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In the first half of the twentieth century, members of the public in Britain were familiar with traditional Chinese painting, but not work produced by living artists from Republican China. Public museums did not become enthusiastic about acquiring twentieth-century Chinese pictorial art until the 1960s. Substantial gifts of modern Chinese painting and calligraphy presented by private collectors to the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in the 1990s have contributed to the proliferation of associated exhibitions, illustrated catalogues and scholarly activities. This paper explores the visions and strategies of British museums in forming their collections of modern Chinese painting in the second half of the twentieth century. It focuses on the institutional histories, acquisition policies and the collections of Chinese pictorial art in the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in order to examine the impetus for initiating new collecting strategies in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It also investigates the contribution of individual curators in enhancing the British understanding of modern Chinese painting through acquisitions, exhibitions and publications from the 1960s to the 1990s, which laid a strong foundation for developing vigorous programmes of contemporary collecting and display. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the transition of Chinese painting from literati painting, exclusive to the scholar-amateur or scholar elite--the backbone of the Chinese traditional culture--to a new genre, guohua (national or traditional Chinese painting). It studies the role of artistic institutions in this process, using the Shanghai Fine Arts College as an example. This research draws upon a number of primary sources to shed light on the way in which modern art schools institutionalized literati painting, and the rationale of guohua education in the Chinese Painting Department in the College. This research shows that while competing with professional artists teaching in private studios, the College developed its own pattern of guohua education which preserved literati painting principles and enhanced efficiency in teaching technical skills but was intrinsically weak in inculcating the scholarly spiritual content of literati painting. Thus, the College played a role in developing a style of semantically exhausted literati painting known as guohua. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]