Faces and Facets: Recent Acquisitions
Princeton University has maintained a dynamic, constantly evolving art collection since 1755, when what was then the College of New Jersey received its first portraits. Each year, the Art Museum continues to acquire new works of art to build on the strengths of its holdings, to meet critical teaching needs, and to open up new areas of research and discovery. Gifts to the collections bring works of remarkable quality that would often be beyond the Museum’s reach, while past generosity also allows the Museum to shape its holdings through purchases. This summer, fifty exceptional recent acquisitions from across the collections are featured in a special installation. Most of the works have never been on view at the Museum, and some have never been exhibited before.
One important acquisition is a folding screen that combines Chinese monochrome ink painting techniques with a traditional Korean landscape theme of the sun, moon, and five peaks. Her Suyoung (born 1972) learned traditional Korean ink painting at Seoul National University before going to China to study ink painting. After returning to Korea, he joined the faculty of Jeonju University in South Korea. One detects in Her’s brushwork the influences of the Chinese painter Wang Meng (ca. 1308–1385), one of the Four Masters of the Yuan dynasty (1260–1368), as well as elements of Northern Song (960–1127) monumental landscape painting. In his meticulous brushwork, Her creates different hues of black ink and white paper to describe the various forms in a visually dramatic and engaging manner.
In the center of the screen is a large mountain peak built up from textured layers of brushed rocks and dark trees. The exposed tree trunks stand out like lightning bolts against the dark ink surround of the leaves. Flanking the central massif are pairs of distant mountain peaks with a foreground river receding to the left and right. In the sky over the peaks at left is a crescent moon, and at right a bright sun. Framing the entire composition are pairs of tall pines that are firmly rooted to the rocks and rise up to the height of the mountains and celestial orbs. This composition follows the Korean Sun, Moon, and Five Peaks screens (irworobongdo) that stood behind the king’s throne during the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910). The throne and screen symbolized the ruler’s position at the center of the universe. It has been suggested that the images of the sun and moon represent universal harmony, with the king as the solar yang force and the queen as the lunar yin. The Sun Moon screens possibly began to be used after the late sixteenth century in royal palaces such as the Changgyeonggung Palace in Seoul.
Her Suyoung’s screen reinterprets the sun, moon, and five peaks theme in a Chinese ink painting manner, eschewing the bright polychrome of the screens of the Joseon dynasty court. This reinterpretation of a Korean royal pictorial tradition raises many questions about the rhetoric of kingship, cultural interaction, and identity. In a palace setting, the ruler seated on the throne occupies the cosmological landscape in the screen. In Her’s monochrome reinterpretation, not only are the colors gone but the monarchy is also no longer present.
Among several clay vessels in the exhibition is a Fourmile ceramic bowl produced in the fourteenth century in what is today east-central Arizona. Exceptional for its condition and divergence from the more common geometric designs of the same period, the bowl depicts a highly stylized yet still easily discernible parrot, likely a macaw, with its distinctive hooked beak. Macaws and other parrots are not native to the American Southwest, yet archaeological evidence demonstrates a vibrant long-distance trade in live tropical birds in the early centuries of the second millennium, presumably facilitated by the Aztec’s extensive trade network. The Aztec coordinated the exchange of tropical birds and feathers, as well as chocolate, from the tropical lowlands of southeastern Mexico and northern Central America and of turquoise from the American Southwest. The Fourmile bowl highlights this trade, as does Princeton’s important collection of Aztec jewelry incorporating turquoise, which was prized throughout Mesoamerica.
Fourmile polychrome is the most sophisticated style of polychrome ceramic painting known from the ancient Southwest. A late phase in the tradition known as White Mountain Red Ware, from the Cibola region of north-central Arizona, Fourmile pottery typically presents an interior decoration of abstract, geometric designs outlined in white kaolin slip on an orange-red slip ground, with forms then filled in with a distinctive, glittery (slightly vitrified) black slip comprised of lead, copper, and some manganese. Simple decoration of the same technique is typically applied to the exterior in a band just below the lip. Tree-ring dating provides excellent chronological controls, indicating that the Fourmile style was produced from about A.D. 1325 to 1400, contemporaneous with the establishment of the Aztec empire in central Mexico.
The title of the exhibition points to the multifaceted nature of the Museum’s holdings, which span the globe and more than 5,000 years of world history. Divided into four thematic categories—faces and facets, symmetry, assemblage, and revealing and concealing—the installation suggests connections between works of art that might initially appear dissimilar. Such connections offer a window into the fundamental mission of a teaching museum, where the history, significance, and meaning of these objects continue to be illuminated and interpreted anew.
Juliana Ochs Dweck
Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow for Collections Engagement
Cary Y. Liu
Curator of Asian Art
Bryan R. Just
Peter Jay Sharp, Class of 1952, Curator and Lecturer in the Art of the Ancient Americas