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 Carl Schuster was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on November 9th, 1904, to a prominent Jewish family, and he passed away at Woodstock, New York on July 3rd, 1969. In the sixty-five years between, he amassed a vast body of research and established himself as a foremost scholar in the fields of Folklore and Symbolism.He received his BA (1927) and MA (1930) from Harvard University, and in 1929, he went to Beijing (Peking) as a Harvard-Yenching Institute fellow. There he studied Chinese language and art with Baron von Stael-Holstein, a Baltic refugee and a scholar of Sanskrit and Tibetan Buddhism for three years. When Schuster was in Beijing, he already began to collect a few folk textile pieces with blue and white cross-stitches from southwestern China. In 1932, from July to September, Schuster undertook his first collecting trips in the western and southwestern provinces. Then, in 1933, Schuster took his collections to Vienna to continue his study of art. He pursued his doctorate degree in Art History from the University of Vienna in 1934 with Dr. Josef Strzygowski and wrote a dissertation entitled Chinese Peasant Embroideries. After graduating from the University of Vienna, he briefly served as Assistant Curator of Chinese Art in the Philadelphia Art Museum. However, he favored active research over curatorial work, so he returned to China in 1935 and stayed until 1938. Within three years, while based in Beijing, he made another three trips to the southwestern part of China (August 1935-January 1936, July 1936-September 1936, October 1937-March 1938). Due to the Japanese invasion of China, he returned to the US and served as a cryptanalyst for the Navy during the Second World War. During the following decades, and for the rest of his life, Schuster lived in Woodstock, New York. He dedicated himself to the study of symbolism in art and wrote many articles. He was aided during this period by grants from the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Bollingen Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation (which gave him several) and the Guggenheim Foundation (from which he received at least two). biography continues > |
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