James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Escapist Blog

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Created on Friday, 27 July 2012 05:49

Written by James Cahill

Escapist Blog

The news in the NYTimes and elsewhere is so near-uniformly bad that I have no urge to respond to it in a blog. And the Bad Guys in my book who carry much of the responsibility for the disasters--the NRA and the Gun  Lobby, the deniers of global warming, much of the Chinese government, most of Wall St. and the .01%ers (I could add, for longer-term damage, the unadmittedly racist Obama-haters and Be Tough On Immigrants advocates)--they all seem so close to being impregnable that solutions to the problems they cause appear to be far off. So I take the easy out, for now, and write an escapist blog about something entirely different: the art-forger.

No, it’s not my old friend Zhang Daqian again, although I could go on writing about him more or less forever. This time it’s a painter named Ken Perenyi, subject of an article on the front page of the Arts section of the NYTimes for July 19^th. The article begins: “Madeira Beach, Fla. -- For nearly three decades Ken Perenyi made a small fortune forging works by popular 18^th- and 19^th-century artists like Martin Johnson Heade, Gilbert Stuart and Charles Bird King.” My first reaction to this (apart from the old professor’s “substitute ‘such as’ for that ‘like’ and put a comma after ‘Stuart,’” and “Who are Heade and King? Popular? Never heard of them”) was: If they know he’s a forger, why isn’t he in jail? It turns out that the F.B.I. has been “onto him” since 1998, but for some reason hasn’t charged him with crimes, and he’s now developed “a new business model,” selling his paintings openly as “reproductions” of these masters. And so forth--interesting, as are all revelations about authenticity and forgery in art. But I don’t mean today to pursue those issues into the really great cases of van Meegeren and Zhang Daqian, or why the would-be early Chinese landscape painting known as “Riverbank” has to be by Zhang--I’ve offered enough proof of that already to satisfy any open-minded person, and if the closed-minded aren’t responding to my presentations of new damning evidence, that’s their problem. (I still hope I live to see a real “break” in this story, comparable to the one that made the van Meegeren affair an international sensation--it should be, if anything, bigger, since Zhang was a much more interesting, versatile, prolific, and talented artistic personality than that Dutchman. But to go on:)

Instead, I want to raise again, and respond to, the question that revelations of this kind always arouse among artistically unsophisticated readers. It is: If you can’t tell the difference, why does it matter? Why pay tens or hundreds of thousands for a real Gilbert Stuart (or Winslow Homer or whoever) when you can have another indistinguishable from it for a small fraction of that price? Why should we pay so much for “authenticity”? Or, as the headline of the article on Perenyi reads, “Forgeries? Call ‘Em Faux Masterpieces.” Why not? And the answer or refutation to that, if not immediately obvious, is (I believe) in the long run compelling: Because after a while it won’t be the same painting, and you won’t like it any more. Spending time with the painting, seeing real works by the purported artist of yours, will more or less inevitably open your eyes to what’s wrong with yours as a work by that master, and those points of “wrongness” will stand out, take prominence over the once-positive impression of the whole, whenever you look at it. Also, part of the pleasure of owning a painting by a good artist is showing it to others and listening to their admiring comments about it.  If, instead, you hear embarrassed equivocations or outright expressions of disbelief in its authenticity, these can’t help coloring your own perception of the painting.  Some expert will look at it and pronounce it a forgery, and his or her words will come back whenever you look at it. You may say now that it will still be the same painting, and in a simple material sense it will be; but as it exists in your mind--which is where it really exists for you--it won’t be the same painting at all. I write this from experience, my own and those of others as I have watched and listened to them.

Another way out is to say: it’s just a matter of opinion; I have mine, you have yours, and that’s the end of the matter. But that’s like denying the possibility and value of judgments of quality. Somewhere I’ve written about a course in aesthetics I audited long ago given by the philosopher Abraham Kaplan, who spent some class sessions setting up criteria for defining “good” experiences in art: complete, disinterested, prepared-for, etc., vs. incomplete and otherwise “bad” experiences of it, and how these lead to better- or worse-founded judgments of it. And in the end he gave us this formulation: if enough of the best-qualified people, experiencing the work under the best conditions, judge it to be a masterpiece (or a failure), then we can only say: it is a masterpiece (or a failure). Asking for anything more is asking for a judgment from Heaven, and that we aren’t going to get. So, when enough of the best-qualified people declare that the “Supper At Emmaus” was painted by van Meegeren and not by Vermeer, then it was. I know all the objections to that argument--the commission charged with determining authenticity in would-be Rembrandts that couldn’t reach agreement on some of them, and so forth. But those cases are uncommon, and don’t last forever--usually  the really qualified people will reach near-agreement in the end, and objective criteria for analysis will support their judgments.

So, how in the end can we determine authenticity, firmly and finally, when expressed opinions by established authorities continue to differ? Some will answer: Never, so long as well-qualified people disagree over it. And we should remember that they may well have motivations other than real, disinterested conviction that push them to misstate their true beliefs. The disbelievers in “Riverbank” as a Zhang Daqian forgery want its age and authenticity to remain an open question, and they continue to insist--as an old and valued friend has done--that they still can believe somehow in its antiquity, against all the evidence.  And he has advised me not to write of this as an intellectually dishonest position or a cop-out, as in fact I believe it to be.  (For one, only one, of the visual proofs linking “Riverbank” to Zhang Daqian’s hand, contributed by one of my readers and pronounced by another to be “the final nail in the coffin” of “Riverbank,” look back to my blog for April 19^th this year on this website. He juxtaposes a passage of tree foliage in an old, published painting by Zhang with a similar passage from “Riverbank,” revealing a correspondence or near-identity that is indeed damning. )

Why does it matter so much to me? My only response to that question is: Zhang was much better than Ken Perenyi, he was a major artist who did far more than paint forgeries, and he never found himself pushed by the F.B.I. or any international agency of art authentication into acknowledging his copious production of fakes. We have to do that for him, and for future art historians so that they won’t be deluded into allowing his works to distort their histories of early Chinese painting. And in the end, the non-antiquity of “Riverbank” will be established by a drastic reduction, if never total elimination, of doubters. That’s because we cannot, alas, get a judgment from Heaven on the matter--or an admission of guilt like Perenyi’s from my old friend Zhang as he enjoys his afterlife up there. (So, in the end, this blog turned out to be really another one about the inescapable Mr. Zhang.)

James Cahill, July 25^th 2012

A Neo-Confucian Blog

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Created on Thursday, 19 July 2012 09:01

Written by James Cahill

A Neo-Confucian Blog

Once again I open a blog with a reference to an item on The NYTimes editorial page--this one on yesterday’s, for July 11^th. The Times is the first thing I read every morning early, beginning with the front page headlines and going on to the editorials. (My other regular readings are in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly--plus, of course, several online news services that I have bookmarked.) This time the editorial didn’t evoke anger, only an initial sense of hopefulness that dissipated as I read on. It’s by a certain Jiang Qing (no, not Mao’s wife--different characters, surely) who is “founder of the Yangming Confucian Academy in Guiyang” --named, it must be, after the great Song-period philosopher Wang Yangming. Listed as co-author but apparently more editor is Daniel A. Bell, an Australian scholar who is himself author of a book on Neo-Confucianism. The editorial begins by stating that what China needs isn’t so much democracy as a government of Neo-Confucian “humane authority.” I immediately expanded that second word in my mind: he probably means humane authoritarianism, style of Singapore? And sure enough--hopes raised, only to be heavily dropped soon after.

As I have related on several occasions, I used to reply, when asked about my religion or philosophical leanings, that I was a Neo-Confucianist. And it’s true that that body of philosophy had a great appeal for me in my early career. I used it to counter the excessive claims that the Ch’an/Zen people were making in the 1940s-50s to most everything that was attractive in East Asian culture--spontaneity, humor, inner peace, transcendence of the worldly. I wrote, for a 1958 conference on Neo-Confucianism, one of that great series organized by John Fairbank and others, a paper on “Confucian Elements In the Theory of Painting.” And I traveled for weekend seminars in colleges and universities as one of Wm. Theodore  (Ted) de Bary’s team of experts to help persuade university administrators to start up China programs with Ford Foundation funding--seminars in which Neo-Confucianism was presented and promoted.

As a U.C. Berkeley professor I enjoyed for some years the friendship of a major Confucianist, Weiming Tu, who was in our History Department from 1971 until he moved on to Harvard in 1981--forced out, so we understood, when he divorced his wife and she chose to stay in Berkeley, obliging him to move elsewhere. (Fig. 1, a photo of Weiming Tu.) He is now some kind of dean at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, not one of my favorite places. I liked Weiming as a person while leaning in an opposite direction on those issues for which he seemed to me a counter-foil for Joe Levenson--Levenson constructing historical and intellectual situations in terms of tensions and contending forces, Weiming searching for grand harmonies and unities. Weiming was called to Singapore to advise that government on their adoption of a Neo-Confucian political stance. (In my video-lectures I point out that the great Neo-Confucian intellectuals of the late Northern Song would be Tea-Party types today, with their bitter opposition to the political reforms advocated by Wang Anshi and others.) But I benefited a lot from his scholarship. Weiming involved me, for instance, in a conference organized in 1981 by Peter Gregory on “Sudden and Gradual Approaches to Enlightenment”--my article for that, exploring implications of Dong Qichang’s “Northern and Southern Schools” theory, was printed in the Sudden and Gradual volume that Peter Gregory edited, published in 1988. (It was also at that conference that, in response to a limerick contest announced by Gregory, I composed the “Sudden and Gradual Limericks” that are the first items in the Ching Yuan Chai Treasury of Imperishable Ephemera, accessible on this website under Writings of JC. I won the contest, if only by composing more than anyone else. I still like the one about Ikkyû.) Fig. 2: Participants in Sudden and Gradual Conference.

Back to Jiang Qing’s editorial: I read on with interest--almost anything would be an improvement over the present regime in China--until I came to his plan for a government of “humane authority.” It would have a “tricameral legislature”--not, like ours, an attempt at balance between executive, legislative, and judicial branches, but a House of Exemplary Persons, a House of the Nation, and a House of the People. Exemplary Persons would be made up of “great scholars” who would be “examined on their knowledge of the Confucian classics”--we are back, that is, to the old examination system of dynastic times. The “leader of the House of the Nation should be a direct descendant of Confucius,” and it would be made up of “descendants of great sages and rulers.” Only the House of the People would be elected.

 Augh--would this really be an improvement over the present Chinese government? Even if a Singapore-like attempt to implement it were made, it wouldn’t last long--nor should it, in my view. It would pull back into 21^st century China too much of the worst of their past. I have often asked rhetorically, thinking of the relative peace and prosperity of China under the Manchus, or of Hong Kong under the British: How long has it been since China produced a native government that any sensible person would want to live under? Some time in the Ming? Is there some ingrained set of qualities in the Han Chinese that works against their ability to govern themselves effectively and humanely? I hope the answer is no, and that I will have the satisfaction of observing such a government take shape while I’m here to watch it.

Finally, a word about making “a lineal descendant of Confucius” into a leading legislator. I used to know one of them--K’ung Te-ch’eng, 77^th generation lineal descendant of Confucius, living in Taiwan and Director of the National Palace Museum when I carried out the great photographing project there in the early 1960s. (See Fig. 3, a group photograph--I am  second from left, K’ung at far right. For an account of that project, see CLP 117 on this website.)  But it was George Yeh, whom I had come to know while he was Chinese Ambassador in Washington D.C., who really facilitated that project.  I saw K’ung only when he and George gave one of their frequent banquets, in Taipei and later in Taichung, for our photographer Ray Schwartz and myself. Both K’ung and Yeh were great gourmets--or is it gourmands--making up the banquet as they went along, sending messages to the chef, sending dishes back to be recooked or supplemented--the banquets would go on for hours, and leave us uncomfortably stuffed. K’ung, I remember, brought a string instrument, the erh-hu? and played on it while he sang, or performed--I suppose it was k’un-ch’ü, or kunqu--whatever it was, it went on for very long stretches of time, and was not pleasant to the foreigner’s  ears. So I remember him as a good banquet host, but not as someone I would like to see heading one of the branches of a government I live under.

China lost its best chance in recent history at a more liberal and enlightened government back when Zhao Ziyang lost out to the awful Li Peng and the party elders in the Tiananmen confrontation of 1989--I am now working on a video-lecture in which I allude to that tragic and far-reaching turn of events. The lecture is on “The Birth of the Goddess of Democracy,” which I take to be the greatest interaction of history and artistic creation accomplished in our time. So I end this blog and return to my work on that lecture, which eventually, I hope, you will all be able to view on this and the IEAS’s websites.

James Cahill, July 11^th.

L.L.L. Blog

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Created on Tuesday, 10 July 2012 06:54

Written by James Cahill

L.L.L. Blog

I ended the previous blog with a teaser: “Hint: they were small, leather-covered, with a distinctive and not-unpleasant odor, and they did a lot to start my intellectual life off in a good direction. And their initials were L.L.L.” Of course I have no idea how many of you readers guessed what they were--fairly few, I would suppose, because they are scarcely remembered today, except by book-dealers and book-collectors. But try Googling them and you’ll find lots of entries. They are:

The Little Leather Library. Here is an image of one of them (Fig. 1).

I awoke yesterday morning thinking about them--or, rather, remembering holding one of them and reading from it. And remembering its feel, and its modest look with green cover and cheap yellowing paper, and its “distinctive and not-unpleasant odor.” And where was I, while holding and reading it? Up in the crotch of a tree out behind the house I was living in, on the eastern edge of the Mendocino coastal town of Fort Bragg (then population 3,500), where I spent most of my pre-teen years. The house was on a plot of twelve-and-a-half acres, with forest covering much of it, the part away from the road. I lived with the family of Charles Blackledge, known as Blackie; he was an insurance salesman, and had his office in a separate small building just outside the house. And in the small ante-room of that office, intended for clients who came to see him to sit waiting, were bookshelves, mostly lined with books of no interest to me. But on one of the shelves was a box, or a case of some kind, with the green backs showing of a collection of Little Leather Library books. Each was about 3” wide and about 4-1/2” inches high--easy to hold in one’s hand, or carry into a tree. And I would take them out, one after another, and go off to read them--at least, the ones that seemed to me worth reading, and accessible to an already overly-literate young person. And a favorite place for reading these and other books was in the comfortable crotch of a large tree--some kind of oak? (I didn’t learn the names of trees, then or later.) It was located at the edge of the clear land, above a small stream (which provided soft background sound, along with the wind), only a few hundred yards from the house, and it was a favorite place of mine--I would almost say that more of my early literary and intellectual development happened there than at school. (The Fort Bragg Public Schools didn’t expect much of their students, or offer them much--until my sixth grade year, when three young teachers arrived from the Bay Area. But that’s another story. Back to L.L.L.)

The cheap edition that Blackie had was published in 1920-24, and was mainly, according to one account, the plan of Harry Scherman, who (bless him) evidently believed in making cheap editions of the classics available to ordinary people. They appeared first in a deluxe form, with red covers made of real leather (see Fig. 2) and were sold by mail and at Woolworth’s stores; later the low-cost sets were published in greater numbers, with green, artificial-leather covers and cheaper paper, and were sold by mail-order, advertised in popular magazines etc.--a sample copy might even be found in a cereal box. (One chose cereals in those days partly for the minor treasures included inside.) Descriptions of the L.L.L. books on the web see them as parts of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and it’s true that they were well-designed and widely accessible. (See Fig. 3, a group of them.)

What were their contents? Some sets included as many as 101 volumes; Blackie’s was probably (from memory) about fifty or so. One 35-volume set advertised on the web had these titles:

"Words of Jesus", " Fifty Best Poems of America", "Poems" by Robert Burns, "The Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Inferno/The Divine Comedy" by Dante, "Short Stories" by Rene de Maupassant, "Confessions of an Opium Eater" by Thomas de Quincy, "Christmas Carol" by Dickens, "Sherlock Holmes" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "Comtesse de Saint-Geran" by Alexander Dumas, "Essays" and "Uses of Great Men" by Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Man Without a Country" by Edward Everett Hale, "Ghosts" by Henrik Ibsen, "At the End of the Passage", "City of Dreadful Night", "Mark of the Beast", "Mulvaney Stories", "The Finest Story in the World", "Vampires and Other Verses", "Without Benefit of Clergy", all by Rudyard Kipling, " Hiawatha" by Henry W. Longfellow, "Lays of Ancient Rome" by Thomas B. Macaulay, "Irish Melodies"by Sir Thomas Moore, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Raven and Other Poems" by Edgar Allen Poe, "Midsummer Night's Dream" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor" by Shakespeare, "Enoch Arden" and " Idylls of the King" by Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Friendship and Other Essays" by Henry D. Thoreau, "The Bear Hunt, Etc." by Leo Tolstoy, "Memories of President Lincoln" by Walt Whitman, "Ballad of Reading Gaol" and "Importance of Being Earnest" by Oscar Wilde.

Imagine, then, being about ten years old, sitting up in the crotch of a tree, and reading one of these--now you understand why the memory of them remains so intense. Imagine discovering, up there, the pleasures of Shakespeare, or Poe, or Kipling. The book shown in Fig.  2 included two Sherlock Holmes stories, and must have been my introduction to those; the one in Fig. 1, in its cheaper edition, may well have helped to start me on reading poetry, and  also on my lifelong fascination with the King Arthur legends, containing as it did two of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.

(If you are wondering how to pronounce that seldom-used word: no, it isn’t like “idle,” as you might suppose from “idyllic.” For the right pronunciation, remember the quatrain by the American humorist Dorothy Parker, who, annoyed by Alfred Lord T.’s excessive genuflections to the Queen, to whose late consort Prince Albert the Idylls were dedicated in a long sanctimonious verse, wrote this--I quote from memory):

“If God should send me any son

I hope he’s not like Tennyson--

I’d rather have him play the fiddle

Than bow and scrape and speak an idyll.”

Also from memory, here she is on the Romantic Poets:

“Byron and Shelley and Keats

Were a trio of lyrical treats--

The forehead of Shelley was covered with curls,

And Keats never was the descendant of earls,

And Byron went out with innumerable girls,

But that didn’t affect the poetical feats

Of Byron and Shelley

Of Byron and Shelley

Of Byron and Shelley and Keats.”

Now I have wandered far off my subject, as my aged mind tends to do, and it’s time to close. I hope I have aroused memories of L.L.L. readings in some of you, especially oldsters like myself, and stimulated interest in others who will watch for these small treasures in old bookstores. No way can I convey their feel and their “distinctive and not-unpleasant odor” in writing: you have to find one and hold it and smell it. And with that well-meant advice I conclude this blog.

James Cahill, July 6, 2012