Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris

At the core of this study are three major collectors: Enrico (Henri) Cernuschi, Emile Guimet, and Edmond de Goncourt, whose practices are analyzed to illuminate a larger history of transnational relations between modern Europe and Asia. The book takes an original approach that includes such overlooked issues as the impact of monetary histories and theories on European collections of Asian objects; the somatics of travel; collecting, writing, and display as polymorphous narratives of identity.

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris examines a history of contact between modern Europe and East Asia through three collectors: Henri Cernuschi, Emile Guimet, and Edmond de Goncourt. Drawing on a wealth of material including European travelogues of the East and Asian reports of the West, Ting Chang explores the politics of mobility and cross-cultural encounter in the nineteenth century. This book takes a new approach to museum studies and institutional critique by highlighting what is missing from the existing scholarship -- the foreign labors, social relations, and somatic experiences of travel that are constitutive of museums yet left out of their histories. The author explores how global trade and monetary theory shaped Cernuschi''s collection of archaic Chinese bronze. Exchange systems, both material and immaterial, determined Guimet''s museum of religious objects and Goncourt''s private collection of Asian art. Bronze, porcelain, and prints articulated the shifting relations and frameworks of understanding between France, Japan, and China in a time of profound transformation. Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris thus looks at what Asian art was imagined to do for Europe. This book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in art history, travel imagery, museum studies, cross-cultural encounters, and modern transnational histories.