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Object Lessons: The Politics of Preservation and Museum Building in Western China in the Early Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2007

Sanchita Balachandran
Sanchita Balachandran
Affiliation:
Objects Conservator in private practice, Baltimore, MD. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The preservation of cultural property is never a neutral activity; and the question of who is to possess, care for, and interpret artifacts is highly politically charged. This paper examines how preservation was used as a justification for the removal of pieces of immovable archaeological sites in the early twentieth century, and became a tool for building museum collections. This study focuses on a collection of 12 wall painting fragments from the site of Dunhuang, China, which were removed by art historian Langdon Warner in 1924 for the Fogg Art Museum. The removal process resulted in significant damage to some of the fragments as well as to the site itself, calling into question what is preserved: an intact ancient artifact or an ancient artifact scarred by and embedded with its modern collection history? Using the Harvard collection as an example, I explore the contradictions and legacies of early preservation ethics.ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: The Harvard University Art Museums generously supported this research through the Baird Fellowship and the Advanced-Level Training Program at the Straus Center for Conservation. I am particularly thankful to Thomas Lentz, Francesca Bewer, and Glenn Gates for their encouragement and advice throughout this study. I thank Abigail Smith, Martha Mahard, and Joanne Bloom Toplyn of the Fine Arts Library at Harvard University for providing access to archival documents and photographs. I owe a great debt to the staff of the Straus Center for Conservation, particularly Henry Lie, Craigen Bowen, Kathleen Kennelly, Narayan Khandekar, Anthony Sigel, and former interns Ige Verslype and Scott Homolka. I am grateful to Robert Mowry, Melissa Moy, and Anne Rose Kitagawa of the HUAM Department of Asian Art. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviews of International Journal of Cultural Property, Francesca Bewer, Julie Hollowell, Robert Mowry, and Anand Pandian for their attentive and thoughtful readings of this article.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Journal of Cultural Property , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , February 2007 , pp. 1 - 32
Copyright
© 2007 International Cultural Property Society

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Footnotes

This term was first used by Swiss educationist Johann Pestalozzi who emphasized a “connection between attentive observation of objects and the cultivation of moral judgment.” For Pestalozzi's usage, see Glover, “Objects, Models and Exemplar Works,” 543. I suggest a different usage of the term, as explained further in this article.

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