James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Big Projects Blog, 2013/1/5

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Created on Saturday, 05 January 2013 21:43

Written by James Cahill

Big Projects Blog, 2013/1/5

- Biggest News: I’m deeply and seriously involved in a project to help the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou--the oldest art academy in China, the one most open to foreign ideas (even when they differ from Chinese tradition), and my “home base” in China--they are also taking on the function of posting my video-lectures--a project to help them increase their library facilities by giving them most of mine, thousands of books. (I gave first choice to UCB’s East Asian Library, but they have most of them  already.) The Librarian at the Hangzhou Academy, Prof. Zhang Jian, and two assistants are coming here in March for 2-1/2 weeks to work on listing all the books for Chinese customs and arranging for their shipment.

And in the course of correspondence about how the books would be used, I argued that some of them--the ones that aren’t of the expensive reproduction-book type--should be available for borrowing, so that they can be read, not just looked at in a memorial library that’s a monument to me. They have agreed to this, in principle. That insistence of mine brought a message from Prof. Hong Zaixin, a major mover in this project and my main contact with the Academy, to which I responded with this paragraph--worth quoting, I think, as an expression of one of my deepest beliefs:

“Dear Zaixin, What you refer to as my democratic belief and anti-elitist mindset--I appreciate the thought, and take it as a compliment--is commonplace among people of my generation and status, especially here in Berkeley. If some people are choosing to forget the great legacy of F.D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, Johnson and the Great Society, and all that to pay attention to latter-day elitists, that’s a perversion of our national past. Those of you who grew up in China still preserve--however much your mind has opened over the years, and changed--some remnant of an older way of thinking. Whatever I can do to help convey the all-men-are-equal idea to elsewhere in the world, I want to do. And letting everybody (or lots of qualified people) read my books, not just gaze at them on library shelves and library cards, is an important move in that direction. So I’ll continue to press for that.”

Zaixin also commented on the quality of my writing, wondering where it came from. The right answer is: from extensive reading while young (see my Little Leather Library blog of July 9^th, 2012, about reading these small-size classics while sitting in a tree). But in later years, it came from doing lots of both reading and writing, all the time, and choosing good models. To his question about where the best American non-fiction writing style came from, I answered: from, above all, articles in “The New Yorker”, especially those written during the early years by E. B. White, who had more to do than anyone else, I think, with establishing a great model for American prose writing. If you know him only from “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little,” do some more reading. I myself am now reading, and re-reading for some, his short pieces collected in “E. B. White: Writings From the New Yorker, 1927-1976” (ed. by Rebecca Dale, Harper, 1991; paperback reprint, 2006) and admiring his essays on Walden and “Visitors To the Pond,” on “Liberalism” and other political themes, on the death of James Thurber, and all the rest. He could serve as a model also for how to express strong views on moral issues without sounding preachy.

I wrote Zaixin about how every good American writer used to use, and teachers used to recommend to students, White’s reworking of a writing guide his teacher Strunk had written into what we called “Strunk and White,” (From the internet: “White's expansion and modernization of Strunk's 1935 revised edition yielded the writing style manual informally known as Strunk & White, the first edition of which sold approximately two million copies in 1959. In the ensuing four decades, more than ten million copies of three editions have been sold.”) Students and young writers heard so regularly and insistently about this that some of them rebelled, in the 1960s, and argued for a broader range of acceptable writing styles, seeing Strunk and White as “elitist.” But that’s another story: back to mine.

- Consoling Message To Friend who wrote that he/she had failed to get an applied-for grant:

Sorry to learn you didn’t get the grant for ----. And you are right to be optimistic about it and resolve to try again with an improved proposal. It’s a necessary part of the whole academic game, raising funds for one’s projects--I remember doing it in old days. And making fun of it--for several years I wrote or co-wrote the scripts for Faculty Club Christmas Party performances, and in 1983, when U.C. was badly in need of more funding, I wrote one based on the 18^th century ‘Beggar’s Opera.” We persuaded our Chancellor Mike Heyman to join in as the leader of the outlaw band (expanding his name to Mike HighWAYman) and our band of robbers, who in the original sing “Let us take the road,/ Hark I hear the sound of coaches,/ The hour of attack approaches,/ To your arms, brave boys, and load!” etc., our group sang as foundation-grant-seekers:

Song, MacDestry and Chorus (Tune: “Let Us Take the Road”)

Let us seize the chance—

Hark, I hear the approach of deadlines—

We’ll join the academic breadlines

And pursue foundation grants.

See the pen I hold--

So prettily we write the jargon

Our project sounds like a bargain

And they send us pots of gold!

And it went on to elaborate, with songs based on those great originals, on how different UC departments turned their expertise to making illegal money--It was a bit too esoteric for the tipsy & rowdy holiday audience, and not one of our great successes, but I am still fond of it. (You can read it on my website, in the  “Ching Yuan Chai Treasury of Imperishable Ephemera,” a collection of my non-scholarly writings, under “Writings of JC”.)

So, to coin a phrase, Better Luck Next Time! Jim

- Words of 2012: A NY Times page on this matter includes the word “gladly”, as used by--I think it was Al Gore. Anyway, I can never see this word without thinking of a certain optically-challenged mammal. The old story goes: A line in the hymn, as sung in church, went “Gladly the cross I’d bear,” meaning: If I had been there when Jesus made the final march to Golgotha, I would gladly have taken up the cross and carried it for him. But children in the congregation misheard it and thought of it as a hymn addressed to an animal named “Gladly, the cross-eyed bear.”

- More to come: I’ll be writing about an expansion of the plan for supplementing the library at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou (see above) into a grander plan: to establish some kind of center for the collection and distribution of digital images of works of art, especially (for my contribution) Chinese and Japanese paintings. I want to do whatever I can, while I can, to advance the practice of visual art history in China, where--as you know if you’ve been reading these blogs--the other kind, the “verbal” (based mainly in reading texts and using them to write more texts) has mostly been practiced. (I’ve called this “Cahill’s Dream” and compared it to the vision of the old man in Uday Shankar’s film “Kalpana”--see previous blog.) And I’ll be writing about the arrangements I’m making with assistants and collaborators to continue producing and posting the video-lectures in the “Gazing Into the Past” series (of which six are already posted here--see at left). It’s a busy and productive time late in the long life of

Yours truly, James Cahill . 1/27/2013.

New Year’s Blog for the End of 2012

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Created on Thursday, 27 December 2012 21:43

Written by James Cahill

New Year’s Blog for the End of 2012

FIRST AND MOST IMPORTANTLY: SEE THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF BIG NEWS AT THE END, Then come back to reading this.

- Several nights ago, on Sunday the 23^rd, Turner Classic Movies showed as its Sunday Silent feature Carl Dreyer’s “Joan of Arc” (also called “The Passion of Joan of Arc”) made in 1928. In my Movie Notes (written for my sons Julian and Benedict and posted here under “Writings of JC”) I wrote of it:

“Silent masterwork by Danish director, starring a great actor, Renee Falconetti, who appeared only in this one film. Intensely moving, don’t watch casually. ‘Convinced the world that movies could be art,’ says the jacket blurb, and it’s right. I remember my first seeing it;  you will remember yours. (Seen again: this is of all films the most unlike any other. Some consider Falconetti’s performance to be the finest on film—it seems beyond human capacity.  The young priest sympathetic to Joan is Antonin Artaud, himself a famous actor, and promoter of a rather poisonous doctrine of a ‘theater of cruelty.’)”

Last Sunday I intended to watch only the beginning, to call back my memories of that greatest of film performances, which indeed seems more than a performance, more than acting, somehow moving into the transcendental, the sublime. But in the end I couldn’t look away, and sat there mesmerized through the whole, through the terrible scenes of her death by burning. Looking up more information on Maria Renee Falconetti I see that she did make one other film, now forgotten, and was mostly a comedienne. Dreyer reportedly meant originally to use a famous movie actress such as Lillian Gish in the role, but ended with Falconetti, and somehow drew out of her--with harsh treatment, it’s said, that made her physically uncomfortable--this mesmerizing series of close-up studies of her face, her responses to the brutal questioning of her tormenters, which make up about half the footage of the film.  Nothing like it has been done before or since, and one can’t imagine anything like it being attempted again. If you haven’t seen it, buy the best disk you can get--a recent restoration with a musical score taken from old compositions that somehow fits the images--and watch it over and over. It will enrich your life.

- From the Sublime to the Ridiculous-- but the nostalgically and enjoyably ridiculous: The next afternoon Turner Classic Movies showed, and I happened to tune in on (without having noticed it in their programming) the original “Babes in Toyland,” with Victor Herbert music and starring Laurel and Hardy. Made in 1938, it must have been shown in that or the following year at the Union Theater on Main St. in Fort Bragg, the small fishing and lumber town in Mendocino County on the Pacific coast where, on one Saturday morning, a triangular-faced little boy of eight or nine stood in line clutching his dime for admission. He loved the movie, and was impressed enough by the “March of the Wooden Soldiers” near the end to persuade his piano teacher, a Mrs. Stagner, to order the music for it so that he could try to play it--as he never quite could. But the music haunted him through many later viewings, when he showed it to his children, always in danger of turning wet-eyed when Mother Goose at the beginning sings “Toyland, Toyland, little girl and boy-land” and “Once you leave its borders you may ne’er return again.” As a teen-ager he was devoted to the light operas of Victor Herbert, Sigmund Romberg (“The Desert Song,” “The Vagabond King”--push the right button and he will still sing the song with which Francois Villon rouses his fellows in a tavern to go off to fight the troops of Burgundy) or Jerome Kern (“Music In the Air,” with John Charles Thomas and Irra Petina, at the Curran Theater in S.F.) Anyway: seeing this old movie for the umpteenth time--but the first in a decade or more--stirred the old feelings in me, and I watched it through. Two complete movies in two days (see above) sets a kind of record for my later years.

- The NYTimes Obituary section for December 19^th printed an obituary for the death at age 96 of Mary Griggs Burke, the New York collector who put together a great collection of Japanese art over many years. I got to know her when I was a fellowship student at the Met in 1953-4, and in later years saw a lot of her and her husband Jackson (whom she married in 1955.) The great exhibition of Japanese art shown at the Met in the spring of 1954 included several fine works of Nanga painting, introducing that subject to me, and I later advised Mary and Jackson on expanding that side of their collection, which was new to them (and pretty much everybody else outside Japan). When I put together the first foreign exhibition of that school of painting, the 1972 “Scholar Painters of Japan: The Nanga School,” I included, in an exhibition otherwise entirely made up of works from Japanese collections, a Taiga screen they had bought on my recommendation representing “The Poetical Gathering At the Orchid Pavilion.” And in fact this exhibition would not have taken place if Mary Burke had not gone to a lot of trouble to rescue it when it seemed doomed, confronting the Bunkachô authorities in Japan and arguing for its restoration in their program after they had decided to eliminate it. (For that story, see on this website Reminiscence no. 50, “My Partly Botched Nanga Exhibition.”) I visited Mary less often in later years, but remember being shown some Chinese paintings she had bought, including a figure scroll by Wu Bin. Like another New York collector I knew well, John Crawford, she was reluctant to see her collection go to the Met because, also like Crawford, she disliked the curator (and department chair) with whom she would have to negotiate.  But in 2006, perhaps in response to the retirement of that curator and his replacement by another, she announced that her collection would be divided between the Met and the Minneapolis Museum of Art--with the Met getting, I assume,   pieces that would best supplement what they had already, notably from the Harry Packard sale and gift. (This is only an “educated guess”--I have no direct information about the matter.)

So, farewell to another old friend and supporter.

- Finally: The Big News: OUR NEW SERIES OF VIDEO-LECTURES BEGINS TO BE POSTED AT LAST. At left, under the blog section, is a new one for the new series, which is titled “Gazing Into the Past: Scenes From Later Chinese and Japanese Painting.” The detail picture on it, from Shitao’s great “Waterfall on Mt. Lu” in the Sumitomo Collection, is the same detail that appeared (more cut-down) on the title page of my Skira book “Chinese Painting”  long ago, and depicts two men: one seated and watching the other, who is standing and gazing, not upward at the waterfall, but downward into the mist. When each of the lectures is opened, another “Gazing Into the Past” image appears behind the titles: a detail from Luo Ping’s 1799 “Portrait of I-an” that is the last painting in that same Skira book. (The implications and resonances of that picture, and of the music that accompanies it and the pianist who plays the music, are all explained at some length in an insert at the beginning of GIP 2--watch and listen to that and you will understand better  my purpose in doing this new series.)

Another dozen or more GIP lectures are close to completion and will be posted before long. Each, with a few exceptions, is devoted to a single artist, and in many cases centers on a single painting, typically an album or handscroll from which we see many sections and details. And always the lectures contain large numbers of  images, wholes and close-in details, mostly made from old Kodachrome slides from my collection--disorderly, but the largest anywhere?--and feature also commentary from my old head, of which much the same can be said (more visual images of Chinese paintings than in any other still-operative head, but more and more disorderly as time passes.) That the images, and whatever wisdom the old head holds, will be lost forever when I join my ancestors, is my main motivation for working to complete as much as I can of this series.

So:  take some time, when you have the time, to watch these lectures, which offer never-before-seen visual accounts of some of the most exciting Yuan-Ming-Qing paintings of China and some   great paintings--mostly Nanga but also works by Sesshû--of Japan.

And that is my Christmas and New Year’s gift for the end of 2012, offered with the warmest wishes for the new year, to all of you from your old lecturer and blogger,

James Cahill

Blog on 12/12/12

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Created on Wednesday, 12 December 2012 21:42

Written by James Cahill

Blog on 12/12/12

All day I’ve been reminded--and not just by the Madison Square Garden super-celebrity concert for Storm Sandy relief--that today is the only day we will ever experience for which the date can be written all in twelves. So I use this as a convenient heading for what will be another blog made up of miscellaneous jottings, and especially several that correct wrong statements I’ve read recently in the popular media. .

First: all my blogs seem to contain something that has to do with my old friend the forger Zhang Daqian; so let me get that over with first.

Another Extravagant--and Wrong--Claim About Another Artist. This one was brought to my attention by one of my Facebook friends, who sent me off to an article published in Vanity Fair last month. The website is:

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/10/wolfgang-beltracchi-helene-art-scam

And when you go there you find this headline:

The Greatest Fake-Art Scam in History?

It’s about a 56-year-old German “hippie artist” named Wolfgang Beltracchi, who has made a lot of money forging the works of recent painters, especially German painters, and selling them for big prices; doing this has permitted him to live the life of a rich man. But the writer who makes such claims about him obviously didn’t know--too few do--about Zhang Daqian, whose long career of producing forgeries along with thousands of genuinely-signed works of his own outdoes any of the other contenders for the honor (or dishonor) of being “the greatest fake-art artist in history.” But I’ve written enough about him already. So on to other matters.

- Second: Still About An Artist, and Inward Chants. I watch the BBC news often, and there is one of their announcers whom I really dislike, for no definable reason--her face, her voice, her whole manner. Her name is Kattie Kay, and when she is on camera (I leave her on so as to see and hear the news) I am chanting silently, inwardly: “Go away/ Kattie Kay/ Don’t come back another day!” (I like other women announcers on BBC news, so it isn’t that she’s female.) Now I have begun to chant inwardly, when another of my Facebook friends posts still another thing about Ai Weiwei and his big exhibition, “Go away/ Ai Weiwei/ Don’t come back another day!” But then the inner voice corrects me: you can’t do that, “away” and “Weiwei” aren’t a proper rhyme, but an identical ending... ANYWAY, I don’t want to be made to look over and over at the same dumb things, the Han pot he drops and shatters, the pile of ceramic sunflower seeds, and the rest, nothing much worth looking at among them. As I’ve written before, I respect him as a political dissident but not as an artist: he rose to prominence, like lots of others in China, by having a famous father (a writer)---and there are many    really good artists in China, people who make real works of art on their own, without hiring helpers to do it, and who deserve better the accolades Ai Weiwei is receiving. OK, enough of that.

Third: Another in a series that I could title: “Very Old Person Corrects the Media.  What has your Old Fusser found to fuss about today? Not the Fiscal Cliff, since all right-minded people already know what the solution to that is: higher taxes on the rich. No, today I’m fussing about a review of a new book in the NYTimes Book Review section for Sunday Nov. 24^th (p. 18). The book reviewed is about the cartoonist Saul Steinberg, and it begins: “Saul Steinberg, the preeminent cartoonist of the 20^th century. . .” NO NO NO! He’s a clever cartoonist, a great self-promoter, who did MOMA-style drawings (that looked, that is, like prestigious works of modern art), so successfully that he indeed ended up with his drawings exhibited at MOMA. But the preeminent cartoonist of the 20^th century, who could out-draw any of the others and had a sense of humor worthy of Groucho Marx, was: GEORGE PRICE (1901-1998). I have made him the chief subject in one of my still-unreleased video lectures, titled “Old American Funnies,” in which he follows Gellett Burgess and Clarence Day (not Day’s “Life With Father,” but his “Scenes From the Mesozoic”) as one of three American humorists who should be celebrated more than they are for their contributions to our culture. George Price was best known as a longtime New Yorker cartoonist, contributing some 1,200 cartoons to that publication during the seven-decades span of his career. His humor was graphic, not verbal: he reportedly had other people think up some of his captions for him. His specialty were detailed, structurally strong drawings of interiors with figures, especially run-down urban apartments and their denizens: a favorite of mine (Fig. 1) portrays one of these with a worker entering the door carrying his lunchbox and saying to his slatternly wife, who is washing dishes at the sink: “I heard a bit of good news today. We shall pass this way but once.” But look at the three-dimensional acuity of his drawing, which constructs the ordinary objects and the spaces they occupy as a setting for the people with a precision worthy of a master--Goya would have admired it.

My lecture on him will culminate with a long section on what I take to be his masterwork, “George Price’s Ice Cold War,” published in 1951. In it, using captions from Shakespeare below his drawings, he takes on the notable politically-far-right figures of his day: Joseph McCarthy, William Randolph Hearst and his sons, Gary Cooper, Hedda Hopper, a racist orator named Homer Loomis (Fig. 2), the American Legion (Fig. 3), the Daughters of the American Revolution--with a mordant pen that raises him, in my view (expressed in my lecture), to be “the Daumier of our time.” The arty Saul Steinberg couldn’t touch him. I end my lecture with a series of photos of some recent rightists: Trump, Gingrich, Rohrer, McConnell, Romney--and asking rhetorically: Where is George Price now, when we need him? Look in your library, or in a second-hand bookstore, for a copy of one of George Price’s cartoon collections, and take it home or buy it. And wait for my lecture, along with others, to appear on this website. (They will have to be in a third series, to be titled “Pages From My Notebooks: Issues, Arguments, and Memories,” made up of video-lectures that don’t fit into either of the first two series, including some that are semi-autobiographical, and others on subjects that don’t belong within the “Later Chinese and Japanese Painting” scope set by the sub-title of the GIP second series.)

Fourth: the death of the sitar player Ravi Shankar at the age of 92 has brought forth obituaries hailing him as “the man who introduced Indian music to the Western world.” He was a great performer, but this last is not true: it was his older brother, the dancer Uday Shankar, who introduced Indian music to the Western world. I saw and heard him and his troupe of musicians several times when I was young, and had--still have somewhere?--an album of old Victor red-seal 78 RPM records of Indian music played by them. You can hear them on a 1937 recording at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7syjXvCHyA.

You can also, if you are adept enough at cyberspace-hunting, watch and listen to his 1948 film “Kalpana,” meaning “imagination” or “creativity”--not for god’s sake the 2012 horror film of that title, but the film that Uday Shankar made late in his life--a somewhat amateurish but impressive and moving film that presents an eccentric old man trying to persuade a film producer to take on the making of the movie he envisions, about an ideal project that will present classical Indian dance and other culture to the outside world through an imagined Shangri-la-like enclave in the Himalayas--well, my memory of it isn’t  clear enough for me to write more. But find it, watch it.

What I remember about Uday Shankar as a dancer is the way he would strike a pose and stand center stage looking sideward, smiling slightly, see Fig. 4, while his musicians continued playing behind and around him, and without moving his feet or body or head, he would send ripples through the muscles of his outstretched arms. And he could make his eyes vibrate--I know this because I learned to do it myself. I don’t recommend trying it--I was told by an oculist that it could be damaging to the eye muscles. But I could do it, by a certain relaxation of muscles, and see the world vibrate before me. (I just tried it, and now the text I’m writing blurs on the computer screen.)

So, in the midst of all of the well-earned adulation for his younger brother, join one very old enthusiast in acknowledging that the person who introduced Indian music to Western audiences was not Ravi, but Uday, Shankar.

A few final notes. I’ve been informed, more about this later, that our video-lecture series “A Pure and Remote View” will be posted in China, for free viewing by everybody there, I would hope, by a very large number of people, since my books in Chinese translation have been best-sellers in China, and my lectures might well appeal to the same people.

The second of our video-lecture series, “Gazing Into the Past: Scenes From Later Chinese and Japanese Painting,” should be up and accessible on this website quite soon. But I’ve been writing that for a long time, and a succession of obstacles, human and technical, have kept it from being posted. Keep watching this website, the space below the PRV symbol at right, for another to appear--and within that, when you click on it, the first half-dozen or so of the GIP lectures.

So, that’s all for today, or rather tonight: I end this just three minutes before the date will be: 12, 13, 12, spoiling forever the one-two-one-two pattern.

Your old blogger, James Cahill 

Later: Tonight Turner Classic Movies, which I watch regularly, is showing several movies of “Les Miserables.” The 1935 Hollywood one with Frederick March and Charles Laughton I don’t want to see again, but the 1934 French one I definitely will watch, partly because the great actor Harry Baur is Jean Valjean. (See, if you have a chance, his 1941 “Volpone,” in which Louis Jouvet is his henchman Mosca.) But also because the young man Marius in this French “Les Mis” is played by Jean Servais! So who, you young people will ask, is Jean Servais? Well--back in those days when we went to art-film houses to see movies from France, one that I especially liked, along with the great Pagnol trilogy (with Raimu and others, the films that the name Chez Panisse came from--those were days when you could use such a name and expect cultivated people to know who Panisse was)-- was another Pagnol film made in 1934 titled “Angele.” In it, Orane Demazis is a young woman named Angele who is imprisoned by her father in the basement of their house (as I remember) for misbehaving, going off to the city with a Bad Guy; the comic actor Fernandel is sympathetic but unable to help her; and she is rescued by a handsome young hero played by Jean Servais. Twenty-one years pass, and in 1955 Jules Dassin makes what I have always taken to be the best of all heist (elaborate robbery) films, titled “Rififi.” And the anti-hero, just out of prison and enticed into joining in one last job--which he will not survive--is none other than Jean Servais. If you haven’t seen this one, get it and watch it. See how they devise a way of silencing the alarms; see how they come into the jewelry shop through the ceiling; see how Jules Dassin pays for a casual theft with his life. And watch Jean Servais--with tears in your eyes, if you are like me--drive through Paris, while dying of his wounds, to deliver a little boy he has rescued to his mother. No, I haven’t spoiled anything by revealing these bits of the plot; the movie goes far beyond story-telling. Rent it, buy it, see it.

Much later, early morning: Watched the 1934 French “Les Mis” with Harry Baur as Jean Valjean--one of the great performances on film, director is Raymond Bernard, unknown to me. Three-part, epic length (like “Children of Paradise”), music by Honnegger! I’ve ordered a DVD to watch again. (Have I related how, back in the early 1940s, Gordon Cyr and I and several others formed the Honnegger Society of America to attend performances of his works and cheer loudly? We actually corresponded with him--he believed we were a large, recognized organization instead of a few high school boys.)