Media Coverage

LA Times - "James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art"

New York Times - "James Cahill, Influential Authority on Chinese Art, Dies at 87"

The Daily Californian - "Professor Emeritus James Cahill, Chinese art expert, dies at 87"

LANDsds Sustainable Voice News - "Loss of Guru Voice James Cahill Leader in Chinese Art"

SFGate - "James Cahill, Asian art expert at UC Berkeley, dies"

KTFS - "美國知名中國繪畫史研究者James Cahill病逝柏克萊"

James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

http://www.latimes.com/obituaries/la-me-james-cahill-20140222,0,625432.story#ixzz2uSDSCivh

Gazing Into The Past - Scenes From Later Chinese & Japanese Painting - A Lecture Series By Professor Emeritus James Cahill

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Lecture 1 GIP 1 - Wang Meng and His Qingbian Mountains

We begin our new series with a prolonged look, in many detail images, at one of the great landscapes of the Yuan period, Wang Meng’s “Dwelling in the Qingbian Mountains,” painted in 1366. I attempt to set it in both art-historical and historical contexts, and include visual treatments of other Wang Meng paintings as comparisons.

Lecture 2 GIP 2 - Cheng Shifa

A fond and respectful presentation of the paintings of this recent Shanghai master, whose great potential may have suffered from the over-popularity of some of his paintings. This lecture partakes of the autobiographical, since Cheng Shifa, during his later years, was a good friend of your lecturer..

Lecture 3 GIP 3 - Huang Gongwang

Another of the “Four Great Masters” of late Yuan landscape, and the one who would most profoundly set the course for much of later scholar-amateur painting, here receives an encompassing visual treatment that looks at all his known extant works. Aspects of his brushwork and his influential landscape style are revealed in close-in details.

Lecture 4 GIP 4 - Orthodox Masters and Shao Mi

After a look at some works by members of the “Orthodox” school of landscape in the late Ming and early Qing periods, the so-called Four Wangs, we explore at length the leaves in a strange and fascinating album of “dream” landscapes by the less-known Suzhou master Shao Mi.

Lecture 5a GIP 5A&B - The Hikkoen Album I

This “Garden Plowed By the Brush” is a collective album in the Tokyo National Museum made up of sixty small Chinese paintings, mostly of Song and Yuan date and entertainingly diverse in subject and style. We examine these at length, using original images and details, and putting them in context with similar paintings.

Lecture 5b GIP 5A&B - The Hikkoen Album II

Lecture 6 GIP 6 - Shitao’s Album for Daoist Yu

Everybody’s favorite work by this greatest of the Individualist masters, once owned by Victoria Contag, later by C. C. Wang, presently whereabouts unknown--but viewable in images made from the original album, with lots of visually exciting details. A feast for the eyes hard to match in the Chinese or any other painting tradition.

Lecture 7 GIP 7 - More Wang Meng Painting

This lecture covers additional paintings not included in the first lecture on Wang Meng. After speaking briefly about the four great masters of the Late Yuan Landscape paintings, I will cover several individual paintings and then go into extensive descriptions of the incredibly long hand scroll by Wang Meng hanging in the Liaoning Museum.

Lecture 8 GIP 8 - Four Pictorial Handscrolls and an Album

This lecture differs from the first seven in the series, which explored traditional literati painting. In this lecture, I will highlight paintings by lesser-known artists, often of “mundane” scenes of city and court life. A good companion to this lecture would be my own recent book, Pictures for Use and Pleasure.

Lecture 9 GIP 9 - An Album by Shen Zhou

The main artists in this lecture, Shen Zhou and Zhou Chen, represent for the Ming dynasty the contrast of a great literatus-artist, who was counted as one of the Four Great Masters of Ming painting, and a master who hasn’t received as much attention as he deserves.

Lecture 10 GIP 10: Zhou Chen - His Beggars and Street Characters

In GIP 9, I said these lectures would form a kind of contrasting pair; that even the names of the artists sound as though one were almost the reverse of the other: Shen Zhou and Zhou Chen. I said the work by Zhou Chen that will most occupy us might be termed, not Gazing Into the Past, but Gazing Out of My Window. I hope that excited your curiosity and brought you back to find what I could mean by that.

Lecture 11 GIP 11: Chinese Paintings of Gardens

This is the first of two lectures on Chinese paintings of gardens. This one is a general treatment of the subject, about how different forms can be adapted to depict Chinese gardens. The second lecture, GIP 13, will be about, a remarkable example of an album by the late Ming master Zhang Hong that pictorializes a great garden in a way unprecedented and never repeated.

Lecture 12 part 1 GIP 12A: Three Nanga Albums - Japanese Paintings

This video-lecture, in two parts, will be about Japanese Painting, I spent a great deal of time in Japan, doing research and writing about a school of artists called, Nanga. They strove to be the Japanese counterparts of, literati painters in China.

Lecture 12 part 2 GIP 12B: Gyokudo’s Mists and Clouds – the Fourth Nanga Album

In part two of my lectures on Nanga painting in Japan, I will discuss my introduction to Nanga through my early exposure to Gyokudo’s Mists and Clouds, which led me to study in Japan. I will talk about his early life, the loss of his wife and becoming a recluse. He also became a musician. I will give my thoughts on each leaf of this album

Lecture 13 GIP 13: Wu Bin & Zhang Hong Garden Paintings

This second part of my two lectures on garden paintings in China, includes two unique approaches to garden paintings, and rock paintings, with the works of both Zhang Hong and Wu Bin. These two artists broke from traditional Chinese practice, by composing their paintings from particular points of view.

Lecture 14 GIP 14 - Chen Hongshou and his Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove

This lecture is about Chen Hongshou, an artist of the Ming era whose work I have been deeply engaged with from early on in my career. Much has been written about him but not much about his paintings. In this lecture I have a lot to say about a few of his paintings including in particular, the “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove”.

Lecture 15 GIP 15: Luo Ping’s Pictures of Ghosts and Others

This lecture is about the 18th-century artist Luo Ping. You know him already, as the painter of the “Portrait of I-an” that we use for opening and closing credits for this series. Luo Ping has always been a favorite artist of mine, and I’ve collected lots of images of his paintings, and will use them in this lecture. They will be the visuals, with my talk as an accompaniment, to keep you looking at the paintings.

Lecture 17 part 1 GIP 17A: The “Madness” in Bada Shanren’s Paintings Pt. 1

This lecture, in two parts, is about one of the great Individualist artists of early Qing China, Bada Shanren, who was born in 1626 and died in 1705. In my title I put the word “Madness” in quotations marks, leaving open the question of whether of not he was “really mad,” a question ultimately beyond resolution.

Lecture 17 part 2 GIP 17B: The “Madness” in Bada Shanren’s Paintings Pt. 2

Part 1 was based on a paper I presented at a symposium on the artist held at his birthplace Nanchang in 1988; part 2 will be derived in some part from a lecture I gave at Yale University in January 1991, while an exhibition of Bada’s paintings was showing there. In it I discuss such problems as Bada’s possible knowledge of Chan or Zen painting produced back in the Song-Yuan period, and the ways in which the changes in his painting style fit into what we know about his biography and the events of his life.

Lecture 18a GIP 18a - Pictorial Woodblock Printing in China, Preface

In this video lecture I will discuss the tools, materials, techniques, processes related to woodblock printing in China. These include ink rubbings, ink sticks, ink stones, seal stones, carved stones and others. I will also talk about some of the paintings that were created using these tools and processes.

Lecture 18a Part 2 GIP 18a Part 2 - Pictorial Woodblock Printing in China, Preface

This lecture is about Chinese pictorial color prints. I cover multi-block color prints and letter-papers, different woodblock print methods, and discuss notable print series like Hushan shenggai, Jianxia ji, Luoxuan biangu jianpu, Shizhuzhai shuhuapu, and Xixiang-ji. I continue to explore the effects of these print techniques on Japanese art.

Lecture 19a GIP 19a - Sesshu and Chinese Painting (Part 1)

This lecture expands on the observation I made in the postlude to our first series, "A Pure and Remote View", that the great achievements of the ink monochrome landscape paintings of the Song Dynasty are scarcely carried out in post-Song China, but instead were taken up in the Japanese development of ink monochrome landscape paintings.

Lecture 19b GIP 19b - Sesshu and Chinese Painting (Part 2)

In this continuation of my lecture on Sesshu, I discuss his strangely neglected 22-leaf album of ink monochrome landscape paintings. I make the case that it is not only a genuine work by him, but a work that is deeply important in understanding his relationship to Chinese painting, especially that of the Southern Song period. I show his transition from a Chinese influenced artist to becoming a thoroughly Japanese master.

Lecture 19c GIP 19c - More Sesshu Landscapes

In this conclusion of my lecture on Sesshu, I offer no new scholarly materials, but rather simply show some more images of his landscape paintings and talk about them freely. Many details are presented, and several images suggest that Sesshu may very likely have painted some works from locations in China.

Lecture 20 GIP 20- Continuation of Song Professional and Academic Landscape Painting

Large numbers of Chinese paintings from early times were lost, but some were taken to Japan and preserved there. In this lecture, I show and discuss Song landscapes as practiced by the real artists – the professional or vocational masters who made up the main tradition, and whose works we know through their preservation in both China and Japan. Following this, I show and discuss images of paintings of post-Song works that continue the great tradition.

Lecture 21 GIP 21 -BAM Sakaki Hyakusen Lecture

Based on a talk I gave at the Berkeley Art Museum, this video lecture deals with a pair of screens painted by Sakaki Hyakusen. I purchased them and donated them to the museum. The brushwork and compositions suggest that Hyakusen had significant knowledge of Chinese works of art. One of the goals of this talk was to encourage funding to help restore these screens.

Lecture 22a GIP 22a - Chinese Paintings of Beautiful Women/Meiren Pt. 1

This video-lecture, a long one in two parts, will follow an essay I’ve written for publication in the catalog of an exhibition that Julia White, the Asian art curator at our Berkeley Art Museum, and I organized titled “Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting.”

Lecture 22b GIP 22b - Chinese Paintings of Beautiful Women/Meiren Pt. 1

This is the second part of a long lecture on Meiren or beautiful-women paintings in China. The lecture is based partly on an introductory essay I’ve written for the catalog of an exhibition of Meiren paintings that Julia White and I organized for the Berkeley Art Museum.

Lecture 23 GIP 23 - The Huangshan Album Attributed to Hongren

This video lecture is based on a controversial paper that I wrote on the Huangshan Album. The paper was presented and published in China, but has never been published in English, largely owing to the large number of illustrations that would be required to support my argument – a problem solved by the video presentation format. My contention is that the Haugshan Album was incorrectly attributed to Hongren and should be attributed to his less famous and older contemporary, Xiao Yuncong

Lecture 24 GIP 24 - Continuations of Chan Ink Painting
into Ming-Qing and the Prevalence of Type Images

This video lecture is based on a paper that I wrote of the same name. I present here two main arguments. First that Chan painting, generally thought to have ended during the beginning of Ming, continued to be practiced in Chan monasteries in later centuries, though not well preserved. Second, that the motifs and styles which survived in this tradition, could be called type images, which were painted in ink mono-chrome by both amateurs and professionals of the era.

Lecture 25 GIP 25: Freer Funnies

In this lecture, I’ll show and talk about several prank projects carried out while I was a student, about to become a curator, at the Freer Gallery of Art in 1956. When I gave the address of acceptance at the Freer Gallery of Art in D.C. on receiving the Freer Medal, I included in my talk several photographs and a few drawings from the retirement party of Burns A. Stubbs in 1956. People urged me to make them available on the web. This lecture will begin with these drawings and go on to show two other amusing projects I carried out in those early days—this my way of making these available for those interested in the past history of my chosen field, Chinese art studies.

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