Book – Feng Schöneweiß

Feng Schöneweiß, The Provenance of Monumental Vases: Chinese Porcelain, German Curators, and Global Art History in Dresden since 1700 (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, forthcoming 2026)

This book explores a history of provenance research as global art history. It examines the correlation between provenance and monumentality in the making of transcultural heritage within local cultural memory. This is elaborated through the entangled biographies of a rare collection of Chinese monumental vases (chinesische Monumentalvasen) and four generations of Dresden museum professionals. On 31 March 1982, Stasi agents and DDR tax officials confiscated the collection of Dresden citizen Helmuth Meißner (1903–1998). Among the confiscated artworks was a colossal blue-and-white porcelain vase made in Jingdezhen, China, in ca. 1690. Craving for foreign currency, the Stasi intended to sell the whole collection abroad via its hidden networks. Learning of the confiscation and the planned sale, museum professionals at the Dresden State Art Collections (SKD) cooperated with Saxon cultural officials to register the vase as “cultural property of national significance” (national wertvolles Kulturgut), the highest category of cultural heritage according to the Cultural Property Protection Act (KGSG). Such a legal status recognized the vase as “particularly significant for the cultural heritage of Germany […] and [is] thus formative for Germany’s cultural identity” (§ 7 KGSG). The Stasi was hence prohibited from removing the vase from DDR territory, and subsequently submitted the vase to the Dresden Porcelain Collection, SKD.

Why did Dresden museum professionals choose to take legal measures to battle against the infamous Stasi over the possession of a vase? Moreover, how could they make a case for the Chinese vase being formative for German cultural identity? Fundamentally, how did Chinese porcelain acquire a monumental status as German cultural heritage? Indeed, the legal measures were effective in acquiring the colossal vase for the museum. Beyond a strategic move, however, what actually motivated the museum professionals was the status of the vases in cultural memory. The book argues that provenance research shaped the transcultural monumentality of the vases. This long process was completed through interconnections between museum professionals and global objects, embedding unintentional heritage in the history, space, and identity of the museum and the city. As museum professionals identified, clarified, and exemplified the links between global objects and local communities, the objects were gradually conceptualized as the material evidence of identity and memory.

The Provenance of Monumental Vases narrates a history of collection, of the museum profession, and of art-historical writing in a transcultural context. It focuses on eighteen pieces of the so-called Dragoon Vases (Dragonervasen) among the Chinese monumental vases at the Dresden Porcelain Collection over three centuries. In 1717, Augustus the Strong (1670–1733), Elector of Saxony and King in Poland, exchanged 600 Saxon dragoon soldiers with Friedrich Wilhelm I (1688–1740) for 151 pieces of large-format Chinese porcelain from the Prussian collections in Berlin. Among the porcelain objects as barter, the vases were extraordinary. Measuring more than one meter in height and weighing more than 50 kilograms, they were the largest porcelain objects worldwide before the mid-eighteenth century.

By the late nineteenth century, Dresden curators coined the designation “Dragoon Vases” to indicate their provenance from the dragoon-porcelain exchange, and the period term “Chinese monumental vases” as a ceramic genre and inventory tag to denote colossal porcelain vases made in the Kangxi period (1662–1722) of Qing-dynasty China. The museum professionals under spotlight are Gustav F. Klemm (1802–1867), Johann G. T. Graesse (1814–1885), Ernst Zimmermann (1866–1940), and Fritz Fichtner (1890–1969). Each of these long-term directors of the Dresden Porcelain Collection contributed to shaping both the collection and the field of ceramic studies in various ways. Their career, academic aspirations, and knowledge production also manifested generational changes in German museum profession from antiquarianism and cultural history to the newly established discipline of art history and the emerging expertise in East Asian ceramics.

As the book will show, provenance research played the pivotal role in fostering the monumentality of the Dragoon Vases and transforming them into German cultural heritage on social, cultural, and intellectual levels. From the translocation of objects to the emergence of disciplinary knowledge, the book unfolds the long-duration transculturation of Chinese art in German cultural history, revealing the dynamics between global objects, the culture of memory, and the agency of museum professionals. Consisting of five chapters, the book is thematically arranged through materiality and periodization, inventories and provenance, making curatorial decisions, writing global art history at the museum, besides identity and cultural memory. In doing so, the book brings to analytical attention the historiography of provenance and the conceptual framework of transcultural monumentality for the fields of global art history, history of collecting and collections, provenance research, ceramic studies, and transcultural studies.