Asian Art and History

Lecture

Asian Art and History How to Read Chinese Painting 2.0

Maxwell Hearn, Ph.D., Douglas Dillon Chair, Department of Asian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Join Maxwell Hearn, Ph.D., the leading curator of Chinese painting in the U.S., as he leads a lecture about the Chinese way of appreciating a painting. Often expressed by the words du hua, “to read a painting,” Hearn explains the process, visually analyzing images of landscapes, flowers, figures, religious subjects and calligraphies from the encyclopedic collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art to elucidate what makes each a masterpiece. Hearn’s How to Read Chinese Painting, published in 2008, the first in what has become a 13-volume series of “How to Read” books, remains the series’ all-time bestseller, with a Chinese translation selling twice as many copies as the English edition.

This presentation is part of the Asian Art and History series.

Image: Griffin, Peter. Chinese Painting. Photograph from Public Domain Pictures.

Maxwell Hearn

Maxwell Hearn

Maxwell Hearn, Ph.D., is a leading curator of Chinese painting in the U.S. and head of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s renowned department of Asian Art. In four decades at The Met, he oversaw the expansion of the museum’s Chinese art collection and its permanent installations, most notably the Astor Chinese Garden Court and the Douglas Dillon Galleries for Chinese painting and calligraphy.

His books include How to Read Chinese Paintings, Along the Riverbank: Chinese Paintings from the C.C. Wang Family Collection, Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632-1717) and more. He has also curated numerous exhibitions, including Chinese Calligraphy, Art of the Brush: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy and The Yuan Revolution: Art and Dynastic Change. Additional contributions to his field include catalog essays, articles, symposium presentations, lectures and seminars on Chinese painting at Yale, Princeton, Columbia and New York University.