by Jon Lackman | 2 May 2007 | Asia, Conferences
This MediaNews article was published in advance of the James Cahill symposium last weekend: “Fourteen of the world’s greatest experts on Chinese painting, coming from as far away as Australia, Hong Kong and Japan, will descend on Berkeley this weekend … to honor the man who taught them, James Cahill, professor emeritus in the history of art at University of California, Berkeley and former chairman of the art history department. He taught at Cal from 1965 until his retirement in 1995 … [Cahill's] career has been noted for championing previously ignored painters and restoring them to a more prominent place in the artistic pantheon … At the same time, the Berkeley Art Museum is presenting an exhibit through May 27 of some of the priceless Chinese masterworks it acquired under Cahill’s direction … The collection, widely regarded as one of the finest in the United States, is rivaled only by the Cahill family’s private collection, which was collected in the 1950s and 1960s by Cahill and his former wife, Dorothy Dunlap Cahill. Most of that collection is also at the Berkeley Art Museum … This will be Cahill’s first return to Berkeley since his heart attack last year. He currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his second wife, art historian Hsingyuan Tsao, and their twin 11-year-old sons, Julian and Benedict. His oldest son, Nicholas Cahill, is professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin … [Cahill] spent much of his youth trying to decide whether to be a musicologist or an art historian until the Army sent him to its Japanese Language School during World War II and inadvertently set him on his career path as an Asian art expert. (He’s also an expert in Japanese art, but that’s another story.) … He spent his [high-school] graduation night in jail, having been busted for hanging a huge banner from a campus building mocking the school’s vice principal … He’s that rare combination — a great teacher and a great scholar, earning both the prestigious Distinguished Teacher Award from Cal and the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award For Writing from the College Art Association … Many other colleges tried to lure him away, including Harvard, which trotted out the ultimate bait — a university professorship, which is widely considered the pinnacle of the academic profession. But Cahill turned it down — the first person to do so since Galileo, according to Sydney Freedberg, then chairman of Harvard’s art history department.”
