Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting Exhibition Records

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art have both long been known for their Chinese art collection, especially their Chinese paintings. In 1980 and 1981, they joined in conducting a major exhibition of their combined masterworks of Chinese painting.

• This large exhibition, Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting (八代遺珍：堪薩斯城納爾遜-阿特金斯藝術博物館和克里夫蘭藝術博物館所藏中國繪畫特展), featured a superb selection of 282 objects from the two museums. The two institutions also shared the history of having museum directors who specialized in the field of Asian art, Sherman E. Lee, the director in Cleveland who was also the museum's chief curator of Asian art, and Laurence Sickman, director emeritus of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the man chiefly responsible for assembling the museum's superlative Chinese collection. Sickman and Lee led Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting, and Marc Wilson, the Nelson-Atkins’s East Asian art curator (who himself later became director of the museum) and Wai-kam Ho, Senior Research Curator of Chinese Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, were also major contributors for the exhibition.

The exhibition focused on landscape paintings from as early as the third century BC to the mid-nineteenth century, covering over two thousand years of Chinese painting history, and featured many important works. Among the 282 objects, 99 were from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and 183 from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The two museums both hosted an academic symposium during the exhibition, with speakers including international distinguished scholars and graduate students.

This landmark exhibition was on view at the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum from November 7, 1980 to January 4, 1981; then held at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland on February 11 - March 29, 1981. The exhibition also traveled to the Tokyo National Museum in 1981 as well as the Asian Society (New York) in 1982.