Background
Langdon Warner was born in Cambridge, Massachussets, the son of Joseph Bangs Warner, a prominent Boston lawyer, and Margaret Woodbury Storer Warner.
(Since this book is not meant for specialists or for stude...)
Since this book is not meant for specialists or for students beginning to specialize but for the general public, I have tried to avoid all facts that seem even once removed from the immediate use of sculpture itself. Those things that are immediately necessary to know while we are looking at an object made by another man are: its purpose, its materials and manner of making, its formal image in the maker's mind.
https://www.amazon.com/Craft-Japanese-Sculptor-Langdon-Warner/dp/B000EB7QYS?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000EB7QYS
(stored in a clean pet and smoke free environment)
stored in a clean pet and smoke free environment
https://www.amazon.com/Enduring-Art-Japan-Langdon-Warner/dp/0802131328?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0802131328
(This charming book, illustrated with 92 half-tone plates,...)
This charming book, illustrated with 92 half-tone plates, opens such doors of understanding on Japanese art, artists and traditions that H.G. Henderson, in the New York Times, called it "practically a 'must' for anyone interested in Japan." In its pages, Langdon Warner shares with the reader his own loving understanding of Japanese art, history and way of life. First, Mr. Warner presents an informal survey of the history and personalities, the culture, and the religion of Japan from their beginnings through the middle of the 18th century, revealing the rich variety of arts and crafts that expressed the changing times> He then interprets three aspects of the national art which profoundly affect the whole: folk art, the development of the shorthand convention in painting, and the transcendental force of Zen Buddhism and its expression in the art of gardens and ceremony of tea. His vivid descriptions of the life and work of the Japanese craftsmen and his perceptive interpretation of the Japanese way of life is given an added dimension with the help of the many illustrations.
https://www.amazon.com/Enduring-Art-Japan-Evergreen-579-/dp/B0034QM14U?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0034QM14U
Langdon Warner was born in Cambridge, Massachussets, the son of Joseph Bangs Warner, a prominent Boston lawyer, and Margaret Woodbury Storer Warner.
He attended Brown and Nichols elementary school and then Noble and Greenough before entering Harvard University. He graduated in 1903.
With no particular career aspirations in mind, he accepted an invitation to join an archaeological expedition into Russian Turkestan under the leadership of the geologist and explorer Raphael Pumpelly. In 1904 he supplemented this experience by taking a specialized course in archaeology at the Peabody Museum at Harvard. He then received an appointment as a trainee in Asian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In this capacity Warner made a number of trips to Japan, staying for various periods of time, in order to learn the language and acquire an intimate knowledge of the works of religious art, particularly sculpture, located in Buddhist temples there. It was in this connection that Warner came under the sway of Okakura Kakuzo, the curator of Far Eastern art at the Boston Museum, who spent a much greater part of his time in the Orient than at the museum. Under Kakuzo's inspiration Warner made forays into the interior of China to visit several important archaeological sites that were seldom visited by Westerners. These brief visits undoubtedly inspired the two celebrated expeditions to the caves at Tun-huang in Kansu that he led in 1923 and 1925. Lorraine Warner accompanied her husband on some of his Asian journeys and became an expert in Korean pottery. In 1913 Warner was invited to organize a school of American archaeology in Peking, but the project never materialized. About 1915 he received a minor academic appointment as lecturer in art at Harvard University. In 1917 Warner became director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but he did not begin full-time activities there until 1919, when he returned from Asia after completing an assignment (barely related to art or archaeology) for the Department of State. Warner returned to Harvard in 1923. The same year his definitive work, Japanese Sculpture of the Suiko Period, appeared. Once in Cambridge again Warner immediately began preparation for the first Fogg expedition to China. This was actually a modest project to explore Khara Khoto, Genghiz Khan's Mongolian capital. Warner and his companion, Horace H. F. Jayne, were, however, unable to reach that goal and focused instead on the painted caves at Tun-huang, near the western end of the Great Wall. The western world was just beginning to understand the significance of the caves through Sir Aurel Stein's account of them in his Serindia (1921) and Paul Pelliot's photographs of the wall paintings. Warner brought back a dozen fragments of the paintings and a small polychromatic clay statuette of a kneeling Bodhisattva, all from the T'ang period and the only examples of their kind to be seen outside of the caves. Upon his return to the United States Warner lost no time in preparing a second and much more elaborate Fogg expedition, which included a group of specialists intending to make a very thorough-going study of the hundreds of paintings, the earliest of which were presumably done in the fourth century. The disturbed political situation in China and the opposition of a group that believed Warner a despoiler of China's cultural heritage limited the Fogg specialists to visiting a lesser group of caves at Wan Fo Hsia, where they photographed ninth-century paintings stylistically related to those at Tun-huang. Warner eventually published various accounts of these expeditions; those in book form are The Long Old Road in China (1926) and Buddhist Wall-paintings (1938). Between 1925 and 1937 Warner devoted his energies to a number of interrelated activities. While continuing to teach at Harvard, he produced The Craft of the Japanese Sculptor (1936) and Tempy04 Sculpture (published posthumously). During this period he also advised several museums (notably Cleveland and the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery in Kansas City) in the creation of departments of Asian art. In addition he made repeated journeys to Japan and China. In 1937 Warner was invited by the managers of the San Francisco World's Fair to undertake the preparation of a very large exhibition called "Pacific Cultures - The Art of the Pacific Basin. " He began a long journey that resulted in the borrowing of more than 1, 500 objects representing thirty-five cultures and obtained from 132 different sources. Warner also compiled the catalogue for this exposition, which remains a landmark of scholarly research. When hostilities erupted between Japan and the United States in 1941, Warner served the American government in various advisory capacities. During the American occupation of Japan, Warner was named technical consultant to General Douglas MacArthur on arts and monuments. In this capacity he was able to protect and help restore a large number of public and private collections. He also performed a similar service in Korea. After his return to the United States in 1946 he continued to teach and lecture. He published a series of lectures given at the Lowell Institute in 1950 and repeated in Honolulu in 1951 under the title The Enduring Art of Japan. This book sums up and distills the knowledge, understanding, and wisdom acquired in a lifetime of study. In 1952 Warner was one of three commissioners sent to Japan to select an exhibition to be circulated throughout the United States to celebrate the signing of the peace treaty with Japan. Seventy-seven paintings and fourteen sculptures were chosen from among the most precious of Japan's treasures. Warner died in Cambridge, Massachussets.
(Since this book is not meant for specialists or for stude...)
(This charming book, illustrated with 92 half-tone plates,...)
(stored in a clean pet and smoke free environment)
book
In 1910 Warner married Lorraine d'Orémieulx Roosevelt, a cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt. They had three children.