This family lineage blog is based on an interview with Paul Moss by the art journalist Roland Arkell, for the Antiques Trade Gazette in 2017; with several tweaks.
Paul Moss chose an unorthodox route to move the family firm into its second century. The owner of Mayfair dealership Sydney L. Moss Ltd., Paul has clear opinions about what great Asian art is all about. And it isn’t the imperial porcelains or stonewares that had earned his grandfather the epithet of ‘the king of Junyao’.
Paul Moss
There was, he said, no great eureka moment – more a gradual understanding that what really rocked his boat often lay outside traditional London art market favourites. “It was the stuff I kept on falling in love with, kept making all sorts of wonderful new discoveries in,” he recalls. That stuff was literati Chinese arts – painting, calligraphy and objects conceived in organic materials in the scholar’s taste – and the arts of Old Japan, notably netsuke, inro and other sagemono; as well as their painting and calligraphy, too.
It is the gallery’s narrow focus on the Asian artist as an individual that gives it a distinct character.
“I wanted to make my mark as an art dealer, to do something original, proselytising what I knew was great art and seemed to me under-appreciated, in the West, anyway. If it wasn’t going to work, I’d have rather gone on the run than stick with a business just because my father and grandfather were rather good at it.
“I don’t particularly care about Chinese imperial ceramics, because they largely lack that dimension of the artist’s personality. It may all be wholly admirable in many ways, but I’m afraid I get bored with the same thing over and over. It doesn’t matter how technically perfect it is. I want it to ring my chimes. I want the chance to get to know the artist.”
It was also a conscious decision to do something different in an evolving market.
“By the time I made that cut, it was obvious that the heights of the traditional Chinese art market were painfully expensive, and getting more so. We didn’t have backers – by choice – or deep family pockets; we had to pay our way with a bank overdraft. In that sense there was never an element of choice about it.”
Moss left Durham University in 1973 supremely confident about his future but not wholly sure of the direction it might take. “I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I trusted that it was going to be a work of art.”
He’d already taken a student sabbatical to become a city councillor in Durham, and later taught himself more than 10,000 Chinese characters via flashcards, building up to his BA finals and to aid with his dissertation on Tibetan thangkas.
It was a temple-hopping tour of Asia in 1977–78, including eight months in India and three in Indonesia, that crystallised his decision to throw in his lot with the art world, rather than attempting to write the great English language novel of the last quarter of the twentieth century. He spent his four-month recovery from water-borne hepatitis, contracted in Bali, with his half-uncle Hugh Moss in Hong Kong, creating a vast index card system recording the names and detailed characteristics of Chinese artisans across a variety of literati-related disciplines.
The laborious endeavour (later to some extent the basis of the 1986 Hugh Moss/Gerard Tsang exhibition catalogue Arts from the Scholar’s Studio) showed an aptitude for nitpicking research and translation, and taught a simple lesson. “When you write it down, you learn it,” he says. Some three decades later when Oliver, the oldest of his three sons, completed his BA and MA studies in east Asian culture and joined the gallery, he too was set a similar task, to create a database of Chinese collectors of old painting and calligraphy.
Moss senior wears the mantel ‘custodian of the family business’ lightly. “Of course I’m proud that we are the oldest family-owned Asian art dealership in London, or for that matter the Western world. I think it’s extremely cool that I shall hand over the reins of directorial control to Oliver next year (2018) on the 108th anniversary of the company’s foundation. [And this indeed took place.] “But it’s not something that occurs to me when I ask ‘what am I doing this for’ as I ponder life over the muesli. It isn’t for the family business, it’s for every day being different, for the expectation of coming across something really good and rare, for our research projects, and for the likelihood that any new people interested in our chosen fields are likely to be good, serious people. They come with the territory.”
Sydney Moss
He had known his grandfather reasonably well. According to family lore, Sydney Leonard Moss (1893–1980), an amateur watercolourist, talented tennis player and professional ceramics restorer from Wimbledon, had been encouraged to become a dealer in 1910 by the orientalist and private banker George Eumorfopoulos (1863–1939); because he knew his ceramics from the inside out. It was a pregnant moment in Western collecting; the collapse of the Qing dynasty and surrounding years of unrest would bring many of the treasures of the Chinese court to market.
Moss retells two anecdotes that speak something of his grandfather’s character: an “uncharacteristic generosity” with cigars upon learning his grandson had achieved a first class degree in Chinese, and his refusal to allow the original ‘poor little rich girl,’ Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton to return to the gallery once he discovered that she was using Roman glass dishes for ashtrays at parties. “He was an Edwardian in outlook – of the generation that always wore a hat outdoors.”
Geoffrey Moss
His father Geoffrey Bernard Moss (1925–79) was a study in contrasts. “My grandfather had a broker. My father carried around huge amounts of cash” is how Paul frames it. Geoffrey Moss was known in the trade as a born salesman, his every pocket filled with rolls of banknotes and some with the netsuke he had introduced into the firm’s inventory. He designed his own suits, ensuring that he had a lot of pockets. Handsome, generous and easy-going, everybody loved him. But he died young, just two years into Paul’s full-time tenure with the family firm.
Recent succession planning has taken him back to that precipitous moment of shifting responsibilities.
In at the sharp end, still in his 20s, Moss quickly emerged among that rare breed of merchant academics, comfortable moving between the grubby world of commerce and a more ‘noble’ calling. Unlike museum curators, good dealers, he attests, “need in addition to being art historians to be alert on all channels at once, never forgetting that vital money channel.”
He made some of his first major ‘solo’ purchases in the Chinese and Japanese paintings field at auctions of the collections of US dealer Howard C. Hollis (1899–1985) and the orientalist, diplomat and guqin player Robert Hans van Gulik (1910–67). At the latter, held in the relative obscurity of Christie’s Amsterdam in 1983, he bought 30 lots. “I stopped when I knew I couldn’t carry any more home,” he recalls. Among his purchases was a painting of musicians by Choson artist Kim Hong-do, also known as Danwon (1745–c.1806), later sold to the British Museum.
Other institutional clients followed. Through relentless travel and book-catalogues, conceived both as visual entertainment and serious reference works, he fostered strong relationships, particularly with American collectors and curators who “spoke my language”. Most of his early friends were junior academics and associate curators, some now the professors, curators and directors of noteworthy international institutions. In the US museum context, it was often a symbiotically paired curator and donor-collector whom he dealt with. When the great Minneapolis philanthropist Bruce Dayton decided that his local Institute of Arts needed a proper collection of old Chinese painting and calligraphy to help catapult it into the top ten of US museums, he and his chief curator Bob Jacobson picked Paul to be their go-to expert. Their timing was exquisite, and for over a decade as the market moved into its mainland Chinese auctions mode, at ever-increasing levels of value, Sydney L. Moss Ltd. supplied Bruce and Minneapolis with the basis of what is now an important collection.
Oliver Moss, the current director of the gallery
Three years after that interview, Oliver Moss is the fourth-generation head of Sydney L. Moss Ltd. The Asian art market continues to evolve rapidly, but for the foreseeable future he continues to emphasise old Chinese paintings and – where it is possible – literati objects, as well as Japanese paintings, sculpture, netsuke and inro. In addition to his long tours of the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong auctions twice a year, he is also newly embarked upon regular Japanese tours; the latter at this early stage accompanied by his father, who is only semi-retired.
So to some extent it is business as usual; but watch this space.
Left to Right: Ashley Gallant, Finn Daley Roberts, Paul Moss, Hortense Marandet, Georgia Leach, Oliver Moss