The Emergence of East Asian Art History in the 1920s

Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe saw an increasing interest in non-European art from Africa, Pre-Columbian America, Asia, the Pacific Islands and elsewhere. Private collectors and museums eagerly collected, exhibited, and published such works, often in competition with each other in the context of colonization. ¹ In addition to museums and collectors, artists developed a great interest in non-European art and artifacts since at least the mid-nineteenth century, ranging from Japanese woodcut prints to African masks, often summarized under the problematic category of primitivism. The academic discipline of art history, however, was slow in responding to the broadening range of images and objects that became available for study. In German-language academic art history, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a formative period with regard to the field’s methodological foundations, with major centers at the universities in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Basel, and Vienna among others. ² Non-European art and artifacts rarely made their way into academic art-historical research; the newly emerging specialists in these fields were philologists, ethnologists, and archeologists in addition to museum curators, collectors, and private scholars. ³ One case in East Asian art was Otto Kümmel (1847-1952), who was appointed curator of the newly established Department of East Asian Art at the Berlin Museums in 1906. His academic background was in classical philology and archeology before he started to familiarize himself with East Asian art, learned Japanese, and became one of the most influential figures in German art history of East Asia in the early twentieth century. ⁴