If the standard exhibition catalogue of Chinese art is a collection of topical essays and entries that describe individual items, then Between Two Cultures: Late-Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is both more and less than what we normally expect. Wen C. Fong’s book neither provides sufficient description of the exhibition’s contents, allowing the reader to know what was in it, nor tells him or her what proportion of the exhibition is represented in the catalogue. In its 114 color plates, Between Two Cultures, one of the few published works in English on modern and contemporary ink paintings from 1860 to 1980, reproduces ninety-five sets of painting that are done in ink, usually with water-based color pigments, and known either as “traditional painting” or by the neopolitical term guohua (“national painting”). The need for specific description of the paintings is obviated by the detailed accounts found in the earlier three-volume record of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth’s collection (Ellsworth et. al., Later Chinese Painting and Calligraphy: 1800–1950 [New York: Random House, 1987]). In Between Two Cultures, Fong treats the paintings and the biographical accounts of their twenty-nine (male) artists as elements of...