James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

All About Old Mr. Zhang

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Created on Sunday, 08 April 2012 03:45

Written by James Cahill

All About Old Mr. Zhang

This morning I awoke thinking, for some reason, about my late friend Zhang Daqian (or Chang Ta-ch’ien,  or Chang Daichien, or whatever--all the same person.) Nearly thirty years after his death, he is still very much in the news among those of us seriously concerned with Chinese painting--and will be even more in the news when a revelation about one of his works (I’ll get back to that below) breaks on the world. So, let me ramble for a while about my old friend.

Those of you who have explored this website know that he haunts it like a ghost--the long piece on his forgeries among “The Writings of JC,” various lectures and papers among the CLPs, reminiscences about him among the  R&Rs. And he turns up over and over, in images and in words, in my video-lectures. What can be added to all that? Well, let me (as I say) ramble for a while about him before trying to answer that question.

One can’t open an auction catalog today for any auction of recent Chinese painters, or read the results of those auctions, without being confronted constantly with his name. There are rich collectors who specialize in assembling as many as they can get of his works.  Sotheby’s Hong Kong “Fine Chinese Paintings” for April 3^rd offered, as lot no. 1271, a piece of his calligraphy called simply “Menu,” framed, estimated at fifty to seventy thousand Hong Kong dollars. Looking at the reproduction and realizing what it was, I laughed aloud. When you went with Zhang for dinner at a restaurant--as I did quite a few times (Peking style in the suburbs of Washington D.C., Szechwan style near Roppongi in Tokyo--a restaurant with his paintings on its walls--others in Taipei, Hong Kong, San Francisco, elsewhere) Zhang never looked at the menu--he knew what the restaurant’s cuisine was, what could be expected of the chef,  and he simply took paper and  brush and wrote out the dinner he wanted and sent it off to the kitchen. And the chef jolly well prepared that dinner, scrambling to find the ingredients if he didn’t already have them on hand. So this piece of Chang’s “calligraphy,” now offered at auction, was one of those menus, quickly written out by Chang to order a dinner at some restaurant, that a chef had saved.

I may have related already, but let me do it again, my regrets over having turned down his request, delivered to me by Zhang’s son, that I write another essay for an  exhibition of his  paintings--I  had done  one, which he liked and often  reprinted, for a 1963 show of them in New York, I think it was at the Hirschl & Adler Gallery. This second request came after he had moved to California and was living at Pebble Beach near Carmel, and had begun painting in a new style in which he splashed ink and color onto the paper as if (but not really) randomly and then added some fine drawing--a few houses, perhaps--to pull it all together into a landscape. Why did I decline? Because I knew that this new style, hailed by some as Zhang’s brilliant response to Abstract Expressionism, was in considerable part adopted because his eyesight was failing--he had diabetes--and he wanted to minimize the need for detailed drawing in his paintings. Splashing was easier. And I didn’t see how I could write about his new style without revealing this truth about it, as I didn’t want to do.  I’ve sometimes regretted turning him down--I could have found a way out of this situation, compromised a bit. And (although this wouldn’t have been a big factor) been rewarded, doubtless, with one or more of the paintings, as I had been for the earlier essay, works of a kind that are now fetching millions of dollars. (I did in fact own a number of Chang’s paintings over the years, acquired cheap or as gifts, but never kept them--I was convinced, like C. C. Wang, that Zhang was too prolific, too facile, and that his works wouldn’t be worth much in future. This in contrast to C.C.’s own, serious paintings--which now are worth far less. Strange trick of history and reputations.)

I have related elsewhere various stories about how Zhang advised me as a collector, how his daughter Sing was my student through the masters degree, and about my first meeting with him--in Kyoto in 1953, when I was a Fulbright student and he was staying at the finest ryokan or Japanese inn in Kyoto, the Sa’ami, with his companion Chu Hsingchai. (Chu, an art journalist and sometime dealer, used his studio name Hsingchai, it was said, because he had dishonored his real name by collaborating with the Japanese during their occupation of China.) Chang had come to Kyoto bringing some of the old paintings he owned to arrange for the publication by Benrido of another volume in his series Ta-feng-t’ang ming-chi.  Anyway, Chang and I at that first meeting soon discovered that we had a common language, Japanese, and chattered away in that. And I have told of how, as we talked about particular paintings and I asked his opinions of them, he would sketch details from them with the brush he was holding--such was his incredible visual memory, his ability to turn his hand to re-creating pretty much any kind of imagery that the whole history of Chinese painting could offer. I write this now because a colleague asks me, in an email I was reading this morning, how it could be that C. C. Wang was fooled by Chang’s fake antique landscape, the one titled Riverbank: surely C.C. would recognize Chang’s hand, since he knew him so well? But Chang could disguise his hand whenever he wanted to, become Shitao or Bada Shanren or some antique landscapist at will. I watched this happen over the many years I knew him, often enough to recognize this extraordinary ability he had, beyond versatility.

So, let me continue with a good Chang Ta-ch’ien story, one that was well-known to those of us in the field back in the years of his flourishing as a forger. Among his specialties was the great Individualist master Shitao--there are still paintings floating around that no one, certainly not myself, can be entirely sure of: are they real Shitaos or Chang’s fakes? The story was related in print by Chu Hsingchai in one of his publications, but it was well-known to insiders before that. Here is the story (I’ll call him Chang in this one, as I did when I first heard it):

Chang hears of a collector who is especially fond of Shitao’s paintings, and goes to visit him. (You should understand that Chang, although known as a  Shitao forger, was  also a recognized authority on Shitao--he published a corpus of his paintings, as I recall, as well as other writings about him.) Chang expresses lavish admiration for the man’s collection, and tells him that he should construct a special gallery to show off his Shitao paintings--all the art-lovers of the region, he says, will flock to see it. The man is inspired by this idea, constructs the gallery as an addition to his residence, and invites Chang back to show it to him with pride. Chang indeed admires the gallery and the collection, but meanwhile is also measuring one of the walls with his eyes, and he tells the man: This is all very impressive, but what you really need now is one large, major Shitao painting to hang on that wall. That would be wonderful, the man responds, but where am I to find such a painting? Just be patient, says Chang, it will turn up in time if you just wait. And indeed, some months afterwards a dealer turns up with a painting that is just what the collector is hoping for, an impressive large Shitao (or would-be Shitao) painting that fits ideally on that wall. The collector, feeling almost too lucky, calls back Chang Ta-ch’ien--who was, as I say, a recognized authority on the artist--to see it and pronounce judgment on it before he buys it. The dealer who is offering it is there. Chang stands gazing at it for a long time, eventually shaking his head and saying: No, a very impressive forgery, but nonetheless a forgery. The collector gives the painting back to the dealer, who hurries frantically after Chang asking:  What are you up to? He was going to buy that painting! And Chang replies: Don’t worry, just wait for some days and then go back and tell the man that I have bought it. The dealer understands, and after a time revisits the collector to tell him that Chang himself has bought the painting, saying he made a mistake in pronouncing it a forgery, that it is really a fine and genuine work by Shitao. The collector is now convinced that Chang tricked him, told him it was a fake so that he could get it for himself. And that painting becomes the one he cannot live without, must have for his collection; he sends the dealer back to Chang offering to pay a higher price for it. But Chang says no, he made a mistake once but now he realizes that this is a fine and genuine Shitao, one that he cannot part with. And the man continues to make higher and higher offers through the dealer, for the one painting that he really must own--until finally--You can guess the rest. Chang at last agrees to let him have this great work by Shitao--which is, of course, one of his own forgeries--for a very high price.

True story? I have no idea. I remember Cheng Shifa taking me to see the collection of a private collector in Shanghai that contained just such a big Shitao painting. (One that seemed genuine to me at the time.) But it’s the kind of trick that Chang was capable of--I can vouch for that. The great Mr. Chang, I knew him well. And liked and admired him, in spite of everything, and learned a lot from him.

Question: But surely all this is in the past--his forgeries couldn’t fool today’s sophisticated specialists, at a place like, for instance, the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

Answer: (to which all this has been leading up): Go to my Pure and Remote View video-lecture series, pull down to the most recent, open and watch Addendum 1B, the one titled “Riverbank, the Controversy.” That will answer your question.

Question: But surely there must be some way to prove that Riverbank is a Zhang Daqian forgery, to everybody’s satisfaction, beyond argument?

Answer: I thought you’d never ask.  Now, for what really all this has been leading up to: Go to Addendum 2B, the one titled “Riverbank, A Closer  Look.” About twenty minutes into that (be patient) begins an insertion that I added at the last minute, presenting in words and images a new discovery which, I firmly believe, does exactly that: it proves beyond any remaining doubt, with visual evidence that everyone can see for themselves, that Riverbank is one of Zhang Daqian’s forgeries. I won’t tell you here what it is: find the time to watch it.

That addendum ends, by the way, with a concluding passage in which I show two more photos of Zhang Daqian, one in which he is seated before some of the great Monterey cypress trees, another in which he sits in his garden across the valley from the Palace Museum outside Taipei, his final home, with his daughter Sing standing beside him and smiling. A perfect image--evoked, that is, not reproduced here--to end this very long reminiscence about, and tribute to, my old and good friend Mr. Chang, he of the great beard and the intense inner vitality, or charisma. No photograph can really convey those.

(P.S. For a lengthy and detailed account of the 1999 symposium, go to Carter Horsley’s Chinagate website at http://www.thecityreview.com/symposium.html.)

Two Writer-Teachers On Art: Langer and Kaplan

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Created on Tuesday, 03 April 2012 14:25

Written by James Cahill

Two Writer-Teachers On Art: Langer and Kaplan

Throughout my many published writings (and, more recently, my posted video-lectures) I acknowledge frequently, with a kind of false modesty, that I never  really studied philosophy or aesthetics, and pretty much formed my beliefs about art, such as they are, on my own, by picking up ideas and references from my teachers, Max Loehr and others, and from miscellaneous  reading.  Two people, however, deserve acknowledgement as having influenced heavily my thinking about art: Suzanne Langer and Abraham Kaplan.

I read others, of course, and tried to understand them. In the late 1960s when everybody was reading Foucault I did too, explaining to my classes what lay behind his funny reference (citing Borges) at the beginning of The Order of Things to “a certain Chinese encyclopedia” on the subject of dogs. (Chinese encyclopedias don’t collect definitions, they collect references in the literature.) I tried to understand semantic theory and apply it to our subject of study. (The one writer on the subject whom I found especially helpful, whose name I forget, was dismissed by Svetlana Alpers, when I spoke to her about him, as far too popularizing and intelligible to be taken seriously.) Others in our field have read and understood far more than I: John Hay, notably, who as a good Englishman could cite Clive Bell and the rest. His near-namesake Jonathan Hay specializes in citing writers, especially French writers, whom the rest of us have never heard of. (I write this with no disrespect for either--both are people I like and respect.)

Back to Langer and Kaplan: biographical information on both of them is easily accessible on the web, so I won’t copy it out here. I never met Langer, only read her two books Philosophy In a New Key (1942) and Feeling and  Form (1953) and was deeply impressed by them, finding her ideas about how art objects function to deliver their aesthetic impact the most convincing of any I  knew. As for Kaplan, I sat in on a course he gave at the University of Michigan in 1953, it must have been--he was a UCLA professor but also taught at UM for a time. He used Dewey’s book Art As Experience as a basic text, and tried in his lectures to define the artistic or aesthetic experience as distinct from other kinds of experience--the work of art, then, being the thing that arouses or delivers that experience. He tried to define--using the teaching method of drawing answers from the class members and then submitting them to critical evaluation--tried to define, over a number of class sessions, what made some experiences of art better or worse than others: they were more or less complete (the reviewer didn’t arrive late for the concert), informed, prepared for by previous experience of related works, etc. And then, in a summing-up lecture, he delivered his punch-line: if enough people at a given time, people who are properly qualified to have and evaluate aesthetic experiences of a given kind, experience a certain object or event and give it a high rating, that means it is a fine, or even great, work of art. There is, Kaplan pointed out, really no other way to reach a collective evaluation that will hold up--we aren’t, he said, going to get judgments from God.

I may be distorting or misunderstanding his point, but that is my sixty-year-old memory of his teaching. There was a lot more, of course, based on readings of Dewey, Santayana, and others, but none of that stays clearly in my mind now.

Suzanne Langer had learned from the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer a way of thinking about aesthetic experience that recognized it as conveying meaning through what they called non-discursive symbolism--symbolism that doesn’t depend on the logical discourse of language and the thinking behind it, that is, in conveying its meaning and impact. And they recognized the need to engage in creating non-discursive symbols of that kind--in effect, works of art--as a human need as basic as the needs for eating and for sex. (Again, I may well be failing to convey her points fully--I am writing out my long-after understanding. Learned essays on her ideas can be found and read on the web.) Through a kind of symbolism that echoes real experience in a “virtual” way--virtual space for sculpture, virtual time for music, etc.--works of art present or evoke experiences that structurally parallel real-world experiences--at best, they can evoke or convey (how many times have I  recalled and quoted this phrase!) “passages of felt life.” In her Feeling and Form book she elaborates this basic idea for one after another of the arts, including, as I remember, poetry and the dance. And along the way she reveals--again I write this from memory--a deep understanding of all these arts, beyond what one might normally expect of any individual.

I remember being especially impressed at how her understanding of the relationship between artistic expression and ordinary speech and writing agreed with old Chinese ideas--for instance, their belief  (outlined near the beginning of my essay “Confucian Elements in the Theory of Painting”) that when one had reached the limits of what could be expressed in writing, one would break into poetry or song. I forget whether I quoted Langer in that article--I should have.

I used to devise ways in which I could meet and talk with this woman whom I idolized, but none of them ever worked out, alas. Alongside my list of notable people I knew during this long life, I could make a list of people I should have sought out and talked with, but failed to--Robert H. van Gulik was another. And writing in this way about people whom I never met but who influenced me heavily through their writings raises the question of the difference between knowing a person face-to-face and only reading her or his writings--another question recognized and dealt with by the old Chinese, for instance in colophons on paintings that, they say, “make you feel as though you were meeting the man himself.” Perhaps my success in making Chinese writings and works of art more accessible to popular audiences depends in some part on such fusions or correspondences in my mind between the beliefs and expressions of the old Chinese and some in our own culture--for instance, my early (and ultimately wrong-headed) argument that the expressive-brushwork aesthetic of Chinese literati painting anticipated the expressive method of Abstract Expressionist painting, or my more recent (right, I think) association of the history of Chinese painting through Song with Gombrich’s kind of quasi-progress toward greater and greater lifelikeness. We are cautioned endlessly, and properly, by sterner-minded critics against attempting that kind of association, but…

And that brings me to my final question for today: How far has my success as a scholar-writer, such as it is, depended on my taking stands and approaches that my more severe-thinking and theoretically-grounded colleagues have scrupulously avoided? I have been charged with that, and have never troubled to deny it, and certainly don’t mean to do so now, at this late point in a very long and generally successful career. And with that dangerously self-satisfied observation I end this and remain, your unrepentant blogger,

James Cahill

Still More on Art

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Created on Sunday, 01 April 2012 15:15

Written by James Cahill

Still More on Art

One more observation about what has happened to art: I realized once, and wrote somewhere, that the moment when recent art went off in a wrong direction was that moment when artists were permitted to define what art is. In other words, anyone who calls herself/himself an artist can now make or do something and say “This is my [today’s] work of art” and no one can argue otherwise. Time was when artists produced paintings or sculptures that people wanted: you went to an artist to say, “I would like a portrait of myself” (or of my grandfather, or my king, or my castle), or a religious picture to put in the church, or a sculpture for the public square--whatever it might be--and you negotiated a price, and the artist did it. Did this lower the quality and originality of the art, as lots of artists today would argue? I don’t need to answer that, only to suggest that you look back over the history of art and see the works that still arouse the most aesthetic appreciation and visual excitement, and read about the circumstances of their creation, and the  question answers itself. And it was the same in China, as readers of my book The Painter’s Practice know very well. (The Chinese-language edition of that book, by the way, is selling very well and arousing lots of comment, most of it favorable. Tell your Chinese friends to look for it: Huajia Shengyai, by Gao Juhan.)

I recall a meeting of the Arts Club here in Berkeley, of which I have been a longtime member, in which Peter Selz was giving a talk about Christo’s “Running Fence,” a lot of white sheets hung on lines between poles like someone’s laundry, stretching from the road to the sea somewhere over in Marin County. And Peter mentioned that Christo had to pay the farmers who owned the land for their  permission to put this “work of art” over their property. And I spoke up, as the Opposition Voice I often was, to point out how we have moved from centuries in which people would pay the artist to do something they wanted on their land--erect a sculpture, design a building, whatever--to the situation now when the artist has to pay the owner of the land to put his work there. It was a time (as I remember pointing out then) when another prominent sculptor, Richard Serra, had constructed as his work a large bent wall on a public square in New York that required office workers in the building to take a long way around where they had previously walked freely. It was eventually removed after a long public debate that attracted much media attention. Art lovers fussed about those philistines who can’t appreciate a true work of art; most people were happy to see it go. Serra opposed the moving of it, saying that it was “site-specific”--meaning that he meant for people to have to walk around it and be annoyed.)

Much the same observation underlay the lecture I gave in Shanghai in the 1980s for the Chinese Artists’ Association, the one that caused such an uproar (see Reminiscence no. 9, “Angry Response to Talk in Shanghai.”) It was my “Xieyi As a Cause of Decline in Later Chinese Painting” lecture (which is printed as the final chapter in my Three Alternative Histories book), arguing that when painters in late-period China were able to persuade their old patrons that quickly-done pictures in the sketchy xieyi (“drawing the idea”) manner were better than the those in the older xiesheng (“drawing from life”) manner, they made life easier for themselves but helped to bring about a general decline in Chinese painting. Another case of artists being allowed to decide what good or acceptable art is, to the general detriment of art.

I doubt very much that we will ever go back to an age when the purchaser of an art work could tell the artist: No, what you’ve given me isn’t a real painting, it’s a dumb scrawl, and I’m not going to pay you for it. Most everyone in the art world today will tell me:  That would be terrible, a reversion to an earlier and unenlightened period, to the bourgeois formalism (or whatever) from which we have long ago emerged. To which my only response is: Look at the NYTimes tomorrow and see what’s being produced and promoted as art. Do you really, honestly, want one of those? (Supposing it’s something one can have, and not just watch.) The pile of ceramic sunflower seeds, the shark in formaldehyde, the trash pile in the middle of the room? (Of course there will be those who will answer:  yes, of course I want one, and I’d pay millions of dollars for it--millions I can easily spare.)

And that arouses a final memory: when Hsingyuan was an art history student at Stanford, she went with me to the home nearby of a rich woman who was  a noted supporter of contemporary artists--artists who had come into her home, done their “works,” and gone off with their checks. It was a nightmare:  I could not imagine living there, dodging around a big water tank full of god-knows-what, forever fearful of moving awkwardly and damaging a fragile “work”. As it was, I brushed against some construction of balsa wood and broke a minor projection from it, and received severe looks from the woman, who now would have to call the artist back to repair it. And as we were leaving I unguardedly said something aloud to Hsing, on the order of “Thank god that’s over!” which the woman overheard, and I was reproved (quite properly) for my rudeness.

All for today’s blog, written late at night by your overage & out-of-touch blogger, James Cahill (March 26, 2012)

Afterword: A prominent contemporary art critic to whom I sent this before posting it responded with irritation, pointing out that it can be read as an all-over condemnation of contemporary art and the collectors of it.  I didn’t mean that at all, as I responded to him: there are lots of artists working today whom I admire, and lots of perceptive and discriminating collectors. I was complaining about a tendency, and (as I would see it) a general decline in the all-over quality and interest of art being produced in our time--brought about in part by the giveaway to artists that this blog deals with, letting them define art in any way they please, with no way being wrong. I am still inclined to believe that is true. JC

More Afterwords: Before this got posted, the obituary for Hilton Cramer appeared in the NYTimes. He was the longtime art critic for them, and for many years carried a lot of weight. As the obit detailed, he believed that art went badly wrong when artists decided collectively that they wouldn’t make objects of art any more--their lofty principles and distaste for anything commercial prevented them from producing marketable objects. This is still another way, I think, of defining the phenomenon I’ve been writing about. (Reading this, I was reminded of an old serial cartoon by Jules Feiffer which I’ve saved somewhere, in which the artist, brandishing his brushes and palette, strikes a series of dramatic poses while denouncing the commercialism of his time, finally throwing out his arms and exclaiming: FUND  ME!)

With Gombrich and Kramer both gone,  there are fewer and  fewer of us left to lament the  decline of serious art-object making. So I end this as one of the dwindling number of true believers in art production as the making of aesthetically rewarding things,

James Cahill, March 29, 2012.