James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Mike Pieta

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Created on Tuesday, 06 March 2012 06:54

Written by James Cahill

Mike Pieta: PUT IT BACK BEHIND THE SOFA

Real drawing:

Fake painting:

The Sunday (May 29, 2010) Arts and Leisure section of the NYTimes devoted most of three pages to an oil painting (on wood panel) purporting to be a work by Michelangelo; a big color reproduction of it on the front page, and more reproductions, including one of the real Michelangelo drawing on which it is based, on later pages. The long text reports on a new book about it, tells of how leading experts have delivered the opinion that it may well be a real work by the master, how it was shown long ago at the Met and elsewhere, then fell into obscurity (behind a sofa, fell off the wall that is) for many years. All very impressive—until one looks at the pictures. (They can also be seen, more clearly, in older articles about it on the web.)

I have saved the NYTimes pages and mean to use them to show my boys Julian and Benedict, now nearly sixteen, when I next see them. And if they fail to see the profound difference between the painting and the drawing, I will disown them. (Don’t give away my plan by telling them, please.) What they will tell me, after looking for a while, is that the painting cannot possibly be by Michelangelo or any other really good artist, because of its total failure to achieve visual effects of space and depth, in the way the drawing does so magnificently (even with its more limited means.) Forms that recede or turn in space in the drawing are completely flat in the painting, with everything appearing as pressed against the frontal plane. The virgin’s face, which tilts back and has a properly soulful look in the real Mike is straight up & down in the painting and looks more angry than distressed; the head of Christ, convincingly bent forward in the drawing, is a flat blob in the painting; his bent legs fail to move forward and back—and so forth, striking contrasts of this kind throughout both works.

So, how has the painting been able to fool so many people, including reputed experts? Hard question; the only general answers I can suggest are, first, that a lot of money is involved—many millions of dollars—and  secondly, that the directions painting has taken during the past century or so have not obliged the viewers’ eyes to develop the capacity for reading effects of space and depth, the placement of objects at different angles to the picture plane, and all the rest. So that visual capacity in viewers of pictorial art has been largely lost. It can still be regained, by attention to the great paintings of the past, which required this kind of reading—people can be taught, that is, to see. Whether that will happen, on a large enough scale to be significant, is another question. My lecture series is, among other things, an effort in that direction.

(Let me anticipate an objection that will be raised: how can you offer such sure verdicts on the basis of reproductions, without seeing the originals? To answer that I can only repeat what I often told my students: strange as it may seem, one can often see the compositional strengths or faults of a picture –the larger features, not the fine “hand of the artist” things—in a photo or reproduction more clearly than in the original. This is especially true when the original painting is large, and on dark silk, as many old Chinese paintings are.   I have learned this over decades of looking, and can only offer it as a truth without attempting an explanation of why it is so.)

Pure and Remote Notes

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Created on Saturday, 03 March 2012 16:07

Written by James Cahill

PRV Notes Intro

The official, or “proper,” place to find the written-out notes used in making my Pure and Remote View lectures is on the Institute for East Asian Studies website http://ieas.berkeley.edu/publications/aparv.html, where one finds printed in blue below each of the images for the lectures the words “Click here for notes to Lecture 1” etc. The notes that can be downloaded there have been carefully edited by Kate Chouta, Managing Editor of IEAS. Working with a Chinese-language-reading assistant, she has also turned all the Chinese names into proper pinyin spellings and added characters for the names of artists and some others. All this work I appreciate greatly, and I recommend that as a first place to go for my notes, or “handouts.”

I have decided to post here on my website, however, for whatever interest they may have for viewers of the lectures, copies of the original printouts of my pages of notes, including pages of additions and corrections, changes made after the lectures were first recorded in draft. These are completely unedited, sloppy in many ways, originally intended only for the use of myself and my collaborator Rand Chatterjee, As you will find if you compare these texts with the recorded lectures, they only approximate what I say--I have never worked from completely-written-out texts. And even when I follow roughly the written notes, I try to make my talking sound spontaneous, with momentary decisions and little jokes. My regular viewers know all that.

Anyway, here they are, for what they are worth. I’ve written large identifying titles in the upper right of the first page of each, using my own abbreviations. “Talking Head” means the introductory sections that appear at the beginning ir each with me on camera, introducing the lectures. “C & c” means comments and corrections, pages I would give Rand after looking through the original draft of each lecture, telling him what I thought needed to be changed. And I’ve used abbreviations for common terms--Kate Chouta has spelled all these out, I’ve left them as is. They include: LS = landscape, ptg = painting; I on p means ink on paper, I & c on s means ink and colors on silk. And there are lots of “discuss briefly” etc. notes to myself. Chinese names are given in both the old Wade-Giles spelling and the new pinyin, whichever came into my head. AddAudio is a term we use for when I need to record a new segment to insert into the draft of a lecture.

So, with all that to help the intrepid who decide to try to read these original notes, for whatever reason, here they are, in all their primordial messiness.

James Cahill, February 21, 2012

To My Video Viewers: You're Missing the Best ONes!

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Created on Wednesday, 29 February 2012 16:47

Written by James Cahill

To My Video Viewers: You’re Missing the Best Ones!

The viewing numbers for the Pure and Remote View series are, on the whole, gratifying--over 2,800 people have watched the first lecture, for instance. But looking at the viewing numbers for the later lectures, I note with distress that several of the richest and most important, both in images and in what I have to say about them, haven’t attracted large viewerships, maybe because I titled them unwisely. So my fervent message to my video viewers is: forget those titles that may make the lectures sound unattractive, and go back and watch these! They are:

- Lecture 5, Five Dynasties Painting: Reliable Works. All right, that was a badly-chosen title. But the lecture is more rewarding, I think, in its visuals and in my argument about them, than Lecture 6 which is titled “The Great Landscape Masters” and has been viewed by over a thousand people.

- Lectures 7a and 7b, on Early and Late Northern Song Landscape--again, badly titled so little watched. But if I were to choose a real high point for the whole series, this would be it--both the paintings and my lectures about them. I state that Northern Song landscape painting is up there among the great works of man, along with Gothic cathedrals and German romantic music. Watch them and judge for yourselves. But watch them, and listen.

- Lecture 9C, Masters of Representation: The Southern Song Academy. So “representation” has become an off-putting word, while “literati” or “poetic” draws you in. Alas, that’s the affliction of art history in our time that I’m forever arguing against, exemplified in the viewership of my own lectures. Be an exception to the trend, watch this one please. Even if it’s about representation.

- Lecture 12C, Six Persimmons. All right, the title doesn’t draw you in, and once you’re in you may not have the patience to finish it. But this is another of the really central and important ones, in which I make the attempt to define what Chan (Zen) painting is, and even, in a limited outsider’s way, what Chan is. Watch it please!

I will try to have learned my lesson and to avoid, in future, giving dull titles to lectures I really want to promote. I should have known better before titling these PRV lectures. This plea to my viewers to go back and watch the badly-titled but really important ones is an attempt to make up for that mistake.

James Cahill, February 24^th, 2012