Ladies' Homes and Men’s Rooms: Gender and the Global Mass Market for Chinese Antiquities in the 1930s

• In Event: 286. Collecting and Imagining "Asia": Collectors, Museums, and Scholarship

Abstract

This paper will examine the paradoxical association of Chinese artworks with both femininity and masculinity in the mass market of the interwar United States. Scholars of collecting have demonstrated the increase in the supply of Chinese antiquities, and demand for these items among American collectors. But objects ranging from Qing ancestor portraits to Han tomb ceramics were also prominent in the popular media, appearing in House and Garden interiors, and accompanying a portrait of Frank Lloyd Wright on the cover of Time. The gendered significance of these objects remains largely unexplored. Imperial porcelains were marketed to the “lady of the house” and the “curves and color” of Chinese items were proposed as an antidote to the harsh modernist aesthetic. At the same time, Tang ceramics dominated the severe décor of rooms featured in a 1937 article “Men at Home.” This paper will examine the persistent link between women, consumption, and the categorization of many Chinese goods as decorative. While curators and designers worked with ancient Chinese objects in the 1930s, these pieces were evidently also involved in the construction of the American man as an individualistic consumer. I will seek dialogue between American discourse, and Republican Chinese associations of ancient artifacts with masculine vigor, in contrast to the yielding quality of artworks from the Song dynasty onward. By highlighting the Chinese artifacts that penetrated the American market and cultural sphere, I aim to fortify broader arguments about the transnational and gendered nature of modernism and modernity.

Author

• Lara Netting, City College of New York