James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

The glitches in my website have been largely repaired, and it is ready to be announced. My long-planned send-out will finally be carried out, today and tomorrow. Those of you who receive it: note that if downloading the attachments is difficult or too much time and trouble, the same texts are on the website as CLP 176 and 177.

So, this cumbersome and overloaded vehicle will at last be under way. Piling so many writings and jottings onto it does not imply that I think they are all worth reading; it is intended for free browsing, especially by people with special interests in the many subjects treated in the texts. It will be added to from time to time.

9/3/07. Two more items have been added to the "Writings" section of my website, both of interest chiefly to people who may want to follow up, as researchers or just out of interest, on my paper "Paintings for Women in Ming-Qing China?" published in Nan Nü: Men, Women, and Gender in China, vol. 8 (2006), 1-54. (Note: the original Nan Nü publication, through a publisher's error, lacked the color illustrations, which were later sent separately in a packet to subscribers. Library copies may be missing them. I have a number of disks with these color illustrations digitized on them, and can send one to anyone who mails me a self-addressed padded disk envelope and a request: serious users only, please.) A Chinese translation of this article was published in Yishushi Yanjiu (The Study of Art Hitsory), vol. 7, 1-37. As I told Harriet Zurndorfer (editor) and Paul Ropp (advisor) when they urged me to publish this, I meant it only as a preliminary form of something I intend(ed) to write up at greater length and in greater depth at some time in the future. For that purpose I kept a file of notes and references to be used in that expanded version; It contains a number of important leads for carrying the theme in new directions. I also kept a separate file titled "Suzhou/Women" listing relevant paintings, those with the subjects I meant to treat, as painted by Suzhou artists (and a few others). This is, in other words, follow-up and expansion material for my all-too-brief study. Uncertain now about when and whether I will write the longer version, I put these notes and picture references on the website for anyone who wants to use them. Send me a copy, please, of whatever you do that utilizes them.

I mentioned somewhere that two-and-a-half chapters from my projected Early Qing volume were on my website. Two are under Writings as Early Qing 1 and 2; the half chapter, on Nanjing painters of early Qing, is under the CLPs, as CLP 154.

We have been having a lot of problems of format, due to the difference between the Microsoft Word program in which I typed the texts and the language of the internet; much is lost in the translation. In the WCP lectures, all spacing, all underlining, all boldface etc. have disappeared, leaving only huge unbroken paragraphs, hard to read. Barry has been working on this, and we will try to have them easier to look at and read before long. Also, both the newly-added sections described above, WP Notes and Suzhou/Women, have come through with everything underlined. Please be patient and put up with these faults.

James Cahill

Today's blog is to celebrate, and respond to, an anonymous message that came this morning via the "Contact" facility on my website. It reads:

"Professor Cahill,
Your website is a godsend. Ironically, your approach is "new" to me. The so-called New Art History is all I've ever known; to me, it is "old", it is the orthodoxy. I cannot thank you enough for your generosity in sharing your knowledge online. No password. No subscription. No membership. Your writings have not only stimulated my interest in style-history and connoisseurship, but have also given me bountiful ideas for research in my soon-to-begin graduate studies. Your noble spirit has my deepest respect."

Blessings on whoever wrote that; it warms the heart of this aging academic, makes him feel he still has a function in his field.

It also inspires me to recommend, to anyone who wants to read the messages that embody what I most want to communicate to young people coming into the field, two of my CLPs ("Cahill Lectures and Papers") that were written especially with that purpose in mind. One is *CLP 112, a talk titled "Passing On the Torch," given at a celebration held on Sept. 18, 1993, planned by Joe Price to honor three senior scholars of the history of Japanese painting as they were nearing retirement: John Rosenfield, Tsuji Nobuo, and myself. The other is *CLP 176, "Visual, Verbal, and Global (?): Some Observations on Chinese Painting Studies," delivered at a one-day symposium organized by Jason Kuo at the University of Maryland on November 13, 2005; attached to it is "position paper" prepared for a public conversation with James Elkins the next day. Together, these two can be taken as embodying the deepest messages that I would want young historians of East Asian art, potential or practicing, to receive from me.

Note of advice: Clicking on "Writings of James Cahill" on the home page calls up the whole list of CLPs; but only those with asterisks* are in digital form and so readable on the website. Click once on the orange "Cahill Lectures and Papers" title at left, under Directory, and a long list of numbers, small and black, appears below. Clicking on any one of those calls up the paper.