Memorial Tribute for Dr James Cahill

Mary Anne Rogers 

Sarah Cahill 

Dr. Nicholas Cahill, director of Sardis

Dr Patricia Berger, UC Berkeley

 

 

 

 

Granddaughter Trio Sing "Danny Boy" 

y tribute:   Posted on IEAS Site;

Memorial Dr. James Cahill.

By Janet Roberts

Generous of spirit and kind of heart, Dr. James Cahill is missed by all who knew him through the study of Chinese Art.  Dr. Cahill came to Fudan University in Shanghai, in 1987, when I was a foreign expert part of the US China Peoples Friendship Assn Exchange program, teaching future teachers, acting as writer/editor for a textbook on teaching of English models, and lecturing graduate students in the first American poetry survey course. I was attending  lectures about  Chinese art history with Dora Chen, who had graduated Smith College.  I attended Dr. Cahill’s week long seminar, and recall that he invited me to tea, in the faculty guest house, after which he showed me some of the new paintings he had acquired from artists living in Shanghai. 

It would be some years before I would see Dr. Cahill again, until  he lectured at Princeton University, when he had a residency at the Institute for Advanced Studies.  There may have been other instances of hearing him lecture either in NYC or in Washington DC, but those contacts have faded from my memory. To my surprise, when I decided to remain in San Francisco, in January, 2013,   having returned from China, in August, 2012,  I discovered Dr. James Cahill had returned to his former home as a Professor Emeritus at UCBerkeley.   I promptly joined BAM, and went to the reception honoring his gifts.  . Dr Cahill  introduced himself, when providing the gift of his screen and paintings to the Berkeley Art Museum, by saying he was known now, here, as “Sarah Cahill’s father”, which was endearing.   When I spoke with Dr Cahill , while also meeting the Asian Curator,  Julia White,  Dr. Cahill told me he remembered me and if there was anything he could help me with, in terms of any research I was conducting, he was happy to do so, and referred me to his website in process. This generosity of spirit to his students, and even to an independent lecturer and writer about Asian art  such as myself ---whose photography and remarks had been well received at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in its outreach series to regional museums and in the NEH/PHC administration of lectures under the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, to libraries, community centers, and colleges on Art and Culture in China, Japan and Tibet--- was consistent.  I subsequently attended all his lectures at BAM and at the Asian Art Museum where he really provided us a chronology of his career and accomplishments, having won about every award possible for an art historian.

 I was deeply grateful that  before he passed away, on February 14, Dr Cahill’s  caretaker had called me, to set an appointment to see him, one last time, at home, where he assured me that his family and he were reunited and that they had come to see him.  It was a remarkable experience to witness his courage and fortitude in contributing his knowledge and perspective to the very end, including the final video where he says “good bye” to everyone.  He has left us his legacy of all his lectures and research on line and the BAM celebrates his gifts of art, and all of us hold him in our hearts as his courage in his scholarship, especially in the last effort to elevate the portraiture and representation of  women in Chinese art –  has enriched all of our lives.