Michael Sullivan

"Michael Sullivan who has died aged 96, was an academic, author and leading authority on 20th-century Chinese art.


Assisted by long-standing friendships with pioneers in the field, he surveyed the parallels between these artists and their Western counterparts, resulting in a series of landmark books on the subject. He observed that, for many Chinese painters, Europe (and in particular Paris) was “the goal – or the unfulfilled dream”.


Sullivan’s interest in China’s cultural arena was born from extraordinary circumstances. In 1940 he answered a Quaker appeal for humanitarian work in China’s war-stricken south-west territories. A confirmed pacifist, Sullivan drove aid missions for the International Red Cross in Sichuan province until, in 1942, he found refuge teaching Archaeology at the West China Union University in Chengdu.


It was there, out of the range of Japanese bombers, that he was introduced to the two constants of his life: Chinese art and his wife. When Sullivan first met Wu Baohuan, known as Khoan, she was a bacteriologist working on smallpox vaccines for the city’s public health service. They married in 1943."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10526293/Michael-Sullivan-obituary.html