James Cahill's discussant paper for "Visual Dimensions of Chinese Culture" symposium, March 26, 1999
Both of these excellent papers fit very well the theme of this session, "Artistic Production in Practical Context," and in most respects offer model approaches to this problem, one that increasingly occupies both art historians and general historians. It is a relatively new direction of research, impeded as it was in earlier times by the well-known reluctance of traditional Chinese scholars and their latter-day followers to recognize that the creation of calligraphy and painting had any practical context at all. Studies pursuing this direction are thus necessarily revisionist, as are both these papers. Both show how "cultural capital" could be turned to political purpose, whether by an emperor or by a highly respected scholar-calligrapher.
Pat's paper, an excerpt from her book-in-progress, indicates the direction that her expected revisionism is going to take. Against the standard portrayal of Hui-tsung as a good painter and connoisseur but a weak emperor, an account that linked his failings as monarch with his fervor for aesthetic pursuits, she sees his multilevel engagement with art as in large part politically motivated, aimed at "making his court the cultural center of the realm." The thesis is generally convincing, at least to this reader. I especially admire her section on how Hui-tsung adapted his strategies to the changing conditions of the time, such as the spread of printing (pp. 23-24)--this is new and enlightening. For most of the paper, I could offer only small suggestions, such as the wisdom of distancing one's self a bit more from the claims made by the participants in the situation under scrutiny. For instance, instead of writing that we today can see Li Gonglin as "painting mostly for self-expression," it might be better to write that we can see him "as having claimed to paint mostly for self-expression"--the nature of his paintings, such as the scroll in Beijing with 1,286 horses and 143 horsemen, seems ill-matched to the idea of self-expression, which for him must have been more a matter of rhetoric than of real intent. And the suggestion in her Final Remarks that Hui-tsung's aesthetic bent and real love of the arts "do not mean that he was a romantic preoccupied with expressing his individual genius" may, I feel, be somewhat misleading--no one would argue that, and the deliberate impersonality of his style indicates that he wouldn't have either. That ideal belonged rather to the other camp, the literati artists, who claimed it for themselves even when (as with Li Gonglin) their paintings denied it. I would say that generally the distinctions in theory and taste and practice between Confucian literati and court, or outer and inner court, could be sharpened in some of the arguments.
When, for instance, toward the end of her paper, Pat credits Hui-tsung's "pushing his court painters to paint in a highly descriptive style, probably knowing such technical virtuosity was not easily matched by artists working outside the court" as one of his positive achievements, she does not take enough account, I would say, of the growing critical disfavor for this "highly descriptive style" outside the court. To write that he "rejected the distinction between court and literati culture implicit in much literati art criticism" again puts too positive a spin, perhaps, on what looks more like a defensive reaction of someone for whom old values seemed threatened.
Pat acknowledges (pp. 1-2), that the "amateur ideal" promoted by Su Shih and others "challenged court taste in painting" and calligraphy, then raises the question of how important these challenges were in weakening the cultural centrality of the court. Not so important, her answer would appear to be; very important, I would be more inclined to say, putting more weight, again, on the inner court- outer court distinction. The literati-court divergence in such basic matters as stylistic directions and criteria of evaluation may mark the first major bifurcation in the Chinese painting tradition, and was to prove decisive. But the question cannot be addressed effectively without attention to the paintings themselves. I will return to that point later.
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