James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Chinese Paintings at Auction

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Created on Monday, 26 March 2012 05:53

Written by James Cahill

Chinese Paintings At Auction

Everybody with more than a casual interest in Chinese paintings and the  market for them will have heard by now about the extraordinary results of the Sotheby’s New York auction on  March 22 of “Fine Classical Chinese Paintings.” The total sales totaled $35,163,000, nearly double the high estimates combined. Quite a few of the paintings sold for prices many times the estimates; it would appear that buyers (and especially buyers from China) are willing to spend huge amounts to get the pieces they want. Since four of the paintings in the sale were labeled as former Ching Yuan Chai collection--that was my old studio name, given me by Shujiro Shimada back in 1953 when I  was a  Fulbright student in Kyoto (see Reminiscence no. 6 on this  website)--the assumption has been that the paintings are mine. It’s  true that they once were mine, among my treasures; but for quite a few years they have belonged to my daughter Sarah, part of the group of fifteen paintings that she chose when I made up a group of some thirty for her and Nicholas to  choose from. Sarah sold those four--keeping her real favorites-- to raise money for family purposes, and, happily, came out quite well.

I am here in Berkeley for the months of March and April, and my twin sons Julian and Benedict, now sixteen, are with me for a week; we had a session at the Berkeley Art Museum looking at some thirty paintings that they will choose from, in the same way. Alas, I don’t today have paintings of the caliber of those that went to Nick and Sarah , but the ones they saw and will choose between are still fine things in their lesser way. We will do the choosing tomorrow, with flips of a coin determining who gets first choice in each category (two major paintings, a small group of Ming-Qing paintings, a few Japanese paintings, some fine works by recent Chinese artists.) Doing it this way, instead of simply giving them the paintings, should afford them the pride of owning pieces they chose themselves.

Getting back to the auction: a group of calligraphy fans and album leaves written by Southern Song emperors (or by their court calligraphers--not a calligraphy buff myself, I’m never sure--they were obliged to turn them out in huge numbers to use as gifts, and employed ghost-calligraphers) sold  for $5.7 million. A group of fine Ming-Qing paintings owned by Cecile Mactaggart, from the extensive collection that she and her husband Sandy put together--most of it went to the University of Alberta for their art museum--sold for very high prices, and I had a  long and happy email from Cecile the next morning,  reminiscing about a wonderful weekend that Hsingyuan and I had spent long  ago at their place in Alberta,  along with the New York dealer Robert Ellsworth and Roderick  Whitfield and his wife, going through their whole collection and offering comments on the authenticity and quality of the pieces, for their cataloging purposes. I remember sitting (with my flash camera, making slides) over a lovely small album by the Anhui-school artist Zheng Min--he is the one who opens my Painter’s  Practice book,  where I  contrast the standard idealized account of him--living aloof from the  world, painting to  express his lofty feelings, giving his paintings freely to his  friends, etc.--with the realities of his life as revealed in his recently-discovered diary, which tells of  his seeking commissions, taking on odd  jobs, depending on his paintings to survive, wondering how he will get through the year. And Zheng Min was one of the little-known small masters included in our “Shadows of Mt. Huang” exhibition and catalog of 1981. Now this album by him was acquired for a big price by the Metropolitan Museum, with a happy statement issued by Mike Hearn. (Smart acquisition, congratulations.)

Also in the auction was the great Chen Hongshou handscroll representing the “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove,” once owned by Walter Hochstadter, sold in a Hong Kong auction some years ago but then returned by the buyer, who produced a letter signed by two prominent Shanghai Museum curators pronouncing it to be an obvious fake; the buyer’s money was refunded, and the painting  went to Walter’s heirs, who live in Australia.  They contacted me, as a longtime supporter of the painting, and I wrote for  them a notarized affadavit expressing my  confidence in the authenticity and importance of the painting. This time is sold for $1,650,000, more than twice the high estimate--I have no idea who bought it, but he or she spent the money wisely. It is the centerpiece of a forthcoming lecture in our second video-lecture series “Gazing Into the Past.”

No.  647, a landscape with figure painted in 1662 by Shitao--at least according to the inscription--went for $146,000--again, more than twice the high estimate. Painted in a rather free and sketchy style, it bears a seal of Zhang Daqian, and if I had been able to see it in the original I could have confirmed or dispelled, to  my own satisfaction at least, the sense that it might be  one of Zhang’s many forgeries of Shitao. And I found myself wondering: did some knowing buyer, aware of Zhang’s authorship, acquire it for that high price as his work?  Not impossible in today’s world of fervent Zhang Daqian admirers who don’t mind spending a million or two to add a painting by him to their collections. But, as I say, this is only a loose impression formed without seeing the original--not to taken seriously as a judgment.

All of this happened in a world that otherwise seems, these days, little interested in Chinese painting. During the active decades of my career Chinese painting seemed to occupy the center of attention in the world of Asian art, with exhibitions and symposia, major scholars devoting themselves to it, controversies and discoveries. No longer--now the focus of attention seems to have shifted (quite properly, and in an entirely healthy way) to Buddhist art, early Chinese art, an admiration for objects over those flat, dark old rectangles that so occupied us--and to the art of India, the Middle East, Southeast Asia. A recent NYTimes full page showing notable objects of Asian Art in the Met included no Chinese paintings at all. And as for our video-lecture series, offering the first-ever comprehensive visual history of this greatest (along with European painting) pictorial tradition in world art--as noted in my previous Bitter Blog on Art--no notice at all, no response to a second press release. Thousands of viewers (nearly three thousand for the first lecture so far), enthusiastic responses sent to me (a happy recipient) by email--but nothing in the popular press or magazines to reflect this success and to attract further viewers. Well, I should count my blessings, which are many. A great week spent with my sons Julian and Benedict here in Berkeley ends tomorrow when they fly home. And more blessings of other kinds than I can count, more than will fit neatly into this long blog, which accordingly ends here. I  will try to have another  ready  to post at least by April first (April Fool’s Day--I  must think of how to celebrate that.)

Bitter Blog About Art

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Created on Wednesday, 14 March 2012 13:28

Written by James Cahill

Bitter Blog About Art

The main body of today’s blog consists of a long paragraph, printed below, from an email I sent to my collaborator on the Pure and Remote project,  Rand  Chatterjee, and to Kate Chouta of IEAS, an email about the press release that we are about to send out,  now that that PRV series is complete and posted both on the IEAS website and on this one. The similar press release that we sent out some months ago announcing the series, sent to many publications and reviewers, generated how much response, how many published articles? Answer: none, zero, zilch. Nobody seems to have noticed it--I waited for phone calls from reviewers eager for more information and quotes--none came. We hope for better responses to the one we’re sending out in a few days, probably on Monday. This one will also be posted on this website, and sent out to my many email addressees. If you know an art critic, ask her or him to pay some attention to our send-out and our project. But meanwhile, here is the bitter paragraph that I wrote to Rand and Kate:

“As for critics’ responses: I am hopeful, but only moderately hopeful. The first full-scale visual history of one of the two great pictorial painting traditions in world art, presented in a new medium, free for everybody to watch? Is that big news in art these days? Of course not. What is big news, worthy of NYTimes Arts Section full-page treatment with big illustrations, is some woman performance artist making her audience sit for some ninety minutes while her performers, dancers dressed in black, walked around in circles backwards. (Great bore for audience, excruciating for dancers.)* But IT’S ART! So big news. Or the Tate Modern spending eight million (pounds? dollars?) to buy lots of the little ceramic sunflower seeds that Ai Weiwei had his workers make to scatter all over the gallery floor for people to walk on--except that by miscalculation they produced a dangerous dust and had to be piled up in the middle of the gallery to be gazed at, not walked on. THAT’S REAL ART! I respect Ai Weiwei as a dissident in China but not much as an artist. His other notable work was having his assistants (big artists don’t dirty their hands much these days) cast larger-size copies of bronze animal heads from the Yuanming Yuan. Ai Weiwei belongs to the category I intended to symbolically finish off when, many years ago as I became (for one bad year, was it 1977-78?) acting director of the University Art Museum, I told the staff at our first meeting that we were going to hang a big sign from the highest balcony reading DOING DUMB THINGS AND CALLING IT ART IS OVER! The sign was never made, much less hung, and doing dumb things has gone on to become the very center of art. Augh. I have lived too long.”

I should add, again, my other old observation on art today (i.e. 20th-21st century): If only someone had said, at the right moment, “Good joke, M. Duchamps, a urinal exhibited as a piece of sculpture, ha ha! Now let’s go back to making art”--if only someone (or everyone) had said that, instead of the collective “Oh wow!” that greeted his joke, 20th century art would be very different--and a lot better.
James Cahill, March 8, 2012, from Berkeley

*New York Times for March 7, Arts Section p. 2, almost full-page, Sarah Michelson work of performance art at 2012 Whitney Biennial.

Memories of Xu Bangda

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Created on Tuesday, 13 March 2012 05:14

Written by James Cahill

Blog: Memories of Xu Bangda

This one belongs properly among my Reminiscences, but I post it here to ensure wider readership. I learned last night that the great Chinese connoisseur Xu Bangda had died, about two weeks ago, on February 23^rd. (See the formal photograph of him reproduced here as Illustration 1.)Born in 1911, he was (by Chinese count) 102  years  old. . To be truthful, I had no idea that he had lived so long--my last meeting with him was many years ago, in the 1990s, and when I tried to get from him an answer to a question that concerned me about something that happened in the distant past, by having a friend who was visiting him pose the question, the friend came back with the report that he was too old and bedridden, unable to remember and answer such questions. (For that non-event, see below, quoting from my Responses and Reminiscences  no. 67, titled “Ask Old People Things While They Still Can Answer”--I included as such a case my failure to  ask Xu, while I could have, an important question about the selection committee that chose the paintings sent by the Chinese government to the 1935-36 London exhibition--he was a member.) What follows will be some random memories of him, what I heard about him before we met, our significant comings-together after we first met in 1977. These are not intended as solid biographical information--I will include hearsay and second-hand stories of a kind too sloppy for that. And the incidents I’ll relate will not all be in proper chronological order. But here, with no apologies, are my remembrances of Xu Bangda.

I heard about him long before I met him. He was, along with C. C. Wang, one of the two principal disciples of the Shanghai collector-connoisseur Wu Hufan--subject of a fine recent book by Clarissa von Spee. (No, this isn’t a learned article with biblio. citations--look it up for yourselves.) Wang came to the U.S. in the 1940s; Xu stayed behind in China, and rode out the bad Mao years with difficulty. He was chosen--I believe it was by Zheng Zhenduo, who then occupied a Minister-of-Culture-like position--as one of a team to bring together a national collection of paintings for the Palace Museum in Beijing, to replace the great collection that Chiang Kai-shek’s people had  carried off to Taiwan. (Another on the team was the great Shanghai collector Zhang Congyu, who reportedly came to a bad end in jail.) One story had it that Xu Bangda was in trouble because he had arranged for a woman friend to go out from China with money to buy back paintings in Hong Kong and elsewhere,  and she had simply taken the money and absconded, leaving Xu in a bad situation.

In any case, whatever the truth of that story might be,  Xu Bangda was in political trouble in the 1960s-70s. Before our “Archaeology Delegation” made its trip to China in 1973, I was warned by Cheng Chi, then living in Tokyo but keeping up with art events in China through constant communication, not to ask about Xu while we were there. And I, of course, being as politically naïve as I was, went ahead and inquired about him when we were in Beijing, and was told that he was ill and couldn’t see us. (News of my blunder somehow got back to Cheng Chi, who chastised me for it, quite properly--I deserved it.) On our 1977 Old Chinese Painting Delegation, chaired by myself, we didn’t have to ask--Xu Bangda turned up at one of our viewings in Beijing, and greeted us warmly, chattering away with our Chinese-speaking members, looking as excited and happy, I wrote home at the time, as an animal released after spending a long time in a cage. He was with us for later painting viewings, and seemed in good spirits and good standing.

Move ahead about a decade, to my long stay in China in 1986, living at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in the center of Beijing (near Wangfu Jing, before their move to the new campus far out near the airport.) Late one evening, after the lights had all been turned off, there was a knock on the door of my room (on the 8^th floor, where foreign guests lived) and when I opened it, with a flashlight  or candle, I can’t remember which, there was an attractive woman who wanted to come in and talk with me. And I, never averse to seeing what might happen in such a situation, welcomed her in. She identified herself (I forget whether we talked in English, Chinese, or some combination of those) as Teng Fang, an actress and Xu’s longtime companion and lover. (In the obituaries she is identified as his wife--but his real wife never allowed a divorce, and I don’t think one can have two wives in today’s China.) She had come to convey Xu Bangda’s invitation for lunch at the Beijing Hotel. Of course I accepted--I had been meaning to get in touch with him.

He came to the lunch along with Yang Xin, then his principal disciple. (This  was long before Xiao Ping, identified as his chief disciple in the obituaries, came on the scene.) We talked about lots of things, including meeting for painting viewings at the Palace Museum. I was just then blessed with the possibility of inviting a Chinese scholar to spend a year at the University of California in Berkeley--some foundation had granted us the funds for this--and I took this opportunity to invite Xu Bangda.  Alas, he replied, he wasn’t free to come--I forget now what his reason was. On the spur of the moment, without thinking of consequences, I then invited Yang Xin, who agreed enthusiastically. This proved to be a move with heavy consequences--another specialist with whom I had been more closely associated, and with whom I had traveled--he will remain nameless here--was deeply offended over not having been offered this year in Berkeley, and became (and still is) a kind of enemy. Yang Xin spent a happy year in Berkeley and traveling around the U.S. to see collections and study museum practice; it was partly this experience which not long after his return got him chosen as the Director of the Palace Museum. It also gave him a year away from a somewhat deranged and vindictive wife, left behind in China, while in Berkeley Yang Xin--but no, that’s another story for another time.

Out of chronological order, but I’m fitting it in here anyway: at the first international symposium on Chinese painting to be held in China, the one on the Anhui (or “Huangshan”) school held in Hefei in 1984, I was invited to be the opening-night speaker, because our “Shadows of Mt. Huang”  exhibition of 1981 and its catalog had largely inspired this event. I chose, for reasons  little understood at the time but clear in my mind, to present a paper (with double slide-projection, new to many of those present) demonstrating that a major work supposedly by the leading master of the  school, Hongren,  an album of Huangshan scenes that was one of the treasures of the Palace Museum, was not by Hongren at all, but by his lesser contemporary Xiao Yuncong. (That paper will appear before long on this website, when we have solved the problem of matching illustrations to text.) I was responding to what had happened during the visits by eminent Chinese connoisseurs, with Xu Bangda prominent among them, to see U.S. collections--their frequent pronouncements about some of our treasures that they were not genuine--I wanted to show that we could also play that game. The paper caused a consternation that dominated the rest of the symposium (PROFESSOR CAHILL HAS CHALLENGED CHINESE CONNOISSEURSHIP!). Xu Bangda told me privately, when we were alone in the garden during a break, that he didn’t believe the  album was by Hongren either, although he hadn’t thought of Xiao Yuncong as the real artist. Nevertheless, whatever his real opinion, he was reportedly marched off the next morning to the museum by his Director, Yang Boda, to look at the album together and prepare a talk arguing for its being an authentic work by Hongren, which he delivered the next day, speaking haltingly and with evident discomfort before an audience that knew or suspected what was going on. I was sorry to have subjected him to this. We remained friends, and spent time together during the trip around Anhui that followed the symposium. (See Illustration 2, the two of us together with Wang Shiqing, our guide, and my close friend Takehiro Shindo.)

Various comings-together with Xu Bangda continued during the following years, when I was spending a lot of time in China and he was a prominent figure in the painting world there, publishing important books and continuing in his position at the Palace Museum. The next notable meeting with him that I can recall was when Jeannette Shambaugh Elliott, writing her book on the history of the Palace Museum collection (inspired by conversations with myself, after she heard me lecture about how such a book needed to be written while so many of the participants were still alive--I  have a thick file of correspondence carried on with her during the writing--the book was left incomplete at her death, and was finished and published by her nephew David Shambaugh)--when Jeannette Elliott, to get back to my narrative, “commissioned” my wife-to-be Hsingyuan Tsao to interview Xu Bangda about his role in this great story. Hsingyuan’s interview was incorporated into the book--I remember only sitting and listening while she and Xu talked in Chinese far beyond my comprehension. (Again, you can find the book--highly recommended--for yourselves.)

Xu Bangda did come to the U.S., of course, invited by others for a tour of  museum collections along with the equally famous Shanghai artist-connoisseur Xie Zhiliu and several younger specialists who accompanied those two. According to reports, the two masters were forever arguing about the authenticity of paintings they saw, one insisting that it was genuine, the other that it was a fake. I have used this report sometimes to make the point that even the best connoisseurs aren’t right all the time--they couldn’t, after all, both be right, however sure of themselves they might sound. (That, as I have recounted elsewhere, was part of the basic act of the Chinese  connoisseur, from Dong Qichang onward: to stand or sit in front of a painting and pronounce a judgment on its authenticity and quality, a judgment that was made to sound as though it had been sent down from heaven.)

Xu Bangda was himself a painter, capable of traditional styles (learned, presumably, while in the circle of Wu Hufan) but hardly a distinguished one. C. C. Wang, who started with a similar traditional grounding but went on to become a much more original and important artist, attributed Xu’s failure to develop to his being out of touch with developments in art outside China, and the strong political discouragement of any move toward “modern” styles by artists during the bad Mao years.

Xu Bangda’s notable longevity, living to over a hundred, gives hope to someone who feels already over-the-hill at 85. Still, Xu’s passing removes from the world another of the people I most respected. But one can also outlive his period of real capability. That Xu had already declined markedly some years ago in his ability to think and speak coherently I know from the report of the friend who visited him, charged by me to get from him the answer to my question about the selection committee for the London Exhibition. On that, let me simply quote my Reminiscence (no. 67):

“Realizing that he is very old and that I probably wouldn't be seeing him again myself, I asked a good friend who was going to visit him and his beloved companion—now wife?--Teng Fong to put this question to him, and she promised to do that. But after her return, she wrote:

"’Dear Jim, We had a good visit to Beijing last week. Teng Fong arranged for us to see Mr Xu in his room resting in bed. He could utter sounds but not words. I didn't raise the question of the 1936 exhibition in London as I didn't think his memory would go very far. Well, for his age, he is doing well and being well looked after.’

“Too late again. Now the point of the admonition in my title should be clear: don't wait too long, we don't live forever, and our memories may fail toward the end. I am myself trying to set down a lot of old stories and information in these Reminiscences and elsewhere without waiting to be questioned, but I will also try to respond to any really interesting questions to which I can give unembarrassing answers of moderate length. “

And I ended that Reminiscence, and will end these Memories, with an anecdote I heard about Xu Bangda:

“I will conclude this Reminiscence.. . with a sad and funny story. This one verges on gossip, something I heard and perhaps shouldn't be passing on. But posterity must be informed, even at the cost of proper discretion. Divorces are more difficult in China than here, and several of my Chinese colleagues have remained bound to wives long after their warm marital relationships had in reality ended. Xu Bangda was one of those; I came to know his lovely companion, now (I believe) his wife, Teng Fong, when I first met him in Beijing. She is a former movie star and a cultivated woman of great charm. Some time after the opening of China in the 1980s, Xu Bangda was invited by a U.S. institution for a year's stay, so that he could see collections and impart some of his connoisseurial wisdom to students and scholars here. He wrote back accepting, but asking whether he could bring Teng Fong with him. But—tragicomically—the postage on foreign mail had recently gone up a penny or so, and his letter was returned for insufficient postage. Whereupon, of course, it was opened and read by his real wife--and goodbye to foreign stay. He was able to come for shorter visits in the company of other scholar-specialists, but the happy and productive year was lost, ‘for the want of a [Chinese] penny.’ “

Final thought: with C. C. Wang and Xu Bangda both gone, who now can claim the title of the world’s leading connoisseur of Chinese painting--the one who can identify the most artists by their styles, and the most paintings by seeing them, in wholes or details, in slides or photos or reproductions? (I mean, of course, a visual connoisseur, not one who reads inscriptions and deciphers seals etc.--he is something else.) Who can now claim that title?  Opinions will differ, but in the opinion of Your Old Blogger, it is none other than--

But no, modesty prevents me from ending that sentence. As a clue to how I might have ended it, let me simply sign,

James Cahill, March 10^th, 2012