James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Back in Berkeley Blog II

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Created on Sunday, 01 July 2012 23:18

Written by James Cahill

Back in Berkeley Blog II

I haven’t written a blog for quite a while, and have no clear idea about a direction or a title for one, hence the above.

I suppose I should begin by joining the chorus to say: Bless Justice Roberts. He did the right thing for once. (Maybe more than once, I can’t recall.) This may save his reputation. I remember an old Japanese story that we read when I was in the Japanese language school, about a man who was saved from hell by his single good act, rescuing a spider, whose thread saved him from dropping into the fiery depths. Justice Roberts rescued a great many people from illness without health insurance, and deserves credit for that.

I am more settled in my Berkeley house, sitting at a long desk in the front room facing the street, typing at one computer (the right, or north, or Berkeley computer, which has been here a long time) while at the other end of the desk is my left, or south, or Vancouver computer--I had it shipped down,  not trusting (from experience) people who told me that everything on one computer could be transferred to another. Now I can roll back and forth in my wheeled deskchair between the two, getting different data and images and advancing different projects on each. An old person’s solution, but OK for me. The two computers talk to each other only with difficulty --I have told people that they are like one’s present and former wives--one isn’t sure one wants them to talk to each other.

I am working, of course, on more video-lectures. Now that our first PRV series is pretty much complete (and accessible for free viewing both here--see at right--and on the website of the IEAS, as well as on others that we are trying to expand, especially so as to make it more accessible in China)--now that this series is complete, we will soon launch another, titled Gazing Into the Past: Scenes from Later Chinese and Japanese Painting. Each lecture in this new series will be about an artist or two, and they will mostly be centered on particular works, albums or handscrolls, that require many images for full viewing--images that I have in old slides, and that are not generally available. Much of the value of the lectures continues to be their making these thousands of images accessible for viewing, study, and eventually downloading--we are working on that. The first series will presumably be made available by the IEAS on disks, more convenient for that use, and for teaching. I mean to finish as many of these as I can in my remaining years.

The second lecture in the new series, by the way, will begin with an explanation of why I chose the image and music that begins and ends them--a detail from the “Portrait of the Artist’s Friend I-an” painted in 1799 by Lo P’ing (Luo Ping) that was the last plate in my old Skira book, and playing behind it, the “Forlane” from Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin, played by my daughter Sarah especially for this new series. These, I try to explain, somehow evoke the right mood of highly sophisticated nostalgia, conjuring up the past in a deeply moving way, that is the underlying theme of the new series.  I hope that writing about it like this builds anticipation in many of you. Responses to the first series have been quite enthusiastic, and continue to come in--nearly all, however, from people other than scholars and students in the Chinese painting field in the U.S., who are un-mysteriously silent about it.  I will explain that cryptic comment some other time.

To end today’s blog, an old army story that I can’t recall telling in print before. I recently used, as I seldom do, the word “feasible” in one of my writings, and remembered this event. When I was studying Japanese at the University of Michigan in 1944-5 in the Army Japanese Language School, our unit was made up of educated men, many of them college students and professors, who had been sent to the school because of their special aptitude for learning a language quickly--the Army needed Japanese linguists. Our unit was also, however, a regular Army company with a captain, I forget his name, who was an old Army regular without special educational or intellectual credentials; and this put him at a disadvantage in talking to his “troops,” who were sometimes derisive in a way that made me a bit uncomfortable. Once, standing on the stage before us all and explaining why he was not yet ready to grant us the passes that would turn us loose for the weekend, he said: “Men, I’ll give you those passes when I see feasible.” A long pause, and then someone in the back said, loudly: “Has anybody here seen Feasible?” Much laughter, and cries of “Where’s Feasible?” “Have you seen Feasible?” And the joke went on, to the embarrassment, I’m sure, of the captain--pictures of “Feasible” drawn on blackboards, and so forth. Someone suggested that our supply sergeant, Sgt. Schnee, who was German and spoke limited English but was good at his job, and who was away on leave, might be the Feasible the captain was waiting to see. So when Sgt. Schnee returned, someone asked him, “Sargeant Schnee, are you Feasible?” He looked bewildered, and replied, “Me? No! I’m just fine!”

End of story, and of blog. Soon it will be July 4^th, and I will celebrate it in a place that, unlike Vancouver, shoots off fireworks on that day, or night. I used to go with my family to the top of a building on the Berkeley waterfront to view the fireworks across the Bay. Now I will watch them on TV. But with a deep sense of being back in my real spiritual home.

James Cahill, July 1^st, 2012

Back in Berkeley Blog

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Created on Saturday, 16 June 2012 05:41

Written by James Cahill

Back in Berkeley Blog

More than a month has passed since I posted my previous blog, announcing my permanent move back to Berkeley and delivering some other bits of news. I am getting  close to settled in my comfortable old house in the best flatland neighborhood of this great city, within walking distance of the Gourmet Ghetto (Cheezeboard,  Peet’s Coffee, Saul’s Delicatessen, Chez Panisse--where my collaborator Rand Chatterjee, visiting Berkeley from Vancouver to set up the back-and-forth communications system for continuing our video-lecture project, took me and an old & cherished student, Sheila Keppel, to dinner--at the downstairs restaurant , that is. Very much enjoyed, more so that when I ate there before, long ago. As I tell people, it’s great to live in a city where, as recently as when this restaurant was founded (and I remember when),  had enough people in it who knew who Panisse was to allow that naming of the restaurant. (Alice Waters also has a Café Fanny, elsewhere, and for a time had a Marius café or something like that nearby.)

Something new posted for the interested among you to read: the China Review International’s latest issue (vol. 17 no. 3) has as its  lead review one of my book Pictures for Use and  Pleasure, the one on vernacular painting. After reading it with much anticipation and not being as pleased with it as I had hoped (although it isn’t a negative review, and says polite things about the book) I wrote a long Letter To the Editor--which won’t be printed, they  don’t print responses; but you can read it on this website as CLP 198, one of the CLPs under Writings of JC. I recommend it to interested people as another example of a Chinese historian’s reluctance to accept visual evidence as real scholarly data--nothing that isn’t published already in a book, they feel strongly, is really reliable. I cite there earlier examples of this attitude that I’ve encountered, and could have cited another: the early China specialist Noel Barnard complaining, as we worked on the Freer bronze catalog,  that studies of style are all “purely subjective, with no solid basis.”

(But, as noted there, Max Loehr famously used them to chart the early development of bronze décor, against the counter-beliefs of the book-readers, before archaeology proved him right, and them wrong.)

Our new video-lecture series, titled Gazing Into the Past: Scenes from Later Chinese and Japanese Painting, will soon be launched on the web, with the first half-dozen or so  lectures posted on the IEAS  website and on this one, for free viewing,  like the PRV lectures. And another dozen or so are far along in preparation, and should follow shortly. The first GIP will be about a great landscape painting by Wang Meng, shown at length with many details, along with a few related works for context; the second GIP will be a long (slightly more than an hour) talk, with  lots of images both of his paintings and from photographs of him and others, about this recent Shanghai artist who became my good friend, and why I think he merits more attention than he has received as an artist. Then lectures on Huang Gongwang, Shao Mi, the Hikkôen album in the Tokyo National Museum (in two parts, each an hour or so long, showing the  sixty leaves of this remarkable collective album,  with  lots of  comparative material; and everybody’s favorite album by  Shitao, now whereabouts-unknown but viewable in great slides & details I  made from it long ago. And  more will  follow, on a major but little-known Shen Zhou album, Zhou Chen’s great “Beggars and Street Characters” album/handscrolls, and lots more, including several on Japanese Nanga painting. All will feature the treasury of images I’ve amassed over the decades in the form of super-sharp color slides mostly made by myself and not accessible anywhere else. And watch especially for the ten-minute-long, me-on-camera bit that opens the second GIP lecture, identifying the painting and the music used for our opening and closing credits, as well as the major pianist who plays the music, and relates why I chose these.

Other news--and there is more--I will save for future blogs.

James Cahill, June 15^th, 2012

PS. Those of you in the Bay Area who enjoy innovative music and poetry and other performances in a highly unusual and glorious setting (a columbarium designed by Julia Morgan) should not miss Sarah Cahill’s Garden of Memory event on Thursday of next week, June 21st. For information on how to get there, how to buy tickets in advance, etc. go to http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/251984. Children are welcome, dogs not. You will never forget it, and like a great many other people, will keep coming back in future years. You will find me there, although not climbing through its multi-storey spaces, where the groups will be performing, as I once could.

Big News Blog

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Created on Monday, 21 May 2012 13:51

Written by James Cahill

 Big News Blog

The biggest news, for me, is that I am moving at last back to Berkeley, permanently, after years of living mainly in Vancouver. My reasons are too complex to explain, but they include the presence of my daughter Sarah and her family in Berkeley, along with many friends and colleagues and former students; my twin sons Julian and benedict approaching adulthood and going off soon to pursue higher education; and the increasing difficulty of living more or less alone here in Vancouver, climbing up & down the stairs constantly, not going out much. My collaborator on the video-lectures Rand Chatterjee has agreed that we can continue to work together at long distance, on our computers and with occasional visits to Berkeley by him. So, from next Tuesday, May 22^nd, I will be living in Berkeley. Still reachable by email, still accessible to friends & others who want or need to see me for some reason. I don’t give my phone number here because I don’t want to be phoned by people I don’t know--use email instead please. And not Facebook or LinkedIn: I seem to be on both, through the kindness of other people, but I won’t use them for real communications--too public, too twittery. Email please. I don’t own a cellphone, never have, never will--I may end up as the last person standing who isn’t holding one.

The sad news today (Saturday the 19^th) is the death of Crawford Greenewalt, called by his friends “Greenie,” who was a professor in U.C. Berkeley’s Classics Dept. and the Director of the archaeological excavation at Sardis in Turkey for many years, as well as a major supporter of that excavation. Coming from the du Pont family, he was very rich, although you wouldn’t have known it from his manner, which was always modest. He was one of my son Nicholas’s teachers, and Nick, who has been deeply engaged in the Sardis excavation every summer for many years, is the new director of it. He is quoted in the NYTimes obituary, and has been in Berkeley helping with the disposition of Greenie’s papers and other effects.

More news: the death of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who is being hailed in obituaries as the finest art-song singer of the 20^th century, the one who gave us the definitive Winterreise, etc. He was a fine singer with a wide repertory, and I suppose he was indeed the best of his time. But the best of the 20^th century, for us oldsters who grew up with his records, was the great Gerhard Hüsch. He was known to me first as the Papageno in the original Magic Flute recording, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham and starring also, among others, the brilliant coloratura Erna Berger, who sang “Die hölle Rache”, missing one high note near the end--record afficianados listened to hear her sing it flat, in an otherwise dazzling performance. Gerhard Hüsch recorded the wonderful Schubert song cycles, along with vocal works by Beethoven (“An die ferne Geliebte”) and others. I remember once arguing for his pre-eminence in these with a woman who taught about musical performance in our Music Department at U.C., and lending her his recordings (on DVDs) when she was skeptical. She returned them saying that she hated people who did this to her, but that I was right. So: if you are a Lieder-lover, find the Gerhard Hüsch recordings and listen to them.

The latest New York Review of Books has a review by Julian Bell of a retrospective of Damien Hirst, titled “Brimming with Sheer Cheek.” Worth reading. He quotes Donald Judd as writing in praise of this kind of art--no, this kind of stuff: “’The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting’--not the illusionism, the imagining of bodies and symbols, that dogs the painting tradition and is ‘one of the most salient and objectionable relics of European art.’” Great, now we know. So much for all the real painters still going--I won’t name them, but could make a list. As I’ve written before, this adulation of the conceptual has an element of hypocrisy, because if we were to open an exhibition of one of the great painters who employ the objectionable “illusionism”--Verlasquez, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Manet and Monet, Degas, make your own list--it would be vastly more crowded than any exhibition of one of the illusionism-haters, and people would linger longer before the paintings than they do in the galleries of those new celebrity artists who scorn them. The Damien Hirst-Jeff Koons kind of thing is for dumb multi-millionaires who need to get rid of money while enjoying the prestige of patronizing artists and getting reputations as connoisseurs and collectors.

Other news I won’t comment on, except briefly. Non-white babies now outnumber white ones in U.S. births: good. And we will intermingle: better yet--mixed-race people are on the whole handsomer, smarter than us pure-bloods. China’s wealth is being drained away by corrupt officials and their relatives into foreign bank accounts: Poor China. Time to change the system. Maybe I will live to see that happen. And so forth--mostly bad news, bad guys winning out, people who do good things losing out to those who do bad things but make lots of money at it. I will continue to watch this as a non-participant from Berkeley, which I have called “that bastion of right-minded but ineffectual resistance to the wrong-headed directions taken by the rest of the country, and the world.” Or something like that.

Our first series of video-lectures, A Pure and Remote View, is now complete and accessible online, except for another insert that Rand and I mean to put into Addendum 2B, the one about Riverbank as a Zhang Daqian forgery. A so-called copy of Riverbank, which I believe is really a try-out that Zhang and his mounter-ager made before doing Riverbank, has turned up and we were able to photograph it in detail. Still another revelation! And one that adds to the overwhelming evidence against Riverbank being a genuinely old painting. But not, as I add at the end, one that will persuade the true believers in Riverbank that they are wrong--nothing could do that. For them, it has become an object of quasi-religious veneration, like the Shroud of Turin, far above the understanding of profane doubters.

We are ready now to go on with finishing and posting the first dozen or so lectures of the second series, called Gazing Into the Past: Scenes from Later Chinese and Japanese Painting. The picture and music chosen for our opening and closing credits are movingly expressive of the whole theme of the series, how some art evokes the images and styles of earlier art in a way that tugs at one’s heartstrings. But I won’t divulge now what it is--wait and see. Some sixteen lectures in this new series are now finished in draft, waiting for final checking and posting, and another twenty or so are planned, with the images for many of them already brought together. How many I will finish during my remaining years remains, of course, to be seen. Please join me in hoping that the move back to Berkeley, my real spiritual home, will help to prolong the already long life of your antique blogger,

James Cahill, Berkeley High, Class of 1943