The recent passing of several major figures, including Michael Sullivan (1916–2013) and James Cahill (1926–2014), reminds us of the importance of individuals in advancing the field of Chinese art. As one of the pioneers of Chinese art studies in Europe and North America during the first half of the twentieth century, Finnish-Swedish art historian Osvald Sirén’s (1879–1966) numerous publications helped to propel the field at the time. In Enchanted by Lohans: Osvald Sirén’s Journey into Chinese Art, Minna Törmä reconstructs what she calls the “middle part” of his career, investigating his decision to migrate from studying Italian to Chinese art, and tracing his travels in China, Japan, and Korea between 1918 and 1935. This book is a welcome addition to the growing body of research on collectors, dealers, and scholars of Chinese art in the twentieth century, such as the recent works by Stacey Pierson (Collectors, Collections and Museums: The Field of Chinese Ceramics in Britain, 1560–1960, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), Robert Bagley (Max Loehr and the Study of Chinese Bronzes, Ithaca: Cornell University East Asia Program, 2008), Clarissa von Spee (Wu Hufan: A Twentieth Century Art Connoisseur in Shanghai, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag GmbH, 2009), Nick Pearce (“Shanghai 1908: A. W. Bahr and China’s First Art Exhibition,” Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History and Material Culture 18, no.1 [January 2011]: 4–25), Lara Netting (A Perpetual Fire: John C. Ferguson and His Quest for Chinese Art and Culture, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013) (click here for review), and Joan Stanley-Baker (Hua yulu: Wang Jiqian jiao ni kan dong Zhongguo shuhua [C. C. Wang Reflects on Painting], Taipei: Artco Publishing, 2013).

Enchanted by Lohans focuses primarily on Sirén’s itineraries and contacts, though it also looks into the genesis of his major English-language publications on Chinese imperial palaces, walls, gates, sculpture, and painting as well as his lesser-known works in Swedish, French, and German. Törmä draws extensively from correspondence, notes, and diaries in the Sirén Archive at the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (MFEA) in Stockholm to chronicle Sirén’s contacts with scholars, private collectors, and dealers in Europe, the United States, and East Asia, among them Charles Lang Freer, Yamanaka Sadajiro, Langdon Warner, Edgar Worch, and J. G. Andersson. The incorporation of many passages from Sirén’s unpublished letters and notes, translated by Törmä from the original Swedish, affords readers the opportunity to gain deeper insight into his ideas, experiences, and judgments about China and Chinese art.

The book gets off to a disjointed start in its first two brief chapters that jump ahead to Sirén’s trip to the Forbidden City in 1922, and then backward into his career and training as a European art historian and his links with the Theosophy movement. It hits its stride in chapter 3, “Enchanted by Lohans in Boston,” which explores Sirén’s self-described revelatory encounter with Chinese art in front of two Southern Song Buddhist lohan paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in the early 1910s. In a 1915 article on European art, he pronounced that “the old religious art in China offers already outstanding examples of emotional expressiveness in abstract form” (16). Törmä does a thorough job of unpacking his comment and goes on to reveal that two lohan paintings from the New York dealer N. E. Montross became Sirén’s first Chinese art purchases (27). His early ideas about Chinese art are brought forward in the discussion of his book Rytm och form (Rhythm and Form) from 1917. Törmä explains that for Sirén, “painting as an art offered, within the field of visual art, the most varied and abundant possibilities for rhythmic expression” (31). She goes on to demonstrate how he applied this concept to his understanding of Xie He’s Six Principles and to the British Museum’s Admonitions scroll (ibid.).

The middle three chapters pick up with Sirén’s arrival in Japan in 1918 and follow him through 1924. Chapter 4, “The Golden Pavilion,” recounts his Japan trip, taking its name from Sirén’s 1919 book Den Gyllene Paviljongne: Minnen och Studier från Japan (The Golden Pavilion: Souvenirs and Studies from Japan). Törmä notes that Sirén’s early taste reflected the preferences of Ernest Fenollosa and Okakura Kakuzō for Southern Song and Chan painting. The inclusion of a reproduction of a page from his book gives readers direct experience with Sirén’s affinity for such paintings evocative of the scenery around Hangzhou (45). We see that his photographs, taken during the China portion of his trip, mirror the compositions of the paintings illustrated adjacent to them. The arrangement of the pictures suggests that during his visit to East Asia he came to recognize and even admire the “naturalism” of Chinese landscape paintings. While the “timeless quality” of Den Gyllene Paviljongne and Sirén’s photographs within reveals his sensitivity to the affective qualities of images, they also evince his exoticized view of East Asia as a “vanishing fairyland” (46).

Near the end of chapter 4, Törmä mentions an exhibition that Sirén organized at the University of Stockholm, in which he included all the paintings purchased during his East Asia sojourn as well as Chinese objects from other Swedish private collectors. A Swedish catalogue for the show that seems ripe for a discussion of Sirén’s collection so far is mentioned, but, alas, the chapter comes to a close without further explication. “The Expedition that Lasted Too Long” (chapter 5) follows Sirén through China from 1921 to 1923. Even though his ambitions to conduct archaeological research at Shouxian (Anhui province) were thwarted, he took extensive photographs that would populate several of his books from the 1920s, including The Walls and Gates of Peking (1924), Chinese Sculpture from the V to the XIV Centuries (1925), The Imperial Palaces of Peking (1926), and A History of Early Chinese Art (1929–30). These titles are examined in “Fruits of the 1921–1923 Expedition” (chapter 6), within which Törmä steers away from biography into analysis in her discussion of the rationale and content of these titles, asking how Sirén built up his narratives using verbal and visual descriptions (92). She convincingly argues for the ascendancy of text in Walls and Gates and the primacy of images in Imperial Palaces and Early Chinese Art, reminding readers that Sirén believed that images would tell their own story through their chronological arrangement, even without textual commentary (86). In discussing the use of photographs, she asserts that “the main purpose of the photographs was to serve as documents to be used as illustrations for Sirén’s research” (92), while later pointing out that he referred to his pictures as “photographic paintings” (93). The implications of the overlapping nature of Sirén as documentarian, photographer, and scholar are not fully explored here, yet Törmä does place his photography in the tradition of the picturesque, thus opening up an important line of inquiry to link his vision of China with that of other European explorers in the early twentieth century. Jean Buhot, quoted at the end of chapter 6, tells Sirén that some have criticized his books as “essentially picture-books” with “aesthetic appreciations” that are “not much relished,” but Törmä misses the opportunity to offer a more reflective evaluation of the advantages and pitfalls of his approach.

The last third of the book addresses Sirén’s private and institutional collecting activities from the middle 1920s through the end of the 1930s. “To Go or Not Go Back to Stockholm” (chapter 7) begins the fascinating tale of his relationship with Andersson by detailing the negotiations surrounding the acquisition of Sirén’s collection of jades, bronzes, and ceramics that came to the MFEA in 1926. Törmä also pieces together his time in France, his contacts in Berlin, and his six-month sojourn to the United States in 1925. Readers get an inside look at Sirén’s deliberations about where to take up a position—in the United States, Finland, or Sweden—eventually settling in as curator of painting and sculpture at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. His trips in the late 1920s and 1934–35 are chronicled in “Language Lessons and Curio Dealers” (chapter 8) and “Enhancing the Asian Collection in the Nationalmuseum” (chapter 9). The book does an admirable job of tracking his activities during the quest to see as many Chinese paintings as possible and to acquire good examples for the Nationalmuseum. Several passages from Sirén’s letters provide a glimpse of his experiences with seeing, evaluating, and buying paintings (131–32). He reported buying about forty paintings in China, mostly Ming and Qing. In her careful analysis of Sirén’s catalogue for the 1936 show in Stockholm, Törmä addresses a good number of these, combining her research on the circumstances of their acquisition with exploration of the works themselves and, in some cases, ideas about why they may have appealed to Sirén (134–39; 143–44). The material and analysis in these later chapters is strong, particularly when accompanied by pictures of the paintings being addressed. For instance, her discussion of Sirén’s “successful” purchase of Tang Yin’s Preparing Tea (fig. 26) and his self-acknowledged misstep in the acquisition of a hanging scroll attributed to Ma Yuan (fig. 25) are easy to follow with the in-text illustrations. Unfortunately, only four of the paintings that Sirén bought are illustrated in the book (and all are black and white). Dedicated readers can consult Törmä’s notes for many of the other paintings’ 1936 catalogue numbers and current accession numbers to track down images of the paintings, but others will likely miss out on some of the object-based insights offered in these chapters. About a dozen of Siren’s photographs are reproduced, but overall, the volume seems rather stingy with images. On several occasions, Törmä’s discussions of particular exhibitions, catalogues, paintings, and individuals leave too much to the reader’s imagination.

In the afterword, Törmä offers useful clarifications and explanations about Theosophy and Sirén’s largely unarticulated connoisseurship practice, all of which would be more effective integrated into earlier chapters. Two helpful appendixes round out the volume: one contains brief biographies of significant figures in the book and their relationship with Sirén, and a second lists his itineraries. Some of the book’s content relates to Törmä’s essays from edited volumes over the last several years, many of which are not easily accessible, and there is much here that is new as well. Given the time and effort involved in conducting archival research, it is understandable that, at this stage, Törmä elected to focus primarily on reconstructing Sirén’s travels and contacts during the first decades of his encounters with Chinese art, rather than on an in-depth analysis of Sirén’s collecting, collection, exhibitions, and the reception of his books and scholarship. Törmä wistfully notes that she would have liked to write more about the paintings that he acquired, now in the MFEA, but accessibility proved challenging (xiii). Readers of this volume will likely join me in hoping that she will continue her research on Sirén, particularly in a more historiographic and object-focused “third volume” that critically evaluates Sirén as a collector and scholar of Chinese painting.