Associate Professor of Art History Emeritus Steve Goldberg recently published “Approaches to the History of Chinese Calligraphy in American Scholarship” as the first chapter in Chinese Calligraphy and Painting Studies in Postwar America. Edited by Jason C. Kuo, the book was published last month by New Academia Publishing.
In this study, Goldberg undertakes a historiography of the different methods and approaches adopted in American scholarship on Chinese calligraphy. He said the studies that populate such a historiography are classified into six basic genres: the aesthetic reception of Chinese calligraphy; connoisseurship and the question of authenticity; formal analysis and the question of calligraphic style; periodization and the transmission and transformation of calligraphic style; calligraphic influence, emulation, and creative imitation; and reader reception and the genre of calligraphic texts.
Goldberg introduces each approach through a discussion of a representative example of art historical scholarship.
