The Knight Library Browsing Room was filled with the muted colors of glass lantern slides Tuesday night, as about 70 students, staff, faculty and community members celebrated the life and work of Gertrude Bass Warner.
Warner, an amateur scholar of Asian art and culture, was instrumental in the creation of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and donated a vast library of rare books, glass slides and documentation of her voyages in Asia to the University libraries.
Tuesday's event, titled "Uniting East and West: The Life and Work of Gertrude Bass Warner," marked the opening of an exhibit at the library of pieces from the Warner collection.
"The exhibit represents the historical recovery of an almost forgotten library," said James Fox, head of special collections and University archives.
The exhibit includes rare books and manuscripts, personal letters and other ephemera, maps of Shinto shrines (a particular interest of Warner), a computer slide show of 37 glass lantern slides and early plans for the art museum.
Cecilia "Ce" Rosenow, visiting associate professor of literature at the Clark Honors College, designed the exhibit. She is currently working on a book about Warner. Rosenow thanked the many people who have contributed to the success of the exhibit in her opening comments, including students in the Honors College, describing "a campus-wide effort to mount the exhibit."
Warner moved to Eugene in 1921 to join her son, a professor of law at the University, after the death of her husband, Murray, said Rosenow. Her private art collection, donated to the University as the Murray Warner Collection of Oriental Art, served as the centerpiece of a new art museum. She spent most of 1904 through 1929 in East Asia collecting art and documenting her explorations. Her primary concern was to improve the relationships between the United States and East Asian nations through cultural exchange.
Rosenow introduced Roxann Prazniak, associate professor of history at the Honors College, who delivered a lecture on Warner's 5,000 glass lantern slides. These hand-painted slides show a wide variety of scenes in China, Japan and elsewhere. Prazniak said that while Warner claimed to see the cultural exchange she captured in a positive, optimistic light, the choices she made in producing her slides suggest a more complicated view of the meeting of East and West.
The Warner slides were taken in a period of profound, unsettling change in China and Japan, said Prazniak. During Warner's time in China, the imperial examination system, a 2,000-year tradition, came to an end, followed soon by the end of the empire itself. Shanghai, where many of her slides were captured, was experiencing unprecedented growth due to investments by colonial powers. Japan was experiencing an accelerated version of the industrial revolution.
Many of Warner's slides portray the sometimes confusing meeting of East and West in Shanghai, a city that had only recently emerged from the Boxer Rebellion, a revolt against British cultural and political practices. In the slide titled "Rowing Club," for instance, a colonial rowing club is off to the side of the picture, while a traditional Chinese junk sails straight toward the camera. When Warner shows a long row of rickshaws, they are full of Europeans in suits and bowlers. Instead of a tourist's picture of a pagoda, she snaps it as a steam train travels in front of it.
But Warner maintained a positive view of this mutual discovery, according to Prazniak.
"Warner saw the aesthetic plane of everyday natural life as one on which people of different cultures could meet," she said.
Thomas Munro is a freelance reporter for the Emerald
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