Wittenberg puts priceless Chinese art on display

How to go

What: “Introduction to Wittenberg’s East Asian Collection”

When: Through March 4

Where: Springfield Center for the Arts at Wittenberg University, 107 Cliff Park Road

Cost: Museum admission is $5 for nonmembers; free on Sundays; the museum is closed Mondays

SPRINGFIELD — If Wittenberg University was squirreling away original artwork by Picasso or Andy Warhol, we would want to know about it.

Actually, we’d want to see it.

So with Witt’s recent display of three paintings it owns by Qi Baishi, local art lovers should pretty much run to see them until they go back into storage.

(I’ll hold on a minute while you Google “Qi Baishi.”)

The fact the local college owns multiple works by this guy — China’s most revered artist of the 20th century — is almost as unbelievable as if it had one of Warhol’s paintings of Chairman Mao hanging in the library.

“It’s very precious,” said Yuling Huang, associate curator of Asian art at the Dayton Art Institute.

After all, while Qi isn’t quite a household name in this hemisphere, he’s right up there with Picasso and Warhol in value.

In fact, his art took in more than $70 million at auction in 2009, according to a story last year in The Times of London, officially making Qi the third most-valuable artist in the world.

While Qi, who died in 1957, was stealthily becoming a superstar in the art world, Wittenberg’s East Asian Studies program was quietly accepting donations of valuable art and priceless artifacts for use in the classroom.

An overview of that trove is on display through March 4 in the Halley Gallery of the Springfield Center for the Arts at Wittenberg to commemorate the program’s 40th anniversary.

“These are some of the best we’ve chosen to present for the first time to the public,” said program director Yu Bin.

Huang was called on to sort through the collection, choosing to display everything from a bronze food container used during the ancient Zhou dynasty to the three Qi paintings from the early ’50s.

“They have a wonderful embroidery collection that we couldn’t show more of,” she said. “It’s impossible to show it all. To show all the embroidery, we’d need the entire campus.”

Working with a limited space, Huang leans more toward the Chinese items in the collection: woodblock prints, a sculpture from the Tang dynasty, a ceremonial palace bell from 1715 and lots more.

The three Qi watercolor paintings on display feature trademark nature subjects. They were gifts at one time from Springfield resident Betty L. Cooke, whose sister lived in China.

Another painting is the work of Wang Zhujiu, a student of Qi’s whose output was mostly destroyed during Mao’s Cultural Revolution from 1966-76.

Program director Yu is admittedly uneasy having the Qi paintings in particular out in the open.

“I talked to the curator about what these paintings might be worth,” he said. “They’re really, really priceless now.”

He went so far as to ask university officials to give them police protection during their public display — a request that went unanswered.

Unlike most Western paintings, these were done on paper scrolls.

Provided there’s no local version of “The Thomas Crown Affair” between now and March, you’ll get to see the work of someone even Picasso admired.

“They were people-friendly,” Huang said of Qi’s work. “They just quickly grabbed everyone’s attention.

“Great technique. Interesting subjects. People love to collect his work.”

Huang — who works for a museum that owns one of Warhol’s colorful pop portraits and one of Monet’s iconic “Waterlilies” — called it “fortunate” that Wittenberg owns his work.

“We don’t even have that,” she confessed.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.