CAA 2010

Didrichsen Museum of Art and Culture, Helsinki: view of the China room with an exhibition case containing some objects which originally belonged to Sirén's personal collection (photo: Minna Törmä)

Panel: Roles of Acquistion

CAA Chicago Feb. 12, 2010

”Playing All the Roles: Osvald Sirén as Curator, Collector, Dealer and Art Historian”

Dr. Minna Törmä

Adjunct Professor of Art History, University of Helsinki

Lecturer/Tutor, Christie’s Education

This paper focuses on the combined roles of curator/collector/dealer/art historian and examines this phenomenon through the career of Osvald Sirén (1879–1966). These roles are fraught with conflicts of interest, yet it was not uncommon for one person to be active in all these roles during the early part of the twentieth century.

The research presented in this paper is based on previously unpublished archival material (letters, notebooks and invoices), most of which is in the Sirén Archive of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm. The issues discussed briefly here today will be treated more comprehensively in my forthcoming publication: New Horizons in East Asia: Osvald Sirén’s Encounter with Chinese Art.

Osvald Sirén was internationally known historian of Italian painting and pioneering scholar of Chinese art in the West. Though he was institutionally attached to Stockholm, first as Professor of Art History in the University of Stockholm (1908–1923) and then as curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture in the Nationalmuseum (1926–1944), he was associated with collectors and museums in both Europe and the United States. In addition to acquiring art for the museum in Stockholm, he acted as an advisor for the Honolulu Academy of Arts in the 1930s.

Besides buying from the well-known dealers such as Yamanaka and C.T. Loo, Sirén travelled in East Asia in 1918, 1921–1923, 1929–1930 and 1935. Though the focus on these journeys was on research, the visits to both Western, Japanese and Chinese dealers of antiquities, for example Otto Burchard, and curio-dealers in major cities were an integral part of the programme. While making acquisitions of paintings and sculpture on the behalf of the Nationalmuseum, he bought small objects and paintings for his own collection. His personal collection was not stable, instead, he would sell objects from it in order to fund his research and travel in East Asia, and doing so acted as a dealer himself.