen since.

This paper considers the collection, the circumstances of its acquisition, and its subsequent disappearance from view, and argues that it comprises a significant resource that deserves to be better known today, given the emphasis on diversity in Canadian museums, including the National Gallery.