Ancient Chinese Jade, to Soothe the Soul and Restore Perspective

Sea-green owls, eagles, dragons, clouds, and faces, at Throckmorton in Manhattan

T oday I’m writing about ancient Chinese jade and a small, splendid show of the best examples at Throckmorton, the specialist dealer on East 57th Street. I’ve written a lot about art fairs but never about a single dealer and a specific show at his or her gallery. Some of the best exhibitions and scholarship come these days from dealers, so I’ve been remiss.

The show at Throckmorton, Jade: The Stone of Heaven, considers 7,000 years of carved and polished Chinese jade. Jade has always been a luxury staple in China, but in antiquity it was the decoration of choice to accompany the rich and the dead as they communed with eternity. The show is beautifully, cozily done. The objects aren’t big, making them seem like both sculpture and jewelry. Galleries are arranged to make people comfortable as well as to preserve and protect art. The Stone of Heaven is a delight, aesthetically and intellectually.

Dealers and the auction houses run the art market, so they’re essential to artists, buyers, and sellers, but dealers make art history, too. They support and promote artists, and they’re tastemakers. A good dealer is a salesman but also a matchmaker, connoisseur, and scholar. Each is an ingredient in establishing the art that defines an era. Dealers often work with buyers to build sublime, significant collections, too, developing relationships that last for years.

Impressionism, Picasso, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and dozens of artist titans and movements arose and thrived in large measure because of dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel, Ambroise Vollard, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Betty Parsons, Leo Castelli, Ileana Sonnabend, Allan Stone, and many, many others.

Spencer Throckmorton is the preeminent dealer of ancient Chinese art and, in New York at least, the founder of the market for this art. He also is the key player in establishing the market for Latin American photography and Buddhist sculpture. I first met him through another niche of his, and that was photographs by George Platt Lynes. Throckmorton has done so much original scholarship in these fields, not only on his own but in supporting China-based scholarship.

The mineral jade was first mined around 7000 b.c. in Liaoning, the northernmost coastal province in China and a gateway from China proper to Manchuria, Korea, and Mongolia. It was the foremost of imperial gems, with the oldest objects found in graves associated with the tribal elites of the Hongshan culture from 4700 to 2900 b.c.

Jade is rare and difficult to carve because it’s a hard material. These factors and its ethereal beauty invested the material with mysterious power to reach deities and perform miracles. And it’s always had status magic.

Jade is usually green with subtle markings, but there are some considerable variations in green. When it’s polished, its markings, pearlescent surface, and honeydew, celadon, or sea color suggest animals or moods found in nature. Jade pendants would decorate the dead body with the shapes of pig dragons, clouds, faces, eagles, owls, silkworms, or suggestive zoomorphic figures, hinting at what’s left to the imagination. They’re symmetrically designed, with two eyes and a mouth drilled to make simple circles. The bigger ones, about eight inches, have three registers to suggest torso, face, and headdress. Some have fangs and eyebrow slits.

They pack a punch if for no other reason than age, but aesthetically they’re enchanting. What little elaboration they have is designed to subtly emphasize the eyes and mouth. Some of the objects at Throckmorton are 4,000 years older than the Parthenon. The mottled stone, round eyes and mouth, and stretched ovals for arms and legs do the trick. Minimalism wasn’t invented by the Minimalists.

Throckmorton has a collection of engraved discs on view. A nearly 20-inch disc is opaque, mottled nephrite engraved with birds, fish, and masks representing ancient Chinese mythological figures. There’s a simple hole, less than an inch in diameter, drilled in the center. It’s from 3500–2200 b.c. Another, later disc is from the Western Han Dynasty, which ran from 206 b.c. to a.d. 8. It’s incised with imperial logos. Someone decided to drop the birds, fish, and myths to extol the guys in power.

The disc is a persuasive symbol of the cosmos, and not all of them are engraved. In some discs, veins and color variations in the stone do the work. Yellow and brown striations, sugary white patches, and different greens evoke a complex, busy universe. Vitruvius has met his Zen.

I liked the hair tubes in part because of the nice expanse of sea-green jade with white and rust patches but also because of the technical difficulty of carving an elliptical shape. They’ve been found only in the most opulently stocked graves. Aesthetically, these tubes are statuesque, standing sometimes 16 inches. They’re compelling as they are, but at six or ten inches or ten feet, they’d still make a statement simply for pure design. The hair tubes, depending on the thickness of the jade, can be translucent. Throckmorton installed his near a window, so streaming light makes them glow.

There are portrait masks from the Warring States Period, where everyone was at each other’s throats. Best to be masked so as to glide from 476 to 221 b.c. incognito. These masks are spooky. Mottled jade creates a sumptuous surface that contrasts with two simple circles for eyes and one for a mouth. A 14-piece mosaic portrait mask from 1047 to 772 b.c. is more like Cubist sculpture.

I loved the small jade animal carvings from the Qing Dynasty, from 1644 to 1911 — close to our time. They are mostly five or six inches long and are examples of realism in jade art. The carving is exquisite, but it’s the jade that makes the dragon, buffalo, camel, or unidentified beast. These little objects show the variation in color and markings in jade. A jade camel from the Yuan Dynasty is about ten inches tall and a grey-green color that suggests this hunk of jade picked up some sand in its trek through the desert.

I saw the ancient Chinese jade show Throckmorton has on view now in part because I’d seen the sloppy, vapid Alice Neel exhibition at the Met and wanted to see something ancient, that has stood the test of time and isn’t degraded or smothered by social-justice-warrior piffle. I adore Neel’s work. It’s what straitjackets it that I don’t like.

The BLM, MeToo, Occupy Wall Street, Antifa, Green New Deal, Save the Whales brands of art history? They’re not art history, really. It’s what the New York Times puts on its front page and has nothing to do with aesthetics or objects. The art’s a prop.

These new art-history varietals are like Parmesan cheese made with wood pulp, imitation crab, and, for Vermonters like me, that horror of horrors: syrup made from corn gunk. We locals have never seen Mrs. Butterworth, Aunt Jemima, or Hungry Jack near a maple tree or a bucket of sap or a sugar shack. Just as there’s pure, wholesome maple syrup and the fake stuff, there’s real art history and then there’s the counterfeit kind driven by fads like Oppression Studies.

We almost never see such fare at galleries. Why? Well, it has no aesthetic or intellectual grounding, first of all. It offends people, obviously. And it’s a sideshow indulged by museum-and-academy types who don’t care or don’t understand that they’re peddling themes of no interest or value.

Spencer Throckmorton, whose gallery is 40 years old, is the real thing. I’ve worked with many dealers. Some are ebullient, but Throckmorton has a quiet, reassuring presence. He’s deeply knowledgeable. The big New York galleries specializing in contemporary art have white-cube spaces, but places like Throckmorton’s feel like comfortable libraries with fantastic art. It’s a setting that makes for Old World connoisseurship. It’s not intimidating. He’s created an atmosphere conducive both to learning and the adoration of beautiful things.

In looking at art that’s new to me, as is ancient jade sculpture, I think of aesthetics but also markets and collections. Some of the best Chinese jade collections in America developed early in the 20th century. Charles Lang Freer, Edward and Louise Sonnenschein, Grenville Winthrop, and Alfred Pillsbury became focused, obsessive collectors, working with the archaeologist Berthold Laufer. Laufer was Mr. Go To because he knew the field academically and excavated the first, oldest jade-rich tombs.

When the market for ancient jade first developed, there were, of course, fakes, so Laufer’s imprimatur assured authenticity. Today, there are a few scholars and connoisseurs, among them Gu Fang in China and Throckmorton himself, with the knowledge and the eye to vet.

These four early collectors, through gifts and bequests, make the Freer in Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fogg in Cambridge, Mass., and the Minneapolis Institute of Art heaven for ancient-jade lovers. Laufer was a curator at the Field Museum in Chicago, so collected for his home institution, too.

Love of jade in America emerged from the late-19th-century impact of Japanese design in painting and prints, textiles, and architecture. It found its place in the marketplace about the same time the Chinese themselves recognized the richness of their history. The market for Chinese jade was affected by supply interruptions starting with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, World War II, and the gruesome Mao era. Today, rich Chinese collectors are starting to enter the market for the antiquities of their own country.

It’s always been a market for informed, passionate connoisseurs, and it’s not expensive. One of the two masks I saw is offered at $25,000. The chest pendants are under $10,000. The mosaic mask is $25,000. The early disc is in the high five figures. Not a bad price for a glimpse at the cosmos.