Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris examines a history of contact between modern Europe and East Asia through three collectors: Henri Cernuschi, Emile Guimet, and Edmond de Goncourt. Drawing on a wealth of material including European travelogues of the East and Asian reports of the West, Ting Chang explores the politics of mobility and cross-cultural encounter in the nineteenth century. This book takes a new approach to museum studies and institutional critique by highlighting what is missing from the existing scholarship -- the foreign labors, social relations, and somatic experiences of travel that are constitutive of museums yet left out of their histories. The author explores how global trade and monetary theory shaped Cernuschi's collection of archaic Chinese bronze. Exchange systems, both material and immaterial, determined Guimet's museum of religious objects and Goncourt's private collection of Asian art. Bronze, porcelain, and prints articulated the shifting relations and frameworks of understanding between France, Japan, and China in a time of profound transformation. Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris thus looks at what Asian art was imagined to do for Europe. This book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in art history, travel imagery, museum studies, cross-cultural encounters, and modern transnational histories.

Gisbert Combaz is among a handful of turn-of-the century poster artists to create a personal style that is still recognizable today. His posters for the exhibition society La Libre Esthetique and his sets of postcards are as prized now as they were in Combaz's day. As this lavishly illustrated book reveals, however, Combaz was also an accomplished graphic artist, painter, and art critic who made important contributions to Western understanding of the art of the Far East and was an inspiring teacher to several generations of Belgian artists. For this thoroughly researched first study of Combaz's life, the author consulted family documents, unpublished photographs, works in private collections, and institutional and governmental archives to offer a full assessment of the man and his oeuvre. Included are a biographical essay and an analysis of his major works, with extensive documentation of his 24 posters.