Chinese portraiture.(antiques)(Brief Article)

A byzantine tale lies behind the current exhibition of ancestral Chinese portraits on view at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. through September 9. The players are Richard G. Pritzlaff, an uncouth and irascible New Mexican rancher; H. Ross Perot, the outspoken Texas tycoon; Wu Lai-shi, an esteemed and elusive Peking art dealer; and Jan Stuart, the tenacious and intelligent associate curator of Chinese art at the Sackler Gallery. The Maltese falcon in this case was eighty-five hauntingly beautiful Chinese ancestor portraits and related artifacts.

In 1989 Mr. Pritzlaff telephoned the Sackler Gallery pointedly deriding the curatorial profession, but nonetheless offering his collection of more than one hundred paintings and other objects to the museum. He described the collection immodestly as one that would "forever change American opinion of Chinese art." Then eighty-seven years old, Pritzlaff was concerned about the future of his collection, the seed of which was planted in 1937 when he traveled to China and encountered the art dealer Wu. The latter had a knack for persuading descendants of Chinese nobles to part with their inherited treasures, including rare paintings and porcelains with imperial provenances. Chief among the collection were Chinese ancestral portraits, then a stepchild of Chinese art in which landscape paintings were ranked at the top of the artistic hierarchy.

In the early 1940s, changes in Chinese political tides, Wu's advancing age (he died around 1948), and impoverishment, caused Wu to send Pritzlaff a cache of paintings, which he hoped the collector would sell on his behalf. Instead, Pritzlaff held on to them, sending Wu as much money as he could.

By 1970 Pritzlaff was looking for ways to promote what he had, and he loaned some of his paintings to the Denver Art Museum. Negotiations for the transfer of the collection to that museum eventually came to naught. Enter Ross Perot, who in the mid-1980s was horse shopping with friends at Pritzlaff's ranch. There he was swept away by the Chinese collection, and after a return trip he purchased the majority of it with the intention of building a museum to house it. When that dream fell through, Pritzlaff became so irate that in 1987 he bought back his collection.

In 1990, following Pritzlaff's phone call, Stuart and a colleague traveled to the collector's adobe house in Sapello, New Mexico, which proved to be as ...