Bulletin Summer 1975

Art Gallery Interview with Curator Timely grants from international foundations have helped to promote the professional development of the academic and administrative staff of the University. The Staff Development Programme, initiated in 1965 with a grant from The Ford Foundation, enables our staff to pursue advanced study and to re acquaint themselves with scholars and academic development abroad, giving them new stimuli and vitality and widening their outlook. One of the recent contributions to the Programme is a special grant from the John D. Rockefeller III Fund, which provided for a wide- ranging study tour for the Curator of the Art Gallery, Institute of Chinese Studies, in North America and Europe. Mr. James Watt, Curator of the Art Gallery, and Senior Lecturer of the Fine Arts Department, has been interviewed by the Bulletin after his return, for a detailed account of his study tour. Editor The Curator of the Art Gallery, Mr. James Watt, last year went on a seven-month tour of North America and Europe on a grant from the John D. Rockefeller II I Fund for the purpose of research work on Chinese jade carvings and export pottery, and survey of public and private collections of Chinese art in the United States and Europe. In the course of his travel he visited forty museums, most of which housed collections of Asian art, and about fifteen universities with departments of art history. In his visits to museums he was able to gain an overall impression of the nature and extent of their collections and he was able to examine in detail those collections of special interest to his present research work. For jade carvings, the most important collections were those at Seattle Art Museum, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University and the Sackler Collection housed in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. For Chinese export pottery, the most important single collection for study was that of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. While touring museums and universities, Mr. Watt also took every opportunity to visit conservation and research laboratories for art and archaeology and t o talk with specialists in art conservation. The notes he took on such visits will be most useful in planning for conservation and research laboratory for the Art Gallery of this University. O f the six months that he spent in North America, ove r three months were spent in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was able to make use of the facilities at the Fogg Ar t Museum and the Harvard- Yenching Library for his research work. At the Harvard-Yenching Library he was particularly happy to find an old colleague, Dr. Chiu K'ai-ming, formerl y the University Librarian of Th e Chinese University of Hong Kong. Dr. Chiu, who is re-organising the rare books section of the Harvard-Yenching Library, was most helpfu l in giving advic e and full access to early editions of important works of reference. During his stay in the Boston area, he was able to acquaint himself with the Far Eastern Department of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts which houses one of the most distinguished collections in Asian art in North America. Given such excellent facilities, Mr. Watt was able to collect substantial material for his forth- coming book on " T he Chinese Pottery Trad e in South-east Asia" 18