James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

http://www.latimes.com/obituaries/la-me-james-cahill-20140222,0,625432.story#ixzz2uSDSCivh

Follow @Sjcahill_info

9/29/09

Details: Created on Tuesday, 29 September 2009 08:00

I haven’t written a blog for about eight months, and I am sure that most visitors to my website have long ago given up looking to see if there is a new one. I’ve been unusually busy—but that is supposed to be what blogs record, not what keeps them from being written. No excuses.

Three more items have been added to the “Responses and Reminiscences” series. This series is apparently—as I know from emaiils—gaining a considerable readership, and I enjoy writing it.

Some of you know already, and others will find out before too long, that my big project right now is producing, for non-profit distribution of some kind eventually, a series of videotaped and recorded slide-lectures (in effect) on early Chinese painting, especially landscape painting, through the Sung dynasty (the end of the 13th century.) These began as a relatively simple plan to video-record my old lecture series on that subject; they have grown far beyond that plan, largely through the good cooperation of my producer/director/editor Rand Chatterjee, founder and president of a local company called Chatterbox Films Ltd. The series is being sponsored, and eventually will be distributed, by the Institute for East Asian Studies in Berkeley. I now have on my iPhoto Library screen around 1500 images, made mostly from slides, both from my own collection and from the History of Art Visual Resources Collection, with Jan Eklund as Director and Samantha Zhu as East Asian specialist—I have depended very much on their help. My series, which is titled “A Pure and Remote View” (after the great Hsia Kuei scroll, which will be a climax), was motivated in part by my feelings of guilt, for myself and my whole generation of Chinese painting specialists, over having failed to produce the comprehensive history of this great material that we badly need. Just at the time in the 1960s-70s when we had at last attained the visual mastery that such a history needed to be based in, through large slide-making and photographing projects, this kind of “narrative art history,” or Gombrich-style style history, went out of fashion, and our younger colleagues are disinclined to attempt any such history. I think of myself as, for better or worse, the only survivor both able and willing to do it, and since I am no longer in a position to write it as a book (as I once meant to do, after finishing the “Later Chinese Painting” series), am doing it in this video-recorded form. It will be announced on my website and in emails to a great many friends and colleagues when it is ready for distribution. It will, I emphasize, be only a supplement to proper academic courses in early Chinese painting, since it will offer mostly the visuals, leaving out the longish lectures on history and philosophy and so forth that any such course needs, leaving out Buddhist painting entirely (my decision based on my incompetence in this area). But as a visual resource it should prove really valuable to our field of study, a major late-life offering from this old sensei.

At the end of the list of “Writings of James Cahill” is a new entry, a pdf of the original libretto (1949) of the chamber-opera “A Day At Creed’s” or (the title I didn’t like but have had to accept) “Creedo in Unum Bookstore.” (See R&R 57 about this.) The disk with a recording of this is still in principle available; contact me if you really want it.

I will also be putting on my website, as time permits, several essays-with-images, and will announce them in future blogs. I will conclude this one with a puzzle:

Here is a rhyme-puzzle I made up long ago, which few people have solved. (One of my former students, Mary Ann Rogers, determined to get it, spent two days was it? and did.) It's simple: What rhymes with ice-water? (Three-syllable rhyme, please--otter and potter won't do.) Send answers through the “Contact” form.

All for now, James Cahill

Posted by James Cahill at 9:06 AM

10/1/09

Details: Created on Thursday, 01 October 2009 08:00

Eight months between blogs, and now only two days. I forgot, in writing the previous one, to include information on publications of my writings in Chinese. This is for those of you who read Chinese, or want to let you Chinese friends know.

First of all, the Sanlian Book Co. in Beijing has published new editions of four of my books, the four that were published in Taiwan by Rock Publishing International but have been out of print for some time: the three Yuan-Ming books (Hills Beyond a River, Parting At the Shore, The Distant Mountains) and Compelling Image. An earlier mainland-Chinese edition of these, published in Shanghai, was poorly produced—newsprint-quality paper, no color, sloppy design, illustrations missing—and has, I hope, disappeared. The new Sanlian books are on good paper and well designed, with lots of color, and are relatively inexpensive. My contact in the company tells me that their first printing has sold out entirely, less than a month after it appeared. But they will be printing lots more, and it will be available in Taiwan and in Chinese bookstores elsewhere: be patient.

A translation of a fifth of my books, The Painter’s Practice, has been nearly finished for some time, and is presently going through final correction and completion. Sanlian will publish that as soon as it is ready.

An anthology of my shorter writings in Chinese translation, ranging over my whole writing career, has been in preparation for some time in the Art History Department of the China Academy of Art at Hangchou, carried out mostly by Professor Gao Minglu under the supervision of Professors Fan Jingzhong and Hong Zaixin. It should appear soon.

A less happy report: the journal Yishu pinglun or “Arts Criticism,” in its issue for September 2009, printed what was intended as an announcement of my forthcoming book on what I call “vernacular painting” which will be published next spring by the U.C. Press in Berkeley. It was to be accompanied by a few of the illustrations from that book. But although my RA sent these to their editor by YouSend, they somehow failed to open or download the pictures and thus never received them. Worse, the editor chose three entirely unsuitable meiren (beautiful women) pictures to print with it, giving the false and bad impression that my book is all about those (they are treated in it, along with many other subjects) and trivializing it with two low-class examples. (The third is a well-known painting by T’ang Yin, fine but irrelevant.) Perhaps worst of all, their editor moved my opening paragraph, which announced this piece to be an excerpt from my book with summaries of the rest, to later in the article, so that it now reads as though it had been written especially for them. This was dishonest. But I learned about these actions too late to stop and reverse them, and the damage is done. Please advise your Chinese friends about this, and tell them not to take this article as it appeared as representing my real intentions.

Yang Le, my contact at the Sanlian Book Co., has asked me to write, for their publication Dushu, an account of my relationship with the historian Joseph Levenson, and I have done so, in draft. When it is finished I will put the English text on my website as one of the Responses and Reminiscences, and a Chinese translation of it will appear in Dushu.

All for now, James Cahill

12/25/10

Details: Created on Saturday, 25 December 2010 08:00; Written by James Cahill

This is the first blog I have posted in over a year, and that one was the first in eight months. I am a poor blogger—I’ve written and posted Reminiscences instead--and I’m sure that scarcely anybody bothers to look here any more. But for those few who do—Welcome, faithful few! I have a lot to tell you about today. And Merry Christmas.

First, as many of you know, my long delayed book Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Vernacular Painting in High Qing China was finally published. Haven’t seen any reviews yet, but have received a few enthusiastic responses from fast readers. If you have a serious interest in Chinese painting you should get it and read it—it tries to open up our field in important ways.

Next: the major project that has occupied most of my time and energies over the past two years is about to become accessible: the series of video-recorded lectures titled A Pure and Remote View: Visualizing Early Chinese Landscape Painting.
The twelve lectures that make up this series, some of them in several parts and mostly quite long, running to some 34 hours in all and showing maybe two thousand images, will be posted for free viewing on the website of the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, our sponsoring organization. It is: http://ieas.berkeley.edu/index.html. This website of my own will also be re-designed in the near future, and will incorporate a page featuring these lectures that will send you to the IEAS site. The lectures will also be made available (to be ordered) on disks, both regular and Blu-ray, at cost—this is an entirely non-profit educational project. A special session will be devoted to this project, and the scholarly potential opened by this new medium, at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Honolulu in late March and early April.

Finishing this first series won’t make me stop, however; I’m so persuaded of the visual effectiveness and wide appeal of these video-lectures that I mean to go on making them as long as I can. Three long Postludes are nearing completion: one titled Arguing the Aftermath, about how we should construct the history of Chinese painting after the Song ends; another on dating and authenticity; and a third that repeats, somewhat expanded, the Acceptance Address I gave last month at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. when I was awarded the Charles Lang Freer Medal. This medal has been given to distinguished scholars of Asian art history since 1956; I am the twelfth recipient—my predecessors in Chinese art are Siren, Sickman, Loehr, Soper, and Sherman Lee—all my teachers and heroes (except Siren, who was neither.)

Other news: I am still living in Vancouver, separately from my wife Hsingyuan; our twin boys Julian and Benedict, now fifteen and in tenth grade, come to see me sometimes, not as often as I would like. Our divorce doesn’t seem to go forward, for complicated reasons. I mean to continue for a while with a back-and-forth life between here and Berkeley, where my daughter Sarah is working to prepare my house there for the moving back. My health is still pretty good, considering my age and the heart attacks some years ago; but my mobility declines--I walk with a cane, and not for long distances.

There is more to write about, but that’s enough for now. I will try to be a more frequent blogger in future, so continue to watch this space—those few of you who do will be rewarded.

James Cahill, Christmas Day 2010

Latest Work

Conclusion
VI Conclusion It is time to draw back and look, if not at the whole Hyakusen, at as much of him as we have managed to illuminate in this study. Dark areas remain, and doubtless many distortions, but...
Read More...

Latest Blog Posts

Bedridden Blog
Bedridden Blog I am now pretty much confined to bed, and have to recognize this as my future. It is difficult even to get me out of bed, as happened this morning when they needed to...
Read More...

Blog Archive

Media Coverage