James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

Blog, 7/22/11

Details

Created on Sunday, 24 July 2011 06:54

Written by James Cahill

I write this blog on the verge of flying to Berkeley for a few weeks, to spend time with my daughter Sarah and her family, to see other old friends and colleagues, to gather materials for my video-lectures there in my old library and in the departmental slide-room, to celebrate my birthday with family and friends (I will be 85 on August 13.)

Works goes forward on this website, done by Barry Magrill and the website designer he is working with. Very soon, my long essay on Pictorial Printing in China and Japan, available now as a text you can read, will become an illustrated text, in which you will be able to go from my references to pictures to the actual pictures. This has proven difficult, and I look forward very much to seeing its successful completion, because it can be a model for a series of “illustrated essays,” texts with pictures that seem better presented this way on my website than turned into video-lectures for that series.

About that series: Rand Chatterjee and I have nearly finished the long, three-part Lecture 9, on Southern Song Academy Painting, and he will post it, along with Lecture 10 on bird-and-flower painting up to the end of Song, on Youtube where you can access them and view them free through this website, the IEAS website in Berkeley, and (presumably) the Chinese website Tudou. Let me ask again: please tell your Chinese friends about the accessibility of the lectures there; the more people know about them, the better.

I am giving Barry two more Reminiscences today to post, one a series of memories from my childhood, about a remarkable hermit who lived near us (“down the hill from us”) in Fort Bragg, California, where I was born and spent most of my childhood. The other is about a really memorable, scarcely believable (but nonetheless true), experience that my son Nick and I had when he was a child, in discovering a blowhole--well, I won’t say more, just read it and imagine yourselves having such an experience. It is sill vivid in my memory, perhaps because I have recalled it so often.

At the end of the previous blog I printed one of the “Three Korean Street-scenes,” poems I wrote while I was a language officer in the Occupation in Seoul in 1947. Now I will copy another below. It needs be preceded with an explanation that is painful to write: American soldiers referred to Koreans at that time, somewhat contemptuously, as “gooks.” (Derived from the Koreans’ name for their own country, Hangook?) This was one of those repellent racial/ethnic names--think of wop, nigger, limey, jewboy, huns--that were common back then. Most of them have fallen into disuse, thank god--we have made a few advances in a generally downhill devolution.  So, here is the second of my verses:

II. Trio

Boy:            Daddy, look!

That dirty gook

Made a face at me just then!

Look, he's doing it again!

Shoot him, Daddy, shoot him dead!

Shoot him through the head!

Captain:      That there guy

With one eye?

He's just smilin' at you, son!

He ain't gonna hurt you none!

If he tried to, he's sure be an-

Other dead Korean!

Korean:       Sickly, pale,

Ugly, frail,

Well-fed child who calls me gook--

How repulsive you would look

If you stood by my boy's side

If he hadn't died.

Blog, 7/8/11

Details

Created on Tuesday, 12 July 2011 03:36

Written by James Cahill

Blog, 7/8/11

Again, I open this one with big news--a lot is happening in my life these days. Our video-lecture series, A Pure and Remote View, has been posted onto a website in China! I have no idea who did this, and can only hope that it stays there--nothing in these lectures, at least so far, can be reason for the Chinese government to block them. They are on a website called Tudou, Potato; go to http://www.tudou.com/playlist/id12470915.html. And please tell any friends in China about them. I hope they will be much watched there, and provide good models for my kind of visual approach to art history, and also provide viewers and students there with thousands of high-level images of Chinese paintings and related materials.

Next: We are re-working the end of my Bibliography here on my website to include recent publications, including one not by me but by Stella Lee or Li Yu, long ago my student, now a prominent literary figure; she has published in a Taiwan literary journal called Ink a kind of preview of a video-lecture that wlll appear in a later series, concerning an important event in my past. Find the reference in the Bibliography and follow it up if you are interested.

We are working to make extensive and important additions to this website in the form of illustrated essays or papers, which you will be able to read while referring to the illustrations along the way. The long writing titled “Woodblock Colorprinting in China and Japan,” now accessible only a text, will be reworked into this kind of heavily illustrated text--more like a large Photo Gallery item with accompanying essay--and others will follow. I have realized that this new form of publication permits me to indulge a long-held dream: to use as many color illustrations as I want with a piece of my writing, instead of the few that my editors and publishers have allowed in old-style publication. I think of putting on the website, before long, the chapters of my unpublished book on Chinese erotic painting (titled Scenes from the Spring Palace.) This has in fact been accepted by a publisher, has gone through readers etc., and waits only for me and the editor and others to proceed with producing the book. But in these times when academic presses are pinched for funds, I would be severely limited in the number of illustrations I can use, and half of those would have to be in black-and-white. So: watch this space for the announcement of a great wealth of paintings of a kind that mostly have never been published before.

Continuing with my series of old jokes that somehow pop out of my memory: here is another, Jewish I think:

A man visits a friend in his New York apartment, goes to the bathroom and emerges looking panicky and saying: “Do you know that there’s a dead horse in your bathtub?” The resident of the apartment quiets him down, says yes, he knows, and explains: “I have this smart-alecky brother-in-law who, whatever you say to him, he comes back with ‘So what, what else is new?’. So he’s coming here tomorrow, and he will go into the bathroom and come out, like you, saying ‘There’s a dead horse in your bathtub!’ And then I will say, “So what, what else is new?’”

Onward and upward (or downward, as you prefer): Among the little-read offerings on this website, I think, is my Ching Yuan Chai Treasury of Imperishable Ephemera; if you pull down under Writings of JC and open it, you can download it as a pdf and then open it and go down through the pages reading it--but who goes to that much trouble, with no indication of how rewarding it will be? So I think I will pull items from it and insert them into this and future blogs, in the hope that they will find more readers that way. This first time it is one of “Three Seoul Streetscenes” composed in 1947 while I was a language officer in the U.S. occupation in Korea. It can be found on pp. 61-2 of CYCTIE, along with the other two, which I will insert into future blogs. The city of Seoul had been devastated by the war, and impoverished people and beggars were everywhere. All this was new to me, a Berkeley liberal uneasy about my situation there, and especially about how oblivious others in the Occupation were to what they saw. So, with that background, here it is:

I. Flies

How very wise

Are the flies!

A Korean beggar lies in the street,

His head in the mud, mud at his feet;

And he moves not in his sleep,

Merging into the garbage heap

On which he lies.

When every motion brings him pain,

Why should he wish to move again?

And the flies

Very wise

Crawl on his mouth and nose and eyes.

The sun-broiled offal reeks and seethes;

Fearful, I wonder if he breathes—

A fevered rolling of the head

Shows that he is not yet dead.

But the flies

Very wise

Do not wait until he dies.

Now the sound of oxen hooves

Clopping by him in the street

Wakes him; woodenly he moves,

Rising stiffly to his feet.

And the flies

Also rise

Buzzing their annoyed surprise.

With delicate fingers, from the wet

He lifts the butt of a cigarette

And drops it with a crafty glance

Into the pocket of his pants

As through his rattling breath

He smiles a thin smile over the prize

Which altogether justifies

The pain of living in his eyes,

The staving off of death.

But the flies

Are more wise:

In pin-point brains they realize

How little changes when he dies.

5/31/11 Blog

Details

Created on Monday, 06 June 2011 19:47

Written by James Cahill

5/31/11 Blog

The big news I want to begin with today is that four more of my video-recorded lectures, 7A&B and 8A&B, taking us through the end of the Northern Song period, are now available for watching. Go to the Youtube site http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=5A732B4758A5E5D7. (The pictures are the wrong ones, but that will be fixed.) These haven’t yet been added to the IEAS site or to my own here—both take time. But they are watchable, and for those faithful watchers who can’t wait for the next ones to arrive, there they are. They include my treatment of the Northern Song monumental landscape tradition—which I take to be the highpoint of the whole series, and among the great achievements of man—concentrating on the works of Yan Wengui, Fan Kuan, Xu Daoning, and Guo Xi. Then a lecture centered on the works of two “noblemen artists,” Zhao Lingrang and Wang Shen, and one devoted to the early masters of the literati tradition, Su Shi and his crew. Lecture 10A&B, two longish lectures on bird-and-flower painting through the end of Song, will follow shortly (out of order) and will offer among other things a first-ever attempt to trace a stylistic development in this genre, besides presenting numerous images of astonishing quality and beauty. Rand Chatterjee and I are working hard to finish the remaining three (or eleven, or whatever) of the series; then, if my health holds up, we go on to two additional series, which I mean to introduce in a later blog.

The remainder of this one might be titled: Put It Back Behind the Sofa! The Sunday (May 29) 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 the two 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, one estimate is 300 million—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— more clearly in a photo or reproduction than in the original. This is especially true when the original painting is large, and on dark silk, as many old Chinese paintings are, but it is true of other kinds as well. 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.)