James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

A Yuan “Revolution” in Painting?

 

A Yuan “Revolution” in Painting?

That question, meaning: was there a decisive change in the direction that Chinese painting was taking around the end of Song dynasty and the beginning of the Yuan, decisive enough to justify the common practice of writing of a Yuan “revolution” in painting?--that question may seem too esoteric and specialized for ordinary readers.  But those who read further (bless you) will find that arguing it, as I and two others have done, raises large basic questions about how we “do” art history, and may help to clarify the thinking of others who come to be engaged, one way or another, with that problem, since both my correspondents write with uncommon clarity and make strong cases for their beliefs, as I myself (I hope) do also. The main body of this text is made up of a correspondence that went on between Jerome Silbergeld, Richard Vinograd, and myself back in the winter of 2009--I have taken this long in getting around to writing an introduction to it and posting it on my website. What preceded the correspondence is what I will now outline.

Some time in 1999 I was invited to give an endowed lecture, the Haley  Lecture,  at Princeton. The lecture I gave can be read on this website as one of the CLPs:

CLP 34: 1999 "Some Thoughts on the History and Post-history of Chinese Painting." Haley Lecture, Princeton.

I had already given a similar lecture shortly before at Stanford, and got the responses of Vinograd and his students--more later on that. The lecture was eventually published as:

“Some Thoughts on the History and Post-History of Chinese Painting.” In: Archives of Asian Art LV, 2005, 17-37.

I had asked the editor of Archives, when she accepted my lecture for publication, to ask two younger colleagues,  Jerome Silbergeld at Princeton and Robert Harrist at Columbia, to write responses to be printed after it.
Both did; and when  I read them I was surprised to find that they didn’t so much respond to what I had considered the “main idea” of my lecture--the idea of seeing post-Song Chinese painting as belonging to a “post-historical” period--as to my use of the conventional designation of the division in early Yuan as a “revolution.” (I don’t have their responses here to reread, and am writing mainly of Jerome’s, since he was involved also in the subsequent correspondence. Please find and read Bob Harrist’s for yourselves.) In other words, my “big idea” that I had expected to arouse controversy in fact received little attention, and what they focused on, instead, was a term and concept that I had thought of as generally accepted and un-controversial.

What was my “big idea,” the main point of my lecture and article? It was to adopt for post-Song Chinese painting   the term and the concept of “post-historical” from Hans Belting, who had expounded it in his major book:

Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art? Trans. by Christopher S. Wood, Chicago,1987.

He argued--convincingly, I thought--that the production of art had followed a kind of “history” that can be traced--and has been, endlessly over the centuries in Europe and the U.S., until some recent time--I forget when he places it, after Impressionism & Post-Impressionism & Cubism, I would assume--after which  the production of art  longer seems to follow a “historical” or quasi-developmental pattern, so that one can no longer write “histories” of it. He points out in his book that histories of art are indeed written up to that time, and  carcely attempted afterwards. In my lecture I made the same point about Chinese painting, citing Belting: Chinese  writings on painting that can  be called historical, from Zhang Yenyuan’s  Lidai minghua ji (or earlier) up through Guo Ruoxu in the eleventh century and Deng Chun in the twelfth--and then no  more. From the Yuan-Ming-Qing we have biographical texts, theoretical texts,  technical essays--but no histories. Rick Vinograd, after my lecture, agreed that I had a strongpoint there, even though he couldn’t accept my idea as a whole.

Hans Belting

(I later met Belting, by the way, when we were on a panel together at a symposium at Japan House in New York, where his daughter was a curator, and I had a chance to talk with him. The paper I gave on that occasion is on this website as:

CLP 32: 1999 "Something Borrowed, Something New: Cross-cultural Transmission and Innovation in East Asian Painting." Lecture, Japan House, New York.)

For readings on how artists and their works can take on, over time, the pattern of a series, one following another in a quasi-orderly way, read the works of late Ernst Gombrich--and, for a very interesting theoretical discussion of this phenomenon, George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks On the History of Things. When this book appeared in 1962, all of us seriously involved in Chinese painting studies were reading it and corresponding with each other about how his ideas might apply to our subject. Young people I talk with today not only haven’t read Kubler’s book, they haven’t even heard of it--this is the outcome of a basic tenet of Big Theory: don’t bother to consider or argue against the alternatives, just reject them as hopelessly backward and outdated.

To continue with our narrative leading up to the correspondence: in 2006 Nancy Steinhardt, old friend and distinguished professor at U. Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who specializes in Asian architectural history, decided to organize a symposium on Yuan painting to coincide with the first exhibition of six important Yuan paintings in a private collection there. She phoned me and wrote to me, wanting me to be a “keynote speaker.” But, alas, it was a time when I could not travel--too soon after my heart attacks and operations of that year. The symposium, titled “New Directions in Yuan Painting,” took place on December 2^nd 2006; Jerome Silbergeld gave the keynote talk,  Rick Vinograd the last (except for one by Nancy herself on Yuan tomb painting), and Bob Harrist was  discussant.

Jerome Silbergeld

 

Rick Vinograd

The papers from the symposium were later published in Ars Orientalis no. 37, under the title Current Directions in Yuan Painting. You can read there Jerome’s and Rick’s papers:

The Yuan "Revolutionary" Picnic: Feasting on the Fruits of Song (A Historiographic Menu)
Jerome Silbergeld

De-centering Yuan Painting
Richard Vinograd

When I received my copy of that issue of Ars Orientalis, I wrote Nancy--but  no, we have now reached the point where the main body of this essay (or whatever it is) begins. I will only add, before turning to that, that an old paper of my own alluded to by Jerome and Rick is also readable on this website:

CLP 63: 1968 “Away from a Definition of Yuan Painting.” Yuan art Symposium, Cleveland Art Museum

That symposium was held on the occasion of the great exhibition of Yuan-period art organized by Sherman Lee and Wai-kam Ho, “Chinese Art Under the Mongols: The Yuan Dynasty”--the catalog, under the same title, was for many years one of the basic books in our field. At the symposium I presented a curious paper, intended as a friendly jab at Max Loehr and his insistence that we should pay attention only to the new and significant in art and ignore all the rest; I argued (just for that occasion) that if we wanted to, we could construct a non-history of Yuan painting that took into account all the painting done in that period, including inconsequential continuations of Song traditions. (My title was of course a play on the common “Toward a Definition of…”) Now that paper, which I never “published” in a true sense and which I never meant to be taken really seriously, has come back to haunt me.

(Looking at it on my website now, I see that several other papers in the symposium are also there--Suzuki Kei’s, for one--along with a long list of participants with their mailing addresses! You will have to scroll down to find my paper.)

Finally: as an indication of just how important this issue is to me, how deeply I believe in that great change at the end of Yuan (the virtual end of a great tradition of ink-landscape painting, the rise to the fore of the literati or scholar-amateur movement that casts the long-dominant professional masters into decidedly less prestigious art-historical roles), watch the Postlude to our video-lecture series, which is titled: “Arguing the Aftermath.” That, too, can be accessed through this website. (See? You scarcely need to go outside…)

Now at last (says patient but somewhat exasperated Reader) can we get to the correspondence? Yes, replies your long-winded Introducer, here it is, what you have all been waiting for,

 

An Early Yuan “Revolution” in Painting?

Correspondence with Jerome Silbergeld & Richard Vinograd (winter 2009)

Dear Nancy, (letter to Nancy Steinhardt)

The copy of Ars Orientalis came in the mail this morning, along with the separate offprint of your article. I had already received AO through regular subscription, and have read several of the pieces in it; not yet yours, which I’ll read now.

Although I couldn’t be there for the symposium and am not represented as an author in the volume, I feel very much there in spirit—and target, although everybody is thoroughly respectful and I am cited often, and positively. The pieces by Jerome and Rick follow up on the responses written by Jerome and Bob Harrist to my lecture article published several years ago in Archives, in which I used Hans Belting’s concept of a post-historical period in art history to propose it for the great break (as I persist in seeing it) from Song to Yuan in painting. I recommended to the editor (Marsha) that Jerome and Bob be asked for responses, and they wrote them, both fine pieces expressing the conviction of their (younger) generation, which I would characterize as: Yes, but we don’t recognize revolutions any more. I had already heard that from Rick when I gave the lecture at Stanford, and wasn’t at all troubled by it, as I’m not now. We are talking, after all, only about a concept or construction, not a historical event like the Mongol invasion and the fall of Sung; and whether one accepts that particular construction or not isn’t a matter of great moment. Jerome cites Panofsky pointing out that if one chooses, one can emphasize continuities with Late Medieval and do away with the Renaissance in Italy or Europe. So I am in the company of Jacob Burckhardt (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, was it?), and feel comfortable there—Jacob and I have no worries about how posterity will judge our cultural constructions. I’ll send copies of this to Jerome and Rick—Hi, both of you, enjoyed your pieces, good expressions of the collective attitudes of your generation (joke from Old Professor). I’m just finishing up the recording of a series of video-recorded lectures, ending, as it happens, with the end of Sung, and some comments on what follows; so I’ll make a reference to the pieces by you two, and the whole issue or controversy, there.

Best, Jim

dear jim,

greetings! it's always good to hear from you, no matter what the message. you are in good company, not only with burckhardt but panofsky, too. panofsky faced resistance to "THE renaissance," to its rootedness in notions of period style and regional privileging, but the thrust of of his book, R&R, was to stand by the original concepts. and yet, "my" generation didn't come out of nowhere and you're not off the hook. you asked us to be alert to traditional Chinese class interests and to be skeptical of literati exceptionalism (barnhart resisted; i enthused that someone of some influence in the field felt rather like i did about such things), and i think that today's skepticism about revolutions and period style -- not throwing these concepts out but trying to account for them in increasingly complex and nuanced ways -- is the logical and natural extension of your own questioning manner. in the AO articles, we write of you (as you put it) in a way that is "thoroughly respectful," and that is not just for personal reasons but because we still find your work very much akin to our own and we remain deeply indebted to it. one phrase in my AO article is, "generational trend (by which I mean a generation of thinking, not the age of the thinkers themselves) . . . ." i always thought of you as the bridge -- the main thoroughfare -- between generations, the most forward thinking, forever young-minded and always generous to the young -- and i still do.

i hope you're doing well. fairly well, at least. and perhaps moving toward moving, south and back to berkeley. i spent three hours today with wen, going over a chapter that he's been writing, and he always speaks of his very special affection for you, with lots of nostalgia. let's hear it for nostalgia, something our ancient chinese friends understood well.

all the best from here, and stay in touch

jerome

Dear Jerome, (late night musing on your response)

It is generous and thoughtful of you to write as you did in response to my paragraph for Nancy.  Yes, I played some part in opening up different ways to construct our “histories,” or whatever we call them, in some of my writings--the “Three Alternatives”, before that the “Away From a Definition” talk, which two of the papers cite—I did that, I can’t remember why it was, but to needle Max, and it had that effect. My whole point has been that different ways of thinking about “what happens” in Chinese painting lead to different concepts of “Yuan painting,’ or whatever; and that since they are concepts, they aren’t right or wrong, but can be more or less productive or useful in opening the way to new kinds of understanding. The question of whether the Renaissance in Europe “happened” is the wrong question; asking whether it has been a productive concept is the right one, and obviously it has, when one thinks of the vast literature and kinds of understanding it’s led to. And when I adopted Belting’s post-historical idea and applied it to the Sung-Yuan “revolution,” and pointed out that the Chinese just then (as Belting, whom I quoted, says they necessarily will) gave up writing quasi-art-historical accounts of their painting, after centuries of writing them (exactly the centuries over which we can, if we want, construct a Gombrich-like developmental “history”)--I thought that might be accepted as a confirmation of the applicability of the concept to that epochal (right word?) moment in Chinese painting history. And Rick, after hearing my lecture, acknowledged that I had a point there, I recall, but still went on to do the “we don’t recognize revolutions any more” thing. I was, frankly, disappointed then, and later when neither you nor Bob tried to consider the possible applicability and usefulness of the post-historical concept to the Sung-Yuan whatever. Was the pressure to disavow that kind of formulation as obsolete, no longer acceptable, whatever, so powerful? And is it still? Does some great taboo descend on everybody below a certain age, blocking out the possibility of entertaining that concept as perhaps an applicable and useful one? My respect for you two, and for Bob, is undiminished, so I suppose what I’m saying is that I’m bewildered that the blockage is so powerful, in such good people.

Anyway, the series of recorded lectures I’m working on—which now will run to some thirty hours of talking, with nearly 2000 images—will break all those taboos again, in lots of ways. And will, I hope, help to open the way for the re-recognition of certain modes of thinking about art history that still seem to me quite productive, however “wrong” they may seem to be right now.

Enough; I’ll send this to Rick too, declaring once more that it isn’t meant as any kind of put-down of two major leaders of the generation after mine, and two old and good friends.

Best, Jim

Good, Jim.

It is always assuring to become engaged in the flow of ideas. I mentioned my three hours yesterday with Wen going over his latest manuscript, and you can be sure (as he well knows) it is not at all that we agree about what he is saying, only that it is worth saying. I have gone over most of his manuscripts for him in the past decade trying to help him determine and express what he thinks as best as he can. I write this, defensively perhaps, to indicate that I am not resistant to hearing other formulations of history; quite the opposite, without dialogue (external or internal) there is no real thought. The possibility of an artistic revolution is not one that I would rule out, and I think we would agree that the difference between there being a revolution or an evolution is largely a matter of how one looks at things, what one looks for. You and me aside, I have yet to see evidence that Yuan artists saw themselves engaged in any revolutionary activity, however one might define that. Arthur Danto wrote, in reference to Belting and himself, "It was not my view that there would be no more art, which 'death' certainly implies, but that whatever art there was to be would be made without benefit of a reassuring sort of narrative in which it was seen as the appropriate next stage in the story." One can focus here on the "narrative" or, rather, on the "reassuring sort" of narrative. Was the history of  pre-Yuan painting really organized around a narrative, a reassuring one or otherwise. If one thinks that the drive toward greater naturalism, occularity, unification of ground plane, whatever was it, then I guess it becomes easier to imagine a Yuan revolution. But if one thinks that "naturalism" itself is complex and means different things, that without the aesthetic revolution in calligraphy begun by Zhang Xu, Huaisu, and Yan Zhenqing and brought into painting by Wu Daozi (there was a revolution!), then advanced later on by Su Shi which would not have happened without the changes wrought in the structure of government by early Song emperors, there could have been no "Yuan painting" in the narrow sense of the term, and that all this is merely part of the historical picture, then where is that narrative? And if there was a Yuan revolution, then wasn't it designed to reestablish some "reassuring sort of narrative," so I would ask, how is that revolution consistent (from the Yuan literati point of view) with "the end" of a "reassuring" art historical narrative rather than the beginning of some new narrative (conceived of by them as "revived") with some new reassurances built in? Or is it only an "end" from our point of view vis a vis a modern Western history of (cum assumptions about) styles? To me, and perhaps to Rick - I'm not sure, what all this comes down to more than "revolution" and "end of narrative" is the matter of complexity, and whether we prefer to emphasize, are more comfortable with, and think of history more in terms simplicity and clarity or complexity and messiness. I stress the mess. I believe in it. But if I claimed that my generation shares that view, then I would have to believe in period style, and so that's perhaps too simple.

These are old issues, but always with us.

Best

Jerome

Dear Jerome,

Yes, complexity and messiness—but in selected situations. I used the example of the Renaissance in Italy, but I could use others. If someone is teaching or writing about the transition from Impressionism to Post—Impressionism, or about Cezanne-to-Picasso-and-Cubism, do you and others stop them and say: yes, but what about all that other painting going on at the same time? Not likely. The Sung-Yuan Whatever is quite as clear-cut an art-historical situation/formulation as those, at least. No, all the artists of the time didn’t think they were revolutionaries, but most of them, and the ones we now recognize as most innovative and important, pretty much rejected Southern Sung painting, especially Academy painting; they pretty much downplayed, even ridiculed, Mu-ch’I and the kind of great Ch’an painting preserved only in Japan (I’m doing the lecture on that now) so that if it weren’t for Japan we wouldn’t have it—and so forth. Why insist on looking at the diversity in that situation, not in others? My argument is that you and Bob and Rick could have noted that the situation is more complex than “revolution” or “beginning of the post-historical period in China” cover, as is always the case, but then paid some attention to the concept, instead of dismissing it as what we don’t do any more.

Well, we begin to repeat, we aren’t going to resolve this. As I wrote, I’m using enough outmoded & outlawed formulations and approaches in my recorded lectures to call forth all kinds of denunciations, but I trust in there being enough unbiased, open-minded people to sit through them and gain something from them. Old-person’s hopeful attitude, I suppose. We’ll see. Apparently (by the way) a Gombrich revival or reappraisal is going on in England and elsewhere—I had some correspondence with a journal editor about it. To use my familiar simile, I remember when we were all assured that tonal music was over, no serious composer could do it any more.

Enough. Best, Jim

Dear Jim and Jerome: (rec’d 1/30/10)

Thanks for copying me on this conversation. I think Jerome's initial reply must have dropped out of the string I received, but I think I can reconstruct some of what he said from the acoustics of Jim's second message, so to speak.  A little hard to sort all this out in some kind of coherent way, but here's my crack at it:

1. First, about my contribution to the AO collection of essays -- I was trying to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive or hortatory. I took a some large  parts of the architecture for the article from various things that you wrote Jim (as Jerome seems also  to have noted).  So there is the revolutionary Yuan, but also the more inclusive Yuan of "Away from a Definition" and the more Mongol-centric Yuan of your piece on Gong Kai, and the less independent or distinct Yuan of your Sogen-ga catalogue. As you say, they each have a certain validity for certain purposes, even if you prefer one formulation over all the others at this point.

2. The second part of the description was just to map where the field has been headed in the last couple of decades -- broadly, away from monographs on scholar-painters, and toward institutional, thematic, treatise and discourse  centered studies etc.. Again, not  a question of right or wrong directions, just mapping the vectors. Lots of factors contributing to this, including trends in art history or humanities studies more generally -- the higher profile of visual culture paradigms and discourse analysis for example. One could argue whether this is an enhancement of or a diversion from some sense of proper mission, but it does broadly represent an expanded field of attention and concern.  I don't mean that in a specifically Roz Krauss sense, but just that as the field  matures and grows it's more or less inevitably going to seek new topics of investigation. Mostly a good thing, I would say, but in any case pretty much inevitable.

3. So on to Wang Zhenpeng, etc. Putting Wang at the center of things is a kind of historiographic thought-experiment or provocation, to be sure. It just acknowledges that he is more connected to the multiple dimensions of what Yuan painting comprised -- court/Mongol, Buddhist, jiehua etc. -- than Wu or the other later Yuan scholar-painters. And that those are likely ongoing or growth areas for research.  I would just note that is a different order of issue than the question of whether Wang was in some sense  a better or more important painter than Wu or any of the others   --  they represent different nodes of interest, that don't readily  map onto each other.

4. A couple of parallels. Jim, you say "if you are writing about Cezanne to Picasso and Cubism, what about all that other painting?" That's a possible kind of question, like Wang Zhenpeng vs. Wu Zhen; how many Beaux-Art painters are worth one Picasso? But that first question, Cezanne to Cubism, is also substatnially  tautological or self-fulfilling: it presumes that's the only development that matters, so how could all that other painting count? But what if the question is, "if you are writing about early 20th century Europe, what story is more central, Cezanne to Cubism, or, say,  Symbolism to Surrealism?" That's a real historiographic alternative, and it's obviously been realized by the October group. One can prefer one or the other kind of art, but I'm not sure there's much basis for comparing  them. One story is centered in painting and representation; the other in photography and mixed media and some complex of the psychoanalytic, symbolic, and semiotic. They involves different practices, playing a different sort of game, more radically different than Wang Zhenpeng and Wu Zhen, to be sure, but analogous in some way. You could say, "but it (Dada-Surrealism, say) isn't art" and the response might be, quite so, it's anti-art art. There is at least a coherent alternative narrative proposed, and which agenda and narrative gets pursued may have more to do with the changing sociology of academia than some arguable or defensible criteria.

5. Back to Yuan art.  My general view is that we have three components of our understandings of it:

a. the surviving corpus of art -- fragmentary, messy, and unarticulated

b. historical,  Yuan era discourses -- also fragmentary, incomplete, contradictory, and not to be taken entirely at face value,

but certainly to be taken account of, as best available raw material for forming historical narratives or understandings

c. our modern historiographic constructions and narratives -- usually if not necessarily selective, partial, evaluative, and shaped

You mention the "post-historical art" lecture and essay (by the way, I don't remember saying "we don't recognize revolutions anymore" -- somehow doesn't sound like me, but never mind).  I actually like the post-historical notion a lot, in both Belting's and your uses of it, but I don't think it necessarily equates to a revolution in Yuan painting, although indeed it possibly might. To explain: something happened in Tang Song painting history discourse, after Guo Ruoxu, or Xuanhe huapu, or Deng Chun or thereabouts. The notion of a long historical development, with different summits of figure painting and landscape painting fell into disuse, and painting history became more about biography, collecting and cataloguing, painting techniques and secrets etc. It's less clear to me that this maps neatly onto the Song-Yuan divide, or that it maps onto the conquest of illusionistic pictorial representation in yours and Loehr's sense. No doubt that was part of what the Tang and Song historical critics admired in contemporary painting, but  bound up I think with other values, dynamism and animation in figure painting, some qualities of order and the symbolic in landscape perhaps.

So why the transition to the post-historical, if not because the large representational project and its narratives were completed (and I certainly agree that's one plausible account)?  Well, if the change occurred closer to Huizong's time  and the Northern Song breakup,  maybe because the political and institutional underpinnings of painting were no longer seemed coherent and unproblematic. Or perhaps because the counter-discourses of the scholar-officials in Su Shi's circle and after  brought the old criteria into question.

I think  then that what I would have been trying to say about your post-historical paper was that the discursive phenomenon may well be valid and important without necessarily  equating  to a Yuan revolution in painting. In other words, Loehr's narrative isn't the Song/Yuan narrative in some direct or unproblematic way. Also, , there is the work that has been done on Jin and S. Song versions of scholar or literati painting, so that there seem to have been alternatives to   let's call them  academic values all along since the late Northern Song.  If the Yuan literati picked up and amplified those elements,  maybe it's just a quibble to call that something other than a revolution, but it becomes at least less clear-cut seen through that kind of historical lens.

6. Finally, to close for now, if you (Jim) said, "Ok, but c'mon, isn't Wu or Zhao or Ni or Wang after all more interesting and important, as painter/writer/ cultural presence than any of the other types of painter you could name?"  I might well agree with you. But, once again, that's a different thing than saying that's where the field will go, or should go. And just as some part of what Zhao and the others did was designed to stake out a position distinct from the Southern Song court painters or whomever, it's not surprising that intellectual or professional imperatives  should play a part in pushing others in the field toward alternative topics and approaches than yours or mine.

There, I've gone and stayed up way past my bedtime!

Best, Rick

Rick and Jerome: Great! haven't absorbed it all yet, but will tomorrow--up late after watching late movie. Now we have a substantial body of argument, going beyond what we wrote in my lecture and your papers. Sorry not to have sent Jerome's responses on to you, Rick--will you do that, Jerome? Or I will later. I've twice had extensive correspondences with colleagues published--the Cahill/Barnhart/Rogers lectures published by the IEAS, and the correspondence with Dick, Mike & Stephen Little on Du Jin published in Kaikodo Journal. We'll have to think whether to go that route. Meanwhile, I spent some time yesterday and today writing out another Reminiscence, inspired by the death of Salinger, and will attach it for your entertainment. Most of my Reminiscences I'm happy to have only on my website, but this one may turn out to be of broader interest--if either or you thinks so, and knows a big-media person to send it on to, I'll appreciate it.

Yours as always, Jim

 

Dear Rick,

I’ve read over several times your long email, and really haven’t much to write in response except: very thoughtful, good, and some of it makes me realize I mis-characterized your AO piece, which was indeed a fine article on the various ways one can construct “Yuan painting,” much in the spirit of what I did long ago, but better. No, I don’t recall that you actually said anything after my lecture like “We don’t recognize revolutions any more”—that was/is my own reading of the underlying message, more, in Jerome’s and Bob’s responses in Archives. My memory, though, is that we had a discussion period the day after my lecture at Stanford, and that you and your students all seemed to be saying something in that direction, less directly perhaps. Anyway, your points about the continuity through Jin and the rest are good. Jerome may well—probably will—want to comment on all this, and maybe we can end there, for now, all having spoken our pieces. My own inclination would be to put it all on my website—a kind of publication that stops short of the old printing-and-distributing form. But I wouldn’t do it without the agreement of you two, of course. Jerome?

Best, Jim

dear jim and rick

i'm fine if jim wants to quote us online. so here are a few "final" words, at his invitation . . .

best, and thanks

jerome

like rick, i disown "not recognizing revolutions." i believe there are revolutions, though i'm not exactly sure what is or isn't a revolution. still, the difference is significant, or has historically be regarded as significant, and for there to be a revolution there have to be followers as well as leaders. you can't just study the "great" men (art "history" in western practice, like literary and music "history," being the study of exceptional, not typical, people), or the "best" artists, and proclaim that a revolution has passed this way. in the yuan, we haven't studied typical artists well enough to draw any demographic conclusions. (no aspersions here; jim has probably dealt with "lesser" artists and "minor" trends better than anyone else.) while i wrote that every revolution looked at more closely reveals an evolution, i've already voted (rightly or not, in my note to jim a few days ago) for the early 8th century calligraphers as providing a real revolution in aesthetics, first adapted to painting by wu daozi (to the best of our limited knowledge). also like rick, my approach to this topic has employed a descriptive mode rather than anything more prescriptive or "hortatory." yet i will own up to the fact that "going historiographic," while seeming to put things at arm's length, in itself represents a particular choice, and embraces a particular view of history. ("relativistic" is the way peter novick put it, quoted in my AO article.) rick's recent note nicely describes "three components" for understanding yuan painting. except for briefly illustrating (literally illustrating, not discussing) what rick calls the "fragmentary" and "messy" nature of what survives, my AO piece sticks to his second and third items, which can be rolled into one as "reception" (older and newer responses, by which i understand him to mean critical, textual) to which i would add the practice of favored styles as constituting an artistic mode of reception. looking at the history of reception tells us something important, both particular and in general. in doing so, i'm not excoriating anybody, not blaming nobody for having held such-and-such an opinion at such-and-such a time but rather i've mostly tried to describe and understand historical patterns of changing taste and viewpoints. and i've tried hard to keep my own opinions low-key, although i certainly have opinions and disagreements with opinions. for example, i think your handling of qian xuan, jim, especially as set out in hills beyond a river, is exemplary. but when you write (in chinese painting - still a great book!) of qian and zhao mengfu and gao kegong as undertaking "a revolution in style," i still don't see how you can get there without leaving out much what of we already know and most of what one can imagine of the fragmentary record of song literati painting. a "revolutionary" expansion in the popularity of a certain way of painting, i could say ok to that: but that's reception not the creation of a revolutionary new style. and after all, it was max who wrote that we should only be interested in the inception of new styles, not in their perpetuation. if you try to account for "yuan" literati style, you can't just lay it at the feet of invading mongols. i have no idea how to account for what took place in the early 8th century. i have some better idea to account for how to account for su shi's ideas on painting, largely in socio-political terms. i also think we can't account for the rejection of southern song painting styles only in terms of stylistic sequences and phases -- there's a lot of politics there, too, and political scapegoating. and so, if as rick puts it, "the large representational project and its narratives were completed" by the end of southern song, then why do we have some of the very finest of chinese "naturalist" bamboo paintings (li kan), horse paintings (ren renfa), plum paintings (wang mian and others), figures, furniture and boats (wang zhenpeng), etc., being done in the yuan period? the record is the record -- both the visual record and the published textual record -- and it constrains us. or maybe it doesn't, because we can say any darned thing we want, and we certainly do. quentin bell noted that in the encyclopaedia britannica of 1912, in the articles on contemporary french and english painting, the artists touted were robert fleury, bastien lepage, meissonier, rosa bonheur, gerome, bourguereau, fromentin, bonvin, cormon, henner, herkomer, luke fildes, frank dicksee (you've got to be a good art historian to have heard of most of these guys!), while monet, seurat, cezanne, gauguin, van gogh, vuillard, etc. went entirely unmentioned. so like 1912, maybe there was a revolution going on in 1312 that most people couldn't recognize. and yet even so, that would still have been a revolution in reception, an explosion in the popularity of an old style (or old styles), including new developments of course, but not a "revolutionary new" style. we're not very good at foreseeing the future, but we also have to ask, how good are we at foreseeing the past, which is forever changing.

Dear Jerome (and Rick),

Your long unbroken response is a good summing-up and augmenting of your position, and maybe marks a good point to close this correspondence for now. Again, as with Rick’s, I find much to agree with, but would still differ on some matters. It will no doubt always be so. We’ll think about putting all this on my website—which of course I wouldn’t do without getting the OK of both of you. I would (will) write a brief introductory section, explaining the background etc., and send that to the two of you, with a file of the whole correspondence. Just having the issues explored in this depth and detail, with arguments and counter-arguments, will be good for younger people to read. Let me think more about this, draft an introduction, get back to you. OK?

Interesting “Heirarchies” symposium coming up in the Tang Center. Of course I won’t be there, but I’ve written for abstracts of several of the papers, eventually the whole papers? Topics that still concern me.

Best, Jim

dear jim,

whatever you'd like to do with this is just fine with me. i wouldn't want us to all think alike, would you? no way. anyhow, we've all learned so much from you and it's always so rewarding to be engaged in discussion with you.

Jerome

Dear Jim (and Jerome):

Happy to have the discussion posted on your site. I drafted some further thoughts, but maybe should stick with the earlier exchange for now -- hard to keep the  a 3-way conversation on point as it spirals on.

Best,Rick

Dear Rick (and Jerome),

By all means, Rick, let us have your further thoughts. We aren’t, I think, aiming at balance, or symmetry, when it cuts out what will surely be valuable additions. You too, Jerome, if you think of more you want to say. I’m in no hurry to wind this up or post it.

Best, Jim

CEP Chapter 2

 

B. Erotic Painting Up to Early Qing: the Older Album Type

Leaving aside the question of pictorial erotica on walls, the preferred forms for erotic paintings in China, as they are recorded and as extant examples attest, were first the handscroll or horizontal scroll and later the album, both suited to more modest and intimate viewing, since with these, in contrast to the hanging scroll, the paintings are exposed only when the album is opened or the scroll unrolled. Among the Chinese writings cited above that mention erotic pictures, the earliest, those attributed to the Han-period poet Zhang Heng, describe the paintings as in scroll form; in the 1621 print (Fig. 2) the couple are looking at a handscroll, as are the man and girls in the leaf by Gu Jianlong (Fig. 1). Moreover, in Jin Ping Mei, a novel set in the late Northern Song but in fact reporting late Ming practice in material details, the erotic painting that Ximen Qing and Pan Jinlian look at together is a handscroll.[1] Erotic paintings in handscroll form could be either a series of pictures or a single composition. The Secret Play on a Spring Night that the late Ming collector Zhang Chou, as related above, took to be a work by the eighth-century master Zhou Fang, was a single group composition in handscroll form.

Fig. 1.

Fig. 2. 

Although this painting itself is presumably long lost--no actual erotic painting datable before the late Ming period is known to me--a fenben (sketch copy) has recently come to light that appears from its style to preserve the outlines at least of a pre-Song work, and from its subject to be based on this very "Secret Play on a Spring Night" (Fig. 6). The record in Zhang Chou’s catalogue attests that such a painting was extant in the early seventeenth century, and for it to have survived into the early or mid-nineteenth, from which time this fenben would appear to date (again, on the basis of style), would not be surprising. Fenben copies were made by artists from old paintings they encountered, for use in their own finished works; an example by Gu Jianlong was introduced in PUP Chap. 1  (Fig. 1.4). The picture transmitted in this fenben not only conforms loosely to the Zhou Fang style as it is known from copies, but also differs from other extant erotic pictures in so many respects as to locate it strongly in a very different, much earlier stage in the development of the genre.

Fig. 6. 

The shape, first of all, and the way the artist employs it, suggest that the original was probably a short, tall handscroll--copies after Tang figure compositions in this form survive. The scene is self-sufficient, a dramatic tableau presenting Emperor Xuanzong and his favorite consort Yang Guifei (if these are indeed they) engaged in lusty copulation, she in a chair, he on a stool. Both are supported by women servants: one of these pushes the emperor from behind, two more stand beside Yang Guifei, one of them leaning over to provide a backrest for her, while a fourth stands behind her chair to steady it. The large size of the figures within the frame brings the action up close; this, and the volumetric drawing of body parts, typical of Tang figure painting and surprisingly well retained in the copy, set the picture clearly apart from any other erotic painting presently known. Yang Guifei’s body, made up of fleshy, rotund masses, is entirely unlike the ideal female nude of later centuries as it was defined near the end of PUP (Chap. 5, pp. -- ). Even her vulva, with its Y-shaped opening and thick labia, differs markedly from the modest slits that women in the later pictures reveal. Above all, the picture suggests that early Chinese erotica could be truly gross in ways that the later examples seldom are.

The picture corresponds in nearly all respects with Zhang Chou's catalog description of the original.[2] Zhang begins by noting that the principal woman in it might be either Empress Wu (Wu Zitian) or Yang Guifei. and comments that her "luscious flesh and solid bone structure" agree with what he had heard about women in Zhou Fang's paintings. The woman's engorged vulva, he writes, reveals her "passionate state of mind." His description of the rest--the man wearing a cap and boots and having the appearance of an emperor, the woman wearing silk socks and looking like an imperial consort, as well as the various supporting functions of the serving women--also describes closely the fenben copy, which can be provisionally accepted as preserving the composition of this famous early work.  The copyist, however, apparently was permitted some slight flexibility, as can be seen in the double drawing of the man’s penis, for which he tries alternative sizes and positions.

From the early Qing period on, the erotic handscroll all but disappears and the album emerges as the chosen form. Both handscroll and album can accomodate series of pictures portraying sexual positions and activities; the difference is that in the handscroll these can be presented as if occupying a continuous space (except when clearly separated by text or other dividers), whereas in the album they must be treated as separate pictures. The change from handscroll to album as the preferred form opened the way to the development of a new type of erotic picture series and a fundamental change in the genre. The album allows the artist to present his figures in a succession of different settings. It encourages compositional variety by permitting him to experiment from leaf to leaf in offering a sequence of small pictorial pleasures instead of a single extended one. It dictates that the design of each picture be constructed within clear boundaries and in relation to the frame, and encourages the "window" effect in which the observer seems to gaze into a farther space beyond the picture plane--an effect that is greatly enhanced by devices of spatial rendering that were in this period being adopted from Western pictures by Chinese artists (as discussed in PUP, Chap. 3.) In these respects the album leaf takes on some of the capacities of the hanging scroll, although precluded by its size from the convincingly "lifelike" scale possible in the hanging scroll.

This change in the format of erotic pictures, occurring about the time of the Ming-Qing transition, is accompanied by another change even more momentous: from the album or handscroll presenting a simple series of sex acts to one in which pictures of open and active sex are interspersed with others that offer milder, more evocative scenes of amorous or erotic situations. The literary accounts cited above agree in describing erotic paintings before the Qing period, whether in handscroll or album form, as presenting a series of pictures depicting different postures for copulation.  The poems ascribed to Zhang Heng tell of the amorous couples looking at series of pictures presenting different sexual positions;, the detailed description of the first five leaves in the "Zhao Mengfu" album that appears   in Li Yu's Roupu Tuan,[3] along with the references to  Tang Yin's “Six Extraordinary Positions” and Qiu Ying's “Ten Glorious Positions” in van Gulik's somewhat problematic text, suggest that kind of series for Yuan-Ming examples. Although no painted examples so early as those are extant, nor any by such famous masters, the titles and descriptions suggest that all these belonged loosely to the same serial type that made up late Ming woodblock-printed erotic albums, which will be treated in the following section.

NOTE: OLD FIG. 7 & 8, FROM VAN GULIK, HAVE BEEN DELETED

The type is seen as well in the plethora of poor-quality erotic albums from later periods, which in this respect follow the old model instead of the newer one.[4] The tiles and paintings described by Casanova in the mid-eighteenth century also seem from his brief descriptions to fit this older model. (We may note, without suggesting any historical connection, that early European erotic pictures, notably the sixteenth-century series I modi by Giulio Romano and Marcantonio Raimondi with accompanying verses by Pietro Aretino, follow the same pattern.)[5] In this older model, the main image in each picture is of a couple making love in some fashion, sometimes joined or watched by a third person, usually (in China) a girl or woman. (Some of the erotic prints, as we will see, expand on this formula while continuing the basic pattern.)

Erotic picture series of this kind might be seen as pictorial equivalents to the sex manuals described and translated by van Gulik and others,[6] and also to erotic fiction before late Ming, such as the Ruyijun Zhuan, probably early sixteenth century in date, which details serially the debaucheries of the Tang Empress Wu Zetian with her lover Xue Aocao.[7] Both genres consist largely of descriptions of one sex act or position after another, with little intrusion of psychological insights or dramatic complexities, and few interludes of non-sexual narrative or description to set off the accounts of copulations. The appearance in the later sixteenth century of Jin Ping Mei, and later Roupu Tuan and others,[8] transformed this literary genre, or created an essentially new one; and that transformation may well have been the incentive that spurred some artists to rethink and re-imagine their pictorial genre. Perhaps the job of illustrating fiction of the new type, together with the new availability of foreign-derived representational and spatial techniques, provided inspiration and enabling conditions for the creation of a new type of erotic picture series, one comparable to the new fiction in the effects attempted and the expressive depths achieved. The new type of erotic picture album that answered these criteria seems to have emerged in the early Qing period, especially in the hands of the versatile and endlessly resourceful Gu Jianlong.

Two erotic painting albums can serve to represent the older type. One (Album A) is by a Suzhou small master named Wang Sheng, who is recorded as active in the late Ming period (another work by him is dated to 1614),[9] so that his album may predate any of Gu Jianlong's by a few decades and thus have the distinction of being the earliest erotic painting by an identifiable artist presently known (Figs.9, 10). Two of the facing leaves of calligraphy contain a date corresponding to 1595, and the ten paintings may have been done in that year. Wang Sheng signs the last of the ten, contradicting Zhang Geng’s observation that “secret-play pictures aren't signed by the artists.” The album follows the older type in a plan basically similar to those of the printed albums. In the first leaf (Fig. 9), a scholar and beauty simply stand beneath a flowering tree on a lakeshore, their amorous feelings expressed in his gentle embrace and her delicately raised hand. The other leaves are simple depictions of copulations in different settings and positions, the only departures from this formula being a leaf with sex in a boat on the shore and another (the last, signed leaf) with a homoerotic encounter (Fig. 82). Thematically, the album has much in common with the closely contemporary woodblock-printed albums, which also include a few leaves picturing homoerotic sex and alternate the heterosexual copulations between interior and garden settings. Even Wang Sheng's scenes of open and active coition (Fig.10) are cool in mood, especially in contrast with the strenuous coupling seen in the fenben picture (Fig. 6). In this respect the album indicates the direction that good erotic painting will take for the rest of its history. Enhancing this effect of reserve are the spacious, uncluttered compositions, typical of figures-in-interiors pictures by Suzhou lesser masters of the Ming-Qing transition. We recognize the artist’s technical finesse in these superficially simple leaves only on longer looking: the fine, even line drawing of the figures against the firmer and fluctuating outlines of the blanket; the rough-brush depiction of the landscape on the screen set against the meticulously rendered pattern of the surrounding brocade. Unfashionable and neglected though they have been, figure paintings by minor Suzhou masters of the late Ming-early Qing period preserve the local tradition of high-level craftsmanship, besides sometimes revealing refined sensibilities. They also provide an art-historical milieu out of which Gu Jianlong and his followers can be seen to emerge and to effect a deeper-going transformation of the genre.

Fig. 9.

Fig. 10.

The second album of the older type (Album R), an exception to the general observation that this type persists after late Ming mainly in low-level examples, probably dates from the late 17^th or early 18^th century, the Kangxi era, and may be by some artist working in Zhejiang province, perhaps the Hangzhou or Shaoxing region, since elements of style in it are reminiscent of the late Zhe school. Each of the eight leaves depicts a heterosexual couple having or about to have sex. In one, a girl servant helps to support the woman, and in another the man appears to be of northern nomadic origin.[10] Other than these minor variations, the pictures all present youthful couples engaged in amorous couplings in garden or interior settings. The rich mineral blue-and-green coloring of the rocks, the luxuriant trees and flowers (which also serve to set the seasons), all contribute to the auspicious and comfortable atmosphere created in the pictures. The lovemaking is tender, unhurried; no signs of strong passion appear on the faces—at most, slight smiles of pleasure. Genitals are exposed and in most of the leaves engaged, but they are depicted modestly, not blatantly; the women display little pubic hair. No irony colors the pictures, no tension between desire and circumstance. This is just the kind of album, arousing but at the same time calming, that might well have been used in the way seen in one of the pictures, looked at by the couple together before they proceed with sex (Fig. 3). We can imagine that erotic albums by conservative Ming masters may have looked like this, allowing for variations in style.

Thematically, the leaves are close to those in the Wang Sheng album: interiors alternating with garden scenes, the figures large within the frames. The outdoor scene with the lovers beneath a willow (Fig. 11) appears to depict a consummation of young love, carried out with enthusiasm and after some preparation; this is not a spontaneous encounter. They have spread a mat on the ground beside a garden pond, beneath a willlow. With an orchid in her hair, she leans against a backrest, and has set down a fan decorated with butterflies in flight, an emblem of light dalliance. She rests one hand on his shoulder, the other on a pile of painting albums, presumably erotic. She wears a light green gauze jacket over a red moxiong, a garment that Chinese women had worn since the Tang dynasty as a kind of broad brassiere[11]--it is often the only piece of clothing that the woman has not removed in Chinese erotic pictures, an indication, perhaps, that gazing at the female breasts was not the turn-on for Chinese males that it has been in the West. Far more arousing for them were the woman’s bound feet and the small embroidered shoes worn over them, which are shown prominently in the pictures. An interior scene (Fig.12) agrees with similar leaves in the Wang Sheng album in backing the couple with a painted screen—the design here a blossoming plum—and opening glimpses back or sideward into the garden. But here the interior space is not only much more richly appointed, but also more complex and at the same time more readable than Wang Sheng could manage. In the century or so of interim between the periods of activity of the two artists, a new mastery of rendering interior spaces had been accomplished collectively by painters working in different places and in different styles. It is part of what makes possible the new expressive complexities that Gu Jianlong and his followers could achieve.

Fig. 11. 

Fig. 12.

London 1935/36 Exhibition: " Early" Paintings from China

 

London 1935/36 Exhibition: “Early” Paintings from China

Prefatory Note: This will be an attempt to assess in greater detail the “early” (pre-Sung and Sung) Chinese paintings among the loans sent by the Chinese government to the London 1935-36 exhibition. (I mean, of course, the International Exhibition of Chinese Art, London, British Museum, 1935-36.) My argument, communicated to several colleagues but never published, has been that the “early” paintings among that selection are so overwhelmingly “bad” choices, and the really early surviving works by major masters among them so few, that we have to conclude that this “bad” selection was deliberate: the Chinese selection committee, either on instruction from higher up or on their own initiative, deliberately avoided sending more than a few of their “national treasure” works to London, probably (I speculate) believing either that it would be too dangerous to send these most valuable pieces overseas, or that the foreigners wouldn’t really know the difference anyway—or both. I knew two people who were members of this selection committee, C. C. Wang and Xu Bangda, but failed to remember to ask them this question while they were still able to respond. (Wang died; Xu was unable to communicate clearly, as reported by a friend who, at my request, tried putting this question to him on a visit to him in Beijing late in his life. See, on my website, R&R no. 67, “Ask Old People Things While They Still Can Answer.”)

To the initial response of some colleagues with whom I’ve raised this matter, that the committee must have made honest mistakes, not yet having determined what the real early masterworks were, I sent the following paragraphs (May, 2010):

“In Berkeley I also did something I could only do there, about the 1935 -36 London exhibition problem. I’m never going to reach the point of writing a learned article about this, but I will post another thing about it on my website eventually, and correspond with interested people.

. “What I did in Berkeley is look into my copy—falling apart—of the important old book that in my Index of Early Ch Ptrs & Ptgs (see Biblio p. 392) is called Nanking Exhib. cat., the illustrated catalog of a government-sponsored exhibition held in Nanjing in 1937, just the year after London. My thought was: if the Chinese committee that chose the paintings to go to London had really chosen all those bad paintings as honest mistaken judgments, then the selection for their own exhibition in Nanjing the year later should be correspondingly weak. What I found was pretty much what I suspected, the opposite of that: all the great early paintings from the Palace Museum collection that didn’t go to London did to to Nanjing for this one: “Ching Hao” Mt. K’uang-lu (#8), Chao Kan scroll (#14), Fan K’uan ((#16), Li T’ang 1124 (#18), Ts’ui Po 1061 (#1061), Kuo Hsi 1072 (#25), Wu Yuan-chih “Red Cliff” (#28), the great Hsia Kuei “Pure and Remote View” scroll (#34), and so forth. Lots of major Yuan ptgs, although the Huang Kung-wang Fu-ch’un scroll is somehow absent. And lots of fine & famous Ming-Ch’ing ptgs; good selection of Shitao and Bada, etc. Famous albums of Sung ptgs. In other words, a selection at least as good as our Chinese Art Treasures show of 1960, which introduced these treasures to US audiences. They knew exactly what they were doing. The preface to the catalog mentions the BM exhibition, and the Chinese government sending things to it, but says nothing about the selection? Someone else should read this, who reads Chinese better, to get the implications. They may be saying that the committee held off on sending the great works to London to save them for Nanjing. But even so, the London selection could have been a lot better, if they honestly meant to send "national treasures" as they claimed to be doing. Anyway, my point, I think, is made. I still don’t have the Chinese catalog of what they sent to London—it’s being shipped—so what I write about that is from memory. But as I wrote before, I think that just about the only “good” early painting that went to London is the Ma Yuan “Banquet by Lantern Light,” which they included because at that time it was believed in China to be the bad one.”

Now (July 2010) I have my purchased copy of the Chinese catalog of painting and calligraphy loans and can proceed with a more detailed analysis.

(Illustrated Catalogue of Chinese Government Exhibits for the International Exhibition of Chinese Art in London, Shanghai, 1936, 4 vols.; volume on painting and calligraphy.)

First of all, of the recognized masterworks of early painting listed above, eight of them, from the “Ching Hao” Mt. K’uang-lu (not all that masterly, really, as shown in my lecture series, in which I show details from it and see it to be an impressive composition executed by a routine hand—a copy?) to the “great Hsia Kuei scroll,” how many went to London? Answer: none. Zero, zilch, naught. The “Anon. Sung”  Banquet by Lantern Light went (no. 58) but only because it was then believed to be the copy, and the one ascribed to Ma Yuan the original. We now know that it’s the reverse. So, what did London get in “pre-Sung” and “Sung” paintings? Enough to send studies of early Ch. painting in wrong directions for a whole generation: (using their numbers)

1. a “Li Chao-tao” Loyang Tower picture, much later;

2. The wrong “Emperor Ming-huang’s Journey” picture, called Travelers in Spring Mountains (Loehr reproduces both in his book);

3. An “Anon. T’ang” Snow LS, really much later;

4. An album of fan=shaped leaves  with facing inscriptions called “T’iao Kwan-yin,  Five Dynasties”—not so early, no association with him;

5. One real masterpiece: Deer in an Autumn Forest, now recognized  as a Liao work, not so highlyvalued then;

6. Anon. 5 Dyn.: “Fisherman on Snowy Day,” much reproduced afterwords, favorite with non-specialists, but surely post-Sung;

7. “Tung Yuan,” the Lungshan Chiao Min picture; good Yuan-dynasty work, much discussed  later for its subject, much  reproduced—how often we gazed at it;

8. Awful fake Chû-jan, not earlier than Ming;

9. “Fan K’uan, “Sittng Alone By a Stream,” later Sung school work, not bad, not The Fan K’uan;

10. “Yen Wen-kuei,” “Three Immortals in a Cave,” strange Ming picture;

11. “Chao Ch’ang” flower picture, “Sui-ch’ao t’u” = New Year’s, Ming decorative work;

12. “Chao Ch’ang” Peonies: ditto (give the foreigners some pretty flower pictures!)

13.”Ts’ui Po” Goose, Yuan or early Ming, ditto;

14., (Sung calligraphy=-for someone else to judge, not me);

15. “Kuo Hsi” Spring snow on Mountain Pass, with insc. dtd. 1072. Yuan work? Much discussed, believed in, e.g. by Loehr.

16. “Kuo Hsi” Landscape (with tall cliff). Ming picture.

17. “Kuo Hsi” Recluse in Mountain Village, Ming Che-school, by Li Tsai? (How could this great artist be represented by three such mediocre works?)

18. “Mi Fei” (Fu), “Pine Trees and Mountains in Spring.” This was in Chinese Art Treasures (not one of my choices); no opinion on real date..

19.”Emperor Hui Tsung” White Goose & Red Polygonums.. Yuan-Ming copy?

20. “Hui-tsung” Evening Scene by Lake handscroll, on paper, broad style; I’ve never known what to do with these, don’t especially like them.

21. More Sung calligraphy: no opinion.

22. “Li Ti” Buffalo and Herdboys Returning. This was in Chinese Art Treasures; I ended up taking it to be a good court copy.

23. “Li T’ang” Milch Cow with eErdboy. Early Ming copy?

24. “Chao Po-chô” Spring Mountains. Ming, close to Ch’iu Ying.

25. Su Han-ch’en, Children At Play. This was in Chinese Art Treasures; fine work, quite likely as attributed.

27. Su Han-ch’en, “A Pedlar of Toys.” Good Ming work.

28. Ma Ho-chih, Willowy Stream in Spring. Fine early work, could be.

29. “Ma Ho-chih,” Busy Idler: man sitting under tree twisting thread. Ming work.

30. “Liu Sung-nien,” Women Weaving. Ming work.

31. “Liu Sung-nien,” Five Scholars of T’ang, Fine; Southern Sung Academy?

32.  “Lin Ch’un” Ten Magpies Singing. Ming work.

33. Chu Hsi calligraphy, with portrait of him at beginning.

34. “Yen Tz’u-p’ing” “Four Pleasures.” Style of Yuan Chiang! Ridiculous as Sung painting.

35. “Li Sung” Arhat. Probably Yuan painting.

36. “Ma Yuan” Gazing At the Moon.” Ming work, by Chung Li, whose signature and seal are still on it!

37. “Ma Yuan,” Solitary Fisherman Sleeping in Boat. Ming work.

38. “Hsia Kuei” Willow Bank on West Lake. Ming work.

39. “Hsia Kuei,” 10,000 Li of Yangtze, Long, long handscroll. Ming Zhe-school work. (I read somewhere that the BM people, or somebody, particularly requested this; doesn’t excuse Chinese committee for sending it.)

40. “Ma Lin” Three Quail Under Tree in Snow. Ming picture.

41. “Lu Tsung-kuei” Birds Welcoming the Spring. Ming work.

42. Album: Li=tai hua;-fu chi-=ts’e. This has several good paintings in it, bird-and-flower pictures, a picture of T’ao Yuan-ming Drunk; but also a “Li Ch’eng” painted by Wang Hui, early Ch’ing. Ch’ien-lung Emperor loved it.

So, to state the question asked above in another way: Were there any paintings in the group from China that were reliable works by any Sung or pre-Sung artist? Answer: maybe one, no. 25, the Su Han-ch’en “Children At Play,” not signed but plausibly by him.  No others, not one.

Nos. 43-62: these are Anon. Sung paintings, including a number of fine and genuinely early ones. The selection committee was much more generous in sending anonymous early paintings than they were with “signed” or attributed ones. As noted before, no. 58, the “Anon. Sung” Banquet By Lantern-light is the work now recognized as the genuine Ma Yuan painting of this subject; it was sent because at that time the “Ma Yuan” version was mistaken as the original.

Nos. 63-103, Yuan paintings: Here, too, the selection was much better, and includes quite a few fine and genuine works. Sending the “wrong” Huang Kung-wang Fu-ch’un scroll (no. 70), the one with Ch’ien-lung inscriptions covering most of the bare spaces, may have been an honest mistake--there was still some disagreement at this time about which was the genuine work.

All-over conclusions: The Chinese government’s selection committee, either acting on their own judgment or on instructions from above, avoided sending any of the recognized masterworks by Sung and earlier artists to the London 1935 - 36 exhibition. This decision, and the subsequent reproduction and citation in writings on Chinese painting of the “wrong” paintings that were sent instead, seriously set back studies in the West for several decades, until the 1961 Chinese Art Treasures exhibition brought the good ones to the U.S., allowed extensive slide-making and photographing, and totally transformed our field of study.  Those of us who studied the subject, formally or just by reading, during the 1940s-50s had to use books by Siren, Cohn, Loehr and others in which the "wrong" paintings were reproduced and discussed, along with the “good” ones, as by Sung artists. Arthur Waley and others who criticized the Chinese selection at the time of the London exhibition were right in doing so; John C. Ferguson and others who maintained that the Chinese datings must be respected because their level of connoisseurship was superior were wrong. It is time for the record to be set straight on this crucial episode in the history of Chinese painting studies.

Added Note: Re-reading the essay by John C. Ferguson (“Reflections on the London Exhibition of Chinese Art,” in T’ien Hsia Monthly II/5, May 1936, 433 -442), I am reminded that his criticism was directed at the British writers of the exhibition catalog and labels for suggesting datings that differed from those given in the Chinese catalog. His long penultimate paragraph (pp. 441-2) provides examples of changed dates for the paintings, and makes clear—no surprise—that the British authorities were not themselves on very solid ground in this area (in contrast to others such as ceramics and bronzes, in which they had themselves engaged in high-level collecting and scholarship). They wrote, for example, of no. 995, the “Children At Play” attributed to Su Han-ch’en—the one Sung-attributed painting in the whole Chinese government selection, as suggested above, that has a good chance of being by the artist to whom it is attributed—they wrote of it as “unsigned but probably Ming.” But this British weakness on dating and attribution of paintings does not, I think, excuse the deliberate choices of “bad” paintings by the Chinese committee, which did know better, as is shown (see above) by the selection made for the Nanjing exhibition in the following year, and by abundant other evidence.

Another added note: Arthur Waley, bless him, wrote in his review of the exhibition (Time and Tide for November 30, 1935): “Despite the admirable way in which the objects are displayed, it must be confessed that this exhibition is something of a disappointment. . . The pictures, indeed, come near to being a fiasco.”

Reading about exhibition organizers who alter the datings of paintings sent from China reminds me of my own experience in 1961 when conservative Chinese authorities in Taipei, after reading our text for the painting section of the Chinese Art Treasures catalog in which we proposed datings later than the traditional attributions for some of the paintings, demanded that we return to the traditional datings—if we did not, they warned, the exhibition would not go forward. How I responded to this demand in a way that could have caused a crisis, and how the Chinese ambassador to the U.S. (and my friend) George Yeh saved the day with a compromise, is told in the opening pages of my essay “The Place of the National Palace Museum in My Scholarly Career,” on my website jamescahill.info as CLP (Cahill Lectures and Papers) no. 117 (2005). The crucial difference, I hasten to point out, is that the revised datings we used in the catalog were not foreign opinions opposed to or “correcting” Chinese, but opinions shared by the real authorities both Chinese and foreign: the selection of paintings for this exhibition, and the re-datings of some of them offered in the catalog, were heavily based on my own experience of looking at these paintings with Chinese specialists such as C. C. Wang and Li Lin-ts’an, and were in line with the views of other really knowledgeable authorities such as the Palace Museum’s Director Chuang Yen. The demand that traditional attributions (based on those made in the Qianlong Emperor’s catalog) be retained was made rather by powerful conservative political figures on the Palace Museum’s governing committee, notably Wang Shih-chieh. This, too, is spelled out in my essay.

Books Read

 

Intro to Books Read

Now I am going to introduce a curious old document that I found by chance while searching for something else in my old library-study in Berkeley. It is a list--and I can’t recall why or when I made it--of all the books I read during a period of four years or so? from my entry into the Army in 1944 until some time in 1948 when I had returned from the Army and was an undergrad student at U.C. again. The term “books” is used loosely--some are collections of plays, or long poems, etc.

I carried books with me always when I was in the Army, because we spent so much time waiting, time that could be spent reading. I was bawled out often for having a bulge in the pocket of my uniform, a bulge that was a pocket book, one of the Oxford World Classics or something like that. In free time in Ann Arbor I haunted bookstores, especially one called Wahr’s on State Street near the campus--it is no longer there. As a special customer I was allowed to descend into their basement where a great many books were stored--I found treasures there. I carried books in the footlocker that held all the soldier’s belongings; I had (and still treasure) a small leather-bound India-paper volume of the poems of Robert Browning that I meant to take into battle if I were ever sent to the battlefield, to carry over my heart to stop bullets, as the Bible had reportedly done for others.

Many of the books on this list now bring back no memories at all--I can’t remember why I read them, or what they were about. Others, on the other hand, stir nostalgia and an urge to find copies and read them again--as of course I never will. A few are still in my old library in Berkeley--Max Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland, Ben Hecht’s Count Bruga, for two. (If you enjoy delicious parodies and don’t know Beerbohm’s book, find a copy--a treasure.)

Appended to the List of Books Read is a list of espionage novels that I read and liked during this early period, as a guide to what I considered the especially good ones. A note at the end mentions the authors I would of course include if I were to update it, especially three: John le Carre (his early books especially), Alan Furst, Charles McCarry (serious spy novel readers need to find all of his and read them, ideally in sequence since a kind of all-over narrative connects them.)

So, here it is to browse and wonder over: where did he find that? And why would anybody read it?

James Cahill   February 20, 2012

BOOKS READ (from Jan. 2, 1945, entry into Army, until 1948?)

I. Ann  Arbor (Jap. Language School)

1. Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen

2,  Count Bruga: Ben Hecht (second time)

3.  The Somerset Maugham Pocket Book (Cakes and Ale, The Circle, stories, essays)

4. Old Man Adam and His Children: Roark Bradford

5. Anna Karenina (2 vols.)

6. Six Elizabethan Plays (1. The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Beaumont & Fletcher; Philemon: Webster; 3: The Duchess of Malfi, 4. The White Devil, Dekker; 5. The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Massinger; 6. A New Way To Pay Old Debts.)

7. Shakespeare Tempest, As You Like It, Merry Wives of Windsor.

8, 9, Ruskin: Sesame and Lilies, Ethics of the Dust.

10-12, George Moore, Hail and Farewell (3 vols: Ave, Salve, Vale)

13. John Austen, Rogues in Porcelain: 18^th cent. lyrics.

14. Kenneth Grahame, Pagan Papers (second time)

15-17. Christopher Morley, Thorofare, last half; The Powder of Sympathy (read by bits at USO), Ex Libris Carissimus

18. Flaubert, Madame Bovary (on first furlough)

19, Yeats: five or six plays, many poems.

Poetry of many sorts; magazines (chiefly Encore, Tomorrow)

20. Parts if Romany Rye, Tristram Shandy, Rabelais, etc.

21. Gissing, Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft.

22. Rockwell Kent, Wilderness (this includes much time enjoying the pictures)

23. Kenneth Grahame & wife, First Whispers of The Wind In the Willows.

24, F. A. Steel, Arthur Rackham illus., English Fairy Tales.

25. Hendrik de Leeuw, Cities of Sin—on the Oriental underworld.

26. Robinson Jeffers, The Tower Beyond Tragedy (dramatic poem)

27. Christopher Morley (Arthur Rackham illus.) Where the Blue Begins

28, Poems, Translations from the Chinese; Christopher Morley, The Rocking Horse.

(This much by June1,1945)

II. Basic Training in Alabama.

29. James Stephens, In the Land of Youth.

30. W. B. Yeats, The Great Hern’s Egg, and Other Plays.

31. Lawrence Housman, A Farm in Fairyland.

32. Kenneth Grahame, The Headswoman (second time)

33. Octave Mirbeau, The Torture Garden

34. Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp and Other Essays

35.  Anatole France, Penguin Island

36. George Moore, Evelyn Innes

37.  Llewelyn Powys, Love and Death

38. Robert Frost, The Masque of Reason

39. Isaac Walton, The Complete Angler.

40.John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture

(Second furlough)

41, Thomas Love Peacock, The Misfortunes of Elphin

42. Peacock, Headlong Hall

43. George Moore, Avowals

44, Essays from Charles Lamb

“     “     George Moore, Impressions and Opinions, Modern Art

“      “    the prose works of Francis Thompson

45. Chaucer, The Miller’s  Tale, Reve’s Tale, Monk’s Tale, Merchant’s Tale, from Canterbury Tales

46. John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera

47. Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon

48. Maeterlinck, Pelleas and Melisande

49. The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part I.

50. Ludwig Bemelmans, Small Beer

51.   “         “            , My War With the United States

52. Byron, Don Juan, Cantoes I – IV.

53. Darrel Figgis, The Return of the Hero.

54.Clarence Day, Scenes from the Mesazoic

55. Jean de Bouscheres, illus., Folk Tales of Flanders

56. Hermann Kesten, Copernicus and His World.

57. Abbe Prevost, Manon Lescaut

58. Anais Nin, Under a Glass Bell

59. Anatole France, The Gods Are Athirst

60. Longus? tr. George Thornley, illus. John Austen:  Daphnis and Chloe

61. Kate Greenaway, Under the Window

62. Flaubert, Temptations of St. Anthony

63.George Borrow, The Romany Rye

64. Lord Dunsany, Last Tales of Wonder

65. Horace Gregory, trans., The Poems of Catullus

66. George Dorsey, Man’s Own Show: Civilization (Harriette) ch. 1-8

67. Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels

68. W.B. Yeats, The Wanderings of Ossian (dramatic poem)

69. Richard Garnett, The Twilight of the Gods (short stories etc.)

70. Lord Dunsany, My Talks with Dean Spanley (?)

71. Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops To Conquer

(To here by Jan.1, 1946)

72. Ella Young, Flowering Dusk

73. H. P. Lovecraft, The Weird Shadow Over Innsmouth etc.

73a. Fiona MacLeod, Deirdre and the Sons of Usnach.

74, Voltaire, Candide (reread) (Here on third furlough)

75. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand, and Stars

76. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

77.A. Merritt, The Ship of Ishtar

78. A. Merritt, Dwellers in the Mirage

IV. Basic Training, Alabama

79. William Saroyan, 48 Short Stories

80. Five Pre-Shakespearian Comedies, ed. Boas.

1, Fulgens and Lucrece, Medwall

2. The Playe Called the Foure PP, John Heywood

3. Ralph Roister-Doister, Nicholas Udall

4. Gammer Gurton’s Needle, Mr. S. Ma. of Art

5. Supposes, George Gascoigne

V. Fort Snelling, Minnesota

81. H. P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror, The  Shadow Out of Time

82. Walt Whitman, Prose Notes from Nature

83. Henry James, The Death of the Lion (Y.B.)

84. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Night Flight

85.Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying

86.James Thurber, The White Deer

87. Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

88.  Robert Gibbings, Lovely Is the Lee

89.Erskin Caldwell, God’s Little Acre

90. Walter de la Mare, The Return

91. Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

92. Henry James, The Coxom Friend (?) (YB)

93. Shakespeare, King Lear (reread), Timon of Athens

94. W. H. Hudson, Green Mansions

95. H.W. Longfellow, The Spanish Student (play, worthless)

96. John dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer

97. John Collier, Defy the Foul Fiend

98. D. H. Lawrence, The Lovely Lady

99. Christian Darnton, You and Music

100. Kaufman and Hart, Once In a Lifetime, You Can’t Take It With You

101.Ben Johnson, Every Man In His Humour

102. Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

103. George Gissing, The House of Cobwebs

104, Virginia Woolf, Orlando

105. Ralph Temple, Cuckoo Time

106. Andre Maurois, Ariel: The  Life of Shelley

107. Christopher Morley, Thunder On the Left

108. Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

109. S. J. Perelman, Crazy Like a Fox

110. H.. P. Lovecraft, In the Vault, The Rats in the Walls, Pickman’s Model, The Music of Erich Zann, The Color Out of Space, The Call of Cthulhu, The Moon Bog, The Hound.

111. Irving Stone, Lust For Life (life of van Gogh)

112. Ludwig Bemelmans, I Love You, I Love You, I Love You

113.Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan, and Other Stories

114.John Collier, Green Thoughts, and Other Stories

115. Aeschylus, tr. Lewis Campbell, The Early Plays: The Persians, The Suppliants, Seven against Thebes,

116, Lord Dunsany, The Book of Wonder

117.James Stephens, The Charwoman’s Daughter (Mary, Mary)

118. Robert Lawson, Mr.Wilson (illus. by author)

119. Aeschylus, tr. Lewis Campbell, The Late Plays: The Orestrean Trilogy: Agamemnon, The Choephoroe, The Eumenides; also Prometheus Unbound.

120. Jessie (?) The Undying Monster

121. Goldoni, The Liar

122. Yone Noguchi, Harunobu

123. Frank Lloyd Wright, Japanese Color Prints: An Appreciation

124. Henry James, Daisy Miller, An International Episode, The Author of Beltruffio.

125. Edward F. Strange, Japanese Color Prints

126. Rupert Brooke, Collected Poems

127. H. Rider Haggard, She

128. (skipped)

129. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

130. H. Davison Ficke, Chats on Japanese Prints

131. Norman Krasna, Dear Ruth, play.

132.  Sir Thomas Malory, Morte d’Arthur Books I-VII (reread)

133. Algernon Blackwood, Short Novels and Stories

134. Jeremiah Digger, Bowley Bill

135, Sir Thomas Browne, Hyudriotaphia, or the Urne Buriall

136, W. H. Hudson, The Purple Land

137. G. B. Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession (with Author’s Apology)

138. Lord Dunsany, Time and the Gods

139. Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

140. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

141. Walter Pater, The Child In the House, Conclusion to Studies in the Renaissance, Sebastian von Storck, etc.

142. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Diamond As Big As the Ritz, and Other Stories

143. Virginia Woolf, The Years

144. Stefan Zweig, The Royal Game, Amok, Letter From an Unknown Woman

VIII. Korea

145. H. L. Wilson, Ruggles of Red Gap

146, Dorothy Parker, Sunset Gun: verses

147.A. A. Milne, The Red House Mystery

148. Thornton Wilder, Our Town

149. Alexander Woolcott, While Rome Burns

150,  Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth

151. Joseph Wechsberg, Looking For a Bluebird

152. Morton Thompson, Joe, the Wounded Tennis Player

153. Herman Melville, Moby Dick or The Whale

154.Nicolai Gogol, Dead Souls

155.Ivan Turgeneff, Fathers and Sons

156. Lawrence Watkins, On Borrowed Time

157.H.H. Munro (Saki) 24 Short Stories

158.Arthur Kober, Thunder Over the Bronx

159. John van Druten, The Voice of the Turtle

160. James Gibson Huneker, Painted Veils

161. Aaron Copland, What to Look For in Music

162. Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Portraits

163.John Erskine, The Private Life of Helen of Troy

164.Whit Burnett, ed., Time To Be Young (anthology)

165. John O’Hara, Pal Joey

166. Max Beerbohm, A Christmas Garland

167. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

168. Kaufman and Ryskind, Of Thee I Sing

169. Maxwell Anderson, Elizabeth the Queen

170. Edmund Wilson, Memoirs of Hecate County

171. Maxwell Anderson, What Price Glory

172. Eugene O’Neill, Anna Christie

173. Frederick William Gookin, Japanese Colour Prints and Their Designers

174. John Galsworthy, Escape

175. R. C. Sheriff, Journey’s End

176. Stephen Crane, Whilomville Stories

177.G. B. Shaw, Candida

178. D. H. Lawrence, The Portrait of M. M.

179. Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters In Search Of An Author

180. Edmund Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, reread.

181 Arthur Schnabel, Music and the Line of Most Resistance

182. Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths

183. George Moore, Esther Waters

184. E. B. White, The Fox of Peapack and Other Verses

185, Ferenc Molnar, Liliom

186, James Stephens, Collected Poems

187, A. E. Housman, Collected Poems

188. Robert Herrick, Love Poems

189. George Moore, Heloise and Abelard

190. E. B. White, Stuart Little

191. Kenneth Patchen, Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer

192. G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

193. Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader

194. Philip Wylie, Night Unto Night

195. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

196. Sally Carrighan, One Day On Beetle Rock

197. Max Shulman, Barefoot Boy With Cheek

198.Walt Whitman, Specimen Days (pages from his journal)

199. Edwin Bulmer and Philip Wylie, When Worlds Collide

200. Philip van Doren Stern, ed. The Moonlight Traveler, anthology

201. Isaac Dineson, Winter’s Tales

Jan. 2, 1947

202. E. M. Forster, A Passage To India

203.James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man

204. Andre Malraux, Man’s Fate

205. John O’Hara, Pipe Night

206. Adolf Dehn, Water Color Painting

207. Virgil Thompson, The State of Music

208. T. H. White, Mistress Masham’s Repose

209. Christopher Isherwood, Prater Violet

210. Thorne Smith, Rain in the Doorway

211. Joseph Conrad, Typhoon

212.Max Schulman, The Zebra Derby

213. James Stephens, The Crock of Gold, reread.

214. George Papashvilz, Anything Can Happen

214. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

216. Ben Hecht, Concerning a Woman of Sin, and Other Stories

217. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, reread

218. Graham Greene, The Confidential Agent

219. E. E. Cummings, The Enormous Room

220. Henry James, The Lesson Of the Master

221. Walter Pater, Imaginary Portraits.

222. J. M. Synge,  In the Shadow of the Glen, The Tinker’s Wedding, Deirdre of the Sorrows, reread.

223.Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

224. J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, The Well of the Saints, Poems, reread.

225. James Henry Duveen,  Art Treasures and Intrigue

226. Christopher Morley, John  Mistletoe

227. J. M. Synge, The Aran Islands, reread

228. John McNulty, Third Avenue, New York

229. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

230. G. B, Shaw, Saint Joan

231.William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf

232, E. E. Cummings, Tulips and Chimneys, XLI Poems

233. George Harriman, Krazy Kat, Preface by E. E. Cummings

234. Osvald Siren, The Chinese On the Art of Painting

235. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey

236. E. E. Cummings,  W,  No Thanks, Last Poems
237. Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

238. Joel Sayre, Rackety Rax

239. Walter de la Mare, Peacock Pie (reread), Bells and Grass, verse

240. Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

241. Five Great Modern Irish Plays, including J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, Riders To the Sea (already read), Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock, Lady Gregory, Spreading the News, Paul Vincent Carroll, Shadow and Substance.

242. John Dos Passos, Number One

243, Norman Douglas, South Wind

244. Virginia Woolf, Monday Or Tuesday

245. Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree

246. Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock

247. Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson (reread)

248. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg Ohio

249. Walter de la Mare, Behold the Dreamer

250. William Saroyan, Razzle Dazzle

251. Ambrose Bierce, In the Midst of Life

252. James Branch Cabell, Jurgen

253. Jaraslov Hasek, The Good Soldier Schweik

254. Baudelaire, Selected Poems, trans G. A, Wagner, intro. Enid Starkie

255. Maxwell Anderson, Winterset

256.James Branch  Cabell, There Were Three Pirates

257. P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins, Mary Poppins Comes Back

258. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

259. James Joyce, Ulysses

260. Huysmans, Against the Grain

261. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

262, Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel

263, George Moore, The Brook Kerith

264. Five Elizabethan Tragedies, including:

Jasper Heywood, Thyestes

Norton & Sackville, Gorboduc

Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy

Anon., Arden of Feversham

Thos. Heywood, A Woman Killed With Kindness

265. Walter Barton, This Is My Beloved, poems

266. Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

267. Dostoievsky, The Gambler, Notes From Underground

268, Herman Wouk, Aurora Dawn

269. J. A. Symonds, Wine Women and Song: Medieval Latin Student Songs

270, Shakespeare, Othello

271. Dostoievsky, The Eternal Husband

272, Thomas Wolfe, A Stone, A Leaf, A Door

273. Mary Webb, Precious Bane

274. Dostoievsky, The Brothers Karamazov

25. Lawrence Housman, Victoria Regina

276. Christopher Morley, Human Being

277. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture

278. Richard Sale, Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep

279. Isaac Dineson, Seven Gothic Tales

280. Algernon Blackwood, The Silence

281, Kenneth Fearing, Clark Gifford’s Body

282. Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

283. E. A. Robinson, Tristram

284. Brahms & Simon, Don’t, Mr. Disraeli

285. Graham Greene, The Orient Express

286. Walter de la Mare, Memoirs of a Midget

287, Frederick Prokosch, The Asiatics

288. Mary Webb, The Golden Arrow

289, John Tasker Howard, This Modern Music

290. Frederick Prokosch, The Conspirators

291. Yosup Chu, Kim Yuan: The Romance of a Korean Woman of the 7^th Century

292, W. H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror, New Year’s Letter, Songs and Other Musical Pieces

293. Andre  Gide, The Counterfeiters

294, Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

295. Frederick Prokosch, Idols of the Cave

296. Cecil Stewart, Byzantine Legacy

297. Christopher Morley, The Trojan Horse

298. Stendhal,  The Red and the Black

299. John Dos Passos, 42^nd Parallel

300. John Dos Passos, 1919.

301. Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh

302. Jean Charlot, Art From the Mayans to Disney

303. Bruno Frank, The Days of the King

304. John Dos Passos, The Big Money

305. J. A. Symonds, In the Key of Blue, and Other Essays

306. E. H. Visiak, Medusa

307. Paul Goodman, The Facts of Life

308. Anais Nin, Children pf the Albatross

309, Anais Nin, The House of Incest

310, Thomas Wolfe, The Web and the Rock (unfinished)

311. Will Rothenstein, Men and Memories (vol. I: 1872-1900).

312. Charlotte Armstrong, The Unsuspected

313. E. M. Forster, The Longest Journey

314. Kunigita Doppô, Shôjiki Mono, Jonan, Ummei Ronsha (in Japanese)

315, Will Rothenstein, Men and Memories (vol.  2, 1900-present)

316. Elizabeth Ruggles, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life

317. Elmer Rice, A Voyage To Purilia.

318. M. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud

319. Ludwig Bemelmans, Dirty Eddie

320. Rudolf Besier, The Barrotts of Wimpole Street

321. Willa Cather, Oh Pioneers

322. G. B. Shaw, Short Stories, Scraps and Shavings

323. Dostoievsky, The Idiot

324. M. P. Shiel, The Black Box

325. Anais Nin, Ladders To Fire

326. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

327. Chekov, Short Stories

328. Dorothy B. Hughes, The Delicate Ape

329. John Tasker Howard, On Modern Composers

330. (skipped)

331. H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines

332. George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feveral

333. Walter Karig, Zotz!

334. Katherine Ann Porter, Selected Short Stories

335. Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers

336. Pietro Donato, Christ in Concrete

337. Eugene O’Neill, The Long Voyage Home

338. Francois Viollon, Poems, trans. J.P. Lepper (reread)

339. H. G. Wells, The Food of the Gods

340. Aristophanes, Comedies, vol. I: The Knights, The  Acharnnians, Peace, Lysistrata, The Clouds

341, H.L. Mencken, Heathen Days

342. Earl  Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde

343, William Irish, Phantom Lady

344. Aristophanes, Comedies, vol. II: The Wasps, The Birds, The Frogs, Plutus, The Thesmophorizusae, The Ecclesiaszusae

345. John Gay, Polly

346. W. S. Ede, Savage Messiah

347. Ludwig Lewissohn The Tyranny of Sex

348. F,  L. Green, Odd Man Out

349. E. M. Forster, Room With a View

3509, Natsume Soseki, Inhuman Tour (Kusamakura)

351. George Moore, Celibates

352. H. H. Munro (Saki), The Unbearable Bassington

353. Max Beerbohm, Seven Men

354, Franz Kafka, The Trial

355. Osvald Siren & Others, Studies in Chinese Art and Some Indian Influences

356. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

357. Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis

358. Maeterlinck, The Death of Tintagulea

359. Graham Greene, The Man Within

360. Kenneth Fearing, Dagger Of the Mind

361. Norman Lindsay, Age of Consent

362. Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children

363. E. M. Forster, Howard’s End

364, John Cleland, Fanny Hill

365. The Kamasutra

366. Edwin Muir, The Marionette

367. Norman Lindsay, The Cautious Amorist

368. john O’Hara, Butterfield 8.

369, Thorne Smith, The Glorious Pool

370. Elinor Wylie, The Venetian Glass Nephew

371. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

372. Albert Camus, The Stranger

373. George Cronyn, The Fool of Venus

374. Maude Magher, White Jade

375. Christipher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta

376. Anonymous, The West Chamber

377. Haskins, The Normans in Europe

378, Barker, The Crusades

379. Henry Adams, Mont St. Michel and Chartres

380. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

381. Rose Quong, trans., Chinese Love and Ghost Stories

382. Andre Gide, The Immoralist

383. Burkhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

384. Marco Polo, Travels

385. Alan Watts, The Spirit of Zen

386. Eric Ambler, Journey Into Fear

387.    “    “      , Background to Danger

388.     “    “      , Cause For Alarm

389. Manning Coles, Let the Tiger Die

390. Roger Maxwell, Film

391. Ida Zeitlin, Gessar Khan

392. Charles Louis Philippe, Bubu of Montparnasse

393. Eric Ambler, A Coffin For Demetrius

394. Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

395.    “        “       , This Gun For Hire

396. D. T. Suzuki, Introduction to Zen Buddhism

397. Thomas Mann, Death In Venice

398. Tanizaki Junichiro, Ashikari

399. Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

400. Tanizaki Junichiro, The Story of Shunkin

401. Arthur Waley, Three Ways of Thought In Ancient China

402. Kenkô Hôshi, The Harvest of Leisure (Tsure-zure Gusa)

403. Gilbert Collins, The Starkenden Quest

404. Anon. Chin P’ing Mei

405. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

Supplement: List of International Intrigue & Espionage Novels (written ca. 1950, maybe a bit later)

The Great Masters

1. Eric Ambler.

a) Earliest, not so adroit as later: Epitaph For a Spy.

The famous four: b) Background to  Danger

c) Cause for Alarm (these two including Zaleshoff, a

Russian agent, and his sister)

d. Journey Into Fear

e. A Coffin For Demetrios

More recent, still first-rate: f) Judgement On Delchef

Co-authored under the pen-name of Elliott Reed: g. Skytip, another.

2. Graham Greene

a) The Confidential Agent (favorite of mine)

b. The Ministry of Fear. Both masterpieces of the genre.

c. The Third Man. Not really espionage, but same atmosphere. (Later: The Tailor of Panama, comic-espionage.)

d. The Orient Express (early work)

3. Almost in the same rank: Dorothy B. Hughes

a) The Delicate Ape. Finest of the lot; read all in one sitting if possible.

b) The So Blue Marble. Not quite a spy story, but same technique.

c)  The Bamboo Blonde, genuine spy story with same characters as b),

d) The Fallen Sparrow. Also one of the best. Also e) The Blackbirders

f) Johnny, g) The Candy Kid, all worth reading.

4. Peter Cheyney, an English writer, does spy stories of a particular sort, concerning network of British agents masterminded by man named Quayle.

a) The London Spy Murders

b) The Dark Street Murders

c) Dark Interlude, and others.

(He also writes imitation-Hammett private eye mysteries)

5. Darwin L. Teilhet & Hildegarde Tolman Teilhet, co-authored:

a) The Fear-Makers. Good book.

He has written several others, names of which I can’t recall; she has written at least four five spy novels, all including a Colonel Hook as deus ex machina:

a) The Assassins b) The Double Agent c) The Rim of Terror, d) The Terrified Society, or something like that—set in Latin America—a pocket book edition appeared under a different title.

6. John P. Marquand: the Mr. Moto stories. All very skillfully written, enjoyable. Curious semi-glorification of Japanese espionage. Dated, of course. See the movies with Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto.

7. Manning Coles. A long series of novels about a British agent, Tommy Hambledon. More relaxed, slower moving than Green, Ambler, Hughes variety; not so exciting, but worth reading. Drink to Yesterday, A Toast To Tomorrow, are the first of them; many follow.

8. Michael Innes (John Innes MacIntosh Stewart).

a) The Case of the Journeying Boy. His only real spy novel, so far as I know. Wonderful.

b) The Paper Thunderbolt. Same sort of thing, well written, like all his novels. Highly recommended.

9. E. Phillips Oppenheim: the old school of espionage writing, seems rather lumbering now.

10. John Buchan. Also old school, but still holds up, although slow.

The 39 Steps, The Four Hostages, Greenmantle, others.

11. Geoffrey Household. In the John Buchan tradition.

a) Manhunt (movie title: Rogue Male.) Probably his best. [Reread recently, 2009: still holds up.]

b) The High Place. Curious book about a colony on international pacifists.

c) Arabesque. Not primarily a spy novel.

d) A Rough Shoot, e) A Time To Kill. Both somewhat disappointing after the above; e) is actually about the efforts of Russian agents to spread the hoof-and-mouth disease among British cattle!

12. Victor Canning

a) A Forest of Eyes, b) Panther’s Moon c) The Chasm, d) The Golden Salamander, e) another located in Venice, don’t recall title. All above average, well worth reading.

13. John Sherwood, Mr. Blessington’s Imperialist Plot, and another one since. Pretty good.

14. Van Wyck Mason: A long series involving one Major Hugh North. Sloppier, slower, more in magazine-serial style. Last resort reading.

15. Frederick Hazlitt Brennan, Memo To a Firing Squad. Not bad, not first rank.

16. Robert Parker, Passport to Peril, also another one, minor. To be read when one runs out of other things.

17. Kenneth Millar: The Dark Tunnel, perhaps others. He’s the one who changed his name to John D. MacDonald, copied the Chandler formula, went on to write best-seller private-eye books (Lew Archer).

18, Martha Albrand, No Surrender and Without Orders. More realistic, quite good.

19. Barton MacLean (?) The Baited Blonde. Adventure-story type, not first rate, but good enough of the sort.

Haven’t yet read:

David Garth, Appointment With Danger

Pat Frank, An Affair of State

George Griswold, A Gambit for Mr. Groole

Helen MacInnes: Above Suspicion, others. [Later: I read most of hers, enjoyed them, can recommend them.)

(Afterword, June 2010: Needless to say, if this were updated it would include the major John Le Carre books, the Alan Furst books, lots of others. I haven’t the energy or time to attempt updating it, and offer it only as a list of what seemed worth reading back around 1950.

James Cahill.)

(If I were writing about private-eye novels of the Hammett-Chandler type, for people who have read all of theirs and want more, I would recommend Thomas Dewey: pretty good of that genre.)

Anyone interested in the espionage genre should find and read all the books of Charles McCarry, ideally in rough chronological order, since they form a kind of continuous narrative, up to his last book which rounds off the series.