An exterior view of Palais Stoclet, Brussels. British Architectural Library, RIBA, London. Photograph Royal Institute of British Architects.
	Collecting in Grand Style: Adolphe and Suzanne Stoclet by Jan Fontein Among the Asian art collections assembled in Europe during the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century, that of the Belgian banker and industrialist, Adolphe Stoclet, and his wife Suzanne, was in a class all by itself. The geographic scope of the non-European component of the collection encompassed the arts of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, China and Cambodia, as well as pre-Columbian Mexico and tribal Africa. It could, perhaps, be said that its geographic reach far exceeded its chronological span, for in their collecting the Stoclets displayed a definite preference for early objects. In theater and music, however, their taste tended towards the contemporary, even the avant-garde. There were other collectors who displayed a similarly eclectic taste – at that time perhaps more common than it is today – but none succeeded in bringing together distinguished masterpieces from so many different cultures. However, we should not think of the Stoclets as great globetrotters, for his business commitments left him no time for world-wide travel, at that time much more time-consuming than it is in the jet age. They admired and loved the world beyond Europe only through the exquisite artistic creations of distant cultures with which they surrounded themselves. During his years of itinerant apprenticeship, three European cities played a crucial role in determining the direction their growing collecting would take. The first was Paris, where, as a young man, Stoclet met his future wife, Suzanne Stevens. Raised in an artistically inclined family, she shared his collector’s instinct. She was, from the beginning of their long life together, actively involved in all of their acquisitions. Like so many other collectors, both in Europe and America, their interest in Asian art was awakened by Japanese prints of the Ukiyo-e school. However, instead of remaining under the spell of the Japonisme that was fashionable in Paris at the time, the Stoclets moved on to Chinese art as soon as early Chinese bronze objects began to appear on the European art market, shortly after the turn of the century. The second city was Milan, where the Stoclets lived from 1896 to 1902. Although La Scala became the focus of their social life, their distinguished collection of Italian painting was the most lasting result of their happy years there. Perhaps it was their love of music and opera which made them willing to move, after six years in Milan, to that other great city of music: Vienna. During Stoclet’s two-year stint (1902-1904) as a banker in Vienna, the couple made the acquaintance of Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956) of the Viennese Workshop, one of the leading artists of what was called the Viennese Secessionist Style, the Austrian version of Art Nouveau. One of the first decisions they made upon their return to Brussels after eight years abroad, was to commission Hoffmann to build a residence for themselves and their collection: the Palais Stoclet (see frontispiece), now universally considered one of the great monuments of early 20th century architecture. In Brussels, where another distinguished Art Nouveau architect, Victor Horta (1861-1947), had previously been commissioned by a leading industrialist to build a splendid residence known as the Hôtel Solvay, the Stoclets’ invitation to Hoffmann was perhaps less surprising than it would have been in any other city. However, the Stoclets made Hoffmann responsible for the entire project, and his Viennese Workshop supplied all the furnishings of the house, from the furniture to the dinner service and even the teaspoons, almost all designed by Hoffmann himself. The result was an interior of an extraordinary esthetic consistency and cohesion. This total design approach, too, had a precedent in Brussels, where in 1895 another prominent Art Nouveau artist, Henry van de Velde (1863-1957), had designed a house and its entire interior for himself and his family, the Bloemenwerf in the suburb Ukkel (Uccle). However, what made Hoffmann’s Palais Stoclet unique was the combination of Hoffmann’s interior design with the results of the Stoclets’ genuine appreciation and successful blending of ancient and contemporary art. Built between 1905 and 1911, the Palais Stoclet was the perfect home for their growing encyclopedic collection. Perhaps because Art Nouveau had come to Vienna relatively late, Hoffmann’s style was more restrained, less exuberant than that of Art Nouveau in some of its other European centers. The stark simplicity of some of Hoffmann’s designs could even be regarded as a precursor of the style of the 1920s. Instead of overwhelming the quiet beauty of the great art collection, as one might have feared, Hoffmann’s design provided it with a sympathetic, welcoming and supportive environment. Another leading Viennese artist, whom Hoffmann involved in this enterprise, was Gustav Klimt (1867-1918), to whom the commission was given to decorate the dining room with his masterful murals, a mixture of abstract, stylized and figurative motifs, executed in painting combined with mosaic. One searches in vain for another setting in which a love of Asian antiquity and European contemporary art have been blended so successfully. The only remotely comparable example I can think of, in which Asian art and contemporary design came together in such a felicitous manner, could have been the (unfortunately never realized) design by Frank Lloyd Wright for the collection of Japanese woodblock prints of William S. and John T. Spaulding in Boston. I still remember vividly my first visit to the Palais Stoclet, made in 1947 in connection with the preparations for H.F.E. Visser’s Asiatic Art in Private Collections in Holland and Belgium, in which many of the finest objects in the collection were published, some for the first time. I admired the magisterial Krishna lifting Mount Govardhana from Phnom Da (fig.1) (now in the Cleveland Museum of Art), prominently installed in the same house theater in which the Stoclets often entertained their guests with avant-garde theater and musical performances. After having been shown a dazzling array of early Chinese art objects, produced from drawer upon drawer of Hoffmann’s elegant cabinets, I was served tea in a Viennese Workshop cup, and stirred my sugar with a Hoffmann teaspoon – a truly unforgettable experience for a young student. Years later, when I revisited Palais Stoclet, part of the collection, already divided and dispersed among the children, had been replaced by African sculpture from the Congo. It proved, in the most convincing visual manner, the remarkable adaptability of Hoffmann’s original design. The Stoclets acquired their treasures of ancient Chinese art at auction and from the leading international antique dealers of the day, like C.T. Loo, Edgar Worch and Jörg Trübner. Much has changed since the 1920s and 1930s, when every year a fresh supply of bronzes and jades appeared on the European market. The Stoclet collection came to exemplify what may be called a classical, pre-World War II type of Chinese art collection and it is among the last of its kind to be dispersed. Almost all artifacts that appeared on the international art market before World War II were of undocumented provenance. Many were attributed to one of four or five known or reputed Bronze Age sites. Bronze vessels were often said to have come from Anyang, an ancient Shang capital and long the only Bronze Age site scientifically excavated by Chinese archaeologists. Bronze objects inlaid with gold or silver were invariably given a provenance from Jincun (Henan Province), but reliable information on this site was lacking. One suspects that foreign scholars, especially the most determined who tried to establish the precise provenance of these objects, among whom Bishop W.C. White of Luoyang, and the Japanese archaeologist Umehara Sueji should be mentioned, were sometimes even deliberately misled by their suppliers, who responded to their queries with fairy tales. Now, after fifty years of archaeological discoveries by Chinese archaeologists, we can say with confidence that the sketch of the Jincun tomb, supplied to these scholars, was merely a grave robber’s concoction. In their profound concern for the obvious loss of archaeological data, the most perceptive scholars of Chinese art, living in Beijing during the 1930s, may well have overestimated the damage inflicted on China’s cultural heritage. As late as 1960, the great scholar and connoisseur Laurence Sickman, in his preface to Selections from the Avery Brundage Collection, still considered it unlikely that any bronze vessels of the quality that had been on the market during the 1930s would ever be found again. In the same year, reacting to a lecture on the first archaeological finds in New China, I heard the distinguished scholar Otto Maenchen proclaim: ‘The Good Earth of China has already yielded all of its treasure’. In retrospect and with the benefit of fifty years’ hindsight, it is easy to see now that instead of having reached the end, we were actually on the verge of entering the most exciting periods of discovery in the history of archaeology. The excavations of the 1930s had only scratched the surface. The spectacular results of modern Chinese archaeology have often thrown new light on the objects in earlier Western collections. A few examples from among the pieces of the Stoclet collection exhibited here may illustrate this point. The animal head with gold inlay in the Stoclet collection (cat.no.4) is thought to have come from the so-called Jincun site. Among the first finds by Chinese archaeologists in the early 1950s was a bronze chariot fitting in the shape of an animal head with gold inlaid designs of spirals and striations in a very similar style. It was excavated from tomb no. 1 at Guweicun in Huixian, the district that was long the alleged provenance of the notoriously forged Huixian figurines. In 1968, the tomb of Prince Jing of the Zhongshan Kingdom (died 113 BC) was excavated at Mancheng (Hebei Province). From the rear chamber of this important Western Han royal tomb came a set of four gilt bronze corner fittings in the shape of two animal bodies, standing at right angles and joined by a single head. This beast appears to belong to the same mythical species as the animal of a similar object in the Stoclet collection (cat.no.5). It may even be regarded as the Han offspring of the famous early Chinese winged bronze dragon, one of the celebrated masterpieces of the Stoclet collection that has not yet been matched by new finds. The fact that two sets of four pieces were recovered from the Mancheng tombs suggests that they may have served as corner fittings for a square or rectangular container, base, or frame. However, the fact that these pieces were close together, not separated by remnants of decomposed wood, suggests that they no longer served their original function when they were deposited in the tomb. By bequeathing their great collection to their children, the Stoclets made its ultimate dispersal almost inevitable. But that may well have been their intention. For it can hardly have been a coincidence that during their formative years in Paris the Stoclets counted among their close friends Edmond de Goncourt. It was he who first proclaimed the dispersal of a collection to be the most appropriate way to give a new generation of art lovers an opportunity to experience the joy of collecting. Bibliography J.P. Goidsenhoven, ed., Collection Adolphe Stoclet, Première Partie, preface by Georges A. Salles and introduction by Daisy Lion-Goldschmidt, Brussels, 1956. G.C. Argan, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, 1880-1940, Propyläen Kunstgeschichte, Band 12, Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1977, s.v. Josef Hoffmann, Henry van de Velde, Gustav Klimt. Gilles Néret, Gustav Klimt 1862-1918, Cologne/London: Taschen, 2000, pp. 54-65. Laurence Sickman, One Hundred Objects of Asian Art from the Avery Brundage Collection, San Francisco: M.H. De Young Memorial Museum, 1960, preface. Hsin Zhonguode Kaogu Shouhuo, (Archaeological Finds in New China), Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1961, pl. 54. The Archaeological Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Huixian Fajue Baogao (Report on the Excavations at Huixian), Beijing: Kexue Press, 1956. Mancheng Han Mu Fajue Baogao (Report on the Excavation of the Han tombs at Mancheng), 2 vols., Beijing: Wenwu Press, 1980, vol.1, p. 97, vol. II, pl. 56.