Assistant Professor

at Case Western Reserve University calls the collection of Chinese painting at the Cleveland Museum of Art one of the top five in the world.

The reason: the incredible eye of Sherman Lee, who directed the museum from 1958 to 1983, and who specialized in Asian art.

Lee famously expanded the museum's collection after it received a $34 million bequest from industrialist Leonard C. Hanna Jr. in 1958 worth $275 million in today's dollars.

It is less widely known that in the field of Chinese painting, Lee also capitalized on his close relationship to a little-known German-Jewish art collector named Walter Hochstadter, who escaped the Holocaust in the 1930s and who became a leading dealer in Chinese art.

Giuffrida will tell the story of Lee and Hochstadter in a free public lecture on Thursday at 4:30 p.m. in Clark Hall at Case Western Reserve University, in a presentation sponsored by the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities.

Hochstadter, (1914-2007), fled Augsburg, Germany and established himself in Beijing and Shanghai as a dealer in Chinese ceramics. He was among a number of dealers and collectors who managed to ship superb paintings out of the country before the Chinese Revolution of 1949-50, Giuffrida said.

Those masterpieces filtered into the global art market through the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. It was a limited window of opportunity for any museum director smart enough to seize the moment – and Lee was one of them.

During the 1950s and '60s, Lee bought about 75 important Chinese paintings for the museum, many of them from Hochstadter, Giuffrida said.

Sherman Lee in a photograph by Yousouf Karsh.

Using museum records, materials from the Archives of American Art and other sources, Giuffrida has reconstructed the making of an important part of the museum’s history and shed fresh light on Lee’s relationship with Hochstadter.

“He and Lee had an interesting and tumultuous relationship,” she said.

Giuffrida’s research is part of her upcoming book, “Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee's Collecting, Exhibitions, and Canon of Chinese Painting in Postwar America.”

Her conclusion about Lee is that his sharp eye enabled him to spot the highest quality in Chinese paintings at a time when few experts in the U.S. had the skill.

As a result, the museum ended up with what Giuffrida calls one of the top five collections of Chinese paintings anywhere.

The other four, she said, are at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Mo.; the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan; and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

Selections from the Cleveland museum’s collection of Chinese paintings, which has been in storage for the past eight years, will go on view in late December after the completion of new West Wing. It will be the capstone of an eight-year, $350 million expansion and renovation.

Consider the Giuffrida lecture a warm-up for what’s to come.