Boston MFA lecture, November 2002 ("Secret Spring" album)
I have been coming to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for over fifty years, and have many pleasant memories of visits here. The first was as a fellowship student sent by the Freer Gallery of Art during my first year there, 1950-51; I was well treated by Kojiro Tomita and, especially, by Robert Treat Paine, whom I remember with affection and respect—among other things he gave me, a student out of nowhere, a rare book he owned, reproducing a work by one of the artists I was working on. That kindness has stayed with me for many years, as an example of how we should act and usually don’t. Across the river I met Langdon Warner and Ben Rowland, along with younger people who were to be my colleagues, notably Dick Edwards and Michael Sullivan. Later, during the MFA years of my friend Jan Fontein, I was a frequent visitor; and on the other side of the river I lectured often enough. Now Tom Wu, another very old friend, has invited me to give a second MFA lecture—the first was a rather inconsequential talk on quality in Chinese painting--but so late in my career that instead of early or middle or even late Cahill, you get late-late Cahill, jaded with most literati painting, absorbed in kinds of Chinese painting he himself could not have imagined taking seriously thirty years ago. Robert Treat Paine would raise an elegant if uncensorious eyebrow, But then, he probably would have done the same upon hearing that the MFA had acquired and exhibited a Chinese erotic album. We live in a different world. So I dedicate this lecture, oddly perhaps, to him, the person with whom this place is most pleasantly associated in my mind. Let us not, in our rush into the 21st century, leave behind altogether the patrician and humane values that Robert Treat Paine stood for.
Shortly after this lecture was announced, Tom Wu informed me that some people were asking: how could such a prominent scholar be talking about such trivial material? If more than a very few people still feel that way by the end of this lecture, I will have failed, because I hope to persuade you that the best of Chinese erotic paintings, the things I’ll be showing, aren’t trivial at all. On the other hand, you may still wonder: why is such a prominent scholar showing us these dirty pictures? and against that I have no defense, except to point out that the centerpiece of my lecture is an album titled “Secret Spring” bought and exhibited last year by the MFA, so that at least I have a co-defendant in Tom Wu.
To understand the art-historical standing of that album as I want to do, we need to begin much further back and outline the development of erotic painting in China. Leaving aside early literary references and a few archaeological finds with rather crude erotic pictures on them, we begin in the late Ming dynasty, the first half of the seventeenth century, with what appears to be the earliest Chinese erotic painting and printing to survive.
S,S. (van Gulik prints) Erotic prints from that period—or, in one case, a set of woodblocks from which they were printed—have been published by Robert van Gulik (the same Dutch diplomat who wrote the Judge Dee detective novels). These were imported early to Japan, and had a lot to do with the development of erotic prints there, and early Ukiyo-e more generally. The pattern they follow is simple: each leaf, or all but an introductory leaf, portrays a couple making love in one posture or another. This is, as many of you know, the same pattern seen in early European erotica, notably the early 16th century series of engravings I Modi by Giulio Romano and others. It continues to be the preferred model in most Japanese erotica, down into the 19th century. Japanese erotic handscrolls, of which some fine examples were exhibited and published here recently, mostly take this form.
S,S. Erotic painting in the Ming appears also to have been made up of series pictures of that kind, in either handscroll or album form—we read of works by Tang Yin and Qiu Ying with titles such as “The Ten Glorious Positions.” The earliest work of Chinese erotic painting known to me that can be reliably ascribed to a known artist is a signed album by a minor master working in Suzhou named Wang Sheng; another of his works is dated 1614, so this must be around that time. The first leaf depicts the couple in a romantic moment on the shore of a lake; the rest are all pictures of couples copulating. A homosexual scene ends the series. This pattern corresponds to erotic fiction before the late Ming, which chronicles in detail the dissipations of the main participants in one sex scene after another, without much of narrative or other material intervening.
(S,S) With the appearance of the great late Ming novel Jin Ping Mei, The Plumin the Golden Vase (a translation by David Roy is underway, two volumes so far), followed in the early Qing by Li Yu’s Rou Pu Tuan and others, a new model with far richer potential is introduced to Chinese fiction. Now the erotic acts are contextualized, elaborate human interactions are chronicled between a larger cast of characters, and the expression of complex and nuanced feelings becomes possible. As if in response to this development in literature, and quite likely inspired by it, artists of the early Qing, especially those working in Suzhou, create a new type of erotic album in which, similarly, the openly erotic scenes are interspersed with others depicting courtships and seductions, romantic interludes and scenes of voyeurism. These I call part-erotic albums. (Identify it)
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