James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

James Cahill - Professor Emeritus, History of Art - UC Berkeley

Welcome to James Cahill's website, which continues his legacy and makes accessible to all colleagues, students, and enthusiasts for Asian art, a diversity of materials: his unpublished writings, lectures, collections of images, and two series of video-recorded lectures. One is titled A Pure and Remote View: Visualizing Early Chinese Landscape Painting.  The other is titled Gazing into the Past: Scenes from Later Chinese & Japanese Painting.  

James Cahill recorded several more video lectures which were completed after his death, and which are now newly posted in the series Gazing into the Past. Both of these series are posted for free viewing on the website of the Institute of East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley, but can also be accessed through this website. The lectures will eventually be made available, through the IEAS, on sets of disks for higher-resolution imagery and easier viewing.

This website also includes a series titled Responses and Reminiscences, made up of essays on many topics, mostly drawing on experiences from Cahill's long career; and the series CLP (Cahill Lectures and Papers), as well as the long file titled CYCTIE or Ching Yuan Chai Treasury of Imperishable Ephemera, a collection of his non-scholarly writings, including a lot of comic verses and song lyrics composed for UC Berkeley Faculty Club Christmas parties and other academic occasions, writings from his early years, and a Shakespearean fragment (recommended) titled Hamlet At Wittenberg.  

A documentary about James Cahill is currently being made by Skip Sweeney and Video Free America, and fundraising efforts are under way.  Please visit the documentary’s website, www.gazingintothepast.com, to see a preview and donate whatever you can to help fund this important film celebrating the life and work of James Cahill.

Trailer on YouTube:  https://youtu.be/YHIXBr1q1aI

Documentary Website:  http://www.gazingintothepast.com

Facebook Page:  https://www.facebook.com/james.cahill.documentary

James Cahill 1926-2014
In Loving Memory by Howard Rogers and Nick and Sarah Cahill

The firmament of Chinese painting studies lost one of its brightest stars on February 14th, 2014 with the death of James Francis Cahill at age eighty-seven while at home in Berkeley, California.   Fluent in both Japanese and Chinese, Cahill was a brilliant scholar, an articulate and dynamic lecturer and teacher, and a writer without peer in his field.  Spanning a period of over sixty years, his lectures, articles, and books defined new parameters for his field of study, influencing generations of students at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught from 1965 to 1994, as well as students, scholars, and collectors throughout the world, especially in China, where all of his books have been translated into Chinese and where he lectured for some years in both Beijing and Hangzhou.

As a teacher Cahill was notable for his exceptional generosity, sharing with students and other researchers the fruits of his own years of study; as a scholar, he tackled issues and groups of artists ranging from the birth of literati painting (in his dissertation), to fantastic and eccentric artists of the early 17th century, to the influence of Chinese painting on Japanese artists of the 18th and 19th century, and to paintings of women during the 17th to 19th centuries.  A good number of these topics, and his research on them, formed the basis for exhibitions of paintings that explored the issues and provided at least provisional answers to the questions that Cahill had posed for the very first time. The College Art Association awarded him its Lifetime Distinguished Teaching of Art History award in 1995, and at its 2004 annual meeting devoted a Distinguished Scholar session to him, with papers by colleagues and former students. In 2007 the College Art Association presented him with its Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art.

In 1973 he was a member of the Chinese Archaeology Delegation, the first group of art historians to visit China from the U.S., and in 1977 he returned to China as chairman of the Chinese Old Painting Delegation, which was given unprecedented access to painting collections there. In the years after that he visited China frequently, lecturing at art academies and universities, organizing and participating in symposia, seeing exhibitions and collections, doing research.

His first major book, Chinese Painting (Skira, 1960) is still widely read and has been reprinted many times. He was also joint author of The Freer Chinese Bronzes, vol. I, 1967. He undertook a five-volume series on later Chinese paintings, of which three volumes were published: Hills Beyond a River: Chinese Painting of the Yuan Dynasty (1976); Parting At the Shore: Chinese Painting of the Early and Middle Ming Dynasty (1978); and The Distant Mountains: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Dynasty (1982). His encyclopedic knowledge and near-photographic memory made possible his Index of Early Chinese Painters and Paintings (1980, reprinted 2003, a monumental compilation of all known works. Translations of his books have been published in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, as well as several European languages.

During the 1978-79 academic year he was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, delivering a series of lectures titled “The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in 17th Century Chinese Painting.” These were published in 1982 as a book with the same title, which in the following year was awarded the College Art Association’s Morey Prize for the best art history book of 1982. His Franklin D. Murphy lectures at the University of Kansas were published in 1988 as Three Alternative Histories of Chinese Painting, and his Bampton Lectures given at Columbia University appeared in 1994 as The Painter’s Practice: How Artists Lived and Worked in Traditional China. His Reischauer Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1993 were published in 1996 as The Lyric Journey: Poetic Painting in China and Japan, and a fifth lecture series, the Getty Lectures, were presented at the University of Southern California in 1994 as “The Flower and the Mirror: Representations of Women in Late Chinese Painting.” They remain unpublished, but another book that grew out of them: Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Vernacular Painting in High Qing China, was published in January, 2011. A number of his books and articles have attained an especially wide readership in Chinese translation in China and Taiwan.

In 2010 the Smithsonian Institution awarded him the Charles Lang Freer Medal for his lifetime contributions to the history of Asian and Near Eastern art.  His major late-life project was a series of video-recorded lectures titled A Pure and Remote View: Visualizing Early Chinese Landscape Painting and Gazing into the Past, a collaboration with the Institute for East Asian Studies, available on this website for free viewing.  Before his death he recorded another group of video lectures which will be made available in coming months.

As a connoisseur of Chinese painting Cahill had few peers. Given his phenomenal visual memory and his passionate love of his subject, it is not to be wondered that he began collecting paintings while still a Fulbright student in Japan during the 1950s.  In those years most collectors concentrated on Song and Yuan paintings of the 12th to 14th centuries, so Cahill had little competition in bidding for Ming-Qing paintings of the 15th to 20th centuries as well as Japanese paintings of the Nanga school that were based on Chinese painting done by literati artists.  His very significant collection of several hundred paintings has been distributed among his former wife Dorothy Cahill, his children, and the UC Berkeley Art Museum.

Fortunately, Cahill gathered his lectures, reminiscences, essays, lyrics, childhood poetry, stories from his life, and writings about music, politics, society, art, and a variety of topics, all on www.jamescahill.info.  This website stands as a tribute to his scholarship, his cultural tastes, and his boundless creative imagination.  James Cahill is survived by two older children, Nicholas and Sarah Cahill, two younger sons, Julian and Benedict Cahill, and six grandchildren: Fiona, Maggie, Abigail, Nora, and Phoebe Cahill, and Miranda Sanborn.  A memorial service will be held later this year at the Berkeley Art Museum.

Click to view "A Song of Experience: James Cahill by Himself"
Orientations, vol. 37, no. 1, January/February 2006, p. 41.