CLP 60: 2004 “Eccentrics, Court Painters, and Professionals in 18th Century China.” Lecture, Berkeley Art Museum

Eccentrics, Court Painters, and Professionals in 18th Cent. China

Instead of spreading thank-yous all over in the usual manner of lecture openings, I want to focus more today, and express a really heartfelt gratitude to Sheila Keppel, not only for planning this exhibition but for all the excellent work she's done for the Museum over quite a few years. Sheila, who is a ceramicist, wrote the thesis for her graduate degree on Oribe ware, and has taken part in international symposia on Chinese and Japanese ceramics, has had to become a painting specialist, more than she intended to, to keep the exhibition schedule going, to respond to outsiders who want information and access to the collection, and many other valuable services. For all this, thank you Sheila. I want to dedicate the lecture to her. But I want also to point out that because of a publication deadline she had to write the description of my lecture for me; and while what she wrote would be a very interesting lecture, it isn't exactly the one I mean to give. I'm not, this time, going to "illuminate distinct artistic traditions in the light of social and political trends"--That's very much worth doing, and I've done it in other contexts, but not today. Sorry, Sheila.

I'll talk first about a few large artistic issues in painting of early to mid 18c, period represented by ptgs in exhib., with references more to economic than to political issues; then I'll show slides and speak about individual artists and paintings. As it happens, Sheila has chosen a group of paintings not often shown, which makes it more interesting to talk about them. This wlll be a relatively low-key lecture, and some of it may be familiar to those of you who are well-read in the literature of Chinese painting studies.

Early to mid 18c corresponds, in Ch. history, to late Kangxi, Yongzheng, Qianlong reigns of Manchu (Qing) Dynasty. Follows on one of the highpoints, the great ages of Chinese painting, the late Ming-early Qing, time of major Individualist and Orthodox masters.

S,S. Dong C-c to Four Wangs (Wang Yuan-ch'i)

S.S. Shitao, Hongren?

Deaths of Wang Y-c, Wang Hui, Shitao, all w/in decade can be seen as marking the end of this great age. Corresponds loosely with end of Kangxi era, one of two long, very successful reigns (other is Qianlong's, 1735-95). There are ways in which we can regard the period that follows, the period of the exhibition, Yongzheng and Qianlong reigns, as a bit of a falling-off. But I don't especially mean to make that argument in today's lecture, to which it seems unsuitable, and I'll talk more about what's interesting and admirable in painting of this period.

S: Map. What follows that early 18th century turning point is usually presented, again, in basically polarized pattern: Yangzhou "strange masters" vs. orthodox artists, or, as in exhibition, "eccentric" masters vs. "academic" such as Yuan Jiang. Both useful distinctions; both reflect the real situation, but only in limited ways. The 1985 exhibition catalog The Elegant Brush, exhib. by Chou Ju-hsi and Claudia Brown that covered more or less same period and somewhat later, organized 18c ptg by regions; but that isn't so very useful either. (The catalog, however, is a very useful source of information on artists of period.)

S Will begin by disposing of the Orthodox school of landscape, which isn't by any means the most interesting kind of painting being done in this period. Well represented, for our period, by Huang Ding (1660-1730). Studied with Wang Yuan-ch'i, so was firmly in the Orthodox lineage; much admired in his time. Relatively strong among later Orthodox ptrs; after his time, little innovation in that direction, a lot of dull stuff produced. Ptg in exhib.; "Dwelling in Summer Mts.", gift of my old friend Cheng Chi, maybe still living in retirement (haven't heard from him for several years), major collector and authority on Chinese art who spent most of his time in Tokyo, during the 1970s-80s; I visited him there many times, to see ptgs in his collection and to talk with him about Ch. ptg (he was a great raconteur). He presented this painting to the Museum when it first opened in1969.

Artists painting Orthodox-style landscapes tended to be associated with the imperial court in Beijing, as Huang Ding was, or with officialdom; the Manchu rulers were promoting this style in court, as part of process of legitimizing their rule, persuading the Han Chinese that they understood and respected their culture. (Manchus were non-Chinese, or properly non-Han, people.)

Economic factors can be introduced in accounting for some changes in painting of the 18th century: This is true espec. in Yangzhou. This city became major center of culture in 18c, as Nanjing and southern Anhui had been before. Many people move to Yangzhou, people who have made fortunes in Anhui and elsewhere, build villas and gardens there; artists and others attracted by patronage, including super-rich salt merchants. By circumstances too complex to even outline here, a few salt merchants had been granted franchises by imperial govt. to buy salt, distribute it, in effect control market. But they paid heavily for this, in various ways--espec. Qianlong emperor, who is said to have ruined one of them so he could acquire collection of ptgs. Maybe apocryphal, but indicates situation these people were in. Had to spend vast sums to outfit Chinese troops in border regions, and to entertain emperors when they came to Yangzhou on Southern Tours. These people supported artists and poets, scholarship, had salons...

But also in Yangzhou (Ginger's work) a clientele made up of a middle-level urban mix of officials, merchants, and others, who seem to have represented a new kind of buyers.

S,S. Ptgs by Zheng Xie (Zheng Banqiao), not rep. in exhib. Zheng Xie's pricelist. (Read) Before: artists more likely to do ptgs on commission, or request, for particular clients; took more time on them. Or did studio ptgs of a more painstaking, time-consuming kind, expecting to find buyers for them. All that changes.

S,S. Shitao screen vs. Yuan Jiang., Shitao. As noted before, a number of artists move to Yangzhou in 1690s and after, settle there;, all tend to paint faster, simpler, sloppier pictures. Xieyi as cause of decline . . (my lecture and article). Not everybody saw this development as positive; critics (read Wang Yun).

S,S. Gong Xian, mine; earlier (Nelson Gallery leaf): patient, time-consuming kind of execution; gives way in late years to linear, faster manner.

S.S. Some Zha Shibiao. Two artists who moved to Yangzhou, from Nanjing (Gong Xian) and Anhui (Zha Shibiao), Their move appears to have affected the character of their ptg: did faster, simpler, looser pictures. Judy Andrews, writing about Zha Shibiao, found a passage in a contemporary book that compares him with a lacquer-worker named Jiang Qiushui; the two are paired in a "ditty" of the time: "For dishes in every place it's Jiang Qiushui; for scrolls in every home it's Zha Shibiao."

These two landscapists were active in Yangzhou in late part of 17c, early 18c, but appear to have had little following there. After that, landscape loses its popularity in Yangzhou: patrons and buyers want pictures of other subjects. Portraiture popular: also figure painting, pictures of plant subjects, pictures of strong decorative appeal. Ginger Hsu quotes another saying, or song: flowers bring silver, portraits gold; if you want to be a beggar, paint landscapes.

Another factor in failure of 18c artists to produce masterworks comparable to those of 17c: Loss of access to great early ptgs, most of which had funneled into a few major late Ming-early Qing collections, then into imperial collection, mostly under Qianlong Emperor, who was a voracious and ruthless collector. There were still some Sung ptgs around to see: Yuan Jiang said to have acquired album of Song ptgs, learned style partly from these.

S,S. Another distinction that can be made is between artists of limited technique and thematic range, such as Zheng Banqiao, vs. versatile ones: Hua Yan, Li Shan, Luo Ping; when these worked in "Yangzhou Eccentric" styles, it was because they were popular. Zheng Xie's kind of ptg also, of course, has its strong attractions; he is one of most popular painters and calligraphers, known to all educated Chinese, partly because of the appeal of his poetry. Same true of ptgs by Li Fangying, others rep. in exhib. who had relatively narrow ranges of subjects and style.. What one admires and enjoys in works by these artists are distinctive compositional tendencies, brushstrokes--"individual styles"--and certain odd traits in their paintings that we are inclined to read as expressing some eccentricities in artists. But this reading is very problematic, I think. Anhui-school artists in period that preceded this worked in styles derived from Yuan-period masters such as Ni Can and Huang Gongwang, a style that is associated w. political rectitude and high principles. But again, that is what their audiences wanted in their time and circumstances. No longer true in 18c Yangzhou.

At the same time, I don't want to throw out the "Yangzhou eccentrics" designation altogether. There are those who love to say: these ptgs aren't really all that eccentric, or not really orthodox, or whatever, and point out that Yangzhou "strange masters" aren't really a coherent group; argue as though fact that ptgs w/in a defined group don't all look alike invalidates grouping. I've always tried to understand Chinese groupings, usually found some basis for them, even though their boundaries are never absolutely clear.

S,S. Chen Zhuan. Fan ptg of blossoming plum by him in exhib. Lesser artist; famous as poet, writer; ptg reflects cultivation, sensitivity more than skill. Real amateur. Very dry-brush style. Small album of blossoming plum, former Murakami: 1714, very early. Kind of album that connoisseur-collector could carry around with him, enjoy in leisure moments.

Yangzhou Eccentrics, or Strange Masters, however, were mostly not real amateurs, although they ptd in "amateur" styles; more like Zheng Banqiao: painted to make money.

S,S. Li Shan (1686-1760 or so): attempted government career, unsuccessful; spent time in capital, twice. Retired to Yangzhou, in financial trouble; became famous and popular there. Prolific, versatile. Differs from others in that he had academic training too, besides learning from late Shitao etc.; when he loosens up, keeps structural soundness, visual strengths, a degree of representational integrity. Cf. Robt. Hughes, listing the most admired artists of later 20c and pointing out that they all had strong training in traditional ptg, before going on to do whatever they did from that base. Something like that in China. We tend to admire artists who strike nice balance of representation and the expressive brushstroke and all the rest.

- Leaves from 1735 album, relatively early; Sarah's. Pines; vegetables (cabbage, bok choy.) Five pines: painted at least 5 times, several large hanging scrolls. Associates pines with five types of notables: a statesman, a general, an immortal or Buddha, etc. Emblems of uprightness, steadfastness. Also make strong, dense. interesting compositions.

Mention: liberating crabs. Minor but quite good: also interesting poem on it.

-S,S. Rock and flowers. Odd, interesting composition. 1726.

S. Li Fangying (1695-1734): Educated for official career, held several appointments, friend of poet Yuan Mei. But also supplemented his income with paintings, especially blossoming plum. This is an outstanding example, finest I know among his works. Large, strong. One of problems with this kind of ptg is that it too easily ends up as flat pattern of brushstrokes, with no depth, either visually or expressively. Li Fangying good enough artist to avoid this, in his best works, by varying ink tone, shifting character of brushstrokes constantly, making it all evoke appearance of old, weathered branch putting forth new blossoms. Story of Zhu Jizhan coming to Bky, in late 70s? (my memory unclear), seeing this ptg at entrance to exhib. of Yangzhou ptrs. (Contag collection, so Shanghai 1940s)

S,S. Also four leaves: (eccentricity) (crotchety, willful, idiosyncratic, etc.)

S,S. Jin Nong (1687-1773.) A lot written on him. Brilliant, mercurical, popular personage--"lived by his wits more than by gainful employment." Lived for a time as a kind of traveling antique dealer. Didn't paint until late in life; learned from Chen Zhuan, among others.

S,S. Self-portrait, Luo Ping's.

S,S. Plum branch in BAM (story. I saw it at Alice Boney's, in Tokyo. She was expert in other kinds of Ch. art, not ptg: caveat emptor. I arranged for one of our benefactors (Dr. Roger Spang) to buy it for presentation to UAM. Showed it to Jap. specialists, who were skeptical. Then, through my favorite dealer in Japan, Eda Yuji, Bungado, took it to show great calligrapher & connoisseur Nishikawa Nei. (story) Eda had facsimile made, on good paper, for mounting.) First (unofficial) envoy from China in mid-70s? Huang Zhen, as I recall--happened to have exhib. of Yangzhou ptgs up then, he went around, stopped, expressed surprise--(etc.).

S. Cf. Freer's: Ginger wrote about.

S,S. Gao Fenghan (1683-1748): rep. by large hanging scroll. He wasn't Yangzhou ptr, but from Shandong in NE. Around 1737, when he was about fifty, lost use of right hand, learned to paint with left. (Self-portrait; leaves.) Large ptg by him in exhib. dtd. 1738, so early work in left-handed phase.

S,S. Hua Yan (1682-1756): born in Fujian, active mostly in Hangzhou; traveled a lot. Another very versatile & prolific master. His bird-and-flower ptgs very popular, but also very good at figures, some landscapes.

S. Bird on branch. Cf. Ren Bonian, after Hua Yan.

S. Li Shizhuo (1690-1770): active mid-18c, spent some time in court. Also from NE, sometimes said to be Korean, although this appears to be a mistake. This attractive painting belonged to collection of late Hugh Wass, my very good friend, who lived in Japan for some years, then taught at Mills College; left his Ch. and Jap. ptgs to us on his untimely death. Unknown subject.

S,S. Cai Jia (1687- after 1750.) Came to Yangzhou to live as profes. artist. Painted in styles of various old masters; versatile; hard to define stylistic direction for him. LS: Shows his mastery of brushwork, composition; not espec. original, certainly not eccentric, but quite fine. S,S. Also his Blind Beggars: in BAM col., not chosen for this exhib. (We have a great deal more that could have been in: Sheila had to make choices, went for less-known pieces.) Sensitive, moving ptg. Cf.:

S,S. - Leaves from Huang Shen album, Blind Musicians; Snake Handler. 1730.

Huang Shen (1687-1772) was Fujian ptr, came to Yangzhou, loosened up style, became very popular. Several of his ptgs in BAM. Born 1687 in Fujian; came to Yangzhou 1724, just in time to join "movement" or whatever we call it; later listed as one of "Yangzhou Eccentrics." Really technically adept; ptd, much of time in deliberately wavering line for effect of lightness, spontaneity. Prolific, perhaps too much so. In this album, still reflecting style of his teacher Shangguan Zhou in Fujian.

S. Beggars & street people not popular subject in China, since Ch. ptg mostly of idealized, positive subjects; but a few examples. Well-known album by Zhou Chen, 1516, Honolulu and Cleveland; these may have had political and social meaning. Later: seem milder, w/o bitterness of others, don't portray suffering in disturbing, or even very moving way. European counterpart might be Murillo, with charming, romanticized beggars and urchins. Or Jacques Caillot? French print artist.

S,S. Beautiful Woman by Window: belongs to category I've been working on in recent years; Sheila put it in knowing that. Very different from what we've been looking at, obviously; done by unidentified artist of quite dif. background and economic standing, not necessarily painting for dif. kind of client, but for a different purpose: such ptgs were hung in household, sometimes for special occasions, or simply to create certain kind of ambiance in room. In Hong Lou Meng, great novel of this time, young Baoyu has one hanging in his room--like this, in semi-westernized style. (Point out why.)

S. Show KC ptg; Larry Sickman bought some good examples of kinds of ptg my book is about, but didn't have them in regular collection; showed them to me when I showed interest. After his death, student of mine went there, they couldn't locate. Such is fate of such ptgs.

S. On to one in Philadelphia Museum of Art, seal recently discovered of Mang-ku-li, Manchu artist active in early decades of 18c (late Kangxi era); held high official position; learned Western methods of ptg in academy from Jesuits there. A bit surprising to find him ptg this . . .

S,S. On to something quite different, but related in representing a kind of ptg that was great for hanging on the wall, conservative in style, strong in composition--cf. Japanese screens.

Wang Yun:. Yangzhou professional master, born 1652, active into 1730s; took part in production of Kangxi's Southern Tours scrolls in 1690s. "Spring Thunderstorm" painted in 1715. Came from Victoria Contag Col. (etc.,), bought, along with several others, for the UAM by Elizabeth Hay Bechtel, one of our principal donors in later 1960s, before she moved from Bay Area. Ptg traditional in subject: man has built house overlooking river, huge cliff; open pavilion for viewing, where he stands with guest, wife and son; servant behind. Nothing remarkable in style, but strong, handsome painting.

S,S. Yuan Jiang: (Here, I slip again into mode of reminiscence. (last time today). First lecture I ever gave at U.C.Berkeley, in 1964? was on Yuan Jiang--I happened to be working on an article on him just then, having found some works by him and closely assoc. artists in old col. of the Freer Gallery of Art, where I worked, bought by Freer in early years of 20c with signatures or attributions to more famous early masters. Yuan Jiang is one of artists whose works are frequently misrepresented in this way... (etc.) These could be re-attrib. to later artists, espec. Yuan Jiang, and exhibited and published with pride. My lecture here was for job opening. This was occasion mentioned in recent piece on me in Cal Monthly: walking along Telegraph Ave. on way to place on campus where I was to lecture, saw for first time Cinema Guild, then owned and managed by Pauline Kael and Edward Dahlberg. They were showing two Buster Keaton films I'd never seen. With handout listing other great films I desperately wanted to see, couldn't in Washington D.C., where I was living. After wrestling for a while with the question of whether I could somehow get out of giving the lecture (I was returning the next morning to Washington D.C.) and finding no way out, I decided at that moment that I had to come back to Berkeley.

- Big ptg in BAM: 1719. Yuan Jiang and several associates, studio painters, mostly painted big, impressive landscapes with palaces, loosely in the Sung manner, somewhat updated. There is a story that Yuan Jiang went to imperial court in Beijing, and painted there; but no work can be found in Palace Collection with his signature, no record that he was ever court ptr. Traveled to north, for sure; may have stayed in Beijing or nearby, painting for high-level officials? or members of imperial family?

He also did screens, like the one I showed earlier. This may be panel from one (talk abt subject.) We can recognize the narrative configuration by seeing other examples of it:

S. Cf: Yen Wen-kuei fan-shaped leaf. Subject complete that is only partial in Yuan Jiang.

S. etc. Sheng Mou or follower. Spelled out more; but all this implicit in other. I've been making the argument for some years now that we don't pay enough attn. to ptgs as pictures, looking closely to find out what is really going on in them. In this case, indicates probability that BAM's Yuan Jiang was originally part of larger composition.

S,S. To illustrate this point even more forcibly, I will conclude with another Yuan Jiang ptg, , now in New York private col.; I made slides when it was owned by Hong Kong collector, the late N.P. Wong's. (etc.--details.) No one who has written abt the ptg has noticed its real subject. (On, show series of details)

S. Yuan Jiang learned this practice of embedding idealized narratives in pictures from ptgs of the Song period, when it was standard practice. (Not so later--range of subject matter tended to narrow sharply.) This Southern Sung fan-shaped album leaf, which has gone through auction twice in recent years, is kind of thing he might have seen. I know it only from the auction catalogs. (Describe)

In earlier years, when I was in a mood to proseletyze, I had an idea for wall poster, with a motto in big letters, to send to everybody I know in the Chinese painting field, to put on the walls of their studies, saying: "It's a picture, stupid!" Now I simply rest comfortable with the assumption that reason and light will prevail eventually, in this and many other matters that have aroused my passions over the years; but I welcome opportunities to make my simple points once again, as this lecture has been. Thank you.

Slides: Map.

- Late Gong Xian, Q&S argument

- Late Zha Shibiao, "

- Hua Yan, trilling bird; cf. Ren Bonian's.

- Various Yuan Jiang

- Yen Wen-kuei-

- Li Shan, various. Sarah's album (early): pine, bokchoy. A few great ones: Eda, etc.

- Jin Nong, Freer, w. color; UAM. - Li Shizhuo, Hugh's?

- Cai Jia, blind musicians

- Huang Ding, Cheng's and another

- Chen Zhuan, plum, album

- Hua Yan, birds etc., cf. to album - Wang Yun, big one, UAM.

-Gao Fenghan, Hugh's. Album leaves.

- Li Fangying, various, incl. UAM. - Cai Jia: another? plus one in exhib.

- Huang Shen album, blind musicians. Cai Jia, same subject?

- Chou Ch'en beggar, harsh one.

CLP 55: 2002 “The Place of the Secret Spring Album in Chinese Erotic Painting.” Lecture, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Boston MFA lecture, November 2002 ("Secret Spring" album)

I have been coming to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for over fifty years, and have many pleasant memories of visits here. The first was as a fellowship student sent by the Freer Gallery of Art during my first year there, 1950-51; I was well treated by Kojiro Tomita and, especially, by Robert Treat Paine, whom I remember with affection and respect—among other things he gave me, a student out of nowhere, a rare book he owned, reproducing a work by one of the artists I was working on. That kindness has stayed with me for many years, as an example of how we should act and usually don’t. Across the river I met Langdon Warner and Ben Rowland, along with younger people who were to be my colleagues, notably Dick Edwards and Michael Sullivan. Later, during the MFA years of my friend Jan Fontein, I was a frequent visitor; and on the other side of the river I lectured often enough. Now Tom Wu, another very old friend, has invited me to give a second MFA lecture—the first was a rather inconsequential talk on quality in Chinese painting--but so late in my career that instead of early or middle or even late Cahill, you get late-late Cahill, jaded with most literati painting, absorbed in kinds of Chinese painting he himself could not have imagined taking seriously thirty years ago. Robert Treat Paine would raise an elegant if uncensorious eyebrow, But then, he probably would have done the same upon hearing that the MFA had acquired and exhibited a Chinese erotic album. We live in a different world. So I dedicate this lecture, oddly perhaps, to him, the person with whom this place is most pleasantly associated in my mind. Let us not, in our rush into the 21st century, leave behind altogether the patrician and humane values that Robert Treat Paine stood for.

Shortly after this lecture was announced, Tom Wu informed me that some people were asking: how could such a prominent scholar be talking about such trivial material? If more than a very few people still feel that way by the end of this lecture, I will have failed, because I hope to persuade you that the best of Chinese erotic paintings, the things I’ll be showing, aren’t trivial at all. On the other hand, you may still wonder: why is such a prominent scholar showing us these dirty pictures? and against that I have no defense, except to point out that the centerpiece of my lecture is an album titled “Secret Spring” bought and exhibited last year by the MFA, so that at least I have a co-defendant in Tom Wu.

To understand the art-historical standing of that album as I want to do, we need to begin much further back and outline the development of erotic painting in China. Leaving aside early literary references and a few archaeological finds with rather crude erotic pictures on them, we begin in the late Ming dynasty, the first half of the seventeenth century, with what appears to be the earliest Chinese erotic painting and printing to survive.

S,S. (van Gulik prints) Erotic prints from that period—or, in one case, a set of woodblocks from which they were printed—have been published by Robert van Gulik (the same Dutch diplomat who wrote the Judge Dee detective novels). These were imported early to Japan, and had a lot to do with the development of erotic prints there, and early Ukiyo-e more generally. The pattern they follow is simple: each leaf, or all but an introductory leaf, portrays a couple making love in one posture or another. This is, as many of you know, the same pattern seen in early European erotica, notably the early 16^th century series of engravings I Modi by Giulio Romano and others. It continues to be the preferred model in most Japanese erotica, down into the 19^th century. Japanese erotic handscrolls, of which some fine examples were exhibited and published here recently, mostly take this form.

S,S. Erotic painting in the Ming appears also to have been made up of series pictures of that kind, in either handscroll or album form—we read of works by Tang Yin and Qiu Ying with titles such as “The Ten Glorious Positions.” The earliest work of Chinese erotic painting known to me that can be reliably ascribed to a known artist is a signed album by a minor master working in Suzhou named Wang Sheng; another of his works is dated 1614, so this must be around that time. The first leaf depicts the couple in a romantic moment on the shore of a lake; the rest are all pictures of couples copulating. A homosexual scene ends the series. This pattern corresponds to erotic fiction before the late Ming, which chronicles in detail the dissipations of the main participants in one sex scene after another, without much of narrative or other material intervening.

(S,S) With the appearance of the great late Ming novel Jin Ping Mei, The Plum in the Golden Vase (a translation by David Roy is underway, two volumes so far), followed in the early Qing by Li Yu’s Rou Pu Tuan and others, a new model with far richer potential is introduced to Chinese fiction. Now the erotic acts are contextualized, elaborate human interactions are chronicled between a larger cast of characters, and the expression of complex and nuanced feelings becomes possible. As if in response to this development in literature, and quite likely inspired by it, artists of the early Qing, especially those working in Suzhou, create a new type of erotic album in which, similarly, the openly erotic scenes are interspersed with others depicting courtships and seductions, romantic interludes and scenes of voyeurism. These I call part-erotic albums. (Identify it)

S,S. The two earliest identifiable examples are both known now only through reproduction albums published in the 1940s in Shanghai; both have the improper bits painted over (on the photos or the plates, one hopes, not on the originals.) This one bears a signature of Qiu Ying, the great sixteenth century master who established the tradition for this kind of painting in Suzhou. But the signature is false, and the album is really by some early Qing follower of his. (Describe)

S,S. The other work known only in an old reproduction book has seals of Gu Jianlong, a highly versatile painter working in early Qing Suzhou whom I credit with the early development, if not the invention, of this type of album. (Describe leaves)

S,S. Two more. Include leaf w. screen.

S --. Numerous correspondences, in figure style, compositional devices, and many physical objects—lamps, the screen with small ptgs affixed to it—indicate that Gu Jianlong was also the artist of a large series of illustrations to the great 16^th century erotic novel Jin Ping Mei, a project apparently carried out when Gu Jianlong was serving in the court under the Kangxi Emperor, 1660s-70s. I mention it here only to inform those interested of this discovery, and to alert everyone to watch for leaves from this album.

S,S. Two more leaves. Produced in the court and handed down through later emperors—it bears Qianlong imperial seals--it was reportedly taken from the palace in the 1920s by Zhang Zuolin, whose son the late Zhang Xueliang had it published in Shanghai in the 1940s. After Zhang was taken to Taiwan, where he lived under house arrest, he seems to have broken it up into groups of leaves that he gave as gifts or sold. I know the whereabouts of 42 (comprising two groups) of the 200 leaves, and would like to know about others.

S,S. Continuing briefly with the theme of erotica produced in the Manchu court, another large-scale project was carried out under the Qianlong Emperor (ruled 1736-96) by an unidentified painter whom I call the Qianlong Albums Master, who appears to have worked both inside and outside the court. Two albums by him also bear Qianlong imperial seals, and similarly came out of the palace in the 1920s and were reproduced in the 1940s in Shanghai. Another album by the same master bears no imperial seals, and was apparently produced outside the court.

S,S. The paintings by this anonymous master offer a remarkably diverse and detailed, if idealized, pictorial account of life and loves in large upper-class or princely households in Qianlong-period China, made up of families along with their servants and concubines, all living in elegantly appointed mansions with well-kept gardens. A long section is devoted to the works of this artist in my book-in-progress, and I can't spend more time on them here, except to say that one of the albums may, if all goes well, enter the collection of this museum.

S,S. Three high-level erotic albums from the eighteenth century can represent what we might call the “golden age” of the art, and also illustrate the growing sophistication and wittiness, as well as the thematic broadening of the genre, that characterize this phase of its development. The thematic diversity to be seen in leaves of these albums includes voyeurism, masturbation by both sexes, homosexuality, bestiality, and incest, along with simple sexual ennui and impotence. The artist and his audience regard all these not so much with prurience as with amusement, enjoying the foibles and absurdities into which a wide spectrum of sexual urges can drive ordinary people. And in these we move further and further from simple series of pictures of people copulating, with which this genre appears to have begun. One of them, which is among the few surviving erotic albums whose authorship can be determined, is an album of eight large horizontal leaves by the Suzhou master Xu Mei, active in the early 18^th century—he took part in the imperial project of a birthday scroll for the Kangxi emperor in 1713.

S,S. The paintings may seem at first closer to soft-core than to hard-core erotica, since they offer little of openly visible lovemaking; the amorous couples are seen through bedcurtains or set-back windows, and remain mostly clothed, with only small glimpses, if any, of engaged genitalia. But the pictures nonetheless reward close attention.

S,S. A scene of voyeurism in a garden is typical of the subtleties of this album. The recumbent woman looks out insouciantly, almost at us, as if oblivious to the exposure of her bare bottom through the transparent pantaloons. Her young husband or lover stares fixedly at what she reveals, while fanning the stove, with a corresponding air of calm that is belied by the erection faintly visible through his own pantaloons. The girl servant at right turns back a bit furtively to watch them both, as the cat does more openly. What is mildly arousing is not the sight of the woman's sex, which is scarcely visible, but her exhibiting it to the man, his looking at it, her looking out at us, and our own gaze visually embracing them all, completing the crisscross pattern of looking. Our scopophilic pleasure is intensified by the complicity and reflexivity with which we become implicated in this pattern, while assuring ourselves that our interest is purely aesthetic and scholarly. It is all very convoluted and pleasurable.

S,S. The other album bears seals of the northern figure master Leng Mei, but is not, I think, by him—the style points to a slightly later and more sophisticated artist. In one leaf, a gardener boy pauses from sweeping leaves to entice a girl in the household, who watches from behind a split-bamboo blind at the window, by drawing out the front of his pants and pointing meaningfully at the farthest extension. The girl chews her sleeve and gazes intently, captivated by what she is shown. But the artist has made us privy to the boy’s deception by allowing us to glimpse, through a gap in his trousers, his much more modest member.

S,S. The album is executed in a highly finished, realistic style that owes a lot to European art, but with a lightness of touch, in both brush and conception, that tempers the indelicacy of the subjects. Several of the leaves are set outdoors, and have an attractively bucolic character. In this one, a herdboy is about to take the virginity (we assume) of a young girl, who may have come out onto the hillside to fly the kite that lies on the ground at left. This seemingly spontaneous and uncomplicated encounter evokes an interplay of innocence and knowledge, and pastoral dreams of return to a state of youthful freshness. It hints also at the allure of child sex, and thus, like other leaves in the album, has a tinge of the near-perverse, which is somehow intensified here by the way the cow and nuzzling calf roll their eyes back to watch.

S,S. The only leaf among the eight that might properly be called coarse presents an old, gap-toothed travelling merchant bargaining with a tavern girl over how much it will cost him to induce her to pull down her pants the rest of the way--or, in a different reading, preventing her from pulling up her pants while demanding, with his two raised fingers, a second bout for his money. When we turn our attention from this rather gross tableau, however we read it, we may be captivated by the meticulous reproduction of wood-grain on the partly-open door, and the glimpse through it into the stable below, from which wild-eyed horses look out.

S --. Even more absorbing is the townscape viewed through the open window, painted in an enchanting version of the Sino-European illusionistic manner. Light snow is falling, and a traveler with an umbrella is leading a horse along the canal; the figures, together with the houses behind and the foreshortened wall of the building at left, are reflected in the water. All this, quite irrelevant to the erotic theme, is rendered with a delicacy and skill that make us wonder why an artist of this excellence didn’t become better known, or turn his abilities to other uses than settings for erotica.

S,S, The third album is by a follower of Gu Jianlong, and bears no signature or seals; we haven’t enough datable material for comparison to allow a firm dating of the work, but I would guess at mid to later 18^th century. The capacity of the part-erotic album, as pioneered by Gu Jianlong, to suggest mini-narratives in its individual leaves reaches a high point here. In this leaf, the aging master of the household is attempting sex in a garden house with a servant girl, but proves incapable; she lies back bored and unsatisfied. Meanwhile, his wife approaches across the bridge, wielding a club.

S.S. Another leaf presents us with the ultimately blasé and permissive couple enjoying their favorite pursuit, which has by now, however, become a bit tiresome. They’ve adopted a position for intercourse that requires little movement or even muscular strain; she passes her time looking through an erotic album, perhaps in search of some novelty that will spice up their sex life, while he turns to flirt with the maid. The Mi-style landscape painted on the screen behind them, a high-culture emblem that was itself by now rather tired, must be an ironic touch.

S,S. In this leaf a mature, bearded man has stretched out naked on a lounge chair on the verandah outside his study to rest from reading a steamy passage in Jin Ping Mei, “The Plum in the Golden Vase”—for that’s the title written on the open book on the floor beside him, one ce or fascicle from a large set seen in the bookcase inside the room. He may be fanning his erect penis with the feather fan, or else is tickling it for stimulation. His eyes are closed, whether in a doze or in satisfied enjoyment is not clear. A young housemaid looks out at him, her sleeve-covered hand to her face in a gesture of concern and uncertainty, feelings that are hinted at also by her raised eyebrows: should she intrude on him, and what would she be risking if she did? I sent a slide of this leaf to my colleague in Chicago David Roy, who is translating Jin Ping Mei; but only for his amusement—that great novel cannot be dismissed as a simple vehicle for erotic arousal, any more than these albums can.

S,S. It was common for erotic albums otherwise devoted to heterosexual encounters to include one homoerotic leaf. In this one (before we turn our attention elsewhere, note the screen with small pictures affixed, an item from Gu Jianlong’s repertory), a scholar in his study is sodomizing a youth, whose effeminate face and hair ornaments suggest that he is a bitong, a boy or young man who dressed sometimes in feminine clothing and catered to the same-sex desires of men. For well-off males to enjoy sex with partners both female and male was commonly accepted, not taken to be unnatural or censorable. Consorting with bitong not only carried no special stigma, but in some times and situations was considered more refined than heterosexual relationships with female courtesans and prostitutes. As in the Jin Ping Mei leaf, female onlookers complicate the scene; here it is two young women in identical postures who look in from the doorway, one from behind a split-bamboo blind. Both raise their sleeved hands to their faces, as does the girl in the other leaf, expressing the same ambivalent feeling. If we suppose that the artist included two young women here because the central scene involves two males, the implications for what might follow become too devious to pursue.

S,S. Having come this far—which is pretty far indeed for what has been considered a rather staid tradition—we learn new things about Chinese painting all the time—we are ready to take on the central work of my lecture, the Boston MFA’s “Secret Spring” album. Many of you will be familiar with it from its exhibition here last year, but I’ll show all the leaves anyway. This, too, is an anonymous work, with no signature or identifiable artist’s seals; the inscriptions mounted opposite each leaf, by three different writers, are poems, and give no clue to the authorship or date. In this leaf—the most innocent, and the one reproduced in the auction catalog—a woman stretches before repairing to the bed in the farther room.

S --. It was common for artists of these albums to adopt compositions from earlier works, and the Secret Spring Master, as I will call him, has done that for several of his leaves. In this case, it’s from the early Qing album ascribed to Qiu Ying with which we began, a work probably about a century earlier. In the earlier leaf, the woman rises after playing cards and drinking tea; the two cups and two chairs indicate a partner, whom in the context of this album we assume to be male, for whom she is waiting, and with whom she will end up in the bed. For the Secret Spring album we have to make different assumptions, as we’ll see.

S,S. In this leaf the Secret Spring Master adopts another composition from the album attributed to Qiu Ying, portraying a woman in her boudoir making up her hair, probably preparing for the visit of a husband or lover, while her maid picks a flower in the garden to put in it.

S --. The Secret Spring Master adds a touch of more open naughtiness: the maid’s skirt hikes up as she climbs over the railing, revealing her sex. We might think that this exposure was meant to titillate male viewers of the album; but we would be wrong, I think; something quite different is going on here.

S,S. A common scene in part-erotic albums by Gu Jianlong and his followers showed people playing a game at a table, with some detail hinting at hanky-panky—here, from an album by Gu Jianlong, the scholar reaching behind to hold hands with the maid. In the Secret Spring leaf, the participants are all women, and one of them is reaching through the chair to place a cylindrical pile of what appear to be game-pieces? on it for one of the others, who is leaning out over the table, to sit down on, unexpectedly, when she sinks back. Another turns her head to watch the reaction. (This, in the Museum of Fine Arts?)

-- S. (Detail) The truth is that the people portrayed in the album are all women, and it is same-sex activities that they are all engaged in—that’s what the album is about. Before pursuing further the implications of that, let me point out the highly distinctive figure style of this master, which allows, I think, the attribution to him of other pictures we’ll see later. The heads are small and oval, with eyes squinting and arched upward, prominent noses, and fixed smiles. Bodies are elongated and often shown in contorted postures, with the heads cocked sideward; clothing folds are heavily shaded.

S,S. Showing the pictures in no particular order (the original order of leaves usually can’t be determined in albums, since they can be shuffled in remounting): An old woman comes to the door selling dildos, which the younger women in the doorway seem eager to acquire. Two maids doing laundry in a stream admire the extended penis of a donkey on the opposite shore, with a cock and hen beyond echoing their imaginings.

-- S. This leaf has a kind of counterpart in the so-called Leng Mei album; here, the young girl holds and contemplates the penis of the animal, which brays with excitement or irritation, while a boy takes the opportunity to reach under her skirt. Chlld sex again.

-- S. The two girls in the Secret Spring leaf, themselves loosely dressed and posed to suggest physical intimacy, provide another clue to the underlying theme of the album. This is not a household of full-time lesbians, but of women who, in the absence of their spouses and masters (for whom the donkey is a stand-in), or perhaps because they are unmarried or simply by personal inclination, devise homoerotic amusements for their own pleasure and satisfaction.

S,S. A similar theme is seen in another leaf from the so-called Leng Mei album, which presents another all-women tableau, again in a manner more designed to amuse than to arouse. It’s an outdoor scene, in which two women hold down a third, exposing and fingering open her sex, while another picks an eggplant with which to violate her; a baby she carries looks slyly out at us, as if privy to the game. If we can avoid either, on the one hand, turning away from this as revoltingly gross, or on the other, going all ethnological and citing the Chinese folk tradition by which women, on a certain day of the year, go out to pick eggplants to prophesy certain important characteristics of their future spouses, we can see it as harmless fun, the mode in which I would like to understand the MFA album, in which all of the participants appear to be enjoying themselves.

S,S. Two outdoor scenes from the Secret Spring album. In one, the older woman supports the younger as she reaches up to rescue the cat; again, a certain physical intimacy is suggested in this seemingly innocent action.

S,S. In the other, a night scene, the maid is about to insert something—some kind of stimulant perhaps—into the vagina of her sleeping mistress. Details that appear a bit mysterious to us, or at least to me, were probably easily readable for people of the time, especially women. The same is true of an album of scenes of women in interiors that will be a centerpiece in my lecture tomorrow in Cambridge. That one is non-erotic, but includes a leaf or two that delicately suggest amorous relationships between the women. I am inclined to believe, for these and other reasons, that both were intended primarily for an audience of women, and will elaborate on that point later.

S,S. In this leaf, a group of women are gazing together at an erotic album. Other albums, presumably of the same kind, are on the seat beside them, and two white rabbits are on the floor, standard symbolic items in these scenes. The picture they are looking at is one of heterosexual sex, since the two figures in it are distinguished in skin coloration, following a convention of these albums, he darker, she lighter. Pictures and literary accounts of women looking at erotic albums, whether alone or with a man prior to sex, are common in Chinese erotic literature and painting, but are sometimes dismissed as the imaginings of male artists, and so of no value in indicating how the albums were actually used. But that seems to me carrying fastidiousness too far, and refusing to acknowledge the likelihood of women as well as men enjoying erotica. Quite a few recorded edicts outlawing salacious literature and pictures are collected in a modern compilation (Wang Xiaochuan), and several of them make a point of including women among the purchasers and viewers of the paintings. A mid-nineteenth century prefect of Suzhou named Wang, for instance, visiting the book and painting markets in his city, was appalled by what he saw there, and issued a vehement edict: (a similar one dates from the Qianlong era, the later 18^th century, but I haven’t yet worked through it):

“Each shop has lascivious books and pictures to sell for profit and to inflame people with lust. The filth extends into the women’s quarters, increasing evil and licentiousness. There is nothing worse than this. The pictures that stimulate heterodox licentiousness are worse than lewd books, since books can only be understood by those with a rough knowledge of letters, while the pictures are perceptible to all.”

This last point, that the evil effects of pictorial erotica are not confined to the literate, is especially pertinent to the likelihood of a women’s audience, since literacy was less common in this period among women, and largely limited to gentry women. In my lecture tomorrow, on paintings done for women in Ming-Qing China, I’ll read this same edict and then add: if you wonder what he means by heterodox licentiousness in the women’s quarters, you need only go across the river. Or something like that.

The edicts seem to have been ineffective, and the large-scale production of erotica continued. Critics directed their anger at the artists who painted it and the dealers who sold it; users, or consumers, are seldom even chastised. The general attitude seems to have been: one can’t blame people for wanting to look at these pictures, once they’re available; the blame goes rather to artists, for painting such things--they are consigned to hell over & over. There is no suggestion that people could choose not to look at them, or that parents could keep them away from children, etc. The situation sounds familiar.

S,S. The remaining four leaves all depict groups of women engaged, or about to engage, in sex. As I said before, these are not necessarily women with lesbian inclinations, although some of them might be that; they are meant to portray women who are making do with available partners, in the absence of men. But the artist makes clear, in their postures and expressions of delight, that they are enjoying themselves. The time in this picture is dusk; they have been playing the game of throwing arrows into a vase, and the mistress of the house, looking tipsy, now wants to cavort a bit with two of her maids before sleeping. Two younger maids in the foreground look coy, perhaps wondering whether to join in.

Van Gulik writes in his Sexual Life in Ancient China (not an entirely reliable book, but informative if used with caution) that homoerotic love among women was “quite common and viewed with tolerance. Provided that excesses were avoided, female homosexual relations were considered as a custom bound to prevail in the women’s quarters, and even praised when it gave rise to self-sacrifice or other beautiful acts of love and devotion.” And we have evidence of the same from other sources. Bisexual women also appear in Chinese fiction and other writing: In Li Yü’s play Loving the Fragrant Companion, Mrs. Shih, a young married woman, visiting a temple, meets a beautiful & talented young girl called Yün-hua. The two fall violently in love; Mrs. Shih arranges for the girl to become her husband’s concubine—an arrangement with which the husband is very happy. A similar occurrence, but this time real-life, is recorded in Shen Fu’s autobiographical Six Records of a Floating Life (trans. by Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-hui) (London, Penguin Books, 1983) pp. 50-51). In 1797, when Shen Fu is considering taking a girl on as his concubine, with his beloved wife Yün’s encouragement, Yün takes the girl off into her room for a private talk, and when she comes out, reveals that she is intending to follow the pattern of Li Yü’s play. Shen Fu, again, seems entirely happy with this comfortable triangular relationship.

S,S. Another scene of dusk; the woman of highest station prepares for bed, unwinding the wrappings of her bound foot while a maid removes her other clothing, another undresses herself, and a third watches at the door for intruders. The shallow tub bath in lower right with a board laid across it is familiar to anyone who has had to make do with this simple facility in a temple or other old-fashioned accommodation in China. The dance-like postures of the women, echoed in the banana palm outside, are characteristic of figure scenes painted by the Secret Spring Master, who uses this device to further enliven his pictures and lighten their content. The question of female nudity in Chinese painting, dismissed in one learned article as a non-problem because there are no nudes in Chinese art, will receive more informed consideration in my forthcoming book. (They do not, by the way, appear only in erotica.)

To return to the question of why I think these were intended principally for an audience of women: for a complete answer I would have to spend time showing, for contrast, a series of pictures aimed at male viewers, and cataloguing their identifying characteristics, and then say: none of these are to be seen here; they are replaced by a different set. And then I would identify those. Lacking time for that, or for any extended treatment of this important question (on which I will have more to say in tomorrow’s lecture), I will simply state that first, I’m not arguing that any particular work or type is aimed exclusively at this or that gender; they could be enjoyed by sensitive and open-minded people in either camp. And then, that in certain features this album seems to answer to what I tentatively take to be feminine tastes or preferences: not much of exposed genitalia or blatant depiction of sex acts; subtleties instead of emphatic effects; a concentration on matters directly relevant to feminine experience.

S --. Lesbian scenes could, of course, be depicted for the arousal of men, but they would be very different from these, I think. This, a leaf from a late and low-level album, can represent that type.

S,S. In this leaf, the sex act seems at first glance more openly presented, in a way that would contradict my observation; until, that is, you try to read it, whereupon it turns out to be rather puzzling. There are obviously two women involved, although the space between the bottom and the top of the one with the blue jacket, against whose back the other is resting, is beyond belief. Anatomical exactitude does not concern the Secret Spring Master. Nor is it completely clear what exactly is going on: There appear to be two small animals, brown and white, perhaps small dogs, the brown one held by the blue-jacketed woman while the white one licks the vulva of the other woman. Remarkable in this album is the avoidance of direct depiction of the usual forms of female homoerotic sexual activities, which van Gulik lists as: rubbing pudenda against each other, rubbing or massaging the clitoris, cunnilingus, and the use of a dildo, especially a double-ended dildo. (Double your pleasure, double your fun . . . ) None of these is more than hinted at in this album. Such an avoidance of the expectable and free invention of the unexpected, which may remind us of certain kinds of Chinese “strange stories” such as those in Liaozhai Zhiyi, tells us something about the Secret Spring Master and his audience, something that we will see confirmed later.

S,S. A leaf that may have been the last; it bears a seal in lower left that could be that of the artist, but unfortunately doesn’t identify him. Tom Wu reads it as Yuzao, “Bathing in Elegant Prose,” and no painter who used that name can be located. He speculates that he could be the same as Mr. Song Siwen, one of the three who wrote the poems; but he can’t be identified either, and I myself think it’s unlikely that they are the same. Here the maids are playing around in the outer room while their mistress sleeps in upper left; one of them is tickling the sex of another with her toe.

Finally: Tom Wu would shoot me, and with good reason, if I ended my discussion of this album without remarking on its high quality, in which an air of wild freedom and sometimes clutter combines with remarkable refinements in details—here the design on the embroidered cloth draped over the chair, the designs on clothing, or

-- S. the drawing of the sleeping woman, which has an almost Yamato-e-like elegance. The whole effect is of a wealthy household lavishly appointed but occupied by rather messy and undisciplined people. All in all, this is a highly entertaining and visually rewarding work.

So far, what we have seen can be accepted as mildly titillating entertainment. Why not? Nobody is hurt, and the assumption is that everything will go back to a more heterosexual condition when the men get back from official posts, or commercial travel, or warfare, or whatever was keeping them away. But other works by the Secret Spring Master, known in originals or from reproductions and tentatively be ascribed to the same master on the basis of the highly distinctive style, compositional method, and content. Since the style of any two albums, even by the same master, is not going to be exactly the same, one might argue for attributing these all to different artists; but to my eye, they all fall easily within the range of possible variance in the oeuvre of a single master (although, since we can't get at the originals for most of them, we should continue to allow the possibility of copies or studio works), and they exhibit quirks of temperament and imagination that for me speak of a single artist behind them all, whom I will continue to call the Secret Spring Master. These are two leaves from an album of nine male homoerotic pictures, which was offered at auction in 1995. Two men strolling with their youthful favorites, perhaps bitong, pass on the street and observe each other, one of them through a monocle; a third man may be sending the boy some kind of signal, pointing to his eye, or his nose. In the other, two men and three boys sport together much as the women do in the Boston album (but perhaps a restaurant or a gay bordello instead of a domestic setting), striking similar postures and playing similar tricks.

S,S. Two leaves that I know only from poor, heavily-printed reproductions in books on Chinese erotic art; they may be from the same album. In one, a younger man fanning an older one in the street peeks through a wall at the scene inside, where a woman in her bath is about to masturbate with a dildo handed to her by her maid. The young man, aroused by the sight, is himself masturbating. In the other, a sewage collector stands on his bucket to peer over a wall at a couple having sex. Since this sexually engaged heterosexual couple is the only depiction of that theme known to me in the oeuvre of this master, it’s worth noting that he manages to make it look somehow like an unnatural act.

-- S. A leaf with a similar theme from the album by some Gu Jianlong follower reveals the difference--even the melon vine growing on the wall adds somehow to the effect of excess and transgression in the Secret Spring Master's picture.

S --. A single leaf, again known to me only from a reproduction in an otherwise useless exploitation book on Chinese erotic art, depicts another heterosexual couple, this time engaged in cunnilingus. (I hope you haven’t begun to feel sorry you came; worse is still ahead.) The clumsy design of the book has made the plate overlap the binding, and cut off some at right, but enough remains to identify another voyeur, who seems to be looking through an eyeglass of some kind. The setting corresponds closely, again, with the Secret Spring leaves, as do the figures.

S,S. Two leaves from what was probably a larger album, kept in the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, also appear to be the work of the Secret Spring master, and take us into the realm of the seriously perverse. The domestic setting and the props suggest that this is a family scene; if so, what we are seeing is homosexual incest, as the seated father sodomizes the boy. The mother--in this context it must be she, although we would prefer to think not--combs the boy's hair, while he ties a sash around his head. This is no longer harmless fun, but, however we draw our boundaries (and mine would follow the standard formulation, "anything non-injurious between consulting adults is OK), this is real depravity. Our artist compounds the nastiness by the device, brilliant in itself (and known to me nowhere else in Chinese painting--a true invention) of placing in the lower left corner a large, round mirror, seen from the back, into which the participants are gazing delightedly, observing their own dissolute behavior. And he locates us, as viewers/voyeurs, just behind and above the mirror, so that we inescapably watch them watching themselves--enough, change slides.

S,S. The other leaf is less disturbing, only very kinky; it seems more the work of someone who is nearing an exhaustion of imagination: what to give them next? As with one of the Secret Spring leaves, the one with two dogs, it is not easy to make out what is happening, so I'll read it for you. It's a double-header composition of the kind our master likes (but which isn't limited to him). A woman leans back against a table, one knee on a chair, masturbating against the rounded end of the chair's armrest. Meanwhile, the man, his large penis dangling, uses a razor to shave the woman's pubic hair. Beside them, a woman raises a ewer to pour a thin stream of water from high up onto the sex of the woman who lies back, looking very satisfied, in the bath. Supposing these were two leaves from an album, one has difficulty imagining what might have gone on in the rest; but, perversely perhaps, one would like to see, since it would surely expand even further the sexual repertory of world art. (Pointed out afterwards: man is circumcised, and wears cap/yarmaluke? shaving woman's pubic hair has religious significance in judaism? weird but possible.)

How can we understand all this? As the work, I think, of a highly inventive master who was willing to produce specialized erotica for people with a great diversity of proclivities and tastes--or, alternatively, for people who wanted to imagine themselves into a great diversity of sexual situations. About his own leanings it tells us nothing at all; and that is in itself worthy of note. With most modern Western erotic painting and drawing by known artists, we are inclined, rightly or wrongly, to associate the sexual proclivities portrayed or suggested in the pictures with those of the artist: Picasso liked this kind of sex, Jean Cocteau that kind; Balthus was turned on by these, Robert Mapplethorpe by those; and so forth. I leave their proclivities blank to avoid being chided for thinking this way by more severe-minded colleagues, and perhaps I still will be; but it’s hard to resist making such associations, in view of the nature of the pictures and the consistency they exhibit. When there are exceptions—E.M. Forster, for instance, writing penetratingly sensitive fiction about heterosexual love through most of his career—we recognize these as exceptions, and admire the artist or writer all the more for transcending the personal.

For the Chinese makers of erotic pictures, we don’t have enough evidence yet to say categorically that the same pattern doesn't apply to them, although the thematic diversity to be seen in some of the albums, especially later ones, suggests that it doesn’t. In any case, I can say with confidence that it certainly doesn’t apply to the Secret Spring Master. We have no idea what his sexual preferences can have been, and we don’t care; he was a master at, among other things, imagining himself into multifarious, sometimes extreme sexual feelings and situations, and embodying them in pictures for the pleasure and gratification of people of every sexual persuasion imaginable, and some beyond our ordinary imagination. There will be those who see this as nothing more than evidence of a dirty mind; I would prefer to see it as an advanced level of empathy, especially because he detaches himself a bit from his creations through his bizarre distortions, which turn most of them, if we are sympathetic (I exclude the pedophilic, those involving children), into good clean dirty fun.

S,S. This stage in the (still only sketchily discernible) history of the Chinese erotic album should not, I think, be taken as a decadent phase, since both the artistic quality and the level of sophisticated imagination remain high. Decadence comes rather in the form of thematic monotony--most of the later artists, except when they are copying old models, simply cannot think of anything beyond the obvious for their amorous couples and their cohorts to do. (These, our next-to-last slides, are leaves from an erotic album by an early 19th century artist named Yin Hung, also in the MFA). Irony and aesthetic distance are generally beyond them

S,S. And even that rises above the level of the great majority of Chinese erotic albums that one encounters, either in collections or reproduced, in which the pictures as a whole exhibit the usual traits of the hack artist's or the copyist’s hand: stiff and heavy-handed drawing, unoriginal compositions, insensitivity to nuance, fixed expressions (often empty grins) on faces, unintended distortions. And these appear to make up most of the production of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Fine and original erotic albums from this late period may well turn up in years to come, necessitating changes in these judgments; for now, based on what we know, they seem valid. And in this context we can congratulate the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Tom Wu for acquiring one of the finest from the best period. Thank you.

Notes toward BMFA lecture:

Van Gulik Sexual life p. 163: Mentions Li Yu’s play Lien-hsian-pan, “Loving the Fragrant Companion,” on the subject. Methods: rubbing pudenda agst each other, rubbing or massaging clitoris, cunnilingus, use of dildo. (A plant used that way among “tartars”. Silver ball inserted, etc.

Li Yü’s play Lien-hsian-pan: Mrs. Shih Yün-chien, young married woman, visits temple, meets beautiful & talented young girl called Yün-hua. Two fall violently in love with each other; Mrs. Shih arranges for her to become her husband’s concubine--husband also very happy.

Something like this in real life (?): Shen Fu, Six Records of a Floating Life (trans. by Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-hui) (London, Penguin Books, 1983) pp. 50-51. While Shen Fu is considering taking girl on as concubine, his wife Yün takes her off into room for private talk, comes out, reveals that she is intending to follow pattern of Li Yü’s play. This was in 1795. Husband, who is the writer Shen Fu, seems entirely happy with this arrangement.

On homosexuality: Wang Xiaozhuan book, CL era prohibition on officials keeping “singing boys.” See also pp 109-110: edict denouncing “kind of petty-minded literatus who, whenever he goes out to view the landscape (scenery), has to take along a boy or young monk: this is called “elegance” fengya; really a kind of intimidation and exploitation (check this trans.) More on pp. 112-113.

Paul Goldin, The Culture of Sex in Ancient China, p. 7 (end of Intro): on few notices of homoeroticism in early Chinese writings. Lesbianism in the harem.

Go on to present “Secret Spring” in this way: good clean dirty fun. Why not? Nobody hurt, assumption is that everything will go back to normal condition when men get back from official posts, or commercial travel, or warfare, or whatever was keeping them away. But: (on to other works by this artist.)

- lack of S&M, as in Japanese erotica, notable. van Gulik makes big point of that. Ch erotic can seem unhealthy to us in involvement of children--not so opprobrious in their culture and time?

Trying to get at question of how women might have responded to erotic ptg, and what they might have liked within it, is always hampered by our inability to get at authentic expressions of women’s tastes and opinions—they are always somehow tainted by filtering through some kind of control and rewriting by men. For instance (shan’ge from Kathy Lowry).

Matter of borrowings from west: Giovanni points out that early erotic fiction (his Chi pozi zhuan, 2^nd half 16c) uses “sustained first-person narrative” which is “thought to have been imported from the West only during the century just gone.” Cf. Other things—cross-cultural adoptions heavier in erotic realm—no resistance from those who don’t want to contaminate native culture---.also, lure of lifelike, or effects of immediacy.

Giovanni p. 7: “As it is also the case in Renaissance pornography, postures play a crucial rhetorical role in late Ming pornographic fiction.”

His novel, and much of literary pornography, takes place inside household, so that all kinds of improper relationships, including incestuous, are generated: also, breakdown of nei and wai, penetrable women’s quarters. “. . . offers a dark and disenchanted view of the family …”

Possible that costumes, hair etc. identify participants in leaves I show so as to suggest improper relationships w/in family; will need more work. For instance—(young boy and woman?)

CLP 59: 2004 Respondent Paper for Distinguished Scholar session honoring me on the subject of “Decentered, Polycentric, and Counter-Canons in Chinese Painting.” Seattle

CAA respondent paper

The four papers in this session all deal with departures from the mainline canon for Chinese painting (insofar as it can be defined), or alternatives to it; and since many of you are not Chinese art specialists, I thought I should fill in, before commenting on the papers, a brief outline of how that canon came into being and how it was maintained. What I will say is mostly well known to serious specialists in the subject, although we have frequently talked and written as though we didn't know it, as though the canon represented the whole of Chinese painting, or at least all that we need pay attention to. I will speak briefly also about studies made in recent decades that have significantly broken with this habit of thinking of the canonical schools and artists as virtually the entirety of Chinese painting. A personal note: by turning attention to areas outside the canon, I have opened myself to admonitions from well-meaning colleagues about how doing this is hurting my reputation. Serious scholars, they believe, do not waste their time on trivia.

The crucial circumstances can be quickly stated. Out of a huge output of paintings produced in China over the centuries, for many kinds of use and enjoyment, only a small part was considered "suitable for refined appreciation," as Chinese writers put it, and so worthy of collecting and preserving. This small part, which came to make up the canon, was composed mainly of works considered to be genuinely from the hands of prestigious name artists; and, since the men who made the judgments and wrote the books were themselves, by definition, members of the educated literati class, the kind of painting done by the literati or scholar-amateur artists, as opposed to the professional masters, was strongly favored, especially for the later (post-Song, or post-13th century) periods. Paintings outside this body of name-artist works were less likely to survive, since scroll paintings need care and regular remounting for their preservation. Sometimes the rejected paintings survived under false pretenses: attributions to older and more highly-regarded artists, or false identifications of subjects, which for sharp-eyed Chinese collectors were reasons for rejecting them as fakes, but which we can now try to strip away so as to recognize the pictures as what they are.

S,S. A good example is this large landscape (at left) by Sun Chun-tse, a 14th century artist who followed the style of the Southern Sung court master Ma Yuan, a style that was considered by literati critics to be unworthy or unsuitable for later artists to imitate. No serious collector in China would have included a work by Sun Chun-tse as such in his collection. Sun's paintings survive almost entirely in Japan (as does the one on the right) where they can, by contrast, attain the status of designated Important Cultural Properties. The work at left is an exception: we know from the mounting style and label that it was transmitted down to modern times in China. But only because the Sun Chun-tse signature in lower left (which matches exactly the ones in Japan) was partially hidden by a stroke of ink, and a label added attributing it "positively" to Ma Yuan, the Sung master, himself. Rejected in China as a fake Ma Yuan, it was on the New York market for several years as an anonymous Ming painting; I finally bought it for a modest price and later discovered the signature. Chinese paintings outside the canon could survive under special conditions: misrepresentation, as in this case; export to Japan (Chan or Zen painting is an important example, as treated in Yoshi's paper) or, from the early 20th century, export to Europe and America., where the "low taste" of foreigners preserved many fine paintings that were less likely to survive in China; preservation in a tomb, buried with the occupant--several examples of that are known.

The formation of the canon, although earlier beginnings might be recognized, was mainly a phenomenon of the middle and later Ming, 15th to mid-17th century, when a succession of prestigious collectors, critics, and artists (frequently the same people in multiple roles) made lists and lineages of the old masters most worth collecting and imitating in one's own paintings. The lineage coming down from later Song academy painting, to which Sun Chun-tse belonged, was mostly rejected for the later periods, although it continued to be popular among non-elite audiences.

S,S. ("Dong Yuan" with Dong Q-c insc.; one of Xiaozhong Xianda album.) This canonizing process culminates in the writings of the enormously influential artist-critic Dong Qichang (1555-1636), where it takes a more or less definitive shape, at least in outline, in his famous, or notorious, "theory of the Southern and Northern Schools." It is no coincidence that this fixing of the canon coincides with the period in which sweeping economic and social changes in China greatly increased the numbers of families affluent enough to collect art. Old-guard connoisseurs, or those able to pass as that, served as consultants to new collectors, enjoying their hospitality and generosity in exchange for advice. Their published writings, along with books offering rules for refined living, annotated lists of famous surviving works, and collection catalogues, appeared in unprecedented numbers. The firming of the canon, then, was in part the outcome of the promulgation of it to a broader audience.

S,S. Dong Qichang's listing represents only the skeleton, so to speak, of the canon; other artists who were judged somehow acceptable could be added, and the so-called Orthodox masters (here, Wang Shimin, Wang Jian), self-declared followers of Dong Qichang in the generations immediately following him, more or less placed themselves within it by their styles and their self-validating inscriptions. In recent times, the leading traditional connoisseurs were likely to be also landscapists in the Orthodox tradition: Wu Hufan, Xu Bangda, C. C. Wang.

S.S. Later in the Qing and under the Republic, as tastes and critical tolerances broadened, schools and artists of less conformist leanings were allowed in--the Individualists of the Ming-Qing transition (Shitao, Bada Shanren),

S.S. the Yangzhou Strange Masters in the 18th century, the Shanghai School in the 19th--to make up the received canon for the twentieth century, which is accepted consistently enough by recent Chinese writers of histories of painting that we can use the term now without constant qualification.

Artists excluded from the canon, considered unworthy of a place in serious collections, often suffered that fate by breaking rules; they include some we now rank among the major masters.

S,S. The late Ming Suzhou artist Zhang Hong was not exactly excluded from the canon, but he occupied a lowly place within it, assigned by one critic to the "competent" class and receiving little attention. In part, this was because he often depicted real places instead of ideal landscapes, but also because he used, as in this landscape of 1629, kinds of brushwork that were undisciplined from an orthodox Chinese viewpoint (but highly innovative from ours).

S,S. Gong Xian in the early Qing, now considered a highly original master of strange compositions with striking effects of light and dark, was dismissed by critics for "coarse brushwork"--he applied the ink, not in conventional brushstrokes, but with a kind of stippling, probably learned in part from European pictures. He was scarcely represented in serious collections until recent times, when his reputation rose precipitously. The early Qing individualist masters, who now command the highest prices in later Chinese painting, are scarcely to be found, for instance, in the Manchu imperial collection, or in the catalogs of the great Ming-Qing collectors.

S,S. In all these cases, as in the Chan or Zen paintings that Yoshi spoke about (here, details from well-known works by Yujian and Muqi), artists needed to violate the limitations, or constrictions, of so-called "good brushwork" and conventional subjects and compositions in order to achieve the effects they were aiming for; and, given the Chinese mistrust of artistic and other practices that were not sanctified by tradition, that was enough to bar them from the canon. The Chan masters are virtually unrepresented in Chinese collections; we know them almost entirely from examples preserved in Japan.

S.S. Also excluded, for the most part, were pictures of unelevating or "vulgar" subjects. These included narrative paintings (the one at left represents the principals of the Xixiang-ji or "Western Chamber" drama); and functional paintings of various kinds (on right, a New Year's picture, that would have been hung on that occasion.) In spite of this exclusion, enough of these are preserved from the later period, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that one can make a book out of them, as I've done: Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Urban Studio Artists in High Qing China, awaiting publication. Also left out were Buddhist painting, especially of the later periods; and portraiture, other than that done by prestigious name-artists. The exhibition catalog-book Latter Days of the Law by Marsha Haufler and others, and Richard Vinograd's Boundaries of the Self, on later Chinese portraiture, have gone some way toward filling in those gaps. Marsha was also chiefly responsible for an exhibition and catalog of Chinese paintings by women artists, which were also mostly absent from the traditional canon.

S,S. (leaf from "Qiu Ying" album; Cui Hui imaginary portrait of Song poet Li Qingzhao). A recent and even more controversial line of investigation for me has been the possibility that paintings of certain kinds were made in the Ming-Qing period primarily for an audience and clientele of women--not pictures of women, that is, or by women, but for women. Other categories I've spoken about were recognized but not admitted into the canon; this one hasn't even been recognized, or pulled together as a body of paintings worth attention. I certainly won't try to present my arguments here; they include the hypothesizing of a "low mimetic," daily-life mode that is new to Chinese painting, into which many of these paintings fit: for instance, the album to which the painting at left belongs, a series of scenes of women engaged in domestic pursuits, including subtle and slightly mysterious interactions with other women. It needs study, and will repay study; but since it bears false seals of Qiu Ying, it's been dismissed as simply a fake--because of that and its quotidian, "vulgar" subject matter, no traditional Chinese connoisseur would spend time on it. These are a few of the areas of Chinese painting that open up now that we've begun, more than before, to judge for ourselves what is "important" or "high-quality" and what is "trivial," even when doing so means going against the traditional canon.

Now, on to the papers.

Yoshi's very interesting paper deals with the kind of painting called Wangliang hua, "ghost" or "apparitional" painting, as it was practiced in China in the 12th to 14th centuries, and in Japan as late as the 17th century. Wangliang hua was the subject of a pioneering study by Yoshi's teacher and mine, the late Shimada Shujiro, an almost saintly figure for both of us--it's as if we both belonged to the lineage of some great Zen master.

At the time Wangliang hua was first practiced in Song-Yuan China, the canon as it would later develop was still in rudimentary form, not yet coalesced; and yet Chan or Zen painters as a group were already placed outside it. Writers on painting of their time dismiss their pictures as coarse, devoted to commonplace subjects, suitable only for hanging in monks' huts, not for refined appreciation. Too much of their painting, as Yoshi puts it, "went counter to the whole point of clarity in the Chinese canon of painting," and made up what he calls a "canon outside the canon." The reverence in which Zen painting was held in Japan, by contrast, depended partly on its associations with the tea ceremony and other revered institutions there, and partly on the freedom the Japanese enjoyed from the taboos that beset Chinese connoisseurs and arbiters of quality. That the Wangliang hua style could reappear in the Edo period in the totally different context of Rimpa, done mainly for a clientele of aesthetically-minded merchants and townsmen, illustrates another well-recognized characteristic of Japanese art: the ease with which motifs and styles there could change contexts and take on new meanings. It was not so easy in China.

S,S. I argued in a paper several years ago that the practice of Chan painting didn't really cease in China after the Yuan; monk-amateur artists in the Chan temples went on doing it, but not on a high enough level--it was amateurish in the most negative sense--or with enough originality to eam it a place in the canon, or any attention from critics. None of it, so far as we know, survives in China; we know it only from the works of monk-artists of the Huang-po or Obaku sect of Chan, who came from temples in Fujian and settled and continued painting in Japan, where their works are preserved in some numbers. These are two of them, both unoriginal and undistinguished pictures, I would say, and representative, I'm afraid, of Obaku painting as it survives. A body of painting could also be excluded from the canon, then, by not being a interesting enough to merit a place in it. Judgements of that kind should be made carefully, but we need not shy away altogether from making them.

S,S. Pat Berger's paper treats Buddhist painting also, but of a more iconic kind. Buddhist and Daoist figure painting, which had occupied the highest position in the collection catalog of the Song Emperor Huizong, drops from favor among later collectors and has no place in the canon through the Ming. By the late Ming and early Qing, however, the early to mid-17th century, a few interesting and original artists had begun again to do Buddhist paintings.: Ding Yunpeng, Chen Hongshou, Cui Cizhong, Wu Bin (who painted these two, leaves from an album Pat mentioned, the one with a colophon by Dong Qichang.) The question on which she quoted me--a question I had raised without really trying to resolve, was: how could pictures so bizarre, so seemingly idiosyncratic, function as Buddhist icons? That question aside, we are again in a situation where admission to the canon, and to the rank of pieces worth owning by serious collectors, depends on the name and fame and distinctive style of the individual artist. Court painters of the kind who worked under the Qianlong emperor could not indulge in any such irony, or grotesquerie; the emperor's engagement with Buddhism was a serious matter, with political implications among others.

(slides off) As a collector, the Qianlong emperor, along with the advisors who helped him amass his collection, adhered for the most part to the by-now well-established canon as it had been represented in the collections of the great 17th-early 18c collectors--much of whose holdings, in fact, Qianlong was voraciously swallowing up. The Manchu Emperors' embracing of the Orthodox School of landscape and of orthodox views on collecting were both in large part aimed at legitimizing their rule in the eyes of educated Chinese. But this was a stance adopted mainly with an eye toward their Chinese subjects; their own taste appears to have been for more highly finished, realistic styles and entertaining subjects, most of all themselves. For these, the identification of the artist was a minor consideration; court painters sign very neatly and small, avoiding any shows of individuality.

That a separate section of the imperial catalog was devoted to Buddhist painting, including works done by artists of the academy and even works by non-Chinese artists, is the remarkable circumstance that Berger traces. Early Buddhist paintings, within the mainline tradition of collecting, had been valued for their antiquity and high technique, and later ones for the identity and style of the artist; Qianlong, leaving behind those art-historical and aesthetic criteria, valued them as icons and images, as practicing Buddhists had always done. The innovation represented by Qianlong's inclusion of these in his catalog was not adopted generally into the canon--other and later collectors do not, to my knowledge, have separate sections of their catalogs for Buddhist-Daoist painting, especially for recent and iconic ones.

Judy Andrews's paper anticipates Lin Xiaoping's in showing that Chinese authorities and institutions in the early 1920s were already questioning whether traditional Chinese painting had any useful role in the formation of a new China. Was Western-style realistic oil painting more in keeping with the new ideals and directions? Chen Shizeng's attempt to make literati painting seem "progressive" by likening its anti-realistic and self-expressive aspects to Post-Impressionist and Abstract developments in Europe only reinforced the bias toward scholar-amateurism, by now the conservative direction in the received canon. But relying on Japanese writings for their histories, as Pan Tianshou and others did, on the grounds that Japan was "about three decades" ahead of China in modernizing their educational system, was also very problematic, since the Japanese versions of Chinese painting history necessarily differed markedly from the Chinese canon. This was both because the Japanese, with their separate visual culture and different contexts for viewing and using the paintings, had only a limited understanding of the qualities the Chinese valued most, and because works that could serve to represent the most prestigious artists and schools in China were not to be seen in Japan. At best, the Japanese writings could offer versions of Chinese painting history that diverged from the traditional Chinese accounts, and so must have seemed fresher, more "modern." Judy and Shen Quiyi outline the circumstances of this interchange and mismatch between would-be progressive Chinese educators and problematic Japanese models more fully and clearly than it has been attempted before, to my knowledge; and they mean to explore further the effects of it in future research.

Lin Xiaoping's paper is less about what happened to the traditional canon for Chinese painting after the founding of the People's Republic than about disputes over whether traditional painting, guohua, had any legitimate place in the new China at all. Lin's account of Jiang Feng's well-intended attempt to establish socialist realism in Chinese art education and associate guohua with the "feudal" past is poignant and ultimately depressing, reminding us again that under such an oppressive system, no one is likely to prevail and prosper for long. Guohua was to make a qualified comeback, strongly tinged with socialist realism among artists and given politicized readings among writers. During the bad years of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, as I saw when I first visited China in 1973, old paintings could be exhibited and published only with commentary praising or condemning their subjects and the artists' roles in society--works by Dong Qichang and Wen Zhengming were accompanied by labels identifying them with the landlord class and charging them with political misdeeds, while those of more "progressive" artists were presented together with a narrative (often invented or exaggerated) about their engagement with positive political movements of their time. (Lin Xiaoping has written about these matters in other contexts.)

When the bad years ended and writers on painting were no longer obliged to make politically-based judgements, they reverted immediately and happily to their long-forbidden version of art as self-expression, in which the work was to be read primarily as a manifestation of the artist's nature and feelings. When one of my students. Scarlett Jang, went to China in the mid-80s and talked about political themes in Chinese painting (a new focus for us at that time--I had just held a seminar on it), Chinese artists and art historians didn't want to hear about it--their response was "We've been through all that already"--although in fact their version of political content was a far cry from what we were attempting. Now the traditional, name-oriented canon returned, triumphantly, to a position of dominance, and heavily underlies most writing on Chinese painting published since then. But the challenges to it, among both Chinese and foreign scholars, continue to erode it; books giving determinedly non-canonical accounts of Chinese painting have been published outside China, and perhaps also in China, unknown to me. In any case, some of the most interesting work for the future will be done in areas of Chinese painting that were once thought unworthy of attention.

CLP 54: 2002 Discussant paper for session on Methodology in "Conference on the History of Painting in East Asia," Taipei

Taipei, October 2002, Cahill discussant paper.

Let me begin by quoting, not for the first time, something that my colleague Michael Baxandall wrote in 1978. The debate over methodology that was then going on among art historians seemed, he said, “oddly hortatory and peremptory: I dislike being admonished. On the other hand, what I do like is there being a manifold plurality of differing art histories, and when some art historians start telling other art historians what to do, and particularly what they are to be interested in, my instinct is to scuttle away and existentially measure a plinth or reattribute a statuette.”

I am in profound agreement with his desire to leave methodological room open for a “plurality of differing art histories,” and would only add to his dislike of being admonished about what to do, an even stronger dislike of being admonished about what we are not to do, what has now been identified as somehow illegitimate or outmoded art history. No one can fault those colleagues who follow through in their writings their personal convictions, such as that the only issues worth addressing today are race (or ethnicity), class, and gender (a formulation I learned from our graduate students in Berkeley), or that too close an engagement with individual works of art can leave one sullied, since it unavoidably enhances their commercial value and so implicates one, however unwillingly, in the marketing of art. We can respect those positions without quite crediting their claim to occupy a moral high-ground. Nor is there any problem with adopting new theoretical and methodological positions of other kinds, assuming again that it is real conviction, not a desire to join the self-designated “cutting edge” of the discipline, that motivates the adoption.

Problems arise only when taking up new positions implies a claim that they discredit and supplant older ones, and, most seriously, when it has the effect of inhibiting healthy, even necessary pursuits within our field. I argued in a recent lecture, for instance, that the great project of constructing a coherent style-history for early Chinese painting comparable to what has been done (over a much longer period, to be sure) for European and American painting, a project begun by the generation before mine which should have been carried much further than it has been by mine, is now even less likely to go forward, since younger specialists are mostly uninterested in so-called diachronic or developmental approaches, or in style generally. The project has in effect been discredited before it has been accomplished. It's as though, I said, we had abandoned the practice of architecture before we had built our city. I don't, of course, mean that style-history should again become a central concern of Chinese painting studies, only that someone should continue doing it, along with other things, and that the project should not be branded as hopelessly backward. The predictable question “Why do we need to have a style history anyway?” is disingenuous and easily answered: because insecurities and boobytraps of a kind long left behind in Western art studies, or at least rendered infrequent, will continue to plague our field until we do. We should, for instance, be able to resolve and agree on, more easily than we have, questions such as whether a certain painting dates from the tenth century or the twentieth. The application of new methodologies in Western art studies is carried out on a relatively firm foundation of more or less securely placed works of art, about which there is far more agreement among specialists than with us. I hold myself as responsible as others for this situation, having made the move from heavily stylistic studies following on Max Loehr into later writings that take a more contextual approach, for which the principal model was Michael Baxandall’s variety of social art history and his inferential criticism, although I certainly don’t claim to have produced anything that would satisfy his rigorous criteria.

Having opened my commentary in this oldster’s cautionary, view-with-alarm way, I can go on to congratulate the paper presenters in this session and in the symposium as a whole for representing collectively a healthy diversity of art-historical methodologies.

Masaaki Itakura’s paper on the “Second Ode on the Red Cliff” scroll by Ch’iao Chung-ch’ang is a strong example of the contextualizing mode of art history. His situating of both the ode itself and the painted scroll illustrating it in the specific historical and political circumstances surrounding Su Shih and his circle of admirers is enlightening, expertly done, and entirely convincing. It is helped by Itakura’s discovery, in a Tanyû shukuzu copy, of the now-missing opening section of the scroll in which Su’s residence, the Lin-kao Pavilion, was depicted. (That discovery was announced already in a related article that Itakura published in Kokka last year.) His concept of “a layering of images,” with pictorial styles, poetic resonances, and literary and political associations overlaid onto visual experience of the natural landscape, is a valuable formulation, and tempers our disappointment on learning, by way of the poet Lu Yu’s first-hand account of a visit to the place, that the real Red Cliff of Su Shih’s ode “was nothing more than a reed-covered knoll.” Itakura’s contextualization of the scroll is correspondingly multi-layered; his treatment of the style of the painting is also contextual, relating it to works associated with Li Kung-lin, as well as Su Shih himself and his son Su Kuo.

The problem with this approach, even when it is carried out so well as here, is that it can draw attention away from important aspects of the work itself, its individual style and its narrative method. Itakura writes only the briefest summary of how the imagery of the painting responds to that of the ode, thus slighting some of Ch’iao Chung-ch’ang’s notable expressive achievements, such as the passage where, after Su Shih has climbed the cliff, he disappears from our sight and we are made to internalize his experience of looking down, through an extraordinary wrenching of space, into the seething water below. That, for me, is the true climax of the composition, as it is of the ode. One must in fairness add that an ideally balanced treatment of a work of art is an elusive goal, and that the elucidation of a truly rich and complex work is probably best accomplished as a collective project made up of successive studies by writers with differing assumptions and kinds of expertise. The Ch’iao Chung-ch’ang scroll has fortunately called forth such a series, beginning with an inadequate entry by myself in the 1962 Crawford catalog and including valuable contributions by Hironobu Kohara, Jerome Silbergeld, and others. Itakura’s study is an important addition to that series,

Sano Midori’s paper is, by contrast, a highly sophisticated exposition of the narrative method of the Tokugawa and Gotô Museums’ Tale of Genji paintings. She argues convincingly that these are not narrative pictures of the simpler types that seem to turn literary images into pictorial ones (it is never, of course, that simple), or present elements of a scene belonging to some moment or episode in a story so as to allow viewers to accept it as a pictorial representation of that episode. The hypothetical but persuasive readings of the Genji pictures that Sano proposes begin with a “zero focalization” view taking in the whole at once, and proceed through stages in which the viewpoints of participants in the scene are adopted, along with those of external and internal narrators. The construction of a narrative situation in the picture can be accomplished only by a reader-viewer with full knowledge of the text. Those of us in Chinese painting studies are familiar with narrative pictures that imply a viewer who already knows the story; I once wrote about Ch’en Hung-shou’s well-known “Scenes from the Life of T’ao Yuan-ming” scroll as an example of this, pointing out how, working for an elite patronage, he could leave out materials that in more popular pictures were needed to spell out the story more fully. The Genji paintings, however, as Sano shows us, are not merely allusive on this model of portraying less and recalling more. In her account they work in a far more complex way: the reader constitutes the narrative by absorbing and synthesizing the various viewpoints within the picture, including those of “the narrators living in the world of the narrative” and the understood omniscient narrator outside it. Images that in the text are apart in time and space can be brought together in the pictures; people within the paintings, such as waiting women spying on the principals, can be imagined as the “ancient ladies in waiting” who are the supposed narrators of the whole story. Seeing the viewing process in this elaborate way allows Sano to make at one point the somewhat startling statement that “in a certain sense, the readers themselves have become the 'author' of the illustrated story.” The complexity of her analysis matches that of the pictures, and in this respect goes well beyond others I have read. I recall an old article by Alexander Soper on the Genji scrolls that showed how heightened dramatic tensions in the narrative were conveyed in steeper diagonals in the compositions; convincing at the time, it seems simplistic now. Sano Midori’s paper is anything but that, bordering rather on the esoteric.

Tim Screech’s paper, like his other writings, is wide-ranging, stimulating, and unexpected. He has immersed himself so deeply in Japanese culture of the Edo period, and especially the city culture reflected in Ukiyo-e and popular fiction, that he can write authoritative and entertaining book-length studies on aspects of it such as its uses of Western optical devices and its production of sexual imagery. All this is far removed from the limited themes treated in older Ukiyo-e print studies, and vastly richer. If Screech’s paper is to be criticized, it is for presenting as though it were general to Japan in the 18th century the special attitude toward China and Chinese painting that belongs to this world of urbane and stylish city-dwellers, to whom Rimpa and Ukiyo-e, different as they are, both appealed. These people’s attitude toward China and Chinese painting, like their attitude toward much of classical Japanese culture, favored playful put-downs in anecdote and parody, mitate and share. They were inclined to leave serious engagement with such weighty concerns to others, and liked their writers and artists to treat them as matters that scarcely merited serious engagement anyway. Their artists’ version of Chinese painting, then, which reduces it to ink orchids and bamboo and what Screech rightly calls “a rather anonymous landscape,” represents only one kind of Japanese response to what he identifies as “the anxiety that Japan, perched at the Far East of a vast continental mass, was intermittently bound to feel.”

It was very different elsewhere. Kano-school painters earnestly depicting didactic and moralizing Confucian themes on walls and screens for powerful patrons, sometimes depending on Chinese paintings and prints as sources, had to exhibit a proper reverence for them. Nanga masters typically worked for patrons who were sincerely sinophile, many of them writing Chinese-style poetry and owning and admiring Chinese paintings. The artists needed to pursue diligently a real understanding of Chinese painting styles through all the channels open to them: woodblock-printed pictures (of limited use), real Chinese paintings long preserved in Japan or coming in as commercial goods through Nagasaki, the works of Chinese amateur artists in Japan, whether Obaku priests or merchants such as I Hai (known to the Japanese as I Fukyû), who was only marginally better qualified to transmit the glories of Chinese painting than the hapless fishermen who so disappointed Shimura Tôzô in Screech’s paper. The problem of how Edo-period painters learned about Chinese painting and what they knew about it is a large one, a comprehensive investigation of which is still needed, as underpinning for Nanga and other Edo painting studies. I myself, with help from Japanese scholars such as Oba Osamu, attempted an outline presentation of it in a 1979 paper titled “Phases and Modes in the Transmission of Ming-Ch’ing Painting Styles to Edo Period Japan,” which was published, however, in a symposium volume so obscure that no one has noticed it in the years since then.

Sato Doshin’s ambitious and admirable paper on “The Requirements for Historicization,” with special attention to the distinguishing of the ‘recent” and “contemporary” eras in Japanese art history, begins with his “very innocent question”: he discovers, as he is surveying modern Japanese art in U.S. collections, that the American and European images of Japanese art “focused on ukiyo-e prints and decorative arts,” a view very different from his own as a specialist in modern Japanese art history. Except for a few private collectors, “works by modern artists that have been exalted in Japan were almost entirely absent from American collections.” He grants that “there is some difference in taste,” but writes that “that in itself is not a problem.” Having thus dismissed quickly these differences in taste, he goes on to look for causes of “this gap in the historical views of the two regions” in broad historical and political factors, such as the Japanese government’s efforts to “increase foreign reserves by exporting decorative arts that reflected western tastes,” their exploiting of Japonisme, and their imperialist cultural policy, concluding that these factors “ ... caused the huge gap between the West’s and Japan’s . . . ‘history of modern Japanese art.’” The implication is that if it were not for these large forces acting from above, appreciation would have been more or less uniform in Japan and abroad.

The circumstances he adduces are indeed to the point in underlying some part of the disparity he notes. But if we do consider matters of taste and accessibility to foreign audiences, along with economic factors, simpler reasons emerge that cannot be so easily dismissed. What he refers to as “works by modern artists that have been exalted in Japan” must of course be primarily Nihonga, traditional painting of the Meiji and Taishô eras that was indeed until recently a blank spot in American collecting and appreciating of Japanese art, including my own. The Japanese “exaltation” of the Nihonga masters, an evaluation of them elevated beyond the understanding of most foreigners, has meant extremely high prices in relation to other Japanese art. I remember trying to acquire in Japan one of the mysterious and loveable landscape paintings by Murakami Kagaku, only to learn that even a minor one would cost far more than a good Ming painting. Tomioka Tessai appeals more to foreign audiences than most of his contemporaries, especially in his late works, but again sky-high prices have discouraged buyers outside Japan. Other kinds of Nihonga paintings, besides fetching big prices, require for their appreciation sensibilities finely attuned to specifically Japanese nuances of style and feeling, a requirement that has excluded most foreigners until recently, when exhibitions in St. Louis (1995) and Seattle (1999) have reflected some belated breakthroughs in understanding. A foreign art-lover of modest means and simpler tastes could, by contrast, collect the very appealing Ukiyo-e prints, and more ambitious collectors and museums could search out and acquire screen paintings that were compositionally bold and visually brilliant, or Rimpa paintings with those same qualities, or the works of the masters now sometimes called “eccentrics” such as Rosetsu, Jakuchû, and Shôhaku. With these to be had for comparable or even lower prices, it was the rare foreigner who would pursue Yokoyama Taikan or Maeda Seison.

A parallel might be made with foreign reception of Japanese films. For a long period it was jidai-mono, costume dramas, beginning with Kurosawa’s 1950 Rashômon, that were most enthusiastically received abroad. These were by no means, however, the genre most highly regarded by Japanese audiences and critics. Contemporary family dramas of the kind beloved of Japanese audiences became accessible to us only later, and still have a much smaller and more specialized following, for easily apparent reasons. Alongside Kurosawa’s stirring dramas, the films of Ozu Yasujiro are deliberately static, with famously protracted views of nothing in particular, and long passages in which people sit quietly and talk. For foreign audiences they can be boring, for those in tune, sublime. The broad and blustery acting of Mifune Toshirô brought him great international fame; Ryû Chishû, the archetypal Japanese father who in Ozu’s films is forever worrying about how to marry off his daughter Hara Setsuko, appears not to act at all, and could never enjoy that kind of reputation abroad. All cultural expressions are not equally accessible to those outside the culture; some, and some of the best, do not travel comfortably.

My point is a simple one. When we descend from the abstract theoretical realm into the rich, messy world of real artists and pictures and their audiences, more immediate explanations for large cultural phenomena are likely to present themselves; and when those phenomena can be adequately accounted for by factors concrete and close at hand, the need to search for causes for them in the broader modes of theorizing and cultural criticism may be lessened. To say this is not to question the value of Sato Doshin’s periodization or his insights into how Japan’s governmental policies and its relations with foreign countries, along with the West’s biased and constricted views of Japanese art, affected the construction of a Japanese art history. It is only to say that some questions can be adequately resolved on simpler levels. His discussion of the creation of the concept of Tôyô, or Asia, is enlightening. I would only add to his three dictionary definitions of Tôyô--the area east of Turkey, the eastern and southern sections of Asia, and Japan from China’s perspective--a fourth, which one encounters frequently in Japan: Tôyô as the rest of Asia, from a Japanese perspective, excluding Japan. If one buys a set of books titled Tôyô Bijutsu, one expects they will contain Asian art but not Japanese; if one goes to the Tôyôkan at the Tokyo National Museum, one sees Asian art other than Japanese, which is displayed in the Honkan or Main Building. But Sato accomodates that view later when he writes perceptively about how China makes the history of its own art the history of Asian art, while Japan and Korea construct the history of Asian art in relationship to the history of their own arts.

This symposium demonstrates, among other things, that the practice of making deep and detailed studies of individual paintings continues to thrive, at least among those scholars who get invited to great international symposia. But of course titling the first session “Studies of Canonical Paintings” more or less guaranteed that that would be so. Of the four papers in that first session, Ch’en Pao-chen’s and Bob Harrist’s easily live up to the high expectations we have come to have of those two excellent scholars. Yasuhiro Satô’s, on the other hand, as the writing of a young, to me unfamiliar scholar on a very familiar painting, was a special pleasure to read. Although it does not belong in my session, let me say anyway that it has the important virtue of making clear why this painting, Buson’s great “Snowy Night Over Kyoto” scroll, is a great painting. One aspect of the art historian’s job, or even an obligation, is to deal effectively with issues of quality. As teachers we owe it to our students, and as writers to our readers, to do this as evenly and sensitively as we can, using our own readings of the works as basis but trying to open up, through informed combining of analysis and imagination, what other readings, recorded or possible, by other people in other times can have been. Sano Midori’s paper also, although not expressly aimed at bringing out the quality or greatness of her paintings, the Tokugawa and Gotô Genji scrolls, implicitly does that in its method of analysis, since no lesser paintings could sustain such a rigorous exposition of what formal features underly their multilayered expressive and narrative method. And Professor Tsuji’s keynote address left no doubt that he feels entirely comfortable with the concepts of masterpieces and of quality, while recognizing that both are always provisional, not eternally fixed. Again, the ideological objections to distinguishing in this way between greater and lesser works of art are well known to those of us who choose to continue doing so; we can coexist comfortably with those who denounce the practice as judgmental and elitist. Let us have the Busons; they can have the Goshuns.

I have not yet read, but look forward very much to reading and hearing, the three papers concerned somehow with Wen Cheng-ming, an artist who has mostly been presented in the past as arising somewhat aloof above the popular and commercial aspects of Suchou culture. The titles of the papers suggest that they will show him to have been thoroughly embedded in the commercial--even, from a traditional literati viewpoint, enmired in it. I am inclined today to welcome studies that question or even undermine the literati ideal, believing that a blindly uncritical espousal of it--for which I bear some share of responsibility--has perpetuated old taboos and biases inappropriate to our time and supposed impartiality, and has been a seriously inhibiting factor in Chinese painting studies.

One announced purpose of this symposium is to celebrate the achievements of Shujiro Shimada and his role in training younger scholars. I can testify, from his guidance of my studies as a Fulbright student during my year in Kyoto in the mid-1950s and from many years of association after that, to his profound and beneficial impact on my work and on the field as a whole, especially his role at Princeton, along with John Rosenfield’s at Harvard, in rescuing Japanese art studies in America from the depressed, almost dead-end predicament they had fallen into. (Here, if I had a more detailed knowledge instead of only a hearsay account, I would include also a tribute to Wen Fong for making, at a crucial moment, the hard decision to use a position that would have benefited him personally, relieving him of much undergraduate teaching, to keep Shimada, who could work effectively only on the graduate level, But that is a story for someone else to tell, and I can only allude to it, admiringly.)

I would like to broaden the tribute, however, to include others of Shimada’s generation, the teachers of mine: Bachhofer, Loehr, Sickman, Soper, Osvald Siren, C. C. Wang, Sherman Lee (the last the only survivor.) They came from very different backgrounds, brought very different strengths to the field, and made very different contributions. Of course I have my own opinions about the relative virtues of these people’s work, as will any of you, or as they themselves expressed in their famous feuds: Loehr vs. Karlgren, or sinologues such as Pope and Maenchen vs. art historians such as Bachhofer, or Siren vs. everybody else. But trying to grade or rank them is outside my present point. I recall coming to the realization, while still quite new to the field, that the arguments they made about the requisites for productive engagement with East Asian art correlated closely with their own backgrounds and strengths. Now I would only add: how could it be otherwise? And yet our field of study, without any one of them, would be significantly poorer.

The moral should be obvious. Of course we should try always to understand and explore other approaches, expand and enrich our methodological toolbox. In my early years I boastfully described my training as like that of the boy Sudhana making his tour of the great bodhisattvas, since I had had the good fortune to work with quite a few of the leaders of the generation before me. But any implied claim to have absorbed and combined their approaches was largely a delusion, as it must always be, along with claims to “combine the best from East and West” or otherwise reach a Great Synthesis of competing methodologies. Recognizing that should make us aspire not so much to synthesis as to peaceful coexistence and mutual respect, as well as cooperation where it seems fruitful. To move from some older methodological position into a new one, however intellectually dazzling the new one may appear, should not be thought of as any kind of progress, except insofar as it entails also a move into somehow better scholarship--better informed, wider ranging, deeper probing, more precise, more enlightening. When I praise some of the papers in the present symposium, it is for advances of that latter kind over previous work, not for their employment of more advanced methodologies.

All of us who have done university-level teaching in recent years are familiar with students whose pride in their deployment of new methodologies leads them to shy away from older modes of scholarship and scant the simple acquisition of knowledge, including visual knowledge of the materials they are to work on. And, given the current criteria for ranking and hiring in too many art history departments, some of them will occupy teaching positions themselves and pass on the same attitudes to their students. It is that, methodological presumptuousness more than methodological backwardness, that makes me uneasy about the future of our field. Our salvation is in the firm expectation that people of this persuasion will be balanced, or better yet overbalanced, by the continuing appearance of well-trained young specialists capable of solid, high-level scholarly work. On that score, the evidence of the present symposium is cause for optimism.

References:
Michael Baxandall, “The Language of Art History,” in New Literary History 10 (1978-79), p. 454.

James Cahill, Haley Lecture delivered at Princeton, Nov. 16, 1999: "Some Thoughts on the History and Post-History of Chinese Painting."

James Cahill, “Phases and Modes in the Transmission of Ming-Ch’ing Painting Styles to Edo Period Japan. In: Papers of the International Symposium on Sino-Japanese Cultural Interchange, Hong Kong: Institute of Chinese Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1985; the symposium was held in 1979.


Ellen P. Conant, Nihonga: Transcending the Past. Japanese-style Painting, 1868-1968. (St. Louis, MO: St. Louis Art Museum, 1995)

Michio Morioka, Modern Masters of Kyoto: The Transformation of Japanese Painting Traditions. Nihonga from the Griffith and Patricia Way Collection. (Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum, 1999)

Laurence Sickman et al., Chinese Calligraphy and Painting in the Collection of John M. Crawford, Jr. (New York: the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1962.)

Kohara Hironobu, “Kyô Chojo hitsu Ko akaheki fu zukan” (Second Ode on the Red Cliff by Qiao Zhongchang), Shoron no. 20, 1982, 285-306.

Jerome Silbergeld, “Back to the Red Cliff: Reflections on the Narrative Mode in Early Literati Landscape Painting,” Ars Orientalis 25, 1995, 19-38.

Alexander Soper, "The Illustrative Method of the Tokugawa 'Genji' Pictures." Art Bulletin vol. XXXVII no. 1, 1955, pp. 1-16.