In the Garden of Contentment

Chinese painting has many faces: landscapes, religious and mythological subjects, genre scenes or portraits. For a long time, a distinction has been made between commissioned works executed by professional painters and those created by educated „amateurs“, which have always been held in far higher esteem than the former. These „literati paintings“ have many manifestations, but are basically characterized by a remarkable continuity and a restrained, quiet language. Not infrequently, color is dispensed with completely, and the world appears in them solely in delicate traces of ink. It is therefore not surprising that, unlike e.g. Chinese porcelain, paintings from China only found their way into Western collections much later and to a far lesser extent.

For a long time, Chinese painting also remained a niche subject at the Museum Angewandte Kunst. Nevertheless, over the course of some eighty years, an outstanding collection has been assembled, which has been scientifically researched since 2020, funded by the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation.

A selection of 54 pictures from this collection are presented in this album.