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One of the finest collections of Vietnamese ceramics in the United States is about to emerge from galleries and storage facilities at the Birmingham Museum of Art.

“Dragons and Lotus Blossoms,” which opens next Sunday, will reveal a unique tradition that can be traced back 6,000 years, despite centuries of Chinese occupation, French colonization and devastating wars.

Prized for their vibrant yellow, green, red and brown hues and decorative floral and animal motifs, these bowls, jars, ewers, vases, plates and other objects have been traded for centuries. Some were inscribed with Chinese characters and Buddhist symbols, others destined for tea ceremonies in Japan. One jar reached Germany, where it was given to the Elector of Saxony in 1590. In recent years, forgers have attempted to profit from their exquisite beauty.

They have also had their “Titanic” stories. Since the 1990s, excavations of 15th and 16th century shipwrecks have recovered hundreds of thousands of objects, some of which have made it to the BMA collection and exhibition. A significant find in 1997 yielded 240,000 artifacts from the wreckage of the Cu Lao Chan, off the coast of Hoi An in the South China Sea, but many more had been recovered prior to 1997 by Hoi An fishermen.

“They were being exported as trade goods to the rest of the world, so they would be made and shipped right away,” said John Stevenson, the exhibition’s co-curator and author of the 1997 book on Vietnamese ceramics, “Vietnamese Ceramics: A Separate Tradition.” “The ship sank shortly after leaving the port. There may have been a half million pieces. That’s probably the reason it sank.”

Spanning 19 centuries, the 221 pieces in the exhibition form a comprehensive history of the genre.

“Some of them have been handed down from collections in the hill tribes in Vietnam and some were just found by farmers tilling their fields,” said Don Wood, BMA’s curator of Asian art and exhibition co-curator. “The collection contains everything from temple and palace pieces to everyday pieces.”

Visionary collecting

Starting in 1974, the collection was developed by the museum’s Asian Art Society at the urging of art historian Sherman Lee of the Cleveland Museum of Art. With the Vietnam War still in its final stages, it was a bold move, said Stevenson.

“What is so impressive about the BMA collection is that the Asian Art Society recognized this was an area of interest, and worth collecting,” he said. “Vietnam was still of limits. It showed vision. I put this collection on a level in this country with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Boston Museum of Fine Arts.”

A large part of the collection came to the museum as a bequest from collector William M. Spencer III, who died in 2010.

“Mr. Spencer gave some of the early pieces, and was able to acquire a collection for us in 2005 and 2007,” Wood said. “He liked Vietnamese wares, and he saw this as an opportunity to help put the collection over the top.”

But when he and Wood were designing the show, he wanted to find a centerpiece.

“I remembered a piece from my book, so I put the museum and dealer in contact with each other and the purchase was made,” Stevenson said.

A transaction with a private dealer in Bangkok brought the work to Birmingham — a 24¼-inch-tall, 500-year-old clay jar in pristine condition, purchased with funds provided by the Spencer estate. The London art magazine, Apollo, listed it ninth among the world’s top 26 acquisitions of 2011. BMA was listed alongside the Louvre, the Metropolitan, British Museum and Rijksmuseum.

Shaped with gray-white clay found in Vietnam’s Red River Valley, the jar exemplifies the best of the tradition — a carved surface, blue cobalt oxide underglaze and enamel decorations, with a carved illustration of four cranes.

But like many of the pieces, it has an air of informality with its fluid lines and animal depictions.

“You don’t find that with Chinese pottery,” said Stevenson. “When the French first discovered these pieces in excavations in the 1920s and 1930s, they considered them to be somewhat degenerate, provincial Chinese art, rather than from a Vietnamese tradition.”

Wood found the distinction fascinating.

“China ruled Vietnam for over 1,000 years,” he said. “In spite of that domination, Vietnam has its own aesthetic and tradition. Music, literature and ceramics are all distinctly Vietnamese.”

Source: al.com

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