Fletcher Coleman, assistant professor, art history, University of Texas at Arlington
This talk explores the Kimbell’s Tang-period Bodhisattva Torso through the birth of Chinese Buddhist sculpture as a category of collected art in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Originally viewed primarily as functional religious objects, these sculptures only reached the status of aesthetic artworks for collecting when antiquities dealers sought to create an international market for them at the turn of the twentieth century. Examining this trajectory, we will place the Kimbell’s work in the broader context of the global history of collecting Buddhist sculpture and the professionalization of the study of East Asian art in the United States.
These lectures, part of a continuing series, introduce the permanent collection and selected exhibitions on view at the Kimbell.
