For Americans, the suddenly fashionable area of Chinese painting has long been dominated—in terms of taste, scholarship and accessibility—by two great public collections: the Freer Gallery in Washington and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
The current show at Manhattan's Asia House is, in effect, a tribute to Cleveland and its director, the eminent connoisseur of Chinese art Dr. Sherman Lee. Entitled The Colors of Ink, it is a selection of classical Chinese black-to-white paintings on silk and paper lent from Cleveland's collection and dating from the 10th century, when the colored paintings of...