Types of Value in 17th Century Chinese Painting. (Introductory stuff.)
Taking on this problem of course raises broader problems: how does one define value, or quality, in art at all? And how, more specifically, in Chinese painting? The first, broadest question I won’t attempt to answer; but I’ll begin by offering a few observations on value in Chinese painting generally, before focusing more on the 17th century and the paintings in the exhibition. (For my purpose I’ll expand the 17th century, as the exhibition does, to include some part of the 18th.)
The Chinese traditionally have been very fond of pithy, catchy slogans that claim to give us the central truth about any subject. These are easy to memorize, all too easy to repeat. Everybody knows the ones for art: “Calligraphy and painting have a common origin” or “Chinese painting doesn’t pursue the outer appearances of things, it pursues the inner spirit” etc. I always cautioned my students to avoid these, since they can have the effect of stifling thought: no need to think more about the subject, just repeat the conventional “truth”. For the question of value in painting, the “great truth” is: It’s all in the brushwork: you don’t have to see the painting as a picture, just look at the brushwork and you’ll see whether it’s a good or bad painting, by a good or bad artist. As my old and admired friend C C. Wang puts it, “You should look at the brushwork, not at the scenery”--by which he means the pictorial qualities, the work as a picture..
Now, I’m not saying that these formulations are entirely without truth; only that they are very partial truths, usually biased in favor of the scholar-elite class who made them up; and they get in the way of serious considerations of any subject. For painting, brushwork is certainly one of the features of a work that we have to pay attention to; but the same is true (with some differences, of course) in Western art--this is not an exclusively Chinese criterion. Scholars of Western oil painting write about the facture or “making” of the painting, or the artist’s “touch”, as an important factor in dealing with authenticity and quality in works by Titian or Rembrandt or Vermeer or van Gogh or any other artist with a distinctive style. I will say more about this as we go on.
As most everybody knows, the Yuan-period writer T’ang Hou made a list of six criteria for judging paintings and put ch’i-yün, the great undefinable quality, at the top, followed by pi-i or “brush conception”; at the bottom of his list he put hsing-ssu , lifelikeness or truth-to-nature, as the last aspect of the painting one should pay attention to. But this was of course because in T’ang Hou’s time literati painting, in which brushwork was emphasized, was on the rise, and the works of the great academy and professional masters of the Sung period were declining in critical acclaim. To apply T’ang Hou’s criteria to Sung painting would be nonsense, as I will try to show in a moment.
I am not arguing, of course, that those who argue for brushwork as the touchstone of quality in Chinese painting really make their judgmeents purely on that basis; of course they don’t--they have to be affected, like anyone else, by other aspects of the paintings. It is only on a theoretical plane, or perhaps rhetorical, that they make their claim. But it the claim, or the dogma, of the primacy of brushwork has nonetheless had a limiting and negative effect, I think, on our ability to discuss questions of quality for Chinese painting while taking full account of the real issues--we feel somehow guiilty if we talk or write about the painting as a good or bad picture, as though we are afraid that Tung Ch’i-ch’ang will come back and denounce us as philistine.
How has this unfortunate situation come about? The problem begins when early critics and theorists such as Tang Hou were confronted with the striking innovations in painting being made by artists such as Chao Meng-fu, and had not yet developed a critical vocabulary adequate for writing about this new kind of painting, with its complex archaistic references and other expressive complexities. They fall back on vague, undefinable qualities such as ch’i-yün and “brush-conception” to praise the artists. Later, connoisseurs who earned some part of their living by making judgements of paintings for new collectors, or for collectors not yet sure of their own eyes, needed answers to the question, asked by the client, “Why is this painting good, and that one bad?” The answer had to stress the undefinable qualities, perceptible only to the cultivated eye, if the connoisseur was to maintain his prestige and exclusive capacity to make these judgements. He couldn’t say “Because this was done by a highly talented and skilled artist and that by an unimaginative and clumsy one,” or “because this one is an original work by a good artist, while that one is by a copyist, and I will show you why,” since those answers would lead to distinctions that the client could see for himself. Instead he would say “Because this one has good brushwork and that one bad,” and add that only the connoisseur’s eye trained by many years of studying paintings could tell the difference. We are all heirs to this system, and must respect it as historically important on the one hand, but recognize on the other its inadequacy for making analytical and objective judgements, as best we can, of the paintings we encounter.
Let me give an example to show how T’ang Hou’s criteria aren’t useful for justments of quality in Sung painting.
S,S. When in 1957 a section of the famous handscroll by Wang Hsi-meng titled “A Thousand Li of Rivers & Mountains” was published in color in a Chinese magazine, painting specialists were very excited and imagined it must be a great masterwork of the blue-and-green landscape style. It was a genuine, famous work from the time of Emperor Hui-tsung, done for him by a gifted artist, Wang Hsi-meng, who died in his early twenties. When a group of us went to China in 1977, it was one of the first things we asked to see.
S,S. But it turned out to be a disappointment; the story was better than the painting. Young Wang Hsi-meng wasn’t really such a highly trained and capable painter, and the scroll was monotonous: the same blue and green mountains, trees, waterfalls etc. for yard after yard (meter after meter).
S,S. It was obvious that other people had felt the same way: the first five or six feet were darkened by exposure and showed signs of wear; but after that the silk was light, the colors fresh, all like new. Those who had looked at it over the centuries had rolled a bit, become tired of it, and given up. It was a symbolic gift from the artist to Hui-tsung, portraying the emperor’s prosperous and flourishing realm; its value was more political than artistic.
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