Ching Tsai Loo, commonly known as C. T. Loo (; 1February 1880August15, 1957), was a controversial art dealer of Chinese origin who maintained galleries in Paris and New York and supplied important pieces for collectors and American museums by illegally exporting a large amount of significant state cultural relics from China. He has been called "the preeminent dealer of Chinese art and artifacts for the first half of the twentieth century," but also criticized for his illegal active role in removing antiques and archaeological treasures from China for sale to western collectors.
Early life
He was born Lu Huanwen in Lujiadou (盧家兜, Lu Family Ford), a village in Huzhou, Zhejiang, China, some west of Shanghai. His family had lived in this single-surname village since the 10th century. Orphaned at age ten, he was raised by his uncle, but he decided as a teenager to try his luck in Nanxun, a center of the silk trade. He did well working under Zhang Baoshan, a successful merchant, whose son, Zhang Renjie, was appointed to the Chinese Embassy in France. Loo accompanied Zhang to Paris in 1902 at the age of 22. Few Chinese were living in France at that time, but Zhang Renjie invited Loo to work as doorman at his teahouse and then in his family Chinese goods import business, the gallery Ton-ying, in the Place de la Madeleine. Zhang used his connections in China to obtain antiques and works of art for the company. On his return to China, Zhang became an early financial backer of Chiang Kai-shek. pp. 146, 190, 451–452.
Career and influence as an art dealer When Loo arrived in Paris, he wore the traditional Chinese gown and sported a queue, but soon became a Parisian dandy. He thrived in Zhang's store but felt constrained. Profits were not reinvested but instead used for the anti-Manchu revolutionary activities of his boss, who subsidized a circle of Chinese philosophical anarchists. In 1908, Loo, now dressed in elegant Parisian fashion and calling himself Cheng-Tsai Loo (Lu Qinzhai), opened his own store on Rue Taitbout under the name "Laiyuan and Company" with branches soon to open in Beijing and Shanghai. Loo realized that Westerners preferred later works such as Qing dynasty three-color porcelains, which he could supply in good quantities because of the political ties he formed. A friend remarked on Loo's sources in China: "being in touch with important people... he was able to know of precious works of art which had been hidden from the storms of many revolutions."
Loo's timing was good. The reports of the French archaeological mission on the Central Asian caves at Dunhuang made the taste for Chinese things fashionable, and Loo supplied high-quality works to fit the new tastes. He developed scholarly understanding and expanded public taste in Asian art, particularly sculpture and early jades, by becoming friends with such eminent Sinologists as Edouard Chavannes, Victor Segalen, and especially Paul Pelliot, director of the Dunhuang expedition, whom he commissioned to write catalogs (as he did later with Berthold Laufer in the United States). The outbreak of war of 1914, however, meant that he could no longer travel to and from China through Siberia but was forced to return by way of the United States. He discovered a growing market for Chinese art in New York and decided to establish a new branch there in 1915. The move from war-torn Europe to the New World was prescient, since the United States became the dominant importer of Chinese antiquities from 1916 to 1931.
Once established in galleries on Fifth Avenue, Loo's charm and connections in China proved effective and profitable. Loo, observes one recent scholar, lived in one of the most vigorous growth periods for the Asian art market. Wealthy collectors were learning about Asian art, as were well-endowed museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, and the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C. In Europe, interest in collecting art from the Orient was such that the major dealers, such as Loo, the Duveen brothers, and the Japanese dealer Yamanaka & Co., could hold exhibitions almost every year, sometimes both in New York and in Paris or London.Vimalin Rujivacharakul, "China and china: An Introduction to Materiality and a History of Collecting", in p. 15Shirley M. Mueller, C.T. Loo and Charles Lang Freer: Neuropsychological Insights, Ceramics in America, 2015:52-60. Loo worked hard to establish personal relations with American museum directors and collectors. Between 1915 and 1917, he offered gifts to at least six museums. In July 1917, for instance, Loo wrote a postcard from Beijing to George Byron, director of the University of Pennsylvania museum, "Will write you if I have seen some fine things suitable for your honorable museum."Ann Blair Brownlee, David B. Brownlee, Penn in the World Expedition 50.1 p. 39 Works which he sold to museums and collectors at this time are on display at the Freer Gallery, the Fogg Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, among others, including the Yixian luohans, two relief panels depicting Emperor Taizong's horses, and a Sui dynasty altarpiece from the collection of the imperial collector Duanfang.
After the end of the war in 1919, Loo found himself competing with dealers such as Duveen for the attention of collectors. A revealing transaction took place in 1921. Loo offered what he thought to be a Tang dynasty bronze head of Guanyin to John D. Rockefeller, III for $40,000. Rockefeller, perhaps concerned that dealers would want to take advantage of his wealth, declined, offering $25,000. After further bargaining led nowhere, Loo sold the piece to University of Pennsylvania Museum for $40,000. Loo continued his attempts to develop a relation with the Rockefellers, however, hosting them in his Paris "pagoda," though they bought little of consequence from him. The decade long boom in Chinese art came to a close with the Crash of 1929, and by 1931, the volume of China's antique trade with the United States had fallen to about half what it had been in 1926.
The years up to 1941 saw a change in the nature of Loo's market as tastes changed. In the West, the study of Asia and Asian art became more professional as museums acquired curators to deepen and widen their collections and universities developed graduate programs. In China, the beleaguered Chinese government viewed traveling exhibitions which visited the West as a way to promote China's image, and Chinese art became an occasion for national pride. Loo's business reached its peak in the second half of the 1930s as he adapted to a more sophisticated market, expanding his international art network to England, France, Germany, and America. Between 1933 and 1941 Loo launched at least one important exhibition or publication project every year. He continued to make major sales to his earlier museum clients, especially of bronzes and sculpture. Loo was instrumental in building the collections of the Nelson Gallery in Kansas City, whose organizer, Laurence Sickman, became a good friend. A series of catalogs and scholarly indexes displayed Loo's knowledge and experience. Among his most successful exhibitions was Three Thousand Years of Chinese Jade, held in 1939 in New York as a fund raiser for China's wartime refugees. The war in China, however, made it nearly impossible to find or export artwork, especially the sculptures Loo so admired. Another problem for Loo was that many of his early clients either died or lost interest.
One new client whose interest grew was Eli Lilly, an Indiana pharmaceutical executive who assembled the basic works for the Asian collection of what became the Indianapolis Museum of Art.Shirley M. Mueller, C.T. Loo as Dealer and Eli Lilly as a Collector: A Tug of War, Traces (The Indiana Historical Journal, Summer 2013): 18–25 In 1947 Loo offered Lilly a group of Song dynasty ceramics for $54,350 which he had listed in his 1941 catalog for roughly half that price. Lilly, perhaps reasoning that Loo should have lowered, not raised, the price for works which had not sold, offered $40,000. After an exchange of correspondence which did not bring the sides together, Loo shipped the pieces to the museum and went himself to Indianapolis, bringing with him five further pieces.Shirley M. Mueller, C.T. Loo and Eli Lilly: Emotions at Work, Fine Art Connoisseur (July/August 2011): 49–50. When Lilly agreed to pay the original asking price, Loo compromised by including the extra pieces. All are now in the museum.Shirley M. Mueller, "Eli Lilly Collects: Emotion at Work" Vastari [n.d.]Shirley M. Mueller, C.T. Loo as Dealer and Eli Lilly as Client: Inside a Collector's Head, Aziatische Kunst, Volume 42 #4, December 2012: 3-1.Shirley M. Mueller, C. T. Loo and Eli Lilly: Neuropsychological Insights
After 1949, the new Communist government gained control of China and cut Loo off from his sources. Some of Loo's associates were arrested, and Loo's nephew, who had been his agent there, escaped to Hong Kong. In 1950, Loo was forced to liquidate much of his stock, leaving the business to his long-time colleague and successor, Frank Caro.
Controversies over Loo's export of Chinese art
The fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 weakened government supervision of antiquities and coincided with a growth of Western interest in them. Loo created a chain of middlemen who were on the lookout for items they thought he might buy, not only from now impoverished families, but also from imperial tombs, monuments, and monasteries.
Loo sometimes suggested that the objects he had acquired belonged to nobody. He reported that an early Zhou bronze was "accidentally discovered" by a friend of Loo's who was digging a well for a new house. His name has been "notoriously" associated with two of the Six Steeds of Zhao Mausoleum, a set of relief panels depicting the favorite horses of Taizong, the founder of the Tang dynasty, among the most important Chinese sculpture pieces outside of China. Loo sold these two panels to the University of Pennsylvania Museum in the late 1910s and the early 1920s for $125,000. Loo later wrote that two tombs discovered in 1924 contained archaic jades, and that he was "able to secure" the whole collection. Jades discovered in tombs at Jincun, Henan, in 1928–29 were "superb" and "thanks to an expert buyer that we had stationed in the village, we were able to secure nearly everything that came from these tombs, and most of them are now in the Winthrop collection at the Fogg Museum." Others are in the Freer Gallery."A Mystery of History A Jade and Gold Assemblage from Jincun" Freer-Sackler.
Loo also arranged for a group of Buddhist sculptures to be removed from Xiangtangshan Caves in Hebei, North China. When they could not find a buyer in China, Loo shipped them to Paris, where they again did not find buyers. When these efforts had failed, he finally shipped them to the United States, where the Philadelphia Museum and Charles Freer bought significant works for prices which now seem quite low.Tom Swope, "Chinese Buddhist sculpture and Fakes," quoting from Stanley Abe, "From Stone to Sculpture: The Alchemy of the Modern," in Treasures Rediscovered: Chinese Stone Sculpture from the Sackler Collections at Columbia University (Chinese regulations and Western museum practices now promote protection of such cultural treasures.)"Promoting the protection of Chinese cultural heritage " Freer-Sackler