They were sixth-grade students from the old Hawthorne School on the north side of Minneapolis, on a field trip to Mia sponsored by the Junior League, and they had every right to be surprised.
It was the spring of 1956, and the field trip was called Eyes on the East—at the time, Americans certainly were keeping an eye on Asia. The Korean War had only recently ended, three years earlier. The French were pulling out of Vietnam, and American military advisers were going in.
Yet Asia, for most Minnesotans, remained a mystery. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Minnesota’s Chinese population would double—to less than 1,300 people. And even in American art circles, Chinese art was often still viewed, unfavorably, as an exotic curiosity. Cold. Distant. Lacking in sensuality, compared to Western art. “How Chinese it is!” Jane Gaston Malher, a critic and art professor at Barnard and Columbia, remarked after viewing a 1946 exhibition of Chinese figures. “For all are clothed.”
The horse in question, 60 years later, second from the right in Gallery 208.
Mia acquired this pottery horse in 1949 along with nine other figurines—guardians, camels, spirits—excavated from an imperial tomb of the T’ang Dynasty in China. They were dug up the year before, and quickly hailed as a rare find—a complete set of tomb figures, covered with a generous amount of precious blue glaze. This horse was singled out by the museum as “one of the greatest T’ang horses ever discovered. Modeled with complete understanding, its controlled restiveness is the more striking because of the suggestion of latent power which prompts it.”
Over the decades, Mia’s Chinese collection would grow and grow. But the analysis of this figure hasn’t changed much: only one other complete set of Chinese tomb figures has made it into Western art collections. And the horse, now prominently displayed in Gallery 208 alongside its mates, still looks ready to go.