Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and The Cleveland Museum of Art

Museum directors Sherman Lee and Laurence Sickman carried on, for years, a friendly rivalry over who could assemble the largest and best collection of old Chinese paintings. The outcome of their rivalry, of course, was the great joint exhibition and catalog Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum Kansas City and the Cleveland Museum, published in 1981. Besides the two of them and Wai-kam Ho, other contributors to that catalog included Sickman's successor as Director of the Nelson-Atkins, Marc F. Wilson, and Howard Rogers.  Wai-kam Ho failed to complete some of the entries assigned to him, while writing a long and excellent prefatory essay about the Imperial Academy of Painting and other matters; Sherman angrily added a few brief entries at the end of the  book to cover some of Wai-kam's omissions. The exhibition was, needless to say, huge. Have so many top-class Chinese paintings ever been brought together in one place, aside from the Imperial Palace? As for who came out ahead in the competition, I had the pleasure of giving a public lecture at the Nelson Gallery with Sickman, very old, in the audience in which I hailed his achievement as "the greatest feat of collecting Chinese paintings ever carried out in modern times." That  can be argued, but it certainly represented my real opinion. - Professor Emeritus James Cahill, Chinese art expert