The Problem of Value in Seventeenth Century Chinese Painting (James Cahill, February 2001) (Jason: see note at end.)
Introduction
Writing as someone who in years past has published two books, several exhibition catalog texts, and quite a few articles about 17th century Chinese painting, I can say that it is no less a pleasure and a challenge to return to this familiar terrain for yet another encounter. The problems and rewards of late Ming-early Ch’ing painting are inexhaustible, if only because so many schools and movements and stylistic directions make it up. This same extraordinary diversity, which we see as a positive condition, was viewed by writers and artists of the time, however, as a symptom of decline and weakness. I began the last chapter of my book The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting by quoting three major masters of the time giving their assessments of what had gone wrong in painting, and what the remedy might be. Wang Hui wrote in 1669:
“It is indeed a pity that painting of the present day has reached a new low, a decline occasioned by an overabundance of different ‘schools’. . . This predilection for schools stems from the lowering of artistic taste and the vulgarization of style.” (He lists four leading schools of his time, the Che, Wu, Yün-chien--Tung Ch’i-ch’ang and his followers--and the Lou-tung, his own. He continues:) “In addition to the painters in these main schools, those belonging to smaller branches and those claiming to be ‘individualists’ are too numerous to be counted. At any rate, with the existence of the four main styles and the handing down of misconceptions from generation to generation, there has been as a result the exhaustion of artistic excellence . . . To put it briefly, painters of Yün-chien laugh at the Che school and followers of Lou-tung scold the Wu school. In such confusion, the students, with brush in hand, are at such a complete loss that it is virtually impossible for them to penetrate the secrets of the art.”
The other two artist-writers quoted were Wang Yüan-ch’i and Shih-t’ao. Wang Yüan-ch’i agreed generally with Wang Hui (both were adherents of the Orthodox school) but saw salvation in a strict adherence to the right stylistic lineage, as it had been traced through a succession of old masters and continued in his own practice by Tung Ch’i-ch’ang. Shih-t’ao took a diametrically opposite position: he wanted to put an end altogether to imitation of the old masters and paint as if from a fresh, pristine beginning. Different as these three were in their paintings and their beliefs, they were in agreement that painting in their time was in a state of crisis. For us, by contrast, this is a great age of painting, producing a dazzling panoply of major masters and exciting stylistic innovations. We can take time, before turning to the paintings, to consider some of the factors that underlay the great diversity in 17th century painting.
Chinese painting after the Sung dynasty enters, I have argued in recent writings and lectures, a condition we can call post-historical. I took the term from writers such as Hans Belting and Arthur Danto who point out that while western art (primarily European) exhibits a traceable, seemingly orderly art-historical development through successive periods (medieval, early to late Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo/Romantic/Neo-classical etc.) up to Post-Impressionism, no such developmental pattern can be discerned in it after that. The same is true, I think, for Chinese painting after Sung. This is not the place to make that argument at length; I mean here to suggest only that the great diversity of 17th century painting is a natural outcome of that breakdown of developmental order--which was, to be sure, exacerbated by the social and political breakdown of that period. Even in an age when the best artists no longer feel constrained to commit themselves to any particular lineage or tradition, however, and enjoy far more latitude of stylistic choice, most of them are still inclined to follow artists and trends of their time or their recent past. Accordingly, we can classify painting of the period, following Chinese practice, into categories: Individualists, Orthodox, archaistic/bizarre, literati amateurs, etc. But these are only a tool for organizing our accounts. Most artists were affected also by regional affiliations, which permit us to write about a Nanjing school, an Anhui school, and others.
Other factors that underlay artists’ choices of styles included the social and economic situations in which they found themselves, and, closely tied to this, their educational backgrounds and training as painters. A major calligrapher such as Wang To would naturally be drawn to a painting style that built on the skills with the brush and abstract design with which he was already endowed through the practice of calligraphy. A more or less self-taught painter such as Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, committed as he was to the project of “imitating” ancient masters, obviously would not attempt to use the polished, professional ways of painting. For Chen Hung-shou, who was obliged to earn his living mainly as a painter, the scholar-amateur styles were of no use--although he was a classically educated scholar himself, he never attained the political rank or status that authorized the artist, so to speak, to paint in an amateurish manner, and also created a demand for his works among those who wanted them as emblems of that status.
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