Word: museum
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...Paris. In 1871, appalled by the turmoil of the Paris Commune, a workers' revolution, he took himself and the young art critic Theodore Duret on a world tour, during which he focused on collecting Asian art. Voraciously acquisitive, he was as likely to buy whole collections-even an entire museum-as a single work of art. One of the 5,000 pieces he brought back, a bronze Japanese buddha, was so enormous that he built an elegant Paris residence around it. For years, Cernuschi allowed visitors to see his vast collection by special request. Before his death...
...That Japanese buddha now reigns over a newly renovated Musèe Cernuschi. After nearly a century of refining and adding to Cernuschi's acquisitions, plus a three-year, $9 million refurbishment, the museum has reopened as one of Europe's premier collections of Chinese art-a coherent, chronological trove of works from the Neolithic period to the 13th century...
...Cernuschi loved ancient bronzes-decorative, ceremonial and technologically sophisticated artifacts from China's earliest history. Among his acquisitions in the museum's extensive bronze collection is an enormous basin from the 6th century B.C., the largest of its kind outside China. But the true bronze masterpiece is a work older by some 600 years, the so-called Tigress you (wine vessel), which the museum bought after its patron's death. The vase, from the Shang dynasty (roughly 1550 to 1050 B.C.), was used for ancestor worship, and is shaped like an open-jawed feline, with a child either resting...
...museum also features an exceptional collection of tomb figures, or mingqi, especially from the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.). The Han believed that humans have both a physical life (po) and a spiritual one (hun), and that at death the two go their separate ways. While the spirit journeys to paradise, the po remains in the tomb. There, it needs the same kinds of company and comforts that it enjoyed in life, which the mingqi were designed to provide. The Cernuschi displays a vast array of these once-buried companions-dancers, musicians, cooks, soldiers and guardians, as well...
...museum's mingqi extend through several short-lived kingdoms up to the Tang dynasty (618 A.D. to 907 A.D.). Some of these pieces are not much better than those found today in the backrooms of dealers on Hong Kong's Hollywood Road. Still, there are some truly remarkable treasures on show, like the "Barbarian with Horn," a large sancai (three-color) glazed terra-cotta sculpture of an elaborately dressed man with bulging eyes, a handlebar moustache and full beard. Obviously he is not Han Chinese, and that's what makes figures from the vibrant Tang dynasty so interesting. During this...