Carl Schuster (1904–1969) was an American art historian who specialized in the study of traditional symbolism.
Life and career
Carl Schuster was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to a prominent Jewish family. His gift for languages was evident from an early age as was an interest in puzzles, codes, and ciphers. These skills would later serve him well both as a scholar and as a cryptanalyst for the OSS during the Second World War. He received a B.A. (1927) and an M.A. (1930) from Harvard where he studied art history and oriental studies. A growing interest in traditional symbolism led him to Peking (1931–1933) where he spent three years studying with Baron Alexander Staël von Holstein, a Baltic refugee and distinguished scholar. It was during this period that he began collecting textile fragments and ventured on the first of his many field trips in search of specimens. His travels would eventually take him to some of the more remote parts of the world, photographing rock carvings, visiting small museums or private collections, and talking to missionaries, scholars, or anyone else who might have information he was seeking. Schuster returned to Europe to study at the University of Vienna with the noted art historian, Josef Strzygowski, and received his doctorate in 1934 in art history under the supervision of Julius von Schlosser.
He worked briefly as Assistant Curator of Chinese Art at the Philadelphia Art Museum but was soon back in China (1935–38) pursuing his researches and traveling until the Japanese invaded.
Schuster was assisted in his researches by academic grants from the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Bollingen Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His easy-going manner and gift for languages provided access to people and information not available to others. He collected and photographed specimens in his widespread travels, but he never wandered randomly.
Nothing diverted him. He lived an almost ascetic life. In rural areas, he could readily satisfy hunger with a heaping bowl of fresh rice, which cost one cent. He never raised his camera to record Mao's Long March, though he witnessed it. Detained by Japanese soldiers in rural China, he recorded the event merely to explain why certain notes and negatives were missing. He literally walked through famine, revolution, and war.Edmund Carpenter, “Decoding the Tribe; Carl Schuster's remarkable quest to trace humanity's ancient iconography.”Natural History Magazine," May 2006.
Some of his rare Chinese embroideries were purchased by George Hewitt Myers for the Textile Museum and another large group was given to the Field Museum in Chicago. He also donated a group of Chinese prints to the New York Public Library as well as a collection of Buddhist woodcuts.
After World War II, he lived in Woodstock, New York, where he began to develop his ideas, publishing learned monographs on traditional design motifs. He generally placed these studies in specialized publications, whose readers, he hoped, would respond with more leads. Harvard University was on the verge of publishing a book, The Sun Bird, but he withdrew it at the last moment because he felt it contained errors.
The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) provided him with a desk and he spent much time there and in the New York Public Library. In 1945, the American Anthropological Association sponsored an exhibition of his photographs at the AMNH illustrating his ideas about how certain symbols were shared by widely separated cultures.
Along with the artist Miguel Covarrubias, the curator Rene d'Harnoncourt, and the politician and philanthropist Nelson Rockefeller, Schuster was involved in the foundation of the Museum for Primitive Art (now part of the Michael Rockefeller wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
He continued to travel, attending conferences and doing fieldwork and to correspond with others who shared his interests.
Scattered around the world, often in remote or unlikely places, were hundreds of self-trained scholars, who in response to some personal passion, sought to preserve the last remnants of fading, local traditions. They were primary sources: rigorously trained in other disciplines, self-taught in their special interests, totally dedicated in their researches. Many were far better scholars than the professionals who ignored them. Most had no one to talk to until Carl arrived. They welcomed him; opened their records to him; corresponded with him. Long after his death, letters from isolated places continued to arrive, filled with data, drawings, and photographs. His archives contain incalculable riches from a world now forgotten.Edmund Carpenter and Carl Schuster, Social Symbolism in Ancient and Tribal Art., vol. 1, bk. 1, p. 39-40.
Schuyler Cammann (1912–1991), Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, first met Schuster in China in the 1930s and was greatly influenced by him.
But Carl was no mere follower; he was a pioneer in the realms of the mind. He constantly developed original ideas and experimented with linking various fields of scholarship in new and imaginative ways, always being careful to check his thoughts and his findings with the most rigorous scholarship before he shared them with others.Schuyler Van Rensselaer Cammann, “In memoriam Carl Schuster, Ph.D. (1904–1969)” Textile Museum Journal, vol. 3, no. 3 (1972), pp. 2-4.
Schuster never sought the spotlight and his work was generally ignored in academic circles where his approach was considered out of date. Privately, he was at the center of a vast network of scholars and other interested parties who shared ideas and sought his advice.
Because he traveled so widely, he was well-known to scholars, museum curators, and congress-goers on five continents. He also served as an important link in international scholarship, not only through personal contacts during his research trips, but also because, from his home-base in Woodstock, N.Y., he conducted a kind of free information bureau for the exchange of questions and ideas among scholars and specialists in different fields, between whom he was the only direct link. There in Woodstock, he had very extensive files of notes and films, just the ordering of which was in itself a marvel of efficient organization.
Schuster's ability to gather, organize and evaluate data was extraordinary. In an age before the copier and the personal computer, he accumulated an archive comprising some 200,000 photographs, 800 rubbings (mostly of petroglyphs), 18,000 pages of correspondence in multiple languages, and a bibliography of 5670 titles filed by alphabet (Chinese, Cyrillic, Latin)—all meticulously cross-referenced. Schuster did not live to see his work completed. He died suddenly of cancer in 1969. The task fell to a friend, the anthropologist Dr. Edmund Carpenter, who agreed to write and publish his findings. The result of twenty years of labor was Materials for the Study of Social Symbolism in Ancient and Tribal Art: A Record of Tradition and Continuity, published privately in three volumes (1986–88) and distributed free of charge to scholars and libraries throughout the world. A much abbreviated version of this work was published in 1996 under the title Patterns That Connect, by Abrams Press. Schuster's archives, which contain unpublished material on a wide variety of subjects, are housed in the Museum der Kulturen in Basel, Switzerland.
Those who knew him well, and were qualified to make judgments, uniformly spoke of his brilliance, his capacity to perceive what no one before had seen. His archives reveal this better than his publications. He was a lucid correspondent, but far too hesitant in publishing. His archives are his real legacy.Edmund Carpenter and Carl Schuster, Social Symbolism in Ancient and Tribal Art, vol. 1, bk. 1, p. 37.
His work Schuster's initial publications centered on traditional design motifs that he found preserved on textile fragments he had collected in western China during the 1930s. While the textiles themselves were not old, the designs were, having been preserved by endless imitation. Even where the motifs seemed specifically Chinese, like the return of the triumphant scholar (chuang yüan) on horseback, the oldest known prototypes were found in distant times and places.
Schuster used the method employed by many art historians of identifying significant design motifs and then tracing their distribution and meaning in different cultural and historical contexts, looking for commonalities. He tried, where possible, to provide historical evidence for the movement of these ideas and images but this proved increasingly difficult as the trail moved backward in time. Writing later about the difficulty of providing historical support for the idea of cultural contact between Asia and the Americas in prehistoric times, he defended his methodology.
However convincing some of these arguments for relationships appear to be, it is inevitable that they remain inconclusive in the absence of any historical documentation. It is the writer’s belief, nevertheless, that attempts at the comparative study of traditions, more especially artistic traditions, of the Old and New Worlds should not be abandoned because of the obvious difficulties of historical documentation, but should, on the contrary, be systematically pursued, on a frankly tentative or hypothetical basis, in an effort to assess the true extent and significance of existing similarities.Carl Schuster, “Joint Marks,” p. 3.
Schuster was a believer in the comparative method. Like the great art historian, folklorist and metaphysician, Ananda Coomaraswamy — from whom he learned a great deal — he believed that traditional symbolism constituted a form of language that communicated the beliefs of ancient peoples from the earliest times. As in linguistics, where many languages can arise from a common ancestor, he sought the underlying patterns that provided the links between seemingly disparate art forms. Not unlike the early navigators in the Pacific, who used the deep ocean swells to find their way around vast stretches of unexplored ocean, Schuster looked for older meanings obscured or altered by the fashion-driven arts of the palace and the propaganda of the great world religions.
We can conceive of popular tradition as an undercurrent which flows deeply beneath the reflecting surface of history, a movement of long duration and great force which, though generally hidden from academic view, comes to the surface occasionally in unexpected places, bringing with it memories of distant times and places.Carl Schuster, in Art and Thought, p. 124.
He learned to look for cross-relations between the arts, following the evidence where it led, across time periods and boundaries, both geographic and academic. He expressed some of his feelings about these matters in a letter to the ethnographer Heiner Meinhard in 1967.
First in the natural sciences, and then to some extent in the humanities (eg in linguistics), empirical observations by individuals over decades established certain facts permitting certain conclusions. But in the study of the traditional arts, we are still in a pre-scientific age. Nobody seems to have any idea even how to go about learning what the world of traditional culture actually is: this can only be learned by the painstaking tracing of traditional forms on the widest possible comparative basis, empirically, without any arbitrary limits set by academic preconceptions and compartmentation.Edmund Carpenter and Carl Schuster, Social Symbolism in Ancient and Tribal Art, vol. 1, bk. 1, p. 36.