James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

WHAT WENT WRONG?

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Created on Thursday, 10 May 2012 22:06

Written by James Cahill

WHAT WENT WRONG?

Before I get to the main matter of today’s blog, let me note with sorrow the death of Maurice Sendak, whose books have been among the favorites of my two pairs of children and myself--we read nearly all of them, some over and over. The TV and other mass-media announcements all seem to choose his Where the Wild Things Are as the book by which he is mainly to be remembered, perhaps because it was made into a movie. Our own favorites included that one but also several others: the Little Nutshell Library, In the Night Kitchen (with Oliver Hardy appearing as two pastry cooks) and an early book, Kenny’s Window. In one of my Reminiscences on this website (R&R no. 82, “Bill Crofut and Alistair Reid,” which is recommended reading for all parents who aim at raising literate children) I tell how my daughter Sarah received a thank-you note with a sketch from Sendak after she wrote to tell him what a big part Kenny’s Window had played in her growing up--he responded that he didn’t usually answer children’s letters, but hers had specially touched him because this was one of his own favorites, and not much noticed. So, if you can find a copy of Kenny’s Window, buy or borrow it and read it (looking at the pictures) with your children. It’s midway between real-world and dream; they may well “understand” it better than you do.

Now, to follow up on my ominous heading, and slip into the elegiac mode. Some time last year I started one of my blogs--I have files of these partly-written ones--with the above title, and wrote three paragraphs of it. We begin, then, with those, updated a bit:

A lot of older people, I think, those who can look back over enough decades to have watched it happen, are asking themselves a painful question: WHAT WENT WRONG with our country, the United States of America? Why has its history taken a seemingly irreversible downhill course? And the right answer, which seems to me beyond denying, is uncomfortable because it sounds Marxist, and I never was that, but it is nonetheless the right answer:          WHAT WENT WRONG is CAPITALISM. It has gone terribly wrong, and it is bringing us down. The truth is: BIG MONEY BUYS WHAT IT WANTS; AND WHAT IT WANTS IS DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY. Is there a way out? I wish I knew of one, or that someone else knew of one, that will work.

During those heady days of the seeming triumph of liberalism in the sixties and early seventies, I had an uncomfortable sense that there would be a backlash. How right I was: Nixon 1969-74; Reagan presidency 1981-89, after his governorship of California; George H.W. Bush 1989-93;

George W. Bush, 2001-09. And the defeat of the “good guys”: Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, others. And, during those bad years, the lifting of all curbs on the financial market, curbs that cannot now easily be reinstated. Ending these curbs permitted a fundamental change in the nature of banks and how they operate, a change that let them turn into huge money-making corporations, more responsible to their investors than to their depositors.

I was around, and beginning to be aware, during the great presidency of FDR [Franklin D. Roosevelt]; he pulled us out of the Depression, pulled off such triumphs as the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps] and the WPA-- good ideas that he managed to carry out in the face of bitter conservative opposition that saw these as “creeping socialism.” Somehow, the two-party system then seemed to work, didn’t permit the kind of stalemate, blockage of legislation and the rest, that we have now. The 99%ers today are basically right: whether they can bring about any change is another question. Has too much irreparable damage already been done?

Now, continuing: I have of course been reading, in addition to the twice-a-week Paul Krugman columns and others that reinforce my feelings, the arguments that have begun to appear in the opposite direction. The NYTimes had a section last weekend of writings by the 1%ers--or, more accurately, the .01%ers--and their advocates about how they are necessary and beneficial for the economy. I suppose there is some truth in that; but insofar as there is, I feel all the more: god help us.

As so often, my thoughts go back to ask: what did the ancient Chinese think about this problem? And, as usual, they were there first, went quite a ways in that direction, decided (wisely, it now appears) to stop. I’ve written elsewhere--following Joseph Needham and others--about how they were for centuries far ahead of the rest of the world in the development of proto-science and technology, then decided (wisely?) against continuing in that direction some time around the early Ming. And I have conveyed the main observations of Ed Shafer’s lecture “China Invented the Middle Ages,” about how they introduced the compass, the stirrup, gunpowder, etc. And we all know that they invented printing, and brought it (including pictorial printing) to great heights surprisingly early, with (for me) a pinnacle around the late Ming. Now, what about money?

My highly unprofessional opinion--I don’t really know enough about the ancient Middle East, for instance--is that the Chinese were innovators there too. Their early currency was copper coinage, and the coin was worth as much as the copper in it. Later, they were the first (I think) to use paper money. And they certainly developed a vast and intricate mercantile system, which has to be taken into account in considering the patronage for painting, as well as much else in Chinese culture. But in principle, the Chinese placed merchants below farmers and artisans in their ranking of social roles, because the merchants didn’t really produce anything, just moved it around, so to speak.

Now, with that ancient insight, let’s look at our present financial world. Money is paid into funds and investments to purchase, in principle, some part of some company that makes goods or provides services. I remember, way back, reading and wondering about “futures”--people would “buy” hogs or sugar or whatever “in the future,” betting that they would be worth more then. The whole financial system is, if I understand it right (probably not), a vast expansion of that. But the old kind of long-term investment, someone looking at the indicators of the future prospects of a company, taking a chance on its being worth more in future and buying shares in it, is not the principal or typical kind of transaction any more. Instead, vast amounts of wealth are transferred, by clever and amoral people sitting at computers, from one commodity or fund into another, in micro-seconds. They are supposed to be doing this to service investors in the funds or banks they represent, but in fact they are doing it to enrich themselves, their shareholders and CEOs. Wealth exists as immaterial figures on a screen, or electrical impulses in cyberspace, largely divorced from real goods and commodities and services. And yet the transactions going on in this disembodied way make the Wall Street denizens obscenely richer, and the rest of us vastly worse off in more ways than one can count or comprehend.

So, fix the system to make that impossible? Great idea, but carrying it out can and will be blocked by congressmen who have (see above) been bought by the big-money powers. So where is a way out? I have no answer to that, and may not live to see one, and can only hope that one will be found. Otherwise, onward and downward to arrive at T. S. Elliott’s vision (as amended by me):

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang

Not with a whimper

But with a bunch of electronic impulses in cyberspace.

James Cahill, May 8^th, 2012

Blog About Joseph Alsop

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Created on Tuesday, 01 May 2012 06:20

Written by James Cahill

Blog About Joseph Alsop

Today’s blog will be of the name-dropping, I-knew-him-well type. But before turning to its main subject I want to call your attention to two new documents that have been added to this website, or soon will be. One, now the last item under “Other People’s Writings,” is a correspondence I have had recently with Jerome Silbergeld about the Riverbank revelation and why my learned colleagues in Chinese painting studies have been so unresponsive to what I take to be big news for all of us in this racket. The other is a paper I wrote and submittted for publication back in 2006 that finally appeared last year in the massive (two-volume) Festscrift for Wen Fong’s retirement, “Bridges To  Heaven.” With all respect to that ponderous publication and the two people mostly responsible for finally getting it out, Dora Ching and Jerome Silbergeld (same as above), it is heavy and hard to read, besides being very expensive, and has only black-and-white illustrations--at least, my article does. So I have decided to put it online here, with the illustrations in color; it will appear as the last item under “The Writings of James Cahill” and its title is “A Group of Anonymous Northern Figure Paintings from the Qianlong Period.” I really think this one is worthy of your attention--it has things to say, for instance, about Qing-period court painting, its heavy use of joint production with the Italian Jesuit  Castiglione as the lead artist, and its projections into the world of painting production in the surrounding areas in North  China.

Now for the proper subject of this blog, which is, as the title has already informed you, the newspaper columnist and writer on art Joseph Alsop (1910-1989). A new play about him titled “The Columnist” was reviewed recently in the NYTimes (Arts Section for April 22, p. 4). It apparently makes much of his being a closet homosexual--something that I never cared about, one way or the other--I don’t recall meeting his wife, and our association was concerned with matters much more interesting than his love-life. (People will say that it was a bigger matter back then, because gay people had to keep it secret; but my recollection is the opposite--I had quite a few friends, even close friends, who were gay and it never seemed to matter  much.) I knew Alsop because of his more-than-casual interest in art and the collecting of art. He was working on a book that would eventually be published in 1982 as The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting and Its Linked Phenomena Wherever These Have Appeared--a highly informed book full of fresh ideas and bold assertions. Working on this, he must have realized that he needed to learn more about Asian art, especially Chinese, its modes of production and transmission and collection; and to learn about those, what could he  do better than summon  for lunch a young curator at a museum only a  taxi-ride away, one who had recently published a best-selling  book on Chinese painting? So there I was, visiting the stylish red-brick Georgetown house of the famous Joseph Alsop.

I saw him quite a lot during my later years in D.C., the late fifties and early sixties, and occasionally after that, at a time when I was an active member of big art-history organizations--the National Committee for the History of Art, the Getty committee that  gave  grants for augmenting the illustration of art-history books, most of  all the College Art Association--I was on their Board of Directors,  then their smaller Executive Board, and I would have moved into the presidency if I hadn’t vigorously turned it down because I was by then absorbed with important personal matters in China. I remember visiting Alsop once, staying there overnight (he liked putting people up and giving them good dinners--he was especially proud of his cook), and having dinner with him and another prominent art historian, Phyllis Bober. She was famous for,  among other things, knowing how to prepare an antique Roman dinner, and doing it.  I never attended one of those, and didn’t especially want to. I knew her already from many College Art and other meetings. I remember standing with her once in the rotunda at the U. of Pennsylvania Museum, where we were meeting for some kind of exhibition or symposium, and arguing with her fervently, drinks in hand (and many more drinks already consumed, contributing greatly to the vigor of our argument) about whether the huge Chinese crystal ball in a  case in the center of the rotunda was  or wasn’t a work of art. She said yes it was, I said no it wasn’t. Why not? Because its perfect spherical shape was a product of craft, reproducible by anybody with enough time & skill & the right materials, with none of the dynamic interaction of parts etc. that permit it to arouse the kind of experience we call an aesthetic experience. (I made a similar argument once at an Arts Club meeting here in Berkeley when the topic was “Is Wine An Art?” I argued no, against some fervent wine-bufts who dominated the discussion, for much the same reasons.) Anyone who wants to know what I believe about how art objects “work” to create that special kind of experience can go back and  read the blog posted here on April 3^rd titled “Two Writer-Teachers On Art: Langer and Kaplan.”)

Back to Joseph Alsop. In his late years, after he had stopped writing his newspaper columns, he was working on another book, this one to take on exactly the problem that Phyllis Bober and I were arguing, namely:  What is art? How does it work? Once when Alsop was in the Bay Area for a lecture or meeting or something, I invited him to dinner at my house with  several members of our Art History faculty,  expecting them to be impressed and anticipating a lively conversation. It was a disaster; they obviously had little respect for him, little interest in his thoughts on this big subject. I wince when I recall all of us sitting down after dinner in our huge living  room before an inadequate fireplace (it didn’t  really heat the room) and my trying to keep the conversation going while my departmental colleagues were letting it die.  Alsop’s book was never finished, so far as I know, and he never published anything on this large question. His overly-simple tentative formulation was:  Art is anything made by human hands that is pleasurable to the senses. The inadequacy of that formulation I tried to point out to him; but old people, once they have what seems to them a good idea in their heads, are reluctant to part with it. An observation richly exemplified by the recent writings and blogging of

Yours truly, James Cahill

More About Old Mr. Zhang and His Finest Production (Or One Of Them)

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Created on Thursday, 19 April 2012 21:47

Written by James Cahill

More About Old Mr. Zhang and His Finest Production (Or One Of Them)

My previous blog ended, after a long build-up, by advising all readers, if they haven’t done so already, to go off and watch the last-minute insert in Addendum 2B, the last item in our now-completed Pure and Remote View series, which is to be found (and watched and listened to) some twenty minutes into that last lecture, the one titled “Riverbank: A Closer Look.” It has been accessible on my website and the IEAS’s for several weeks now, and I have been waiting for responses from colleagues without yet receiving any. Well, one former student, writing me about something else, adds at the end: “Your Zhang Daqian bricks video is great. Something else to look for when I see it.” When she next sees the original painting, that is--a good response: see for yourself. I wish I could still travel to look at it once more, but I can’t, and don’t really need to: the evidence is clear enough from the photographs, and from Rand Chatterjee’s skillful drawing up from them (under my guidance), from scattered places across the surface of the work, the damning, clearly identifying pattern.

Several weeks earlier, about two weeks before these final Addenda were posted on the web, I sent an email out to some twenty colleagues who have been especially engaged in the Riverbank controversy, on one side or the other, giving them a reference to a website that would afford them early access to these Addenda so that they would have a preview and not be surprised and unprepared when they were publicly posted. And then I waited for responses. And what were they? The same as the responses to our two  press  releases for the PRV lecture series; that is: nothing, nil, nada. My well-meant pre-notices sank like stones in the water. I wrote to one of the twenty, someone I’ve believed to be relatively neutral and fair-minded while not one  of my  students, and have been carrying on a correspondence with him since then. It was he who, when I sent him an earlier version of this blog in which I castigated my colleagues for their non-response, wrote back advising against doing this. And, following his good advice, I’ve toned it down considerably.

I did receive, however, a supportive email from a recent correspondent named John Rohrer, who wrote (and I quote with his permission):

“I just finished viewing Addendum 1B: Riverbank: The Controversy, and Addendum 2B: Riverbank: A Closer Look

I understand now why you couldn't just leave well enough alone. I bought and read Issues of Authenticity in Chinese Painting a few years ago,

And I have to admit I did not know whose opinion was right.

“I am now convinced that you are correct in your attribution on Riverbank. The arguments that really swayed me...

First, your problem with the water being shown with no sense of depth. I have attached some ammunition that I think helps support your observation of the problem with the water representation in Riverbank. The image that I have attached is from page 107 of Zhang Daqian's Chinese Painting published in 1988 by Ho Kungshang in Taiwan. The image shows Zhang creating a uniform pattern of waves that show no depth or recession, similar to the wave pattern that you pointed to. The presentation of water became to Zhang Daqian a stylistic problem not one of occularity. [See Fig. 1 for this image.\

“Second, I think I found Zhang Daqian's signature treatment of tree branches in Riverbank. Zhang Daqian trees are at times 'mind trees' that do not really exist, but instead bend and twist into abstract patterns that could not be found in nature. He tended to leave the unpainted media as the base for some of his trees. Examples are attached. [See Fig. 2 for this image.]

“To quote you "open mind and open eyes"

Your student

John Rohrer”

I wrote him back with thanks and appreciation for his opinions and his pictures, adding “If it was an irrefutable argument before, now it will be irrefutable plus two.” His pictures, taken from Zhang’s own publication of some of his paintings intended for teaching students how to depict water, trees, etc., do indeed match up so closely with the same in Riverbank as to provide still another nail in its coffin. (The time should come soon when it can no long rise out of the coffin, like Count Dracula, to go on plaguing us all.) Rohrer’s three-part juxtaposition of Zhang’s painting of trees--two from his acknowledged pictures flanking the detail from Riverbank (the cover of the Symposium volume!)--is devastatingly convincing as all coming from the same hand, that of my late friend. I reproduce the photos he sent, again with his permission. (Figs. 1 & 2 )

The time will also come, I hope while I am still here to observe it, when this whole affair will be recognized as a case of brilliant and large-scale art forgery that at least matches, and in some respects surpasses, the project of forging Vermeer and other Dutch masters by Hans van Meegeren, I remember  very well when that story “broke” in the 1940s, and was the  subject of numerous articles in the popular press and  several books. (I show and talk about several of van Meegeren’s forgeries briefly in my “Authenticity and Dating” lecture, Addendum 2A.) I read these with great interest, and recall especially that for a time there were still those who said:  “Yes, he made Vermeer forgeries; but the ‘Supper at Emmaus’ [his finest production] can’t possibly be one of them--that, at least, is a great Vermeer painting.” And I expect the same will be true for some time of Zhang’s forgeries; some will be holdouts, saying “Yes, but not Riverbank!” But that position cannot survive for long either; the evidence piles up--or, rather, is increasingly recognized (it’s always been there)--and Riverbank will have to be added into Zhang’s creations, in the end, as “Supper At Emmaus” was added to van Meegeren’s.

And even then, there will still be a few of his works going unrecognized, still treasured and exhibited and published as old paintings, especially those in Chinese museums--I think of two in the Shanghai Museum, one in the Palace Museum, Beijing--perhaps I will identify these in a future blogs. (But the one in Beijing, an “Emperor Huizong” painting of a rock, is already identified in PRV 10B, the second of the two Birds-and-Flowers lectures.) So Zhang Daqian will continue to fool some of the leading scholars and curators in the Chinese art world for a long time to come. You still move among us, old friend, and prove again that Barnum was right: you can fool some of the people all of the time,  and all of the people some of the  time. You can, that is, if you are Zhang Daqian. I will end by reproducing another photograph of him (Fig. 3), which I took from the web, positioning it so that he seems to be gazing up at these words of mine and saying (in Japanese, our common language in which we always conversed): Good, friend Cahill, keep working at it--now that the paintings are out of my hands and into the museums, I’m happy to have them credited to me, instead of to all those old guys. And I respond: OK, Cho-sensei, I’ll go on doing my best to see that they are.

Yours, James Cahill