Terra-cotta pillars of Xi'an community

Leah Garchik

Published 4:02 pm, Thursday, February 21, 2013

There are 100 other treasures that are lovingly displayed in "China's Terracotta Warriors: The First Emperor's Legacy," which was celebrated at the Asian Art Museum with a Wednesday night gala, but it's really the warriors themselves that are the showstoppers.

I'm sure many in the crowd had seen the figures in China, where they were found surrounded by thousands of others. But for me, they were a surprise, smooth-skinned, with a variety of facial expressions and naturalistic body poses. There was none of the stiff fierceness of Western military statuary; these figures looked as if they could come alive (there were two humans who were dressed as living statuary) and talk with you, as if the more than 2,000 years between you and the works were inconsequential.

The Asian is usually a serene place. But in the gallery before the dinner (a Chinese masterpiece by McCalls), the speeches, the traditional dances and martial arts performances, was a hubbub of noise. There was no need for hush around exalted figures; rather the figures seemed to be part of vivid conversation, as though they were guests at the gala, too.

Their hands made gestures, their eyebrows conveyed emotions. Welcome warriors, the museum came to life.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/garchik/article/Terra-cotta-pillars-of-Xi-an-community-4298614.php#ixzz2LeoLpVEH

Curator, Tear Down These Walls

“Lake George and the Village of Caldwell,” left, by Thomas Chambers, challenges the perspective of John Frederick Kensett’s “Hudson River Scene.” More Photos »

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: January 31, 2013

 Why don’t you, as Diana Vreeland might have asked, mix folk art in with the more realistic, academically correct kind that has so dominated museums since the 19th century? Despite rising interest in and scholarship about folk art — and even after the wholesale rethinking of several major American wings on the East Coast — the isolation of folk from academic is still the norm. 

This is a problem for several reasons. For one thing, pre-20th-century folk art is every bit as good, as a genre, as academic art of the same period, and in some ways far more original and vital. Its strengths lie not in its adherence to reality but in its enlivening deviations from it. For another, the distinction between folk and academic can be blurry, more a matter of degree than either-or. Third, this segregation results in galleries of academic 19th-century American art that are predictable and monotonous, effectively deadening the works on view and shortchanging the viewer.

The quality of folk art has been recognized enough to be heavily collected by most of these four museums, if not heavily shown. In addition to their formal ebullience, so-called naïve efforts convey the raw desire for art that prevailed in the early years of this country, when museums and art academies were virtually nonexistent. They exemplify an insistent sense of American can-do, the instinctive pursuit of art and, in a way, happiness.

As it stands, galleries of 18th- and 19th-century American art proceed in a highly predictable fashion: Hudson River School paintings in one gallery, genre paintings in another, colonial and Revolutionary period portraits in a third. The goal seems to be galleries as homogeneous as possible, so as not to confuse viewers. “You don’t want to shake the snow globe too much,” was how a curator at a fifth East Coast museum put it to me. Au contraire. The snow globe definitely needs shaking.

Homogeneity dulls the eye and lulls the brain. It is the discrepancies that grab our attention and make us look more sharply and deeply.  .  .

[To read more:  

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/arts/design/american-folk-vs-academic-art.html