James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

2012/1/28 Blog

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Created on Sunday, 29 January 2012 02:46

Written by James Cahill

My good intentions about writing frequent blogs for this site, so that those who drop by (in cyberspace) to see what’s new here will be rewarded, haven’t been fulfilled much lately--I’ve been hard at work on the video-lectures, finishing up the first series (A Pure and Remote View) with a Postlude and two Addenda. Still, we have ambitious plans for big additions to this website coming soon, and I want today to call attention to a few of those, to set up a sense of anticipation in some of you.

First: I promised when we first launched our Pure and Remote View lecture series that notes for it, the ones I prepare and speak from, would be made accessible on my website. The Institute of East Asian Studies at U.C. Berkeley, under the direction of their publications editor Kate Chouta, is preparing cleaned-up versions of these with all the Chinese names properly in pinyin spelling and with characters added, my abbreviations (LS for landscape, etc.) spelled out, and my incomplete sentences finished. I appreciate this effort, and the version of my notes that she is preparing will be the official one, to be used by serious students and others not satisfied with scholarly sloppiness. (I mean by that, of course, looseness in form and language, not sloppy scholarship.)

But I have also given my aide Barry Magrill a set of old printouts of lecture notes, messy as these are, and they will be put into some kind of order-- by lectures, basically, but also, within each, original sets of notes followed by c&c (changes and corrections) “talking heads” (my term for me-on-camera openings etc.) and AddAudios--inserts in which I need to talk to accompany newly-inserted images, usually. These should be posted here before too long. Even though I make no claims for completeness or neatness or total accuracy, they may be of interest to viewers and users of this series.

Second: I have decided to “publish” here, chapter by chapter, the shorter book on Chinese erotic painting that began as a long sixth chapter of my Pictures For Use and Pleasure book on vernacular painting, then was split off (mostly so that the book wouldn’t embarrass owners who would feel awkward about leaving it around the house where their children would find it, etc.)--separated into a shorter book, tentatively titled Scenes from the Spring Palace: Chinese Erotic Painting and Printing. It was taken on for publication by the U.C. Press--it has in fact gone through all the process of outside readers etc. and in principle I should be going ahead with publishing it through them. But most everyone I knew there has retired, no one seems eager to proceed with it, they have reduced drastically the number of color plates I was to have allowed, and I am simply too old to submit to all the editorial minutiae and endless correspondence that a book publication requires--I did my share of those earlier in my life. All and all, I feel it will be better to “publish” it here, where I can use as many color illustrations as I want to, and where it will be accessible to everybody free of charge, like my video-lectures. The first chapter should be posted soon; it will lay out a general introduction to the subject, survey the old Chinese literature on Chinese erotic painting, and do all I can to set right van Gulik’s mis-direction of the whole topic into his beloved areas of esoteric Buddhism and Daoism--a misdirection that has been accepted and followed by too many Western scholars, even though it has no basis that I can find in Chinese writings. I will also find a way to “publish” the image library of high-quality Chinese erotic albums that I have assembled over the decades.

Third: For those of you who have been following the Pure and Remote View lectures as they have been posted on the web (and you are quite a large company by now, with many in China): the final lectures in this series, which follow the 12A-D treatment of Jin and Chan painting, will soon be posted: they are three. A Postlude titled “Arguing the Aftermath” treats the big problem of how we understand Chinese painting after Song, and why the great Song tradition of ink-monochrome landscape as practiced by great masters of the Academy, Xia Gui and others and a few of the Chan masters, was not really continued significantly in China in the post-Song period, but had important followings in Japan and, I believe, probably Korea as well (although I am less clear on this.) How are we to understand this failure of the Chinese to build on that great beginning? Watch the Postlude to see/hear my arguments about that. Then there will be two Addenda: A, which is my Freer Medal acceptance address, and B, which is a lecture on problems of authenticity and dating in Chinese painting, how to tell the best and earliest version of a composition from the later copies, and all that. And each of these Addenda will have a Part 2; and about those I can only say that they will be revelatory, maybe even explosive. I hope writing that will induce more of you to watch them, if only out of idle curiosity: what is he revealing, that he hasn’t already?

And Fourth: Work on our second series of video-lectures, titled Gazing Into the Past: Scenes from Later Chinese Painting, is already very much underway. The opening and closing credits for these will be accompanied by appropriate music, the “Forlane” from Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin--evocative of older music in much the same way our paintings evoke old styles--played divinely by my daughter Sarah. And I plan to incorporate somehow other music from this suite, in Sarah’s performances, into the lectures, when I want to present images without talking. (Yes, there will be such times, even for me.) We have several of this new series already finished in draft, and I have mapped out, collected images for, and even recorded the soundtracks for, another dozen or so already. It will be a while before my collaborator Rand Chatterjee can turn these into a form finished enough for posting; my intention, based on my own perception of my precarious state of health, is to get as many finished in draft as possible, so that they will live on, so to speak, after I can no longer continue working on them, and end up being posted even if it has to be posthumously.

So, those are the things you should expect to find posted on this website in the near future, things that some of you can anticipate, and be confident that your anticipation will be rewarded. And I wish a happy Year of the Water Dragon to you all. (I must do a lecture on dragon paintings, a subject I’ve neglected up to now, in my new series, to celebrate the year!) I will, by the way, be spending about two months in Berkeley from late February through March and most of April. I fly down on that day before the day on which, if children are both then, they will be like Frederick in The Pirates of Penzance. So there is a final puzzle, which G&S fans will know the answer to immediately; others can look it up.

Cahill’s Rule on Generosity

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Created on Sunday, 15 January 2012 05:44

Written by James Cahill

Cahill’s Rule on Generosity

Today’s blog is one for which the title and a draft have been waiting a long time in the Blogs In Progress folder on my computer screen (which I can never see without thinking: Progs In Blogless--that’s the way my mind works.) Opening the file, I see that I’ve put off posting it, partly out of a resolve to avoid moralizing, but partly also because I wrote out at different times several ways of introducing my theme, and couldn’t decide between them. This morning I’ve decided to use them all, so as not to lose any good ideas.

Basic statement: I’ve told both my pairs of children over the years, and numerous others as well, what I call Cahill’s Rule on Generosity. It goes:

If you can do something that costs you only a little in time and trouble and material possessions, and that can be of great benefit to somebody else: DO IT. Don’t even stop to think, just do it.

I hope that all my children, and grandchildren to whom I assume they’ve repeated it, have made this a principle in their lives. It has always seemed to me both beneficial and sensible: I’m not advocating any huge self-sacrifice, like that of Mother Teresa or of Albert Schweitzer (see below if that’s an unfamiliar name.) Just the general practice of Cahill’s Rule, at small cost to yourself and great benefit to others.

Now, what are the ways I’ve thought of introducing this idea? I’ll copy them all below, and add still another.

1. A young woman writes to thank me for spending an hour making up a reading list to help her with writing her thesis. I respond:

I taught my two pairs of children (by two marriages) the following rule about generosity: If you can, at small cost to yourself . . . (and so forth.)

2. I remember two notable examples of receiving such kindnesses myself during my student days. One was when I traveled to Boston from Ann Arbor, during my graduate studies there, and at the Museum of Fine Arts met their Japanese art curator, the late Robert Treat Paine (d. 1965, Fig. 1).

When he heard from me about my dissertation topic, the Yuan dynasty artist Wu Zhen, he went into a back room and came out with a copy of an old reproduction book published in Japan of an album attributed to Wu Zhen, and gave it to me as a present. This impressed me deeply, as Paine did generally—he represented the most positive example of the Boston tradition of younger sons of distinguished families (his had come over at the time of the revolution) becoming museum curators. I realized that the album was probably of small interest and value to him—he must have acquired it long ago in Japan—but was important to me: here was a good example of what would become my principle. The other was during my Fulbright year in Kyoto, when my growing enthusiasm for the works of the great Japanese artist Tomioka Tessai (a photo of him was in the previous blog) led me to visit his grandson Tomioka Masutaro at Tessai’s old home. (Fig. 2--Tomioka Masutaro is the person at far left--this is a photo taken many years later.) He presented me, an unknown foreign student, with a small but genuine Tessai painting, a picture of a rock, simple and unmounted but genuinely from the artist’s hand. Again, it was a small gift for him, a big one for me. And again it exemplified my principle.

3. The philosophical argument (this also copied from an old draft, never published):

When asked about my religion or basic philosophical belief, I used to say, somewhat facetiously, that I was Neo-Confucian. That was largely a joke, but with some truth to it. I have always used the Confucianist-Legalist distinction in my relatively few moralistic admonitions to my students and children. These two systems were antagonists in pre-Han China: the Legalists, with the First Emperor of Qin as their champion, tried to eradicate Confucianism by killing Confucian scholars and burning Confucian books. Resisting them, preserving the canonical texts and other early writings, and more generally working to preserve the wisdom of the past and pass it on to the future, became the mission of the Confucianists.

(PICTURES: FIRST EMPEROR’S TERRA-COTTA ARMY--he was a notable Legalist--VS. FU SHENG, an equally notable Confucianist.) (Later: no, I won’t reproduce those again, they are well-known, and can be seen in my video-lectures among other places--the picture of Fu Sheng ends several of them, including the last.)

Their representative image is this one, of the old scholar Fu Sheng, who survived the Legalist purge and spent his last energies lecturing to an emissary sent by the new Han emperor on a Confucian text that he had preserved by hiding it in the wall of his house.

One of the Legalist mottoes was: You win by doing things that your opponent would be ashamed to do. I used to quote that, and mention my candidates for Legalists in their particular fields, people who had won, for a time at least, by doing what their opponents were ashamed to do. In semi-popular music, it was Andrew Lloyd Webber; in recent Chinese painting, Fan Zeng, whose pictures featuring aggressive males striking poses and thrusting out their bearded chins made him popular among certain kinds of collectors. IMAGE OF FAN ZENG PAINTING (No, again I will save this for a future video-lecture--I don’t have a digitized image of one of his paintings handy.) And I used to cite the Han philosopher who was reputedly so un-generous that it was said of him: if he could save the whole world by giving up one hair of his head, he wouldn’t do it. He obviously represents the opposite extreme, within what might be called a system of proportional morality.

So, with these as examples, I would argue for a certain principle for determining whether or not to do some generous act. I  never advocated giving up a great deal of one’s time and possessions to save the less well-off, although in an abstract way I admired those who did that: an extreme example was Albert Schweitzer, who gave up his career as philosopher, musicologist, and organist to found a hospital in Africa and devoted his life to helping the people there. I admired that without wanting to follow his example; I made my charitable contributions without ever feeling the urge to give up everything for the less fortunate. My principle, which I have told over and over again to both my sets of children, always was this: (and then I repeated Cahill’s Rule.)

My firm belief in this principle, and my practice of automatically carrying it out when the occasion arises, has led me to take the time to respond as helpfully as I could to numerous notes from students of Chinese and Japanese art who wrote me about problems they were encountering in their research. I always shared all my research materials freely—that was a practice inspired also by the example and teaching of the Freer Gallery director Archibald Wenley (Fig. 3) who believed that the Freer and its curators were obligated to do that by the fact of the Freer being a public institution—he had been trained as a librarian, and brought the librarian’s principles to his job. I would come back from China with slides that I knew would be valuable for some colleague’s research, and make them freely available, or simply send them to her or him.

4. Applicable today: If Cahill’s Rule could be impressed on the one percent, the super-rich who have managed to secure for themselves a huge proportion of our country’s wealth, making the lives of the 99% a lot harder, they would voluntarily give up some part of their super-wealth to help out the less fortunate (who are not necessarily the less capable, or even the less smart.) I have told my boys, now young men, Julian and Benedict: that what we are seeing today is a breakdown or abrogation of the old social contract, by which those with more give up some of it to those with less. That has been an ideal, and in varying degrees and places a reality, for several centuries; but now it is being replaced by the principle that I think of (in a British phrase) as “I’ve got mine, now buzz off, chum!” If the 1% followed Cahill’s Rule, that is, they would join Warren Buffet and others in calling for their taxes to be raised so that they would be paying at least their “fair share,” with the loopholes and exemptions given them during the Bush Era dropped--they would accept this or even advance it, instead of spending huge sums to buy congressmen who will block any legislation in that direction.

So, there it is, Cahill’s Rule of Generosity, with four different introductions. And, to alter slightly what a character in Lewis Carroll says: What I introduce four times must be true.

Notes of a Confirmed Diffusionist

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Created on Wednesday, 11 January 2012 22:08

Written by James Cahill

Notes of a Confirmed Diffusionist

What follows will be a series of loose, off-the-top-of-the-head notes on a large subject that deserves better--deserves, in fact, a fully documented scholarly study of a kind that I no longer wish, or am able, to write. By identifying myself as a diffusioinist I am professing a deep belief that styles and motifs in art travel easily, and are easily and often seen and adopted by faraway artists, including those in other times and other cultures. And I am professing also a belief that we should be more free and open than we usually have been in recognizing and acknowledging the artists’ adoptions. My writing about it now is inspired by, among other things, news from several younger colleagues that they are working on essays about the 20^th century Chinese painter Fu Baoshi--I have for decades been contemplating a learned article on what Fu learned from Japanese artists during his early years as a student in Japan. I will get back to that subject later in these Notes, which will be, as I say, off the top of my head, written from memory, with some Googling and some consulting of my favorite Old Authority, my own earlier writings, for dates and other information.

First of all, and deeply important: nothing I write is meant pejoratively; I am not in any way trying to reduce the originality of artists by pointing out what they adopted from older, and sometimes foreign, pictorial art. On this matter I follow Michael Baxandall, as cited in the opening paragraphs of the third chapter of my recent Pictures for Use and Pleasure book, on “Adoptions From the West,” in seeing artists as active agents who choose what to use, out of pictorial materials that become accessible to them, because these materials (or “pictorial ideas,” as I sometimes call them) seem to them attractive and useful. They are not, that is, the passive recipients of “influence.” But identifying the adoptions they have made from foreign sources--especially what Chinese artists have taken from Japanese art, challenging the long-cherished idea of the “insular” status of Chinese art--can arouse negative passions. I recall sitting in the audience at a College Art Assn. session on Tseng Yuho, or Betty  Ecke, whom I have known well for many years, listening to her being (quite properly) lauded as a major modern Chinese master, and wondering: what would the response be if I were to  interrupt this session by showing, with slides, how much she took from Japanese art when she was suddenly exposed to it, early in her career, brought to Honolulu by her husband Gustav Ecke? Painting in big color areas on a gold-leaf ground, obvious imitations of early Japanese embellished calligraphy--I could have devoted a whole lecture just to those--and a highly unwelcome lecture. And I have related elsewhere how I gave, by mistake, my talk about how much major Ming-Qing painters took from European pictorial art for an audience of Chinese bigwigs at an embassy in Beijing, and how one of them complained afterwards: Why did you have to give that lecture for these people?

I have been a committed diffusionist for a long time, perhaps more strongly in my later years, and always in the face of strong opposition--or, more commonly, a strong turning away, an attitude of “Even if you are right, we don’t want to hear about it”--from colleagues more strongly dedicated than I to Theory. I once suggested to a modernist teaching in our department that I could show her what I took to be exciting new Japanese sources, beyond Ukiyo-e and Hokusai, for what late 19^th century European artists learned from Japanese art--and being told, loftily, “I don’t do influences.” For my own part, I have always “done influences”  in my research and writing and teaching. For many years I delivered, when called on, two lectures in a World Cultures course given by a History Dept. colleague, one lecture showing what China learned from the West in art (as set forth in my Compelling Image book and elsewhere), the other about what Occidental artists took from China and Japan--the Post-Impressionists in Europe, as just noted, and the early Abstract Expressionists, notably Mark Tobey, learned from Chinese and Japanese calligraphy.

For many years, from the 1960s-70s into the early 1980s, I spent a lot of time In Japan, partly because U.S. citizens couldn’t go to China, but also because I felt comfortable there--I spoke the language fluently, and Tokyo was my favorite city in all the world, the place where I could accomplish more in a day, and enjoy myself more, than anywhere else. Much of my scholarship and writing was that of a Chinese painting specialist in Japan, and I took on big problems in early Nanga (Bunjinga) painting, about how and what these artists--especially Sakaki Hyakusen and Yosa Buson--learned from Chinese painting. Japanese specialists in Chinese painting, I observed, paid little or no attention to Japanese painting, while their colleagues who specialized in Japanese painting didn’t know enough about Chinese painting to deal effectively with the Chinese sources for Nanga; I could serve, then, as a kind of cross=over. More recently we have seen more acknowledgement of borrowings or adoptions going the other way: to China from Japan. Ralph Croizier came to Berkeley, it must have been in the 1970s, to spend a year working with me and my students to make a new move into Chinese art--he was a pupil of Joseph Levenson, so we shared an inspiration and a model. What he accomplished in that year led to his 1988 book Art and Revolution in Modern China: the Lingnan (Canton) School. Soon after he arrived he showed me reproductions of paintings by the Lingnan artists he meant to study, who had learned painting in Japan, and I told him: Go look at Takeuchi Seiho. It turned out that they had studied with Seiho pupils; Ralph was even able to find and publish, in collections of their descendants, the original Seiho-school paintings they had copied and learned from. More recently, a group of younger scholars working under the general direction of Joshua Fogel on what China learned and took from Japan in art and art history in this same period, the later 19^th and early 20^th century, have further clarified this new and important area of research: my former student Julia (Judy) Andrews and her husband Shen Kuiyi, Aida Wong, Hong Zaixin, Tamaki Maeda, others--I have corresponded with them, encouraged their work, attended one of their meetings and gave a paper. (The paper I gave, delivered in 2005 and quite similar to the present essay, is on this website as CLP 85. Read it there if you want to, for more of the same--but without illustrations.)

Another of my enthusiasms in Japanese painting has been, from early on, the recent great master Tomioka Tessai, whom I never met--he died in 1924--but whom I “discovered” for myself during my Fulbright year in Kyoto, 1953-54, and whose works I helped to introduce to U.S. audiences  with the great exhibition sent by the “Tessai temple,” the Kiyoshi Kojin Saichoji located in the hills above Takarazuka, in 1958--that is another great story,  also told in some writings on this website. And, as related in CLP 85 on this website, after arranging--or helping the Temple to arrange--exhibitions of Tessai paintings in the U.S., Europe, and other places, I initiated in 1988 a major exhibition of Tessai paintings in China, shown in Shanghai and Beijing, and also arranged for the artist Li Keran (whom I had come to know through visits to his studio with my wife Tsao Hsingyuan) to write an essay for the Chinese-language catalog. (My only copies of that catalog were destroyed through water leakage in our Chinese courtyard house--if anyone reading this has a copy he or she can spare and is willing to send it to me, I would be extremely grateful.) Li Keran, my memory has it, wrote with enthusiastic praise of Tessai’s paintings, and wrote about how Chinese artists had long known them and admired them, even learned from them. With my 2005 paper (CLP 85) I showed slides, including some of paintings by Tessai, Li Keran, and Fu Baoshi, to support my argument about how the dark, inky landscape style so popular in 20^th century Chinese painting was taken, in large part, from Tessai, and about what Fu Baoshi learned from two Japanese artists, Tessai and Kosugi Hoan. Now I am going to reproduce a few of these examples with this essay, to make them available to, among others, those studying Fu Baoshi.

I’ve told the story, in CLP 85 and elsewhere, about how several of us--Howard and Mary Ann Rogers, Hugh Wass, and myself--visited the Idemitsu Museum in Tokyo and walked through an exhibition made up of their holdings of an artist unknown to us, but a good friend of the old Idemitsu: Kosugi Hoan. And we went through it murmuring to each other: Fu Baoshi! Fu Baoshi!--because Kosugi’s paintings were so close to Fu’s in many features of subject and style. I have never been able to get reproductions of Kosugi’s paintings to use for illustrating this point, but Judy Andrews and her husband have obtained a reproduction volume of them from the Idemitsu, and they mean to use it in writing about this clear and important derivation. All I have ever had is a postcard from the Idemitsu of one of Kosugi’spaintings (Fig. 1) which I would show to Chinese friends, and they would say, Oh, by Fu Baoshi1 and I would respond: No, by one of Fu Baoshi’s teachers.

Fig. 1

Same figure style, with elongated faces taken from antique Chinese painting, same very distinctive way of applying ink and colors to paper. Whether or not Fu studied directly with Kosugi during his time in Japan, I have never been able to determine, but he could have.

As for his derivations from Tessai: a detail from the lower part of one of his works (Fig. 2--I’ve lost my slide of the whole) can be put beside its unacknowledged source, a well-known painting by Tessai of the same subject. Su Dongpo Visiting the Monk Fo-yin (Fig. 3).

Fig. 2                                             Fig. 3

Tessai’s mode of composing a dramatic picture with heavy ink applications, leaving open spaces within which finely-drawn and richly-colored figures are set, can be seen in many of his paintings--one of them, which he painted in 1921, representing the Tang-period Immortal Sun dwelling in a cave, will serve (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4   

Fig. 5

Again, I have only a detail of one of Fu Baoshi’s many paintings adopting this mode (Fig. 5).

Old Bishop Kojo Sakamoto, for many years the spiritual head of the Kiyoshi Kojin temple and its sect of esoteric Buddhism, had taken on the collecting and propagating of Tessai’s works almost as a religious mission. He had known Tessai in the artist’s last years--those great late years when he had painted his greatest works. (A photograph of the aged Tessai in his study can be seen in Fig. 6), I first met the old Bishop Sakamoto when he was already in his eighties; I accompanied him around New York for three weeks as his companion and interpreter when he came there (alone--currency exchange restrictions of the time prevented him from bringing an assistant.) And I was present in Japan, and talked with him, when he was lying in bed with his final illness, and attended his funeral after he died at age 88. A 1959 photo of the two of us was taken on my first visit to the Temple after the exhibition and his return (Fig. 7).

Fig. 6

Fig. 7

Tessai had developed his heavy-ink landscape style around the age of 70--his Listening to the Rain At a Window By Bamboo (Fig. 8), which he painted in 1905, is a great example and a favorite of mine--and he used it in countless works for the rest of his life. He was in contact with artists and others in China--Wu Changshi carved a seal for him. He himself never went to China, but his son, a Sinologue who taught at Kyoto U., did go there. And Tessai’s paintings were widely disseminated and much reproduced. That his use of the heavy-ink manner had a lot to do with inspiring the same manner of landscape painting favored later by so many Chinese artists--one by Li Keran (Fig. 9) can serve as an example--seems to me virtually beyond question.

Fig. 8

But to make this point to Chinese specialists in guohua, “traditional [modern] painting,” would most likely get one ostrasized from their company. And, after making that observation, I can do no better than to quote, in conclusion, the last paragraph of my 2005 paper:

“I’d like to suggest, finally, that the lively and productive back-and-forth that goes on between artists, which is revealed in their paintings, is perhaps most easily recognized and acknowledged by the artists themselves. Tessai had no problem in crediting his myriad Chinese sources, from which he plundered endlessly throughout his long career as a sinophile painter; Li Keran, at an uncharacteristic moment for China, acknowledged his and his fellow artists’ acquaintance with Tessai’s work, and at least implicitly, their debt to him. It’s rather the art historians and cultural historians, with their overt or covert political agendas, who will sometimes deny what’s before their eyes and continue to argue for some such myth as the cultural insularity of China. And my final plea is: let us all do our best not to.”