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In the preceding chapters I have charted Sirén’s journey into Chinese art. Two points concerning his early career as an art historian should be revisited. The first is the role of Theosophy. One can detect many thoughts in Sirén’s writing which point in the direction of German Romanticism, but it is difficult to decipher how much of this comes directly from German Romantic writers and how much has been transmitted through the Theosophical filter. This is because Theosophy gathered from the same tradition as the art and literature of Romanticism. If we leaf through Sirén’s bibliography, we find titles, for example, on the Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola, Plato, Neo-Platonists, and ancient belief traditions . The theme of “Art and Religion” appears in the texts of some Romantic writers, such as Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–98) and Philip Otto Runge (1777–1810).1 During his early career Sirén wrote on Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901), who justly conforms to our image of a Romantic painter with his sentimental landscapes .2 In the end Sirén felt that the form of expression of the Romantic painters did not fulfill those criteria he held in high esteem with regard to art. Their form language was not sufficiently powerful in its expression. Theosophists believed that if a person was spiritually in tune he would comprehend the ‘truth’ propagated by them without overt explanations. In a sense, Sirén’s assessment of the artist-viewer relationship parallels this. If a viewer possesses a sufficiently refined awareness, he will grasp immediately what the artist wishes to convey with the composition of lines and planes (provided that the form language is appropriately expressive). The growing interest in East Asian cultures at the Point Loma Theosophical Society overlapped temporally with the change of direction in Sirén’s career. However, Sirén drew also from the nascent discipline of art history, and he was well aware of strands in connoisseurship (Morelli, Berenson) and history of style (Wölfflin, Riegl). This brings us to another point which may have had an effect 11 Afterword 152 Enchanted by Lohans (consciously or unconsciously) on Sirén’s decision to change the focus of his research. Though he had been on friendly terms with Berenson initially, in the mid1910s Berenson began to voice disparaging opinions of Sirén’s qualifications as a connoisseur.3 This coincided with Sirén’s emergence as an expert of Old Master paintings and eventually his association with the Duveens, for whom he acquired paintings at least in 1916 and 1919.4 Duveen and Berenson had a secret contract, which did not become public until the early 1920s: Berenson was paid a commission and a share of the profits from the paintings he helped Duveen to acquire and sell forward to collectors.5 Sirén was becoming a serious competitor to him. In this situation Sirén may have welcomed the chance to move to a new field of research, and Chinese art studies must have seemed like virgin territory with less rivalry among peers. Berenson had an interest in Chinese art too, but unlike Sirén he did not venture to make such a radical change in his career. Moreover, Sirén grasped the opportunity to apply Morellian-style connoisseurship to Chinese painting in order to impose order onto the bewildering maze of attributed works. With regard to the history of Chinese painting, the books Sirén published in the 1930s—A History of Early Chinese Painting (1933), The Chinese on the Art of Painting (1936 and reissued in 1963 and 2005), and A History of Later Chinese Painting (1938)— form the foundation for his continued engagement with Chinese painting in the 1950s. In the prefaces for his books of the 1930s and 1950s, Sirén wrote about similar matters: the overabundance of the material, the need for selection and condensation , etc. He emphasized the necessity to understand Chinese texts, because—especially with regard to the earlier dynasties—the lack of original (authentic) works made the writing of a comprehensive history practically impossible. As we have seen, Sirén had had teachers to help him study the language both in Europe and in Beijing. In spite of his earnest efforts to tackle the language—his boxes of flash cards for Chinese characters, for example, are in the Sirén archive—he needed the help of Chinese assistants. Yang Zhouhan’s role in preparing translations for The Chinese on...

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