Description:

Seminar style discussion with lunch, open to all undergraduate students. RSVP to Hana Thomson at art-history@northwestern.edu.

"Purchased by L. Sickman in Peking"

In the early 1930s a young man named Laurence Sickman, who subsequently became the first curator of Oriental Art at the newly established Nelson Gallery (now the Nelson-Atkins Museum) in Kansas City, was engaged by Gallery trustees as a purchasing agent in Beijing. On their behalf, he acquired an array of objects that subsequently became very famous. Little known, however, are the thangkas he sent back to Missouri at this time. This paper introduces Sickman’s thangkas and uses them to illuminate not only his engagement with this type of art, but also the trade in such objects in pre-war Beijing and their reception in American art museums.