Uses of Sketches by Chinese Painters (Paper for Lavin/Millon conference on Sketches and Creativity, May 23-25, 2001) James Cahill
I’m pleased to be one of the speakers on this occasion, honoring Hank Millon and Irving Lavin, especially because I have a comfortable feeling of being here in a familiar role. There was a period of some years in the 1970s-80s when I found myself serving on a number of important art-history committees and boards, frequently with one or both of these two eminences as fellow members or chairs, committees on which I represented the non-West. This was a time when the field was realizing the need to open up a bit to that large outer region, shall we call it, which had remained somewhat outside traditional Western art history, and I and a few others were recruited, in effect, to represent it on the great committees and boards. Also in CAA: when Irving co-organized a session on child, primitive, and mad artists, I was brought in to present a Chinese mad artist. I’m teasing them, of course; actually, both have been extremely supportive over the years, both of me and of non-Western art studies, and I’m grateful for that, and happy to be back serving my simple function again, at an event honoring their retirements. Resuming my familiar role of showing how the Chinese weren’t like us, I’ll speak on why Irving’s European model of the sketch as facilitating or even embodying creativity doesn’t appear to apply to the practice of Chinese artists, and suggest a few possible reasons why not.
S,S. A single case that might fit that model--and even this is not entirely clear--is a group of sketches from the Buddhist cave site of Dunhuang, 8th-9th century in date (and thus predating by centuries any comparable extant materials from the West, so far as I know), drawn with brushes in ink on paper (a Chinese invention), sealed in a cave in the 11th century, acquired by the great French sinologue Paul Pelliot, and now in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. The sketches were published first by Jao Tsung-i, and later, with an extensive study, by my former student Sarah Fraser. Most of them appear to be preparatory sketches for wall paintings, or parts of wall paintings, or for portable paintings on silk, and indeed many can be matched up closely with surviving finished works in both forms.
S. S. Some, however, are what Fraser terms “practice sketches,” identifiable as that by their being loosely drawn, partial images in random arrangements filling otherwise unused areas of the paper. Some of these reveal the artist trying out different ways to draw parts of his picture (as at left, the head and foot); others, like those seen above the guardian figure at right, are simply sketches of unrelated motifs, and would appear to represent the anonymous workshop artists training their hands toward the goal of being able to draw freehand the full images, in preparatory drawings for finished works.
S--. A comparable finished painting from Dunhuang, one of those now in the British Museum, impresses us as less powerful, for reasons that have often been observed. That same preference for spontaneity over finish lay behind the reputation of the divine Wu Daozi, greatest of Chinese figure masters, who painted grand figural compositions on the walls of temples in 8th century Chang’an, the capital. He reportedly instructed his assistants to color his works only lightly, or even leave them uncolored, so as not to obscure the brush drawing.
S,S. From descriptions of his paintings we can imagine his figures in dynamic postures, turning in space, with some parts convincingly foreshortened. (No work of his survives, even in reliable copies; these are two more of the Dunhuang sketches) And all this he accomplished without underdrawing of any kind, making his images come into being swiftly, as if magically--an early critic writes that Heaven seemed to have lent him its creative powers.
S,S. (Two more.) Crowds would assemble to watch in awe as he drew freehand a perfect circle as a halo around the head of some divinity. The unmatched ability of Tang-period artists to render volume in line drawing must have culminated in his work. Of course we can assume that Wu Daozi, and later artists as well, in their long pursuit of this transcendental skill, covered all the waste paper they could find with practice sketches like those from Dunhuang. But no other examples survive, nor is there any written record of the practice, so far as I know.
S.S. What do survive, and are mentioned in texts, are preparatory drawings, huagao in Chinese. Xia Wenyan, in his 1365 Tuhui Baojian, writes: “The preparatory drawings of old artists are called sketches (fenben); many connoisseurs have collected and treasured them. This is because, in their rough and unplanned look, they have a wonderful spontaneity.”[1] Surviving fenben are not especially rough or unplanned, but rather highly finished preliminary drawings or cartoons for wall or scroll or screen paintings. These are two examples from a large group with an old attribution to Wu Daozi; they appear to be 13th or 14th century in date.
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