James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Big News Blog

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Created on Monday, 21 May 2012 13:51

Written by James Cahill

 Big News Blog

The biggest news, for me, is that I am moving at last back to Berkeley, permanently, after years of living mainly in Vancouver. My reasons are too complex to explain, but they include the presence of my daughter Sarah and her family in Berkeley, along with many friends and colleagues and former students; my twin sons Julian and benedict approaching adulthood and going off soon to pursue higher education; and the increasing difficulty of living more or less alone here in Vancouver, climbing up & down the stairs constantly, not going out much. My collaborator on the video-lectures Rand Chatterjee has agreed that we can continue to work together at long distance, on our computers and with occasional visits to Berkeley by him. So, from next Tuesday, May 22^nd, I will be living in Berkeley. Still reachable by email, still accessible to friends & others who want or need to see me for some reason. I don’t give my phone number here because I don’t want to be phoned by people I don’t know--use email instead please. And not Facebook or LinkedIn: I seem to be on both, through the kindness of other people, but I won’t use them for real communications--too public, too twittery. Email please. I don’t own a cellphone, never have, never will--I may end up as the last person standing who isn’t holding one.

The sad news today (Saturday the 19^th) is the death of Crawford Greenewalt, called by his friends “Greenie,” who was a professor in U.C. Berkeley’s Classics Dept. and the Director of the archaeological excavation at Sardis in Turkey for many years, as well as a major supporter of that excavation. Coming from the du Pont family, he was very rich, although you wouldn’t have known it from his manner, which was always modest. He was one of my son Nicholas’s teachers, and Nick, who has been deeply engaged in the Sardis excavation every summer for many years, is the new director of it. He is quoted in the NYTimes obituary, and has been in Berkeley helping with the disposition of Greenie’s papers and other effects.

More news: the death of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who is being hailed in obituaries as the finest art-song singer of the 20^th century, the one who gave us the definitive Winterreise, etc. He was a fine singer with a wide repertory, and I suppose he was indeed the best of his time. But the best of the 20^th century, for us oldsters who grew up with his records, was the great Gerhard Hüsch. He was known to me first as the Papageno in the original Magic Flute recording, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham and starring also, among others, the brilliant coloratura Erna Berger, who sang “Die hölle Rache”, missing one high note near the end--record afficianados listened to hear her sing it flat, in an otherwise dazzling performance. Gerhard Hüsch recorded the wonderful Schubert song cycles, along with vocal works by Beethoven (“An die ferne Geliebte”) and others. I remember once arguing for his pre-eminence in these with a woman who taught about musical performance in our Music Department at U.C., and lending her his recordings (on DVDs) when she was skeptical. She returned them saying that she hated people who did this to her, but that I was right. So: if you are a Lieder-lover, find the Gerhard Hüsch recordings and listen to them.

The latest New York Review of Books has a review by Julian Bell of a retrospective of Damien Hirst, titled “Brimming with Sheer Cheek.” Worth reading. He quotes Donald Judd as writing in praise of this kind of art--no, this kind of stuff: “’The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting’--not the illusionism, the imagining of bodies and symbols, that dogs the painting tradition and is ‘one of the most salient and objectionable relics of European art.’” Great, now we know. So much for all the real painters still going--I won’t name them, but could make a list. As I’ve written before, this adulation of the conceptual has an element of hypocrisy, because if we were to open an exhibition of one of the great painters who employ the objectionable “illusionism”--Verlasquez, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Manet and Monet, Degas, make your own list--it would be vastly more crowded than any exhibition of one of the illusionism-haters, and people would linger longer before the paintings than they do in the galleries of those new celebrity artists who scorn them. The Damien Hirst-Jeff Koons kind of thing is for dumb multi-millionaires who need to get rid of money while enjoying the prestige of patronizing artists and getting reputations as connoisseurs and collectors.

Other news I won’t comment on, except briefly. Non-white babies now outnumber white ones in U.S. births: good. And we will intermingle: better yet--mixed-race people are on the whole handsomer, smarter than us pure-bloods. China’s wealth is being drained away by corrupt officials and their relatives into foreign bank accounts: Poor China. Time to change the system. Maybe I will live to see that happen. And so forth--mostly bad news, bad guys winning out, people who do good things losing out to those who do bad things but make lots of money at it. I will continue to watch this as a non-participant from Berkeley, which I have called “that bastion of right-minded but ineffectual resistance to the wrong-headed directions taken by the rest of the country, and the world.” Or something like that.

Our first series of video-lectures, A Pure and Remote View, is now complete and accessible online, except for another insert that Rand and I mean to put into Addendum 2B, the one about Riverbank as a Zhang Daqian forgery. A so-called copy of Riverbank, which I believe is really a try-out that Zhang and his mounter-ager made before doing Riverbank, has turned up and we were able to photograph it in detail. Still another revelation! And one that adds to the overwhelming evidence against Riverbank being a genuinely old painting. But not, as I add at the end, one that will persuade the true believers in Riverbank that they are wrong--nothing could do that. For them, it has become an object of quasi-religious veneration, like the Shroud of Turin, far above the understanding of profane doubters.

We are ready now to go on with finishing and posting the first dozen or so lectures of the second series, called Gazing Into the Past: Scenes from Later Chinese and Japanese Painting. The picture and music chosen for our opening and closing credits are movingly expressive of the whole theme of the series, how some art evokes the images and styles of earlier art in a way that tugs at one’s heartstrings. But I won’t divulge now what it is--wait and see. Some sixteen lectures in this new series are now finished in draft, waiting for final checking and posting, and another twenty or so are planned, with the images for many of them already brought together. How many I will finish during my remaining years remains, of course, to be seen. Please join me in hoping that the move back to Berkeley, my real spiritual home, will help to prolong the already long life of your antique blogger,

James Cahill, Berkeley High, Class of 1943

WHAT WENT WRONG?

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Created on Thursday, 10 May 2012 22:06

Written by James Cahill

WHAT WENT WRONG?

Before I get to the main matter of today’s blog, let me note with sorrow the death of Maurice Sendak, whose books have been among the favorites of my two pairs of children and myself--we read nearly all of them, some over and over. The TV and other mass-media announcements all seem to choose his Where the Wild Things Are as the book by which he is mainly to be remembered, perhaps because it was made into a movie. Our own favorites included that one but also several others: the Little Nutshell Library, In the Night Kitchen (with Oliver Hardy appearing as two pastry cooks) and an early book, Kenny’s Window. In one of my Reminiscences on this website (R&R no. 82, “Bill Crofut and Alistair Reid,” which is recommended reading for all parents who aim at raising literate children) I tell how my daughter Sarah received a thank-you note with a sketch from Sendak after she wrote to tell him what a big part Kenny’s Window had played in her growing up--he responded that he didn’t usually answer children’s letters, but hers had specially touched him because this was one of his own favorites, and not much noticed. So, if you can find a copy of Kenny’s Window, buy or borrow it and read it (looking at the pictures) with your children. It’s midway between real-world and dream; they may well “understand” it better than you do.

Now, to follow up on my ominous heading, and slip into the elegiac mode. Some time last year I started one of my blogs--I have files of these partly-written ones--with the above title, and wrote three paragraphs of it. We begin, then, with those, updated a bit:

A lot of older people, I think, those who can look back over enough decades to have watched it happen, are asking themselves a painful question: WHAT WENT WRONG with our country, the United States of America? Why has its history taken a seemingly irreversible downhill course? And the right answer, which seems to me beyond denying, is uncomfortable because it sounds Marxist, and I never was that, but it is nonetheless the right answer:          WHAT WENT WRONG is CAPITALISM. It has gone terribly wrong, and it is bringing us down. The truth is: BIG MONEY BUYS WHAT IT WANTS; AND WHAT IT WANTS IS DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY. Is there a way out? I wish I knew of one, or that someone else knew of one, that will work.

During those heady days of the seeming triumph of liberalism in the sixties and early seventies, I had an uncomfortable sense that there would be a backlash. How right I was: Nixon 1969-74; Reagan presidency 1981-89, after his governorship of California; George H.W. Bush 1989-93;

George W. Bush, 2001-09. And the defeat of the “good guys”: Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, others. And, during those bad years, the lifting of all curbs on the financial market, curbs that cannot now easily be reinstated. Ending these curbs permitted a fundamental change in the nature of banks and how they operate, a change that let them turn into huge money-making corporations, more responsible to their investors than to their depositors.

I was around, and beginning to be aware, during the great presidency of FDR [Franklin D. Roosevelt]; he pulled us out of the Depression, pulled off such triumphs as the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps] and the WPA-- good ideas that he managed to carry out in the face of bitter conservative opposition that saw these as “creeping socialism.” Somehow, the two-party system then seemed to work, didn’t permit the kind of stalemate, blockage of legislation and the rest, that we have now. The 99%ers today are basically right: whether they can bring about any change is another question. Has too much irreparable damage already been done?

Now, continuing: I have of course been reading, in addition to the twice-a-week Paul Krugman columns and others that reinforce my feelings, the arguments that have begun to appear in the opposite direction. The NYTimes had a section last weekend of writings by the 1%ers--or, more accurately, the .01%ers--and their advocates about how they are necessary and beneficial for the economy. I suppose there is some truth in that; but insofar as there is, I feel all the more: god help us.

As so often, my thoughts go back to ask: what did the ancient Chinese think about this problem? And, as usual, they were there first, went quite a ways in that direction, decided (wisely, it now appears) to stop. I’ve written elsewhere--following Joseph Needham and others--about how they were for centuries far ahead of the rest of the world in the development of proto-science and technology, then decided (wisely?) against continuing in that direction some time around the early Ming. And I have conveyed the main observations of Ed Shafer’s lecture “China Invented the Middle Ages,” about how they introduced the compass, the stirrup, gunpowder, etc. And we all know that they invented printing, and brought it (including pictorial printing) to great heights surprisingly early, with (for me) a pinnacle around the late Ming. Now, what about money?

My highly unprofessional opinion--I don’t really know enough about the ancient Middle East, for instance--is that the Chinese were innovators there too. Their early currency was copper coinage, and the coin was worth as much as the copper in it. Later, they were the first (I think) to use paper money. And they certainly developed a vast and intricate mercantile system, which has to be taken into account in considering the patronage for painting, as well as much else in Chinese culture. But in principle, the Chinese placed merchants below farmers and artisans in their ranking of social roles, because the merchants didn’t really produce anything, just moved it around, so to speak.

Now, with that ancient insight, let’s look at our present financial world. Money is paid into funds and investments to purchase, in principle, some part of some company that makes goods or provides services. I remember, way back, reading and wondering about “futures”--people would “buy” hogs or sugar or whatever “in the future,” betting that they would be worth more then. The whole financial system is, if I understand it right (probably not), a vast expansion of that. But the old kind of long-term investment, someone looking at the indicators of the future prospects of a company, taking a chance on its being worth more in future and buying shares in it, is not the principal or typical kind of transaction any more. Instead, vast amounts of wealth are transferred, by clever and amoral people sitting at computers, from one commodity or fund into another, in micro-seconds. They are supposed to be doing this to service investors in the funds or banks they represent, but in fact they are doing it to enrich themselves, their shareholders and CEOs. Wealth exists as immaterial figures on a screen, or electrical impulses in cyberspace, largely divorced from real goods and commodities and services. And yet the transactions going on in this disembodied way make the Wall Street denizens obscenely richer, and the rest of us vastly worse off in more ways than one can count or comprehend.

So, fix the system to make that impossible? Great idea, but carrying it out can and will be blocked by congressmen who have (see above) been bought by the big-money powers. So where is a way out? I have no answer to that, and may not live to see one, and can only hope that one will be found. Otherwise, onward and downward to arrive at T. S. Elliott’s vision (as amended by me):

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang

Not with a whimper

But with a bunch of electronic impulses in cyberspace.

James Cahill, May 8^th, 2012

Blog About Joseph Alsop

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Created on Tuesday, 01 May 2012 06:20

Written by James Cahill

Blog About Joseph Alsop

Today’s blog will be of the name-dropping, I-knew-him-well type. But before turning to its main subject I want to call your attention to two new documents that have been added to this website, or soon will be. One, now the last item under “Other People’s Writings,” is a correspondence I have had recently with Jerome Silbergeld about the Riverbank revelation and why my learned colleagues in Chinese painting studies have been so unresponsive to what I take to be big news for all of us in this racket. The other is a paper I wrote and submittted for publication back in 2006 that finally appeared last year in the massive (two-volume) Festscrift for Wen Fong’s retirement, “Bridges To  Heaven.” With all respect to that ponderous publication and the two people mostly responsible for finally getting it out, Dora Ching and Jerome Silbergeld (same as above), it is heavy and hard to read, besides being very expensive, and has only black-and-white illustrations--at least, my article does. So I have decided to put it online here, with the illustrations in color; it will appear as the last item under “The Writings of James Cahill” and its title is “A Group of Anonymous Northern Figure Paintings from the Qianlong Period.” I really think this one is worthy of your attention--it has things to say, for instance, about Qing-period court painting, its heavy use of joint production with the Italian Jesuit  Castiglione as the lead artist, and its projections into the world of painting production in the surrounding areas in North  China.

Now for the proper subject of this blog, which is, as the title has already informed you, the newspaper columnist and writer on art Joseph Alsop (1910-1989). A new play about him titled “The Columnist” was reviewed recently in the NYTimes (Arts Section for April 22, p. 4). It apparently makes much of his being a closet homosexual--something that I never cared about, one way or the other--I don’t recall meeting his wife, and our association was concerned with matters much more interesting than his love-life. (People will say that it was a bigger matter back then, because gay people had to keep it secret; but my recollection is the opposite--I had quite a few friends, even close friends, who were gay and it never seemed to matter  much.) I knew Alsop because of his more-than-casual interest in art and the collecting of art. He was working on a book that would eventually be published in 1982 as The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting and Its Linked Phenomena Wherever These Have Appeared--a highly informed book full of fresh ideas and bold assertions. Working on this, he must have realized that he needed to learn more about Asian art, especially Chinese, its modes of production and transmission and collection; and to learn about those, what could he  do better than summon  for lunch a young curator at a museum only a  taxi-ride away, one who had recently published a best-selling  book on Chinese painting? So there I was, visiting the stylish red-brick Georgetown house of the famous Joseph Alsop.

I saw him quite a lot during my later years in D.C., the late fifties and early sixties, and occasionally after that, at a time when I was an active member of big art-history organizations--the National Committee for the History of Art, the Getty committee that  gave  grants for augmenting the illustration of art-history books, most of  all the College Art Association--I was on their Board of Directors,  then their smaller Executive Board, and I would have moved into the presidency if I hadn’t vigorously turned it down because I was by then absorbed with important personal matters in China. I remember visiting Alsop once, staying there overnight (he liked putting people up and giving them good dinners--he was especially proud of his cook), and having dinner with him and another prominent art historian, Phyllis Bober. She was famous for,  among other things, knowing how to prepare an antique Roman dinner, and doing it.  I never attended one of those, and didn’t especially want to. I knew her already from many College Art and other meetings. I remember standing with her once in the rotunda at the U. of Pennsylvania Museum, where we were meeting for some kind of exhibition or symposium, and arguing with her fervently, drinks in hand (and many more drinks already consumed, contributing greatly to the vigor of our argument) about whether the huge Chinese crystal ball in a  case in the center of the rotunda was  or wasn’t a work of art. She said yes it was, I said no it wasn’t. Why not? Because its perfect spherical shape was a product of craft, reproducible by anybody with enough time & skill & the right materials, with none of the dynamic interaction of parts etc. that permit it to arouse the kind of experience we call an aesthetic experience. (I made a similar argument once at an Arts Club meeting here in Berkeley when the topic was “Is Wine An Art?” I argued no, against some fervent wine-bufts who dominated the discussion, for much the same reasons.) Anyone who wants to know what I believe about how art objects “work” to create that special kind of experience can go back and  read the blog posted here on April 3^rd titled “Two Writer-Teachers On Art: Langer and Kaplan.”)

Back to Joseph Alsop. In his late years, after he had stopped writing his newspaper columns, he was working on another book, this one to take on exactly the problem that Phyllis Bober and I were arguing, namely:  What is art? How does it work? Once when Alsop was in the Bay Area for a lecture or meeting or something, I invited him to dinner at my house with  several members of our Art History faculty,  expecting them to be impressed and anticipating a lively conversation. It was a disaster; they obviously had little respect for him, little interest in his thoughts on this big subject. I wince when I recall all of us sitting down after dinner in our huge living  room before an inadequate fireplace (it didn’t  really heat the room) and my trying to keep the conversation going while my departmental colleagues were letting it die.  Alsop’s book was never finished, so far as I know, and he never published anything on this large question. His overly-simple tentative formulation was:  Art is anything made by human hands that is pleasurable to the senses. The inadequacy of that formulation I tried to point out to him; but old people, once they have what seems to them a good idea in their heads, are reluctant to part with it. An observation richly exemplified by the recent writings and blogging of

Yours truly, James Cahill