The four papers in this session all deal with departures from the mainline canon for Chinese painting (insofar as it can be defined), or alternatives to it; and since many of you are not Chinese art specialists, I thought I should fill in, before commenting on the papers, a brief outline of how that canon came into being and how it was maintained. What I will say is mostly well known to serious specialists in the subject, although we have frequently talked and written as though we didn't know it, as though the canon represented the whole of Chinese painting, or at least all that we need pay attention to. I will speak briefly also about studies made in recent decades that have significantly broken with this habit of thinking of the canonical schools and artists as virtually the entirety of Chinese painting. A personal note: by turning attention to areas outside the canon, I have opened myself to admonitions from well-meaning colleagues about how doing this is hurting my reputation. Serious scholars, they believe, do not waste their time on trivia.
The crucial circumstances can be quickly stated. Out of a huge output of paintings produced in China over the centuries, for many kinds of use and enjoyment, only a small part was considered "suitable for refined appreciation," as Chinese writers put it, and so worthy of collecting and preserving. This small part, which came to make up the canon, was composed mainly of works considered to be genuinely from the hands of prestigious name artists; and, since the men who made the judgments and wrote the books were themselves, by definition, members of the educated literati class, the kind of painting done by the literati or scholar-amateur artists, as opposed to the professional masters, was strongly favored, especially for the later (post-Song, or post-13th century) periods. Paintings outside this body of name-artist works were less likely to survive, since scroll paintings need care and regular remounting for their preservation. Sometimes the rejected paintings survived under false pretenses: attributions to older and more highly-regarded artists, or false identifications of subjects, which for sharp-eyed Chinese collectors were reasons for rejecting them as fakes, but which we can now try to strip away so as to recognize the pictures as what they are.
S,S. A good example is this large landscape (at left) by Sun Chun-tse, a 14th century artist who followed the style of the Southern Sung court master Ma Yuan, a style that was considered by literati critics to be unworthy or unsuitable for later artists to imitate. No serious collector in China would have included a work by Sun Chun-tse as such in his collection. Sun's paintings survive almost entirely in Japan (as does the one on the right) where they can, by contrast, attain the status of designated Important Cultural Properties. The work at left is an exception: we know from the mounting style and label that it was transmitted down to modern times in China. But only because the Sun Chun-tse signature in lower left (which matches exactly the ones in Japan) was partially hidden by a stroke of ink, and a label added attributing it "positively" to Ma Yuan, the Sung master, himself. Rejected in China as a fake Ma Yuan, it was on the New York market for several years as an anonymous Ming painting; I finally bought it for a modest price and later discovered the signature. Chinese paintings outside the canon could survive under special conditions: misrepresentation, as in this case; export to Japan (Chan or Zen painting is an important example, as treated in Yoshi's paper) or, from the early 20th century, export to Europe and America., where the "low taste" of foreigners preserved many fine paintings that were less likely to survive in China; preservation in a tomb, buried with the occupant--several examples of that are known.
The formation of the canon, although earlier beginnings might be recognized, was mainly a phenomenon of the middle and later Ming, 15th to mid-17th century, when a succession of prestigious collectors, critics, and artists (frequently the same people in multiple roles) made lists and lineages of the old masters most worth collecting and imitating in one's own paintings. The lineage coming down from later Song academy painting, to which Sun Chun-tse belonged, was mostly rejected for the later periods, although it continued to be popular among non-elite audiences.
S,S. ("Dong Yuan" with Dong Q-c insc.; one of Xiaozhong Xianda album.) This canonizing process culminates in the writings of the enormously influential artist-critic Dong Qichang (1555-1636), where it takes a more or less definitive shape, at least in outline, in his famous, or notorious, "theory of the Southern and Northern Schools." It is no coincidence that this fixing of the canon coincides with the period in which sweeping economic and social changes in China greatly increased the numbers of families affluent enough to collect art. Old-guard connoisseurs, or those able to pass as that, served as consultants to new collectors, enjoying their hospitality and generosity in exchange for advice. Their published writings, along with books offering rules for refined living, annotated lists of famous surviving works, and collection catalogues, appeared in unprecedented numbers. The firming of the canon, then, was in part the outcome of the promulgation of it to a broader audience.
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