Robert Fan, Architect, Director of Design, Cathay Decorative Art Studio, Shanghai, China (ca. 1925-39) 12pp. in original decorative wrappers. Illustrated with 1 color plate (decorative ceiling panel) tipped to first page, and with 25+ photographs, most of other design panels, and 6 pictures of actual design in a reception hall, library, auditorium and “modern theatre”. Very rare. WorldCat locates only 1 institutional copy in the US and 1 in Canada.
Robert Fan, or Fan Wenzhao, was the leading Shanghai architect of the 1930s Art Deco era. He designed the Nanking Theater (now the Shanghai Concert Hall), three movie theaters and the Chinese YMCA in Shanghai, and several of the city’s surviving private homes and apartment buildings. Born in Shanghai in 1893, he came to America after World War I, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1921, then returned home to open one of the first Shanghai architectural firms. He spoke English in his home, which was decorated with modern European furniture, took his children to see American movies in the theaters he designed, and, after first following older architectural traditions, preferred modernist western lines of Bauhaus, Art Deco and Art Moderne styles. Fan remained in Shanghai until the Communist victory of 1949, when he moved to Hong Kong and eventually to the US, where his children became architects in San Francisco.
In this Foreword to this Catalogue, Fen noted the “recent revival of interest in Chinese arts in the USA and Europe” which “has stimulated the use of ancient Chinese decorative art for beautifying the interiors of buildings. The much admired and appreciated colorful interiors and richly decorative paneled ceilings in the imperial palaces in China have now become so practical and convenient as to be easily obtained and can be adopted to any modern use in the interiors of any library, museum, theatre, auditorium, department store, club, café or even in one’s own private home”. He offered his Studio’s artistry for interior design “in any foreign country”. The catalogue is undated – at least in the English text. WorldCat cites the date as 1925, while the University of Minnesota, holding the only original copy in the US, lists 1939. Whatever the date, this imprint is of undoubted rarity - and of significance in the history of Chinese Art Deco architecture and design.