CLP 50: 2002 “Erotic Painting in China.” published in German trans. In Liebeskunst und Liebeslied in der Weltkunst (Zurich, Museum Rietberg, 2002)

Erotic Painting in China

(Essay for “The Art of Love” exhibition, Museum Rietberg, from November 2002.)

Erotic painting has a long history in China. Examples are mentioned in texts from the early centuries of the Christian era, and a few crude representations of sexual couplings can be seen on painted tiles and relief designs from even earlier periods. The eighth century figure master Zhou Fang, who worked in the imperial court, is said to have made erotic pictures, and artists as prominent as Tang Yin, Qiu Ying, and Chen Hongshou in the Ming are reported to have included them in their output. However, no genuine erotic works by any of these survive. The erotic woodcut-printed pictures from the late Ming published by Robert van Gulik[1] probably represent a continuation of an early type of painting, in handscroll or album form, that presented a series of images of couples in various settings demonstrating different sexual postures; recorded works purportedly by Tang Yin and Qiu Ying have such titles as “The Ten Glorious Positions.” If we can believe accounts in poetry and fiction and a few pictorial representations, scrolls and albums of this kind were enjoyed by couples before lovemaking, to intensify passion and inspire sexual experimentation.

From the late Ming on, the album was the preferred, all but exclusive form, and in the best examples the simple series of copulating couples in different positions gives way to a more sophisticated and richer type in which open depictions of sex acts are interspersed with leaves portraying, or hinting delicately at, flirtations and seductions, even scenes of romantic love. Although the leaves of these, which can be called “part-erotic” albums, are not unified by any narrative or other program, and the participants in the scenes do not reappear from leaf to leaf, the non-erotic or subtly erotic leaves serve to contextualize the sexual acts depicted in the others, much as the non-erotic materials in the new high-level erotic fiction, beginning with the late 16th century masterwork Jin Ping Mei (Plum in the Golden Vase) and continuing with Rou Pu Tuan (Prayermat of Flesh) and others, frame and contextualize the more lurid accounts of sexual activities. This development in fiction probably inspired the new type of erotic album; in both, the way is opened for a much broader palette of literary and pictorial effects: irony, implicit narratives, intricate interactions among the participants.

Central to this expansion of the capacities of the erotic album, it would appear, was the Suzhou master Gu Jianlong (1606-1687 or later.) An undated album by him, known now only in an old reproduction book, is the earliest datable example of the new type.[2] The pictures in it make good use of complex spatial schemes--rooms beyond rooms, seen through doorways and other openings back. These not only draw the viewer’s gaze deeper and more insistently into the picture, for scopophilic effects of penetration, but also permit the introduction of sub-themes of voyeurism, sexual rivalries, and the like, as minor figures observe and become potentially engaged in the actions of the major ones. Spatial effects of this kind can be seen in some leaves of the Ellsworth album (no. ), which is by a follower of Gu Jianlong. Individual leaves in these albums are vignettes, charged with narrative implications beyond what is directly portrayed in them; the ingenious artists plant clues that arouse both curiosity and imagination: what is the relationship between the people? What has led up to the moment depicted, and what will follow it?

The creation of the new erotic album by Gu Jianlong and others, chiefly in Suzhou and in the early Qing period, does not supplant altogether the older type, which still dominates the large-scale production of erotic albums that continues down to recent times. The former C. T. Loo album (no. ), probably dating from late 17th or early 18th century, still exemplifies the older type, but on a level of quality well above the routine production. Chinese erotic albums truly worthy of scholarly study and museum exhibition--those comparable or equal in quality, that is, to the best paintings of other kinds from the same periods--are relatively few. I know only about twenty-five or thirty, in reproductions or originals. Most of what survivives--and, unhappily, most of what has been published--appears to be copies or copies of copies surviving from the copious commercial output of painters of lesser skills and little originality, made in response to a heavy and continuing demand. A mid-19th century prefect in Suzhou complains that the market in his city is flooded with lewd books and paintings, and that worst of all, these have even penetrated the women’s quarters. The paintings are worse than the books, he adds, since books can only affect those literate enough to read them, while just looking at the pictures is enough to corrupt.[3] Edicts prohibiting their production and dissemination seem to have had little long-term effect.

The painters who made the best of the erotic albums were not specialists in that genre, but highly trained, broadly versatile professional masters of the type that I term, in the title of a forthcoming book about them, “urban studio artists”: Gu Jianlong and his followers, Xu Mei, followers of Leng Mei, many others.[4] They might be summoned for some period of service in the imperial court, as Gu Jianlong and Xu Mei were: the Manchu emperors, fascinated by the popular and erotic culture of the southern (Jiangnan, Yangzi Delta) cities, employed painters from those cities to make pictures that captured some of its alluring aspects. The Kangxi Emperor probably commissioned a series of large painted illustrations to Jin Ping Mei from Gu Jianlong, and the Qianlong Emperor appears to have had one of his court artists, still unidentified, produce some of the most finished and elegant erotic paintings that have survived.[5]

Erotic paintings were associated with the imperial court in the popular imagination from much earlier times. Stories (probably apocryphal) about depraved rulers tell of lewd paintings executed on the walls or ceilings of their palace chambers, as stimuli for debauchery. An erotic handscroll that the antihero Ximen Qing in Jin Ping Mei gives to his favorite concubine Pan Jinlian is said to have come from the palace. This association is reflected in the common name for the genre, chungong-hua or “Spring Palace Pictures.” Erotic fiction in China similarly takes as its frequent subjects the misdoings of rulers and their consorts. Fervid imaginings of what went on behind the walls of the Forbidden City, and of the pleasures one might enjoy if possessed of absolute power, were irresistable to novelists and painters and the audiences for whom they worked.

Beginning with an important album by the Suzhou master Xu Mei, active in the early decades of the 18th century,[6] and continuing with other high-level 18th century examples such as the one that bears seals of Leng Mei but is probably by a somewhat later artist (no. ) and the Ellsworth album by some follower of Gu Jianlong (no. ), the erotic album in China develops in the direction of greater thematic diversity and complexity: voyeurism, masturbation by both sexes, homosexuality, bestiality, and incest are all portrayed or hinted at, along with simple sexual ennui and impotence. If this change had been directed only at titillating audiences bored with simpler sexual themes, the outcome might have been a descent into grossness. What saves the best of the later albums from that is a combination of high aesthetic quality and wit. The people in these leaves, engaged in devious, sometimes bizarre sexual pursuits, are observed and presented by the artists with an amused delicacy, so that actions and situations that may cross the line into the seriously kinky become somehow inoffensive. The same refinements, through which aesthetic response tempers the erotic, render the pictures unsuited to the function of simple arousal that the cruder albums performed, for instance as aids to masturbation.

Very little of comparable quality can be found in Chinese erotic painting done after the end of the 18th century, although a few albums from the Shanghai School in the later 19th century may eventually find places in the small body of surviving high-level examples. Erotic paintings from the best periods and artists, as represented in this exhibition, fully deserve to be included, I believe, in our accounts of later Chinese painting. That they play no part in Chinese histories is easily understandable when we note that the infrequent mentions of them in Chinese writings, down to the present day, are virtually all condemnatory. Although the acquisition and enjoyment of the albums was widespread and more or less tolerated, writing positively about them was evidently impermissable. The many denunciations of them, often virulent, are only rarely directed at consumers--the assumption, implicit or stated, is that if pictures of this kind are made available, people will acquire and enjoy them. Zhang Geng, writing around 1735, says of Qiu Ying’s erotic paintings, “It is human nature to like lascivious things, and there is no one who wouldn't want to obtain one of these for secret enjoyment.”[7] It is the artists who paint them and the dealers who sell them who are assigned to hell in one moralizing fulmination after another, Zhang Geng’s included. An exception is a late Ming writer who considers ownership of them a transgression, assigning “ten demerits a day” for “keeping lewd books or lewd paintings.” But even he goes on to assign “unlimited demerits” to those who sell them.[8]

Foreign writers in recent times, by contrast, have looked for ways to sanitize the Chinese erotic paintings, meaning perhaps to defend the Chinese against the stigma of having made pornography or “dirty pictures.” Dealers and collecters sometimes call them “bride’s books,” and argue that their purpose was to instruct newlywed women about the ways of sex. Some writers have associated them with religious sexual practices, whether Daoist or Tantric Buddhist; some maintain that since sex was regarded as a natural part of life by the Chinese, no onus was attached to depictions of it. But, although the erotic paintings were certainly used and understood in a diversity of contexts, none of these foreign beliefs about them is, to my knowledge, supported in Chinese writings, or in the pictures themselves. Perhaps, living in a society that is more open and uncensorial toward sex in its manifold forms of expression, we should no longer feel the need for seeing Chinese erotic paintings as anything but what they are: pornography, if you will, but most importantly, pictures that explore the intricate byways of human sexuality with perception and wit, and present them with a sensitivity that allows viewers to find in them images of their own open or hidden fantasies, and to experience vicariously the fantasies of others--and even to understand some aspects of Chinese culture and society that sources of other kinds leave out. What matters is that when all the copies and mediocre examples are removed from consideration, what remains makes up a tradition of erotic painting hard to match in world art in its depth, diversity, and high artistic quality.

Essay for “The Art of Love” exhibition: the former C. T. Loo album.

Of the three Chinese erotic albums represented in this exhibition, this is the simplest and oldest in type. It probably dates from the late 17^th or early 18^th century, the Kangxi era, and may be by some artist working in Zhejiang province, perhaps the Hangzhou or Shaoxing region, since elements of style in it are reminiscent of the late Zhe school and even Chen Hongshou (but without Chen’s archaistic distortions.) The skilled and readable delineation of furniture, railings, and architecture, along with other well-drawn materials, suggests that it is an original work, not a copy. Each of the eight leaves depicts a heterosexual couple having or about to have sex. In one, a girl servant helps to support the woman, and in another the man appears to be of northern nomadic origin. Other than these minor variations, the pictures all present youthful couples engaged in amorous activities in garden or interior settings. The rich mineral blue-and-green coloring of the rocks, the luxuriant trees and flowers (which also serve to set the seasons), all contribute to the auspicious and comfortable atmosphere created in the pictures. The lovemaking is tender, unhurried; no signs of strong passion appear on the faces—at most, slight smiles of pleasure. Genitals are exposed and in most of the leaves engaged, but they are depicted modestly, not blatantly; the women exhibit little public hair. (All this is in strong contrast to Japanese erotic pictures, in which the size of genitals is typically exaggerated, pubic hair is abundant, and the participants often grimace as if in pain, or otherwise betray the intensity of their ardor.) The furnishings and appurtenances indicate well-off, cultivated households, ideal environments for pursuing amorous affairs. In one of the leaves the man is wearing a scholar’s cap, an indication of status. No irony colors the pictures, no tension between desire and circumstance. This is just the kind of album, arousing but at the same time calming, that might well have been used in the way seen in one of the pictures, looked at by the couple together before they proceed with sex. We can imagine that erotic albums by conservative Ming masters may have looked like this, allowing for updates in style.

Leaf with Couple Looking at Erotic Album

The young man and woman are looking at an erotic album before making love. He, at least, is looking at the album, and encouraging her to do the same; it is unclear where her gaze is directed, and she appears more engaged in clutching him and spreading her legs impatiently. The leaf exposed in the album is a composition quite like the one they themselves occupy: the couple on a mat beside an ornamental rock beneath a tree in a garden. This is one of several representations in the erotic albums of this theme, which is to be found also in fiction of the time--it is as though the artists are advertising the efficacy of their own creations.

Formal repetitions in the leaf are almost too apparent: the rock and tree backing up the leftward lean of the figures, the rhythmic disposition of their limbs, the similar ovals of the two faces in close proximity. The distinction in skin color, the woman’s whiter and the man’s darker, is common in the albums but more marked here than in other leaves; it may indicate a difference in social status, a possibility strengthened by his simple shirt and hairstyle. He may, that is, be dallying above his station. The peaches and lizhi fruit in the basin and the flowers in the bronze pot make this a scene of summer.

Leaf with Girl Leaning Over Pine

Small white chrysanthemums identify the season as autumn. Lovemaking is languid. The girl leans over a pine which leans over a stream; she rests her head on her crossed hands, looking more meditative than aroused. as he enters her from behind. The tips of her tiny bound feet protrude from beneath a red skirt below. These, along with the red rails of the low balustrade and clusters of red-brown leaves, add warm touches to the otherwise cool blue-green coloring. Here, too, the way the nearly horizontal leaning of the rockery and the pine echo the postures of the figures betrays an artifice typical of the professional master working at a late stage in a long tradition.

Leaf with Boy and Girl Beneath Willow

This, in contrast to the other leaves shown here, appears to be a scene of young love, carried out with enthusiasm and after some preparation; this is not a spontaneous encounter. They have spread a mat on the ground beside a garden pond, beneath a willlow. With an orchid in her hair, she leans against a backrest, and has set down a fan decorated with butterflies in flight, an emblem of light dalliance. She rests one hand on his shoulder, the other on a pile of painting albums, presumably erotic. She wears a light green gauze jacket over a red moxiong, a garment that Chinese women had worn since the Tang dynasty as a kind of broad brassiere[9]--it is often the only piece of clothing that the woman has not removed in Chinese erotic pictures, an indication, perhaps, that gazing at the female breasts was not the turn-on for Chinese males that it has been in the West. Far more arousing for them were the woman’s bound feet and the small embroidered shoes worn over them, which are shown prominently in the pictures.

[1] Especially the 24-leaf album titled Huaying Jinzhen published by him as vol. 2 of his Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period (Tokyo, 1961; reprint, Taipei, n.d.), based on woodblocks he had acquired in Kyoto. Other “late Ming” materials reproduced by van Gulik should be used with caution, since some are clearly from his own hand and may be his own invention, not based on any Chinese originals.

[2] Gu Yunchen Huachun Tuce (Shanghai: Yiyuan Zhenshang She, n.d.). The only copy I know was in the library of the late Osvald Sirén, and is now in the library of the Rietberg Museum, Zürich (M XI B81).

[3] Wang Xiaozhuan, Yuan Ming Qing Sandai Jinhui Xiaoshuo Xiqu Shiliao (Historical Materials on the Banned Fiction and Drama in Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties) (Beijing, 1958) p. 111-112; quoted in part in Evelyn Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy in Ch’ing China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979), p. 118.

[4] The book is Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Urban Studio Artists in High Qing China, forthcoming. A second part, on Chinese erotic painting, will be separately published. A few passages from the latter book have been excerpted for these essays.

[5] For these, see James Cahill, "The Emperor's Erotica" (Ching Yüan Chai So-shih II) In: Kaikodo Journal XI, 1999, pp. 24-43.

[6] In the collection of Guy Ullens de Schooten; see Bilishi Youlunsi Fufu Cang Zhongguo Shuhua Xuanji (Beijing: Palace Museum, 2002), no. 13. The whole album is reproduced in Sotheby’s New York Chinese paintings auction catalog for March 21, 1995, no. 52.

[7] Zhang Geng, Guochao Huazheng Lu, Huashi congshu ed., pp. 40-41.

[8] Yuan Huang (1533-1606), see Wang Xiaozhuan, op. cit., p. 178; translated in Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 150.

[9] See Robert H. van Gulik, Sexual Life in Ancient China (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961) p. 299; also Valery M. Garrett, Chinese Clothing, An Illustrated Guide, Hong Kong, 1994, pp. 22-23, where it is referred to as a "bib brassiere."

Spots of color and movement around the two lovers animate the scene and suggest the exhilaration they feel: white flowers, swallows darting over the pond, bright-green moss-dots on the tree trunk, the red and blue of their discarded clothes. But all this is peripheral, and the viewer’s gaze, like the gazes of the two lovers, returns always to the scopophilic focus, the point of their sexual union.

Leaf with Northern Nomadic Man and Chinese Woman

Leaves with this theme appear frequently in Chinese erotic albums; they recall the stories of Lady Wenji and other Chinese women who became the wives or consorts of nomadic chieftains and lived long stretches of their lives in the cold northern steppe region. The man shown here, however, appears to lead a more settled life, with Chinese-style furniture and amenities. The setting, in fact, is not unlike a Chinese garden, with rocks, a rivulet beside which narcissus grow, and a plum tree beginning to bloom. The season is early spring, the weather still cold enough that the two cover themselves with heavy robes and look out upon a charcoal brazier heating pots of tea or wine. They clasp each other for love and warmth; both smile with pleasure. Two scrolls on the table may be erotic, but may also simply indicate that he is cultivated in Chinese ways, even though his facial features, beard, skin coloring and cap identify him as ethnically other than Han Chinese. The severe linear patterns of the thick robes and curtains, the sheer weightiness of the rocks and furniture that surround the central area with the figures, make this a more somber scene than others in the album.

Moss Album

This album is usually attributed to the famous northern figure master Leng Mei (ca. 1670-1742 or later), and it is true that Leng Mei seals appear on the leaves. But his seals often appear on paintings that are not by him. Some of these are crude imitations, forgeries of Leng Mei; others, including this album, are works of high quality to which Leng’s seals were added to make them more saleable. One of the finest of the meiren or beautiful woman paintings, for example, the well-known “Woman Resting from Reading” in the British Museum, bears Leng Mei seals but is a later, more sophisticated production, very different from the distinctive image of woman that can be seen consistently in Leng Mei’s reliable works. Leng Mei’s own paintings, moreover, reveal nothing of the urbane wittiness that distinguishes this album. It must be by an artist working around the third quarter of the 18th century, probably in the north. The style resembles not so much Leng Mei’s as that of a less-known northern figure master, Cui Hui, active around the same time; it may be one of Cui’s followers, not famous enough to market his work under his own name, who painted this album. We would like very much to know who he is, and to identify more of his work.

The album is executed in a highly finished, realistic style that owes much to European art, but with a lightness of touch, in both brush and conception, that tempers the indelicacy of the subjects. In one outdoor scene, for instance, 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. In another, a girl holds and gazes at the extended penis of a braying donkey, too absorbed to notice a boy who is reaching under her clothing. Our artist treats these as good clean fun, and almost persuades us that they are that.

We are a long way from albums of the type that presented simple portrayals of one sex act after another. In none of these leaves is the act really taking place--the one with the ox and calf (no. ) comes closest, showing the moment before penetration. In another, a confused-looking girl kneels before a plump, stern-faced woman, presumably her mistress, who appears to be demanding oral sex, while a young man in the doorway behind, penis exposed, signals a more attractive offer. In still another, a young man just arisen, still naked and erect, from the bed where his wife (?) lies sleeping after sex is already kissing the maid in the doorway. In the more straightforward scenes of less sophisticated albums, sex is unproblematic: he and she come together and go at it, with no interference. This album, by contrast, is devoted to subtle pictorial explorations of how young people and old attempt to negotiate the complex situations into which sexual desire, their own or others’, has drawn them. Some of the leaves suggest a reading of the album as, among other things, an artist’s fondly amused (and partly imagined) exploration of female sexuality. The effects are achieved, moreover, through truly pictorial means: no literary descriptions of the scenes could capture the nuances conveyed here (although, of course, literary description opens other possibilities, such as telling what preceded the moment depicted, or describing what the people are feeling.) The intricacy of the album’s program and its excellence as a work of art must place it, eventually, high up within this neglected genre.

Moss Album, Leaf with Garden Boy and Girl Servant

A garden boy has set down his bamboo broom to engage in a wordless interchange with a servant girl at the window. He pulls out the front of his pants and points to their furthest extension; her response is shown in her cautiously impressed look, and in the way she chews on her sleeve. But the artist has made us privy to the boy’s deception by allowing us to glimpse, through a gap in his pants, his much more modest member.

The composition exemplifies a device introduced to the erotic albums, it would appear, around the time of Gu Jianlong in the early Qing, and probably by him. It is seen also in much other pictorial art of the time, including the leaves of the imperially-commissioned Gengzhitu or “Pictures of Sericulture and Rice Culture,” based on paintings by Jiao Bingzhen (act. 1680-1720) and first printed in 1696. This is the opening back of the space of the picture through a door or other aperture in a wall, so that the viewer’s gaze is drawn into depth, beyond the figure group that constitutes the main subject. In the erotic paintings, the effect is of moving in imagination beyond the participants in the erotic action--or, in memorable cases, beyond and around the woman in her boudoir--so as to seem to surround and embrace them, heightening the sense of visual engagement and scopophilic pleasure.

Moss album, Leaf with Buffalo and Calf

Several of the leaves in the album are set outdoors, and have an attractively bucolic character. In this one, for instance, 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, behind, roll their eyes back to watch. The rendering of the animals and the riverbank setting in the semi-Westernized illusionistic manner contributes to the ingenuous plein-air openness of the scene. See Robert H. van Gulik, (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961) p. 299; also Valery M. Garrett, , Hong Kong, 1994, pp. 22-23, where it is referred to as a "bib brassiere."Spots of color and movement around the two lovers animate the scene and suggest the exhilaration they feel: white flowers, swallows darting over the pond, bright-green moss-dots on the tree trunk, the red and blue of their discarded clothes. But all this is peripheral, and the viewer’s gaze, like the gazes of the two lovers, returns always to the scopophilic focus, the point of their sexual union.

Leaves with this theme appear frequently in Chinese erotic albums; they recall the stories of Lady Wenji and other Chinese women who became the wives or consorts of nomadic chieftains and lived long stretches of their lives in the cold northern steppe region. The man shown here, however, appears to lead a more settled life, with Chinese-style furniture and amenities. The setting, in fact, is not unlike a Chinese garden, with rocks, a rivulet beside which narcissus grow, and a plum tree beginning to bloom. The season is early spring, the weather still cold enough that the two cover themselves with heavy robes and look out upon a charcoal brazier heating pots of tea or wine. They clasp each other for love and warmth; both smile with pleasure. Two scrolls on the table may be erotic, but may also simply indicate that he is cultivated in Chinese ways, even though his facial features, beard, skin coloring and cap identify him as ethnically other than Han Chinese. The severe linear patterns of the thick robes and curtains, the sheer weightiness of the rocks and furniture that surround the central area with the figures, make this a more somber scene than others in the album.This album is usually attributed to the famous northern figure master Leng Mei (ca. 1670-1742 or later), and it is true that Leng Mei seals appear on the leaves. But his seals often appear on paintings that are not by him. Some of these are crude imitations, forgeries of Leng Mei; others, including this album, are works of high quality to which Leng’s seals were added to make them more saleable. One of the finest of the or beautiful woman paintings, for example, the well-known “Woman Resting from Reading” in the British Museum, bears Leng Mei seals but is a later, more sophisticated production, very different from the distinctive image of woman that can be seen consistently in Leng Mei’s reliable works. Leng Mei’s own paintings, moreover, reveal nothing of the urbane wittiness that distinguishes this album. It must be by an artist working around the third quarter of the 18th century, probably in the north. The style resembles not so much Leng Mei’s as that of a less-known northern figure master, Cui Hui, active around the same time; it may be one of Cui’s followers, not famous enough to market his work under his own name, who painted this album. We would like very much to know who he is, and to identify more of his work.The album is executed in a highly finished, realistic style that owes much to European art, but with a lightness of touch, in both brush and conception, that tempers the indelicacy of the subjects. In one outdoor scene, for instance, 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. In another, a girl holds and gazes at the extended penis of a braying donkey, too absorbed to notice a boy who is reaching under her clothing. Our artist treats these as good clean fun, and almost persuades us that they are that.We are a long way from albums of the type that presented simple portrayals of one sex act after another. In none of these leaves is the act really taking place--the one with the ox and calf (no. ) comes closest, showing the moment before penetration. In another, a confused-looking girl kneels before a plump, stern-faced woman, presumably her mistress, who appears to be demanding oral sex, while a young man in the doorway behind, penis exposed, signals a more attractive offer. In still another, a young man just arisen, still naked and erect, from the bed where his wife (?) lies sleeping after sex is already kissing the maid in the doorway. In the more straightforward scenes of less sophisticated albums, sex is unproblematic: he and she come together and go at it, with no interference. This album, by contrast, is devoted to subtle pictorial explorations of how young people and old attempt to negotiate the complex situations into which sexual desire, their own or others’, has drawn them. Some of the leaves suggest a reading of the album as, among other things, an artist’s fondly amused (and partly imagined) exploration of female sexuality. The effects are achieved, moreover, through truly pictorial means: no literary descriptions of the scenes could capture the nuances conveyed here (although, of course, literary description opens other possibilities, such as telling what preceded the moment depicted, or describing what the people are feeling.) The intricacy of the album’s program and its excellence as a work of art must place it, eventually, high up within this neglected genre.A garden boy has set down his bamboo broom to engage in a wordless interchange with a servant girl at the window. He pulls out the front of his pants and points to their furthest extension; her response is shown in her cautiously impressed look, and in the way she chews on her sleeve. But the artist has made us privy to the boy’s deception by allowing us to glimpse, through a gap in his pants, his much more modest member.The composition exemplifies a device introduced to the erotic albums, it would appear, around the time of Gu Jianlong in the early Qing, and probably by him. It is seen also in much other pictorial art of the time, including the leaves of the imperially-commissioned or “Pictures of Sericulture and Rice Culture,” based on paintings by Jiao Bingzhen (act. 1680-1720) and first printed in 1696. This is the opening back of the space of the picture through a door or other aperture in a wall, so that the viewer’s gaze is drawn into depth, beyond the figure group that constitutes the main subject. In the erotic paintings, the effect is of moving in imagination beyond the participants in the erotic action--or, in memorable cases, beyond and around the woman in her boudoir--so as to seem to surround and embrace them, heightening the sense of visual engagement and scopophilic pleasure.Several of the leaves in the album are set outdoors, and have an attractively bucolic character. In this one, for instance, 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, behind, roll their eyes back to watch. The rendering of the animals and the riverbank setting in the semi-Westernized illusionistic manner contributes to the ingenuous plein-air openness of the scene.

Moss album, leaf with Traveling Merchant and Tavern Girl

This is the only leaf among the eight that might properly be called coarse. We see an old, gap-toothed travelling merchant bargaining with a tavern girl, or perhaps a prostitute, over how much it will cost him to induce her to pull down her pants the rest of the way--or, in an alternative 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. Even more absorbing is the townscape viewed through the open window, likewise painted in an enchanting version of the Sino-European illusionistic manner. Light snow is falling, and a traveller 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 (apart from its usual function of lending to it a kind of credibility), is rendered with a delicacy and skill that make us wonder why an artist of this attainment did not become better known (it is quite beyond the capacity of Leng Mei, judging from any of his reliably signed works), or turn his abilities to other uses than settings for erotica.

Moss Album, leaf with Boy and Girl in Garden

This leaf, set in a garden, is another of the scenes of teenage sex of which this artist, or his clientele, appear to have been so fond. The boy’s pants are down, and the girl is taking off hers, while he unties her jacket. He appears younger than she; his smile expresses eager anticipation, hers a touch of uncertainty. Here, too, the contrasts are subtle but effective. Their respective moods and imagined responses are echoed in the energetic thrusts of the garden rock on his side, strongly outlined and colored with heavy blue-and-green pigments (qing, for youth and emotion), and the finely drawn banana trees on hers, the tips of their leaves browning, perhaps intimating the transience of her youth and beauty. The validity of this reading, and others proposed for these pictures, matters less than recognizing the power of the pictures to permit and encourage readings of this kind.

Ellsworth album

The previous owner of this album, from whom the present owner received it as a gift, was the late Alan Priest, longtime Curator of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He acquired it in Beijing, and reportedly described it as “the best erotic album on the Peking market.” It is indeed a work of high quality and extraordinary imagination. The unknown artist was a follower of Gu Jianlong working some time around the mid or later 18th century. Not only the figure style but also the compositional types and the furnishings--notably the screen with many small paintings affixed to it--belong to Gu’s repertory. At the same time, the thematic diversity of the album goes far beyond anything Gu could have conceived, or at least painted. In this respect it is closer to the album with Leng Mei seals (no. ), with which it is probably roughly contemporary.

A few of the nine leaves (there may originally have been ten or twelve) offer relatively straightforward scenes of heterosexual sex: the traveling scholar dreaming of his faraway lover (no. ), a fisherman making love to his wife in a boat while their small child looks on, a nude couple copulating in a garden. But others, including three of the four included here, are anything but straightforward. One that is not included sets the tone, perhaps, for the album: we see the ultimately blasé and permissive couple having sex in his study. They have adopted a seated 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 the other away to flirt with the maid. In another, 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, not at all permissive, approaches across the bridge, wielding a club. Gu Jianlong’s capacity for creating scenes that imply narratives is continued here--it would not require much imagination to build around the album nine erotic stories of some complexity.

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. Irony and aesthetic distance are generally beyond them, and their pictures as a whole exhibit the usual traits of the copyist’s hand: stiff or heavy-handed drawing, insensitivity to nuance, fixed expressions on faces, unintended distortions. Fine erotic albums from the 19th century and even the 20th may turn up in years to come, necessitating changes in the above judgments; for now, based on what we know, they seem valid.

Ellsworth album, leaf with Scholar’s Dream

In the context of the other leaves in the album, this one seems old-fashioned and innocent. Travelers dreaming of their wives and lovers far away are a common theme in literature and art; dreams are customarily enclosed in ovoid shapes, like the balloons in our comic strips, emanating from the dreamer’s head. Here it is a young scholar, still in his cap and robe, sleeping overnight in some hostel; he may be traveling to take the examinations that led to official appointments. The snow on the budding plum tree outside and on the pine tree at right suggest late winter as the season. Even in this cold environment he dreams of being with his lover in a warm garden, perhaps far to the south. His dream itself resembles an erotic album leaf: it is quite close to one in the former C. T. Loo album (no. ). Garden rocks in the dream take on the cloudlike forms of those in old paintings; the ordinary rocks in the “real scene” are plainer, inexpressive. This leaf is imbued with a concept of romantic love that other leaves in the album seem to mock.

Ellsworth album, leaf with Mirror and Voyeur

A man carrying a fan is skulking in a garden; from his dress and his manner, it appears that he is a member of the household, not an intruder from outside. He is spying on a woman through a very large moon window, seeing her image in a big mirror on a stand at the far side of the room. She is on a couch just inside the window; he sees directly only her head from the back, and her whole semi-nude body, with her sex visible, as reflected in the mirror. If she also looks into the mirror, as perhaps she is doing, she will see him plainly reflected in the window and become aware of being watched. Or she could turn her head and look directly at him. The whole pattern of illicit seeing here is more complex than it at first appears.

Mirrors and their reflections had played a part in erotic paintings at least since the time of Gu Jianlong, to compound the scopophilic experience of looking at the pictures by adding internal lines of sight to cross or repeat our own. In their simplest usage they enable a maid outside the room to watch a copulating couple inside. A woman having sex with a man may hold a mirror to admire her own face, or compare it to his; a woman masturbating can gaze at her body in a full-length mirror, while a man peering through a window behind her uses the same mirror to watch her doing it. Here the large size and square shape of the mirror gives it the added function of seeming to open a far window through which we look into a reversal—a true mirror image—of the already complex spatial scheme of the composition.

Ellsworth album, Leaf with Jin Ping Mei

A mature, bearded man has stretched out naked on a lounging 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 is 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?

The picture is among other things an unfair slur on Jin Ping Mei, which, although it doubtless sometimes elicited in its readers responses of the kind shown here, was far more than a stimulus for sexual arousal. In such a picture as this, however, the urbane artist is not so much treating a theme directly as playing on a theme, or on a common notion about it. What we see is the painter’s facetious report of someone’s imagining of how the lofty scholars, in the privacy of their studies, really appreciated this great work of Chinese fiction.

Ellsworth album, Homosexual Leaf

It was not uncommon for erotic albums otherwise devoted to heterosexual encounters to include one homosexual leaf. In this one, 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 in feminine garb and catered to the same-sex desires of men. For well-off males to enjoy sex with partners of both sexes 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. Recent studies claim to recognize bitong in some of the boy servants who accompany scholars in paintings.

As in the Jin Ping Mei leaf (no. ), 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.

The screen behind the figures, with rows of small paintings affixed to it, belongs to a type commonly seen in paintings by Gu Jianlong and his followers; to my knowledge, it is seen nowhere else, nor are examples extant.[10] The antique bronze gu and ding vessels on the table indicate the man’s wealth and cultivation. The loosely-rolled handscroll is presumably an erotic painting; and the book, one fascicle spread out as if they had been reading it together, proves when one looks closely (its title is exposed by the open tao or case on the table) to be none other than the Qing shi, a collection of love stories by the late Ming Feng Menglong (1574-1646) which includes a chapter on homosexual love.[11]

[10] In China, that is; in Japan such screens are common. For the absence of extant examples, I depend on a personal communication from Sarah Handler.

[11] For a discussion of the book and a translation of a selection of the stories, see Hua-yuan Li Mowry, Chinese Love Stories from “Ch’ing-shih” (Hamden, Connecticut, Archon Books, 1983.)

CLP 47: 2001 "Uses of Sketches by Chinese Painters." Paper for conference on "Sketches and Creativity,"

Uses of Sketches by Chinese Painters

(Paper for Lavin/Millon conference on Sketches and Creativity, May 23-25, 2001) James Cahill

I’m pleased to be one of the speakers on this occasion, honoring Hank Millon and Irving Lavin, especially because I have a comfortable feeling of being here in a familiar role. There was a period of some years in the 1970s-80s when I found myself serving on a number of important art-history committees and boards, frequently with one or both of these two eminences as fellow members or chairs, committees on which I represented the non-West. This was a time when the field was realizing the need to open up a bit to that large outer region, shall we call it, which had remained somewhat outside traditional Western art history, and I and a few others were recruited, in effect, to represent it on the great committees and boards. Also in CAA: when Irving co-organized a session on child, primitive, and mad artists, I was brought in to present a Chinese mad artist. I’m teasing them, of course; actually, both have been extremely supportive over the years, both of me and of non-Western art studies, and I’m grateful for that, and happy to be back serving my simple function again, at an event honoring their retirements. Resuming my familiar role of showing how the Chinese weren’t like us, I’ll speak on why Irving’s European model of the sketch as facilitating or even embodying creativity doesn’t appear to apply to the practice of Chinese artists, and suggest a few possible reasons why not.

S,S. A single case that might fit that model--and even this is not entirely clear--is a group of sketches from the Buddhist cave site of Dunhuang, 8th-9th century in date (and thus predating by centuries any comparable extant materials from the West, so far as I know), drawn with brushes in ink on paper (a Chinese invention), sealed in a cave in the 11th century, acquired by the great French sinologue Paul Pelliot, and now in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. The sketches were published first by Jao Tsung-i, and later, with an extensive study, by my former student Sarah Fraser. Most of them appear to be preparatory sketches for wall paintings, or parts of wall paintings, or for portable paintings on silk, and indeed many can be matched up closely with surviving finished works in both forms.

S. S. Some, however, are what Fraser terms “practice sketches,” identifiable as that by their being loosely drawn, partial images in random arrangements filling otherwise unused areas of the paper. Some of these reveal the artist trying out different ways to draw parts of his picture (as at left, the head and foot); others, like those seen above the guardian figure at right, are simply sketches of unrelated motifs, and would appear to represent the anonymous workshop artists training their hands toward the goal of being able to draw freehand the full images, in preparatory drawings for finished works.

S--. A comparable finished painting from Dunhuang, one of those now in the British Museum, impresses us as less powerful, for reasons that have often been observed. That same preference for spontaneity over finish lay behind the reputation of the divine Wu Daozi, greatest of Chinese figure masters, who painted grand figural compositions on the walls of temples in 8th century Chang’an, the capital. He reportedly instructed his assistants to color his works only lightly, or even leave them uncolored, so as not to obscure the brush drawing.

S,S. From descriptions of his paintings we can imagine his figures in dynamic postures, turning in space, with some parts convincingly foreshortened. (No work of his survives, even in reliable copies; these are two more of the Dunhuang sketches) And all this he accomplished without underdrawing of any kind, making his images come into being swiftly, as if magically--an early critic writes that Heaven seemed to have lent him its creative powers.

S,S. (Two more.) Crowds would assemble to watch in awe as he drew freehand a perfect circle as a halo around the head of some divinity. The unmatched ability of Tang-period artists to render volume in line drawing must have culminated in his work. Of course we can assume that Wu Daozi, and later artists as well, in their long pursuit of this transcendental skill, covered all the waste paper they could find with practice sketches like those from Dunhuang. But no other examples survive, nor is there any written record of the practice, so far as I know.

S.S. What do survive, and are mentioned in texts, are preparatory drawings, huagao in Chinese. Xia Wenyan, in his 1365 Tuhui Baojian, writes: “The preparatory drawings of old artists are called sketches (fenben); many connoisseurs have collected and treasured them. This is because, in their rough and unplanned look, they have a wonderful spontaneity.”[1] Surviving fenben are not especially rough or unplanned, but rather highly finished preliminary drawings or cartoons for wall or scroll or screen paintings. These are two examples from a large group with an old attribution to Wu Daozi; they appear to be 13th or 14th century in date.

S,S. We are sometimes unsure whether a linear design that could be such a cartoon for a temple wall painting is that or, alternatively, a careful copy made after the wall painting to preserve its composition in detail, for use in subsequent restoration or replacement. This work, a handscroll on silk loosely attributed to the 11th century figure master Wu Congyuan, generates far more energy in its dynamic procession of Daoist figures than the narrow confines of a handscroll (only about 40 cm. in height) can comfortably contain. It must have been either a cartoon for a wall painting or a copy after one.

S.S (Cui Bo, Guo Xi.) Artists who painted large, complex compositions normally began by making sketches directly on the silk or paper; in modern times, and presumably earlier, this was done with a charcoal stick, which left markings that either were covered by the painting or could be brushed off when the work was finished. That this was the common practice is attested by the singling out for special praise of artists who did not make them, but attacked the silk directly, with their entire compositions (so the critics believed) clearly in their minds. One such was Cui Bo, whose Hare and Jays at left is dated 1061. The great landscapist Guo Xi, whose Early Spring dated 1072 is on the right,

S -- (here a detail of the middle right) would sometimes avoid the undesirable planned look by directing the plasterers preparing a palace wall to throw or daub on the plaster roughly, so that he could use the resulting chance configurations as the basis for his landscape composition. (Early Chinese painting can boast a number of such predecessors to the Western artists of Janson’s “Image Made by Chance.”)

The medium of ink and colors on silk, unlike oils on canvas, didn’t allow any overpainting, and only very minor correction, so that we can’t expect to find pentimenti or detect changes in plan through X-ray, as we can with European easel paintings. When we can detect them at all, it’s through close observation and assumptions about the artist’s intent. (Show place in middle right)

S --. In a remarkable and unnoticed passage in his Early Spring, Guo Xi must have intended originally to turn a sketched-in area (here blacked out) into one of the sloping banks of earth, like the one beyond it, with bare trees growing out from it.

S --. But, in a radical last-minute decision, realizing that to fill it in that way would work against the whole effect of erosion and instability that is the theme of his picture, a vision of the world in process, he opens it up instead to a view into what appears to be a subterranean hollow, making the earth mass above overhang implausibly, adding more trees that turn awkwardly to grow back into the newly-opened space. Such a passage reveals a great deal about the working methods and priorities of Chinese painters.

S,S. I have been speaking up to now about professional artists, academy masters, technically trained studio painters. But, as I’m sure many of you know, Chinese painting after the 13th century or so is dominated, at least in critical writings and collectors’ preferences (which have largely determined what has been preserved), by scholar-amateur artists, the so-called literati painters. (Two examples, from the 12th and early 14th centuries.) Working in principle from inner motivations, they scorned preliminary sketches along with technical finish generally, since they aimed at capturing both momentary feeling and something of their personal cultivation and character in brushstrokes. The idea of working toward a “better” image by way of sketches would have been antithetical to their purpose.

S,S. (Detail from a painting of grapes by Riguan, 13th cent.; pomegranates by Bada Shanren, 17th cent., both Ch’an or Zen Buddhist monk-artists, another category of amateur painters.) By relying on inherited type-images without being bound to them, and by repeating certain motifs and subjects in which their hands had became practiced, while giving room also to momentary impulse, they could produce accomplished and original pictures as if spontaneously, on demand.

S,S. (Sections of Zhao Mengfu’s “Village by the Water,” 1302, at right; and at left, from Huang Gongwang’s “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mts,” painted over the three-year period 1347-50.) Landscape paintings by literati masters, even when elaborate in composition, had to maintain a certain transparence, displaying the hand of the artist so as to suggest sustained spontaneity.

-- S. (Another sec’n of Huang Gongwang’s masterwork, the most admired, coveted, and written about of literati landscapes.) According to Huang’s inscription, he began by sketching out his entire composition (on the roll of paper, that is) all in one day, and then added to it from time to time over a period of three years, until it was--somewhat arbitrarily--judged to be finished and could be presented to the intended recipient, who had grown impatient. The quasi-improvisational look of the work, in which the hand of the artist remains clearly visible, reflects this manner of creation. Here we might find some agreement with Irving’s model in that a kind of sketchiness is in effect equated with creativity. But it is sketchiness that is not a stage on the way, but survives into the finished work, as visual testimony to the spontaneity of its execution.

S,S. Landscapes by the scholar-amateur masters, then, like their simpler pictures, were in principle made without preparatory sketches. Even when radically experimental (like these two by the early 17th century landscapist Dong Qichang) they were required in theory to retain some roots or basis in older painting, expressed in stylistic references that are sometimes abstruse, making this a connoisseur’s art. Xing si or lifelikeness had been placed scornfully by a 14th century theorist at the bottom of a list of criteria for judging quality in paintings, and this attitude, fundamental to literati painting, continued to prevail among critics and to affect artists’ practice. The artist, then, had in principle no impetus for Gombrichian changes of the inherited schemata in the direction of truth to nature. Moreover, since the viewer was not located in relation to the scene by any kind of systematic perspective, adjustments to correct that aspect of the picture were not needed. And so forth: the hypothetical ideal form toward which he might work through successive sketches would have had no meaning for the Chinese painter.

I should add once more, to avoid misunderstanding, that neither reliance on pre-existing type-forms nor resonances with old styles diminished the originality and creativity of these paintings, at least the successful ones, any more than they do in works by Picasso or Stravinsky or Ezra Pound. By no means do they move these Chinese pictures into Irving’s “medieval” model, in which the past is simply replicated endlessly. Western authorities as distinguished as Gombrich and Arthur Danto have misunderstood this aspect of Chinese painting. I’ve devoted some recent writings and lectures (including one given here at Princeton) to correcting these wrong readings of later Chinese painting; but I won’t even try to summarize that argument now, except to say that as early as the 14th century, I believe, Chinese painting entered into what Hans Belting and others call a post-historical phase.

S,S. Literati painters did sometimes make sketches, but for other purposes. Huang Gongwang, the artist of the landscape handscroll we just saw, advises the painter to carry a brush with him on strolls in nature to sketch interesting trees (and, by implication, other things) as he encounters them. Literati landscapists such as Huang’s younger contemporary Ni Zan (right) and Dong Qichang (left) made sketchbooks and scrolls of trees and rocks that may be instances of that practice, although the relationship of their imagery with that of nature is tenuous. (Dong, even though he was quite incapable of depicting a house convincingly, continued to try.)

S,S. In doing such compilations of motifs these artists are in some part following a much older type, the artist’s repertory scroll such as this one, which supplies models for any conceivable way one might want to portray a horse. (Such a taxonomic freedom may call to mind, for a western viewer, Foucault’s famous citation of Borges and “a certain Chinese encyclopedia.”)

S, S. Professional artists of the kind with which we began did go on using preparatory drawings and sketches; and I will conclude with a brief account of the uses to which they were put. Some have been mentioned already. Studio artists would make sketch copies of compositions and motifs from old paintings to which they had access, to be used as needed in their own works. The 17th century master Gu Jianlong does this in a preserved album, one of a great many he reportedly made. (In this leaf he copies the pine trees and rock from a Ming handscroll now in the Freer Gallery of Art.)

S,S. Portraitists would make preliminary drawings of their subjects, either to record their likenesses for later use or to show to their sitters to get their approval before doing the finished portrait. What I take to be an example of the former is an album of portraits of eminent men of Zhejiang Province, dating from the mid-17th century and exhibiting the new light-and-dark shading and other techniques adopted from European art that revitalized Chinese portraiture at this time, and made Chinese viewers exclaim in wonderment that the painted images were exactly like reflections in a mirror. The pictures in this album are usually seen as finished portraits, and I myself published them as that, realizing only later that some features of them--the coarse paper on which they are painted, inscriptions that have the character of informal artists’ jottings--show them to be preliminary drawings. As such, they present their subjects “warts and all,” as we would say, with uncompromising realism; the same people would doubtless have looked more bland and benign in the finished portraits.

S,S. In 1781 the Yangzhou master Luo Ping made this preliminary sketch for a portrait of the famous litterateur Yuan Mei and gave it to him for approval, which in this case was withheld. Before returning it to the artist Yuan Mei wrote a long, facetiously philosophical inscription at the top, playing with the question of whether he himself or the artist’s image was the real Yuan Mei, and adding that the people of his household complained that it made him look like the man who delivered vegetables to the back door. Again, the final image would probably have been less harsh, but it was never made. I first published this preliminary sketch in 1959, and Richard Vinograd discussed it much more seriously in his 1992 book on Chinese portraiture, but neither of us put it in what I now believe to be the right context.

S,S. Painters doing major pictures for important clients, and most of all court artists working for the emperor, were required to prepare and submit detailed cartoons before they could carry out the finished work. When the Italian Jesuit artist Giuseppe Castiglione (Chinese name Lang Shining), who served under three Chinese emperors, was preparing to paint his famous “Hundred Horses” scroll in 1728, he made a cartoon of the whole large-scale composition, which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These are two details.

S --. And this a corresponding detail from the finished painting. The cursive drawing of some of the background in the cartoon, contrasting with the precise linear drawing of the figures, may reflect Castiglione’s practice of sometimes leaving the background to be filled in by Chinese assistants in his studio.

S,S. Similarly, before a team of five painters including Chen Mei executed the well-known Qing-period version of the “Qingming Festival” scroll in 1735, a highly detailed and finished preliminary drawing was made--and signed, somewhat surprisingly, by an entirely different artist, whose name does not appear on the finished scroll. The circumstances behind this odd division of labor remain to be clarified.

S.S. Even under a system with such built-in precautions, a finished painting might displease the client and have to be redone. We know from literary references about paintings that were returned to the artist by dissatisfied customers; I will conclude with the case of a court painting done for the 18th century Qianlong Emperor, who kept an especially tight control over his academy artists. It is a New Year’s picture portraying the emperor and some of his consorts and sons on the porch of a palace building, and it survives in two versions. One, at right, is dated 1738 and signed by five artists, including the same Castiglione and Chen Mei. The other is unsigned, but has been preserved in the palace in Beijing. Those who have written about the two versions have not speculated on their relationship; I would guess that the unsigned picture (at left) was a first version that was rejected by the emperor, and look for reasons why. One is surely that the unsigned work situates the emperor off-center, and within a strong perspectival pull into depth that works to draw the viewer’s attention away from him. The other reason is that he is portrayed in a manner too relaxed, too anecdotal, bending his head to look down at a child in his lap.

-- S. The same is true of other participants in the scene, such as these boys who watch one of their number setting off a firecracker: they are more relaxed and individualized than the highly formal requirements of court painting could accomodate. For us, these may be just the features that make the picture more appealing, the other stiffer and colder. We can surmise that the artists themselves may also have preferred the earlier version, but in China, and especially in the imperial court, their preferences didn’t count for much.

I’m quite aware that some or even most of the Chinese practices I’ve outlined have approximate equivalents in European painting, but limits of time and my competence have ruled out serious analytical comparisons. I’m inclined nonetheless to recognize important differences, and especially, for our present concern, to believe that the Chinese use of sketches stands apart from the somewhat dichotomized developmental pattern of the symposium statement, in which the medieval practice, tending to inhibit creativity, gives way to the Renaissance and later practice that encourages it. This formulation is based, I think, in deep Western beliefs about ideal forms or images toward which the artist might strive, images aesthetically or naturalistically or expressively better than those from which they depart, and also about how the best art arises from conditions in which the artist is least subject to outside demands. Neither quite corresponds with Chinese reasons for preferring one image or work over another. Painting in China for which the artists claimed an inner motivation of self-expression, chiefly literati painting, emphasized spontaneity in such a way as to make sketches counter-productive, while painting done by the professional masters, responding (in principle) to outer motivations, located decisions about altering or “improving” the image more in the client than in the artist. How far these non-correspondences betray real differences between the European and Chinese artistic traditions. and how far they only reflect differences in the ways the concepts and practices within those traditions are formulated, is a larger and more difficult question that I will, in the end, leave unsatisfyingly open. Thank you.

3017 Waipuna Rise
Honolulu, HI 96822
August 9, 2001

Dr. Therese O’Malley
Associate Dean, CASVA
National Gallery of Art
Washington, D.C. 20565

Dear Therese,

I got back from some weeks in China to find your letter of 18 July. I do remember that you and Irving said from the beginning that the papers would be published, but I’m afraid I put this at the back of my mind and didn’t think about how practicable this was for me. And I put together a paper for the conference that seemed right for that occasion, a short account of a large subject, the uses of sketches in Chinese painting, using lots of slides. But there is no way I can turn this into a publishable paper. The things I showed are far-flung, in many collections, and some were introduced briefly only as examples of some type or phenomenon, and getting photos and permissions for all of them, or even for enough to illustrate a paper with footnote references for others, would be a large task that I can’t now undertake, even with a much later deadline than September 4. For reasons of funding, the book I’ve been working on for several years must be finished by the end of this year, to be published (along with several others in the series, The Culture and Civilization of China) around the end of next year; and my travels, and talks with a Chinese collaborator in Beijing who hasn’t even finished his part, leave me in a very tight situation, unable to take on anything time-demanding.

This is entirely my fault; I should have done a different kind of paper, less dependent on visuals, and undertaken to get the photos and permissions much sooner. And I apologize for this to you and Hank and Irving and others. Yours will be a very distinguished and variegated volume, but China, alas, won’t be there, through my bad planning.

Sincerely,
James Cahill

[1] Xia Wenyan, tuhui Baojian, preface 1362 (HSCS ed. chap. 1, p. 3)

CLP 48: 2001 "Types of Value in 17th Century Chinese Painting." Lecture, Taiwan Nat'l U., Taipei

Types of Value in 17th Century Chinese Painting.

(Introductory stuff.)

Taking on this problem of course raises broader problems: how does one define value, or quality, in art at all? And how, more specifically, in Chinese painting? The first, broadest question I won’t attempt to answer; but I’ll begin by offering a few observations on value in Chinese painting generally, before focusing more on the 17th century and the paintings in the exhibition. (For my purpose I’ll expand the 17th century, as the exhibition does, to include some part of the 18th.)

The Chinese traditionally have been very fond of pithy, catchy slogans that claim to give us the central truth about any subject. These are easy to memorize, all too easy to repeat. Everybody knows the ones for art: “Calligraphy and painting have a common origin” or “Chinese painting doesn’t pursue the outer appearances of things, it pursues the inner spirit” etc. I always cautioned my students to avoid these, since they can have the effect of stifling thought: no need to think more about the subject, just repeat the conventional “truth”. For the question of value in painting, the “great truth” is: It’s all in the brushwork: you don’t have to see the painting as a picture, just look at the brushwork and you’ll see whether it’s a good or bad painting, by a good or bad artist. As my old and admired friend C C. Wang puts it, “You should look at the brushwork, not at the scenery”--by which he means the pictorial qualities, the work as a picture..

Now, I’m not saying that these formulations are entirely without truth; only that they are very partial truths, usually biased in favor of the scholar-elite class who made them up; and they get in the way of serious considerations of any subject. For painting, brushwork is certainly one of the features of a work that we have to pay attention to; but the same is true (with some differences, of course) in Western art--this is not an exclusively Chinese criterion. Scholars of Western oil painting write about the facture or “making” of the painting, or the artist’s “touch”, as an important factor in dealing with authenticity and quality in works by Titian or Rembrandt or Vermeer or van Gogh or any other artist with a distinctive style. I will say more about this as we go on.

As most everybody knows, the Yuan-period writer T’ang Hou made a list of six criteria for judging paintings and put ch’i-yün, the great undefinable quality, at the top, followed by pi-i or “brush conception”; at the bottom of his list he put hsing-ssu , lifelikeness or truth-to-nature, as the last aspect of the painting one should pay attention to. But this was of course because in T’ang Hou’s time literati painting, in which brushwork was emphasized, was on the rise, and the works of the great academy and professional masters of the Sung period were declining in critical acclaim. To apply T’ang Hou’s criteria to Sung painting would be nonsense, as I will try to show in a moment.

I am not arguing, of course, that those who argue for brushwork as the touchstone of quality in Chinese painting really make their judgmeents purely on that basis; of course they don’t--they have to be affected, like anyone else, by other aspects of the paintings. It is only on a theoretical plane, or perhaps rhetorical, that they make their claim. But it the claim, or the dogma, of the primacy of brushwork has nonetheless had a limiting and negative effect, I think, on our ability to discuss questions of quality for Chinese painting while taking full account of the real issues--we feel somehow guiilty if we talk or write about the painting as a good or bad picture, as though we are afraid that Tung Ch’i-ch’ang will come back and denounce us as philistine.

How has this unfortunate situation come about? The problem begins when early critics and theorists such as Tang Hou were confronted with the striking innovations in painting being made by artists such as Chao Meng-fu, and had not yet developed a critical vocabulary adequate for writing about this new kind of painting, with its complex archaistic references and other expressive complexities. They fall back on vague, undefinable qualities such as ch’i-yün and “brush-conception” to praise the artists. Later, connoisseurs who earned some part of their living by making judgements of paintings for new collectors, or for collectors not yet sure of their own eyes, needed answers to the question, asked by the client, “Why is this painting good, and that one bad?” The answer had to stress the undefinable qualities, perceptible only to the cultivated eye, if the connoisseur was to maintain his prestige and exclusive capacity to make these judgements. He couldn’t say “Because this was done by a highly talented and skilled artist and that by an unimaginative and clumsy one,” or “because this one is an original work by a good artist, while that one is by a copyist, and I will show you why,” since those answers would lead to distinctions that the client could see for himself. Instead he would say “Because this one has good brushwork and that one bad,” and add that only the connoisseur’s eye trained by many years of studying paintings could tell the difference. We are all heirs to this system, and must respect it as historically important on the one hand, but recognize on the other its inadequacy for making analytical and objective judgements, as best we can, of the paintings we encounter.

Let me give an example to show how T’ang Hou’s criteria aren’t useful for justments of quality in Sung painting.

S,S. When in 1957 a section of the famous handscroll by Wang Hsi-meng titled “A Thousand Li of Rivers & Mountains” was published in color in a Chinese magazine, painting specialists were very excited and imagined it must be a great masterwork of the blue-and-green landscape style. It was a genuine, famous work from the time of Emperor Hui-tsung, done for him by a gifted artist, Wang Hsi-meng, who died in his early twenties. When a group of us went to China in 1977, it was one of the first things we asked to see.

S,S. But it turned out to be a disappointment; the story was better than the painting. Young Wang Hsi-meng wasn’t really such a highly trained and capable painter, and the scroll was monotonous: the same blue and green mountains, trees, waterfalls etc. for yard after yard (meter after meter).

S,S. It was obvious that other people had felt the same way: the first five or six feet were darkened by exposure and showed signs of wear; but after that the silk was light, the colors fresh, all like new. Those who had looked at it over the centuries had rolled a bit, become tired of it, and given up. It was a symbolic gift from the artist to Hui-tsung, portraying the emperor’s prosperous and flourishing realm; its value was more political than artistic.

S --. We also saw a less-known handscroll painting attributed to Chao Po-chü, a famous master of the academy, which in the reproduction hadn’t looked as interesting--rather elaborate and fussy.

S,S. But this turned out, when we saw it in the original, to be the real masterwork: done by a highly proficient artist who really cared about his mountains and trees and rivers, all the materials of his world, and portrayed them, within the archaistic framework of the scroll which dictates the oddly twisted mountains, as differentiated, readable, interesting. One can spend a long time looking at this painting without ever being bored, visually engaged with all its imagery and incidents.

S,S. People move about in real spaces, approaching gates and walls and towns, or stopping to gaze at a waterfall. (etc.)

S,S. (Chao Po-chü at right, Wang Hsi-meng at left.) If we return now to look at corresponding details in Wang Hsi-meng’s painting, we see why his does not engage us in this way; he gives us conventions instead of believable images.

Now, if we were to talk in these terms to a traditional Chinese critic, he would say we were being naive and philistine; he might repeat Su Tung-p’o’s well-known lines about how anyone who discusses painting in terms of resemblance is like a child. And yet, a kind of resemblance, a serious and successful attempt to portray interesting visual materials, individually and recognizably, in readable spaces, is a large part of what makes the Chao Po-chü painting great.

I use this as an example of how “brushwork” criteria can be quite inadequate for judging paintings, and how a kind of hsing-ssu, in the sense of careful attention to the visual qualities of the things depicted, can be an entirely valid component in judging quality in painting, especially for the Sung and earlier periods. But also for some later painting, as we’ll see.

Now, we will jump to the late Ming-early Ch’ing, the 17th century, and to very different kinds of painting, which must of course be judged by different criteria.

S,S. (Wei Chih-huang). To begin once more with a negative example, one that I think of as a bad painting. (There aren’t many in Mr. Chen’s collection, so I have to make the most of the few there are.) Wei Chih-huang is taking advantage of a late Ming taste for odd or even bizarre landscape, a taste that both Wu Pin and Tung Ch’i-ch’ang satisfy, in their different ways. But he misses the point: the picture has to be both bizarre and interesting, well put together, convincing; and his picture is only bizarre. He invents a simple formal theme and repeats it throughout: curly or scolloped contours, masses of big fat tien or dots. And with those his imagination gives out: he has little more to offer.

S,S. He attempts a wierd natural bridge, but we don’t believe in it, we don’t care. He adds a house and figure, and they are completely conventional, uninteresting. Similarly with his trees. So here we can speak of a negative criterion: the painting must have enough creative thought put into it to offer diversity within a coherent style, and so hold our interest in a way this one doesn’t. For an an artist who almost consistently puts this kind of creative thought into his paintings, we can turn to Wei Chih-huang’s great contemporary Tung Ch’i-ch’ang.

S,S. Tung Ch’i-ch’ang’s interesting formal ideas are set within structures that are themselves imaginative and arresting; he is seldom boring. Here, in a landscape of 1621, the composition itself embodies a novel idea: the three large trees in foreground, leaning leftward, are answered by three successive landscape masses behind, leaning rightward. But this doesn’t begin to exhaust the inventiveness of the work. A rising, slanting mass of earth or rock, like an axe, beginning quietly at the base of the further bank, gives rise to others, larger and more striking, all the way up to the highest peak. And the painting has much more to offer in formal relationships. If we say we admire Tung Ch’i-ch’ang because of his good brushwork, then, we are missing much of the point of his pictures--not really missing it, because we can see it and respond to it, but missing it when we try to articulate our responses to his paintings, and fall back on the old conventions.

S,S. Whenever one is writing a general history and characterizes some artist as secondary or minor, someone who owns a painting by that artist or has written a term paper on him will rise up to argue that he isn’t really less good, just different. I have had that happen over and over in my career--there is almost no painter who doesn’t have his defenders. Sometimes this can be for the good, because fine artists are sometimes neglected for wrong reasons; but it’s also true that there really are secondary painters, who cannot, however hard one tries, be raised into the top ranks. One such is Shen Shih-ch’ung. The album by him in the collection is fine among his works, but still stops short of holding our attention as a painting by Tung Ch’i-ch’ang will do. Shen Shih-ch’ung can take old styles to new extremes that make them mildly interesting--Ma Yüan at left, Wang Meng at right. But one turns quickly nonetheless to the next leaf.

S,S. His contemporary and sometime rival Chao Tso has larger ideas for innovative formal structures, but still falls far short of the radical inventiveness of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, and in the end is placed, rightly I think, slightly below the top rank of painters. Chao Tso’s handscroll of 1611 begins with a flat, quiet view over a river with fishing boats to a long grove of trees within which clusters of houses are seen, and through which a ropy band of fog floats.

S --. This is, of course, a reference to the style and imagery of the late Northern Sung master Chao Ling-jang or Chao Ta-nien. But Chao Tso fails to transform the earlier image significantly, simply quoting it or copying it into his own work.

S,S. He ends his handscroll more powerfully, as he does most of them painted in this early period, by bringing the scenery closer up and charging its components with dynamic energy. The movement of the rocks, the earth banks, the stream, surges upward on one side to the climactic point, the house with figures, then subsides downward toward the end of the scroll. This is an interesting idea, and is well realized, but it doesn’t catch and hold our attention in the way that one of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang’s formal manipulations does, mostly because it isn’t radically new, and because of the soft brushwork and relatively naturalistic style in which Chao Tso depicts his forms. It is as if Picasso had never moved out of his Blue Period; Chao Tso could never rise to rival Tung Ch’i-ch’ang.

S,S. When Tung Ch’i-ch’ang infuses his pictures with references to old masters, they are typically starker, more abstract, transforming his sources in a more extreme way, making them serve his new formal purposes. His Landscape in the Manner of Wang Wei (he does not title it that, only writing that it is in the manner of a Wang Wei poem) draws on his very imperfect knowledge of Wang Wei’s style,

-- S. derived from late imitations such as this “River Landscape in Snow.” The recognition of his stylistic references was part of what his contemporaries appreciated in his painting, and therefore is relevant to the question of value.

So, of course, is his brushwork, which a traditional Chinese connoisseur would emphasize in defining why Tung Ch’i-ch’ang is a great painter. But to concentrate on brushwork, I think, is to miss qualities of the painting that play a larger part in structuring our experience of it. Other artists of the time could manage “good brushwork” in the way Tung Ch’i-ch’ang does it; none of them could match his constructivist feats, or the subtleties and sophistication of his allusions to old masters.

S --. His direct disciple Wang Shih-min, for instance, in this landscape of 1651 (an earty work for him, and closely in Tung Ch’i-ch’ang’s manner), exhibits impeccable brushwork but nothing in his formal structure that departs from Tung’s interpretation of the style of Huang Kung-wang. Wang Shih-min adds nothing new, that is; and that was to be the pattern of his career, synthesizing without inventing, except in a minimal way. (The younger two of the so-called Four Wangs, Wang Hui and Wang Yuan-ch’i, are both represented by excellent works in the exhibition, but I will not pursue that direction further here.)

These examples are enough to make my main point, which is that criteria of quality in 17th century painting are multiple and diverse; any attempt to formulate a set that will apply to all the paintings of the time is misguided and doomed to failure. Paintings, that is, are good (or bad) in a variety of ways. Some are common to art everywhere--repetitiveness, for instance, is boring, and formal inventiveness exciting, so long as it keeps some hold on the established disciplines of the art.

S.S. I will illustrate that observation once more with another late Ming handscroll in the exhibition, Feng K’o-pin’s handscroll of rocks and bamboo, painted in 1622. Feng K’o-pin was the son of a well-known calligrapher, and a calligrapher himself, besides being, no doubt, a literatus of high cultivation. But he was no painter. He has mastered the formula for depicting a lumpy rock or earth form, shaped roughly like a clam-shell, taking it from a painting by the famous calligrapher Hsing T’ung, along with the minimal convention for bamboo twigs and leaves, which he takes (he says) from the Yuan-period bamboo specialist Li K’an. And he simply repeats these in different arrangements to fill up his scroll.

S --. Another exciting section. I didn’t make more slides because they would have been wasted. A painting in this style by Hsing T’ung survives, in the former Abe collection, and appears to be just as dull. The painting is accompanied by twelve colophons by notable people of his day; but they were invited to write by the artist himself, and of course praise the work.

S.S. In the strongest possible contrast to this is the excellent scroll of orchids in ink painted by Wang To in 1651. Wang To is, of course, best known as a major calligrapher, and he could easily have slipped into repeating the conventions for ink orchids, without violating the expectations of his audience, who would have said: He isn’t really a painter, after all, we shouldn’t expect a painterly picture. But here, at least, he paints like a painter, not a calligrapher, and the outcome is a work that fascinates, offering cool and lovely plays of ink gradations, interesting variations on the basic formula for painting orchids.

S,S. Another section, with detail. Certain brush effects, such as dry brushwork and shading within the brushstroke, are more difficult to handle when painting on silk; in Wang To’s hands they seem easy, and the silk gives a special elegance to the work.

S,S. It would of course be wrong to say that Wang To’s excellence as a calligrapher is irrelevant to his painting; certain effects are common to the two arts, and his calligrapher’s control of the brush is evident in the clean, firm strokes of the orchid leaves. But good calligraphers who attempt painting can sometimes fail badly, and Wang To’s achievement here is chiefly done in painterly terms, not calligraphic. Where calligrapher-painters are often carried away by the velocity of their brush-movements to the point of dissolving their images, Wang To makes firm pictorial structures throughout. This is a scroll that offers rich visual pleasures.

S,S. If we admire Wang To’s scroll for subtle ink values and refined arrangements of repeated brushstrokes, how can we also admire such paintings as Ch’en Hung-shou’s, which have none of these qualities? We have to shift aesthetic gears, look to the paintings for something else. Like a Sung or pre-Sung artist, Ch’en Hung-shou paints in ink outline and color washes, a manner that implies precise, even analytical description of the phyiscal properties of the things he depicts. But then he subverts the viewer’s expectations (which are based on early paintings in this linear manner) that the things described will correspond closely with things of the real world. Instead, Ch’en Hung-shou distorts his forms in a playful archaism. It is this contradiction that Ch’en exploits in his style: strange, crotchety, sometimes bizarre forms depicted in lsuch sure-handed and precise line drawing that we are made to believe in them. The tree, grotesquely twisted as it is, must be exactly the way it is; the scholar’s manner of carrying his basket (with wine, perhaps?) on a pole over his shoulder is certainly not familiar to us, but the artist, by being so precise in showing us how these things look makes us trust his pictorial report of them. It is a very odd experience, and exhilarating in its way.

S,S. A kind of twisted-rope bag held by the man, as well as the woman’s cloth bag slung over her shoulder, are unfamiliar and a bit mysterious to me (someone here can probably tell me what they are), but again they are described so exactly and completely that they exist for us. The incident that unites the figures is similarly unclear, but it holds our interest nonetheless, excites our curiosity.

The criteria by which we judge the excellence of Ch’en Hung-shou’s paintings are scarcely applicable to any other master of the late period; he is an artist who created his own system of values, and challenges the viewer to understand them and accept them. No one else did what he did so well.

S,S. Moving again to the furthest possible contrast in style and value system, without moving very far forward in time, we see Ch’eng Sui’s undated Landscape. The slide at right, made from a reproduction, loses the subtleties of the painting; but the slide at left, from the original, is too dark, so I will show it in details:

S. starting with this one, at the bottom. In 1981 I organized, with a seminar of eight specialist graduate students, an exhibition of Anhui-school painting. Because the painting of this school was deliberately austere, generally devoid of color and figures and incident and other popularizing features, we assumed that the paintings would be of limited appeal to the Western audiences of Berkeley, Princeton, and other places where it was shown. Instead, it proved to be unexpectedly popular: good reviews in the newspapers, a lot of enthusiasm among ordinary museum-goers. And among the paintings in it, next to the great painting by Hung-jen titled “The Coming of Autumn” (which we could show only for a brief period), the most popular was this work by Ch’eng Sui; visitors would stand for long periods in front of it, fascinated by its subtlety and complexity.

S -. Closer in. The structure of the composition, and the coherence of the painting as a picture, emerges as one gazes at it longer.

S --. (Upper half of the painting.) Now, to say that the attraction of the painting lies largely in its brushwork would be true enough, so far as it goes. But it would be, again, a very partial truth, not getting at the real reason the painting holds our interest for so long. What the viewers at the exhibition were gazing at for long stretches of time was not simply the dry, crumbly brushwork in itself, but the it way it is made to represent, quietly but convincingly, a rich, complex landscape. Ch’eng Sui has sacrificed not only color and washes but also strong tonal contrasts in his use of ink.

S --. (Closer in again, at the top). When one first looks at the painting it appears to be a flat, uniform field of small, dry smudges of ink, with no prominent forms or clear composition. But its structure emerges as one looks longer, and also a wealth of detail, making this as richly complete a world as landscapes in the traditional styles. The success of the best Anhui-school landscape painting often depends on effects of this kind, I think, in which a minimalist manner of painting in dry brushwork and linear drawing is used to depict simple but satisfying scenery.

S.S. As it happens, another masterwork of dry-brush painting, in my estimation, is in Ch’en Chi-te’s collection. This is the miniature album of paintings of blossoming plum branches by Ch’en Chuan, or Ch’en Yü-chi, a master active in Yangzhou in the early decades of the 18th century; he is not usually included among the “eight eccentrics” of Yangzhou, and was older than most of them. He is said to have learned directly from Shih-t’ao, and precedents can indeed be found in Shih-t’ao’s work for crotchety branches of blossoming plum done in a dry-brush manner. The ink is applied in strokes so soft that they catch the nap of the paper and seem to crumble, while keeping their momentum. Some strokes are so light in tone as to almost disappear into the paper.

S,S. Two more leaves. The brushlines, tracing the branches and twigs of the tree, seem to wander freely over the surface, changing direction or doubling back as if at the artist’s whim. All these patterns can, no doubt, be paralleled in the natural growth of the twigs, and are not simply invented; the effect is no less quirky. One reads into the style a quietly unconventional temperament and an unhurried delicacy of touch.

S --. A leaf from the album in the exhibition by Ch’en Chuan’s contemporary Huang Shen, painted in 1726, offers a nice study in contrasts and similarities. The patrons or consumers of painting in Yangzhou liked their paintings to be strong expressions of artistic personality, and they certainly got them here: the reticence and hesitancy implied in Ch’en Chuan’s brushwork vs. the impetuous, unrestrained quality of Huang Shen’s. How much these artistic expressions corresponded to the real personalities of the artists--whether, that is, Ch’en Chuan was really reticent and Huang Shen really impetuous--is an unanswerable and ultimately irrelevant question, since expression in art is far too complex a process to allow simple equations of artist and work. Analyzing art as psychobiography is a practice discredited in art history generally, but survives more than it should in writings on Chinese painting.

S,S. With such a painter as Chu Ta or Pa-ta Shan-jen, the temptation to do that is strong: to say, that is: the artist was mentally unbalanced, and this unbalance of his mind is expressed in his paintings. Since that assumption underlies appreciations of his paintings by many people who see them, one might argue that a sense of “madness” behind his paintings is part of their value. In a paper I gave at a Pa-ta Shan-jen symposium in 1988, and published in the following year, I argued instead that Pa-ta, after going through a bout of real mental disorder or madness and assuming that role in society, drew on the experience to paint pictures that seemed somehow to express “madness”, pictures that satisfied the expectations of his audience and came to be much in demand. Among the qualities I identified in anyalyzing the ways he produced this effect is compositional unbalance--here, for instance, in the way the curving lotus stalks appear inadequate to support the massed ink of the leaves at the top, and also the ambiguous relationship of these to the rock at right, leaving the viewer slightly unsure about solid and space.

S,S. Some of Pa-ta Shan-jen’s landscape paintings exhibit similar effects of ambiguity and unbalance; others, like the one at right, are clearly based on the model of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, and are relatively stable. The painting at left, the other of the pair of landscapes in this album (together with two leaves of calligraphy), is more complex and more interesting, simple as it may appear at first. The composition is obviously based on the formula of Ni Tsan, which was being imitated by many other artists of this time, especially those of the Anhui school.

--S. But Pa-ta, as usual, gives it a curious twist. In the foreground of Ni Tsan’s landcapes, typically, along with a few trees, is a rest-shelter or t’ing-tzu, placed so that one can imagine sitting in it and gazing at the distant shore. Pa-ta turns this formula upside down, placing the t’ing-tzu in the distance without diminishing it in size, forcing the viewer to locate out there and gaze back at the ungainly pine tree. This is not the work of a mad artist, but of a very smart and sensitive one producing a calculated effect of aberration.

S,S. The delights of Pa-ta’s landscape lie within the realm of formal values and plays on the past, with only minimal reference to real experience of the real world. The opposite is true of Fan Ch’i’s album of 1666, which deliberately evokes memories of real experiences in nature, and especially the experience of moving through the world and absorbing impressions of simple scenery in different seasons, weather, and times of day. Brushwork is quite beside the point for this project, except as it contributes to this effect. The origins of this kind of painting are in the Southern Sung; my book The Lyric Journey is about exactly this kind of painting, which uses imagery like that of poetry to arouse sensations we can call poetic. We are made to hear the sound of the stream, understand the distances that must be traversed.

S,S. (Two more leaves.) Houses appear, not as images of reclusion and security as in so much other Chinese landscape, but as stopping-points on one’s journey. The road continues beyond, to lead out of the picture in the distance. In this respect the pictures are so much like those of the 18th century Japanese artist Yosa Buson that one wonders whether Buson could have seen Fan Ch’i’s painting; but this, although not impossible, is unlikely.

S,S. (two more leaves.) The original order of the leaves cannot be known, but the winter scene with the artist’s signature and date must be the last, and is an effective close: the cluster of houses, with no passage indicated beyond them, represents shelter from the cold and a destination finally reached. (I understand that Professor Richard Vinograd spoke about Fan Ch’i and the Nanjing school yesterday--I was unable to hear him, but I’m sure he treated this album much more fully and interestingly than I have.)

S,S. One of the surprises and delights I encountered in going through Mr. Chen Chi-te’s collection last October was this 1696 painting by Shh-t’ao, with which I will close. This is one of four excellent works by this great artist in the collection. It was previously unknown to me, and seems to me one of Shih-t’ao’s most engaging productions from one of his best periods. It records a meeting in the Blue Lotus Pavilion at Kuang-ling, that is, Yangchou, where the artist had been living most of the time since his return in 1693 from his sojourn in Peking, staying often in the estates of wealthy patrons as an artist-in-residence. His host at the gathering asked him for a picture, he writes in his inscription, and he obliged, “casually (or spontaneously) capturing the likeness”--of the pavilion and its surroundings, that is, and what the assembled guests were gazing out at, over the town and the river. It’s significant that instead of using one of the common verbs for painting, hua or hsieh, Shih-t’ao uses hsing-ssu as a verb, literally “to likeness”--exactly the practice of “getting a resemblance” that the critics, from T’ang Hou onward, had condemned. Shih-t’ao was no respecter of conventional wisdom or critical taboos. And in fact the painting is, among other things, an enchanting image of a particular place at a particular moment, as Shih-t’ao must have gazed at it, meditatively, from the pavilion--or rather, since he was himself in the pavilion, imagined someone gazing at it from a more distant and elevated vantage point.

-- S. The Ch’ing-lien Lou must be the two-storied building in lower right, seen over a wall. A flock of birds circles around it, and circling flocks are seen over the trees in middleground, preparing to roost: the time is evening. This, like the leaves of the Fan Ch’i album, fits my definition of “poetic” painting as I attempted it in the “Lyric Journey” book, except that it is much richer, fuller, transmitting a complex, multi-leveled poetic experience. And here, once more, “good brushwork” is scarcely to the point; the hand of the artist is suppressed in favor of a very sensitive portrayal of a specific place at a particular time. Or so we are made to believe; how much Shih-t’ao’s picture actually corresponds to what we would have seen from near the Blue Lotus Pavilion in Yangchou on an autumn evening in 1696 is a question irrelevant to the success of the painting as an evocative and moving work of art.

-- S. The scene is suffused with mist and sunset light; no figures are visible. Further back we see the masts of fishing boats drawn up along the shore.

-- S. and still further back the landscape fades into mist, with the tops of hills closing the picture in the far distance. All this is done with an ease that belies its real mastery, accomplished through diminution in the trees, gradual elimination of detail, and atmospheric blurring and dimming.

-- S, Back to the foreground. Now, everything that the literati critics had been insisting upon for centuries as the requisites of high-quality painting--good, disciplined brushwork, references to the styles of old masters, certain kinds of formal constructions that had come to serve as cultural icons--are absent from Shih-t’ao’s picture, as from most of his others--ignored, transcended, irrelevant to what he is doing. And at the same time he was painting pictures like this one, Shih-t’ao was advocating in his writings the freeing or emancipation of painting from all these constraints. and reaching a synthesis of style in which they had no part.

Chao Meng-fu, Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, Wang Hui, all had aimed consciously at achieving a “great synthesis” of painting; all had realized immense accomplishments, but not that one. Shih-t’ao, after engaging and absorbing a series of local styles particular to the places where he lived during his paripatetic career, along with studying all the old paintings he had access to, did achieve a kind of synthesis in paintings such as this. But it was an individual synthesis, based on a special mastery of old and new styles, and not accessible to others.

We can dream of a different outcome, in which Shih-t’ao’s expressed goal of freeing painting from all the constraints under which it had labored was realized, and a great new age was inaugurated in Chinese painting. Years ago, at the end of the last of my lectures that turned into the Compelling Image book (published in Chinese translation through the efforts of Jason Chia-chi Wang and the generous support of Mr. Chen Chi-te, for which I will always be grateful), I wrote of Shih-t’ao’s “magnificent failure . . . to bring about single-handedly the emancipation of painting from the weight of the past. . .” The sentence was misunderstood by some to mean that I considered Shih-t’ao ultimately a failure as an artist; but that, of course, was far from my meaning. His failure to inaugurate a new age was not due to any fault or weakness of his, but rather of the artists who followed him, no one of whom had the breadth and power to take up the direction he had pointed. Painters who are in some sense his followers later in the 18th century--Ch’en Chuan, Hua Yen, Cheng Hsieh, others--capture at most some limited aspect of his achievement, as though unable even to glimpse the whole project, much less to continue it.

More than any other late Chinese painter, Shih-t’ao forces us to look back over painting of the centuries that preceded him and recognize that for all its sometime greatness, it also imposed difficulties on painters who were not scholar-amateurs but serious vocational painters, and who were discouraged by the critics from undertaking the simple, natural, all but universal project of representing, sensitively and in their individual ways, the world around them. Please understand that I’m not advocating realism in art (I’ve been accused of that too) or arguing that there should have been more of it in Chinese painting; I mean only to recognize the difficulties that the literati aesthetic imposed upon artists who were drawn in other, more representational directions. And I mean to suggest again, finally, that our criteria for judging Chinese painting have to be broad, manifold, and diverse if we are to do justice to the achievements of its artists. Thank you.

CLP 45: 2001 "Chinese Art and Authenticity." Asian Art Museum, S.F Paper for mtg. of American Academy of Arts and Sciences published in their Bulletin, vol. IV no. 1, Fall 2001

James Cahill paper for American Academy of Arts and Sciences Western Center program, Asian Art Museum, S.F., March 3, 2001

Chinese Art and Authenticity

(Introductory remarks: thanks to Paul Silverman, Jean Keating)

The problem of authenticity in Chinese art can be considered from two points of view, theirs and ours. How the Chinese thought about the problem, that is, and how we can and should grapple with it. I’ll talk about both tonight, going back and forth between them.

First, Chinese attitudes toward forgery. A belief that is widespread outside China has it that the Chinese don’t really care about authenticity--distinguishing the real thing, that is, from the copy or imitation. A New Yorker article (June 15 1998) , for instance, adduces the Chinese practice of making replicas of archaeological objects and other artifacts so convincing that they can send them abroad in exhibitions, in place of the original objects; and also of rebuilding old buildings instead of preserving or restoring them, duplicating old artifacts with modern materials, using conservation techniques that don’t permit the original parts to be clearly distinguished from the restorations. All these convince the writer that the Chinese have a very different concept of authenticity from ours. And he comes to this conclusion: “Recognizing the importance of the original hand of the artist places a value on individualism that is foreign to Chinese culture.”

But that’s much too broad a statement, true for some of the Chinese arts but quite false for others. To be sure, the identity of “the original hand of the artist” plays no part in evaluations of architecture, sculpture, bronzes, ceramics, and others that correspond, for the Chinese, with what we would call the applied arts. But for those that correspond roughly to our concept of “fine arts,” primarily painting and calligraphy, the hand of the maker, and his or her original style, are absolutely central to appreciating them. And these two categories of art, whatever we call them (Nelson Goodman uses the terms autographic and allographic), can’t be lumped together when we consider problems of authenticity.

I’ll be speaking tonight chiefly about Chinese painting, both because it’s what I know about and because it presents, I think, the most interesting authenticity problems. Since it would be dull to simply sum up accepted views on the matter, I’ll try to offer some less accepted, even controversial ones--trusting (and knowing from previous occasions of this kind) that my colleague Jerome Silbergeld will not let them slip by unchallenged. But before turning to painting I want to note a few implications of the common Chinese practice of replicating or forging (the distinction isn’t always clear) archaeological finds.

S,S. In the 1940s, small grey-pottery figurines with burnished black surfaces and sculpturally interesting shapes, said to date from the late Zhou period (ca. 4th cent. B.C.) and to have come from tombs at a place called Huixian (after which they were named), began to appear on the market in Luoyang and elsewhere. They were bought by collectors and museums all over the world.

S,S. As time went on, examples appeared that were even more excitingly expressionist-looking. (They are supposed to represent mourners wailing at the funeral of the deceased.) But eventually the bubble burst: forgers in Luoyang were making them in quantities to supply the market, and prices dropped dramatically.

S -- So far as I know, the pieces closest to them that have been unearthed in controlled excavations are these relatively inert and unexciting specimens. Some of the Huixian figurines appear to have been genuinely antique, however, and the thermoluminescence technique of dating ceramics can be used to sort them out from the forgeries.

S,S. The forgers’ practice of supplying a demand when archaeology or genuine tomb-looting falls short continues today: the attractively slim figurines of young men and women uncovered in 1992-3 in an early Han imperial tomb near Yangling have appeared on the market since then in greater numbers than clandestine excavation and smuggling can account for. Antique stores in Hong Kong are filled with replicas of tomb objects purportedly smuggled from excavations on the mainland; most of them are in fact made for the trade.

S --. Tomb figurines were mass produced to begin with, and one could almost argue that for most types, there are enough to go around. One-of-a-kind objects present a different kind of ethical issue: every new catalog from the dealers who specialize in smuggled early Chinese art is likely to evoke twinges of dismay along with excitement in specialist scholars as they encounter for the first time great and unique pieces that should have stayed in China, with their archaeological contexts intact. On the other hand, even in this area the forgers remain one step ahead of us. This painted marble relief of a guardian figure, said to have been removed improperly from the 10th century tomb of Wang Chuzhi in Hebei province, now famous for the reliefs and paintings later found there in a controlled excavation, was put up for auction last year but withdrawn when Chinese authorities demanded its return. My wife Hsingyuan Tsao, however, who has been in the tomb, reports that there is nowhere it can have come from, and to my eyes (and hers) it looks quite spurious. There have been other examples of purportedly smuggled objects that in fact were probably made to supply this already morally clouded demand; one is unsure just what principled stance is proper to such cases. The one observation we can make is that fooling the foreigners has always been regarded in China as a perfectly honorable enterprise.

But so, for that matter, has fooling other Chinese, especially those considered one’s social or cultural inferiors, rich merchants and the like. This was equally true for calligraphy and painting (to which I now turn.) Early writings on painting are full of references to forgeries (they are conveniently collected in a 1962 article on “The Problem of Forgeries in Chinese Painting” by my colleague Wen Fong), and famous and respected artists are credited with making them--borrowing, perhaps, a painting they coveted, producing a convincing replica, and returning that to the unsuspecting owner. I say credited rather than accused, since the act seems to have brought them no moral opprobrium.

When we speak of “authenticity,” our subject tonight, we mean two separable but related things. An object can be authentic by being genuinely what it’s presented as being--for instance, the work of a certain master or from a certain period; or else by being the product of authentic or genuine mpulses: the maker is not trying to fool us, or make his creation seem what it’s not. The latter sense takes us back to the 1960s, when some poems and pots and people were authentic, some weren’t, and the idealistic young were very sure they could tell the one from the other. We can only look back to those days and those attitudes with nostalgia, and go on searching out in art the authenticity that we miss elsewhere in our lives.

Is there an equivalent to this compound meaning of “authentic” in China? Yes, if we attend only to the class of objects to which it’s applicable, the ones that derived their value, in principle, from their being genuine products of the hands of particular people whose admirable character, so the theory went, would somehow impart a correspondingly admirable character to their artistic creations. The word zhen, for instance, with the basic meaning “real,” can be used for “authentic” in the compound zhenji or “authentic traces” of some artist ‘s hand--that is, a genuine work of painting or calligraphy; it can also be used in the compound zhenren, “authentic person” or “realized person” in the Daoist sense. The link between these, in art theory, is the idea of self-expression through the traces of one’s hand, which were read as the imprints of one’s mind, comparable to verbal expressions in poetry. Traces reliably from the hands of persons of a certain moral stature and spiritual attainment, then, were authentic in both senses.

S.S. (Su T-p, Wang Tingyun) On the left, a painting (much worn and retouched) of an old, twisted tree said to be by the great 11th century poet, statesman, and amateur artist Su Dongpo; on the right, another old tree and bamboo by a follower named Wang Tingyun, working about a century later. Both are examples of literati or scholar-amateur painting, a movement that originated in Su Dongpo’s time and was originally centered on himself and his associates; their paintings and their theories were aimed at separating their works from the kind done by professional masters. Su’s picture was read as a visible manifestation of his personal qualities and feelings, its forms (in the words of his friend Mi Fu) “queerly tangled like sorrows coiled up in his breast.” An early colophon to Wang Tingyun’s painting likens viewing it to “seeing the man himself.” For this kind of appreciation, attention to brushwork, the hand or touch of the artist, was paramount, far overriding any judgement of the work as representation, a category that was relegated to the lowest position on the scale of critical concerns. This emphasis on brushwork, along with a heavy reliance on documentary evidence--signatures, seals, inscriptions, records in catalogs--is the basis of traditional Chinese connoisseurship. Our esteemed friend Wang Jiqian in New York, one of its two leading practitioners in our time, has for decades been urging on us an almost single-minded concentration on brushwork as the key to appreciating Chinese painting.

It is a tradition that merits our deepest respect. At the same time, I have come to believe, at this late stage in my career, that as a basis for deciding questions of authenticity it has serious limitations. I’ve even written (to the dismay of some former students, who rightly feel that it contradicts what I once taught them) that brushwork alone, apart from its representational function, is just about useless as a criterion for judging authenticity. To say this is not to depreciate Wang Jiqian as a connoisseur, or traditional Chinese connoisseurship as a whole; he and his connoisseurial compatriots, I believe, are not really reading the brushstrokes purely as traces of the artist’s hand, but are affected also, even when they deny it, by how the brushstrokes function descriptively within the whole pictorial structure. There is some gap, that is, between what is articulated and what is practiced.

S,S. A work titled “Living Aloft” by one of the great literati masters, Wen Zhengming, painted in 1543, along with a copy of it. The Chinese emphasis on the execution of the work, the “handwriting” of the artist, in judgements of authenticity in painting and calligraphy, is valid to the extent that these belong to what Nelson Goodman calls “autographic” arts.[1] An accurate copy of a literary text or a musical score cannot be called a forgery of that work, while even a good copy of a painting or work of calligraphy, done to deceive, must be, since even the slightest divergence between it and the original will be significant in betraying a different hand, a different period, a different intent. I had best introduce here, before continuing, an objection that is commonly, even endlessly, raised: if one can’t tell the difference between the original and the copy, why does it matter which is which? But putting the question that way falsifies the situation one faces in real judgements of authenticity in art: if one can’t tell the difference, one goes back and studies the objects more, and tries to refine one’s perceptions, until one can. The objects will appear identical, that is, only until the differences between them, however subtle, are recognized. And typically, after some passage of time, they come to appear so obvious that one cannot imagine how one ever missed them. That is also the answer to the collector’s question: “Who cares whether it’s a genuine Wen Zhengming [or whatever] so long as I like it?”--the time will very probably arrive [we reply] when your eyes will be opened to the real qualities of paintings genuinely by Wen Zhengming, and you will see how your picture falls short, after which you can never again, however hard you try, feel the same way toward it.

At this point I want to shift from traditional Chinese criteria to some which I think have been undervalued if not ignored in that tradition, but which should be part of our toolbox when we work on problems of authenticity. We have begun in recent years to pay more attention to the social functions of Chinese paintings, in addition to their aesthetic qualities, and to read paintings for how they were designed to perform those functions. Wen Zhengming’s “Living Aloft” was painted for a certain Mr. Liu who had just left government service at the age of seventy and intended to build a two-story house where he would dwell in retirement “upstairs.” The artist, picturing Liu’s intention prior to its realization, situates him (with a visiting friend) in an open room, set above the trees and beyond a series of depth markers that we must pass over visually to reach the focal point of the composition. (Show) And although Wen Zhengming’s manner of painting in outlines and pale colors is commonly (and correctly) described as tending to flatten or deny space, he is able within it to separate his planes of depth and achieve a spatial structure of great clarity, in carrying out his expressive purpose. The copyist (whose work is at left, as you will have realized by now) fails to do the same, compressing his overlapping materials instead into a single plane, as copyists typically will.

S,S. The bare willows in the foreground of Wen’s picture stand out from the bank and the wall beyond, as the copyist’s do not. Note, in Wen Zhengming’s work, the construction of the wall, with flat stones set into the base to strengthen it against erosion and wear, a feature eliminated by the copyist, but one we will reencounter in another painting later.

S,S. The airy upstairs room rises above the masses of tree foliage, which are varied in ink tonal values and placed so that they surround the house believably on all sides. Here again the copyist fails. In every way, Wen Zhengming’s work successfully conveys in pictorial forms the ideal that inspired it, that of living reclusively aloft, above and beyond the dusty world.

To be sure, the copy would not fool a good Chinese connoisseur; Wang Jiqian would see it immediately for what it is. But there are many cases in which true and false are not so easily separated, and even major connoisseurs will fail to agree on whether or not a painting is from the hand of the master, purely on criteria of brushwork. The two most famous connoisseurs in China, traveling with a group touring U.S. collections some years ago, reportedly disagreed constantly, one pronouncing a work genuine and the other fake; and numerous cases can be found in literary records of contradicting judgements by prominent connoisseurs. Attention to a different question, that of how the pictorial structure works to deliver the intended message, on the assumption that the original artist cared about this as the copyist or forger did not, can often contribute importantly, I think, to a solution of these problems.

In discussing Wen Zhengming’s picture in this way we shift attention from the idea of integrity in the artist to a kind of pictorial integrity in the work. From the painting as the product of a particular master’s hand, that is, we turn, if only for a time, to consider the painting as a picture, which can have its own integrity, as if apart from the identity and character of the artist. Western art historians have written about how in the past two centuries or so the experience of viewing oil paintings was aestheticized and art-historicized, from seeing them as pictures made under certain iconographic and other pictorial constraints to fulfill certain functions, to looking at them for their styles and aesthetic properties, and their authenticity as products of the hands of particular masters. The same recognition for Chinese painting, of how the practice of connoisseurship has transformed the way the paintings are read and evaluated, has been slower in coming. But I believe the concept or criterion of pictorial integrity to which it will lead can be useful, sometimes even decisive, in authenticity questions.

It frequently happens also that a copyist, attempting to replicate some painted form, will misunderstand and garble it; recognizing such pictorial misunderstandings, I have argued, should enable us to decide with some finality which is which. (This argument, I may say, has not been universally accepted.) The difference, which should be a clear one, is between an artist depicting some object in the world around him, and one who is attempting to copy a form from a painting, without necessarily having first-hand knowledge of the thing it was meant to portray, or even being quite clear about just what it was. I will show two examples.

S,S. A handscroll representing the scenery of the Wu or Suzhou region by Wen Zhengming’s older contemporary Shen Zhou exists in three versions: one on silk, now in the Allen Memorial Museum at Oberlin; and two on paper, one of them in the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, the other in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. On the screen are two sections of the one on silk, which I believe to be the original, or at least the oldest and best. The place represented is Tianpingshan or Heavenly Peace Mountain, with a Buddhist temple and the ancestral shrine of a great Song-period scholar-statesman located at its base. I don’t have detail slides to show, but the sharp-eyed among you (I myself am no longer that) can make out in the temple wall the same insetting of flat stones in the base that we saw before in Wen Zhengming’s picture. Where the wall changes direction, a stone cannot overlap the join, for obvious reasons.

S --. The painter of the Nelson Gallery scroll, which I believe to be a copy, misunderstands this feature and draws stones of irregular shape piled loosely against the base of the wall, not set into it (as their jagged lower contour makes clear); one of them covers, impossibly, the join of two sections of the wall set at a right angle. (He also adds quite unnecessary bracketing to the modest roof of the gateway, which cannot be heavy enough to require such support.)

-- S. The copyist of the Palace Museum scroll, which must be one further step removed from the original, compounds the misunderstanding by adding shading to make the stones, now freely jumbled against the wall, stand out strongly from it. It’s hard to imagine any Suzhou resident, who saw walls of this kind every day, falling into such a misreading; the copies may have been made in some other place where the sight was not familiar. These pictorial blunders (and there are others in the scrolls, all favoring the Oberlin version) only confirm what I would conclude anyway from the style of the paintings, by asking: in which one do the brushstrokes perform their function of imparting shape and volume to the terrain forms and in which do they flatten them? But although we should be able to agree on that as well, it appears that we cannot, and must use criteria that have a more objective, I would even say decisive, character.

S,S. The other case, on which I carried on a contentious correspondence with three colleagues that has been published in part, deals with a well-known painting of “Examining Antiquities” supposed to be by the Ming master (15th-16th century) Du Jin, kept in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. I will present my side of the argument in the briefest outline. It is a large horizontal painting, probably mounted originally as a screen like the ones represented in it. I saw and photographed another version of the left one-third of the composition in Japan (slide at left) and wrote that it appeared more acceptable as issuing from the hand of Du Jin, or any good artist, than the corresponding section of the Taipei picture, in which we can find various representational mistakes.

S --. Later, another version of the right third turned up in a New York auction; it is now in the Yale University Art Gallery. (Large horizontal pictures were often cut up in this way to make hanging scrolls that would fit into tokonoma alcoves and other places where space was constricted.) This one also, whatever its relation might be to the picture in Japan, seemed to me more acceptable than the same part of the Taipei painting. The later stages of our correspondence concentrated on this part of the composition, in which two women are seen arranging objects on a table for the appreciation of the men, and removing the cover from a qin or zither, which one of the men will play.

S,S. Here are the two versions of this part, side by side. Apart from quite a few details in which the Yale version makes sense and the other doesn’t--the women’s hair ornaments, the scroll ties, the rumpling of their robes--the spatial relationship between the two women is tight and effective in the Yale version, and quite lost in the other. But perhaps the most telling detail--so much so that after pointing it out I wrote that I would like to add q.e.d., I have proved my case--is the bronze tripod.

S,S. Its three legs, in the Yale version, are set properly into the circular recess in the shallow stand, which flares slightly at the base. The copyist responsible for the Taipei picture messes up this passage completely. Besides exaggerating the flaring of the stand into a grotesque form, he inserts two legs of the tripod at diametrically opposite points in the circular recess; realizes that if he were to paint in the third leg, it must hang out beyond the stand; and decides to leave it out, to avoid doing over the whole large and elaborate picture, hoping that his viewers would overlook his blunder. As indeed they have, through centuries of inattention to the pictorial aspects of paintings. I now refer to anomalies of this kind, when we encounter them in paintings, as two-legged tripods, and make the contention, which seems to me self-evident and unassailable, that in cases such as this and the Shen Zhou scroll, the derivative works cannot be other than that--cannot, that is, be reasonably understood as anything other than the outcome of garbled attempts to replicate pre-existing pictorial configurations. No appeals to good artists having bad days, or to clumsy studio assistants (who would quickly have lost their jobs), or to the Chinese painter’s scorn for petty matters of representation, can shake this. To say (as has been said) that I am advocating realism in Chinese painting, and that this is an inappropriate criterion, is to miss the point entirely and deliberately. Realism is not at issue; what is at issue is simply the need for the artist to draw forms that are representationally readable, as any good artist will do, whatever his style.

S,S. A different set of problems is presented by paintings wrongly attributed--works by lesser artists credited to greater ones, to increase their value, or works by painters whose skills permitted them to re-create, well enough to deceive their contemporaries, the styles of the old masters. One who could do this was the late 17th-early 18th century landscapist Wang Hui--he is said to have been urged by dealers not to sign his works in old styles, so that they could be sold with spurious claims to antiquity. It seems likely that Wang Hui also made deliberate forgeries on occasion. The success he enjoyed in this may seem strange to us now, when his imitations leave us unconvinced. Until quite recently, the winter landscape by Wang Hui at left might have been seen hanging in the National Palace Museum in Taipei beside the great work of the 10th-11th century master Fan Kuan at right, one of the fairly few unquestioned masterworks of early landscape; and Wang’s work would have been identified in the wall label as by Fan Kuan’s contemporary Xu Daoning. In attempting to argue why it cannot possibly be a work of early date or by Xu Daoning, we would have to resort to criteria that are quite foreign to traditional Chinese connoisseurship: the idea of period style, or (as I would do) the impossibility of finding in early landscape any such violent distortions of natural form as are seen here. (Once one notices the human foot at the top, the picture can no longer be taken seriously.) One cannot arrive at a valid judgement in this case, I believe, by criteria of brushwork alone. But in resorting to others, we open ourselves to charges of applying, in an Orientalist way, inappropriate western standards to Chinese painting.

S --. It is not that the Fan Kuan painting has no distinctive brushwork, but that the hand of the artist is absorbed into the deeply naturalistic portrayal of geological forms and phenomena, and cannot be read as symptomatic of the artist’s personality. The painting is not genuine, then, because it is “in the hand of Fan Kuan” but because it fulfills criteria we can derive from other reliable landscape paintings of early Song date, including the quality I am calling, while realizing that the term is imprecise and vulnerable, “pictorial integrity.”

S --. This lack of shared vocabulary and common conceptual tools for dealing with early painting makes it difficult for those of us trained in western art history to discuss questions of authenticity with Chinese colleagues, who are, some of them, extremely sharp-eyed--on the whole, probably better than we--for later Chinese painting, but less secure, I think, in the early periods. I’ve been challenged more than once in China, for instance, to explain why this work ascribed to Fan Kuan in the Tientsin Museum, much reproduced in Chinese books, is not as believable for us as the painting in Taipei, and have not found it easy to do. (It has to do with observing how elements of the artist’s style that begin as descriptive of natural appearances end up as schematic and heavy-handed conventions in the works of followers.) The most famous connoisseur in China, Xu Bangda, was largely responsible for putting together the great Palace Museum collection in Beijing, so there can be no question about the high level of his judgements of authenticity in paintings. But when he writes about his methods, matters of style are scarcely brought into play. He does it, that is, without articulating it; and that is probably true of a great deal of Chinese connoisseurship. But realizing this does not make our communication easier.

S --. In this copy by Wang Hui of Fan Kuan’s masterwork, Wang does use brushwork and a system of forms that is more distinctively his own, and a judgement on the basis of brushwork could in principle be validly made. But we know that this copy was preferred by the 18th-century Qianlong Emperor and his court connoisseurs to the original, as an early masterwork; and until fairly recently one could find it hanging in the Palace Museum as the work of Fan Kuan.

I should emphasize here that I am certainly not claiming infallibility--I could give another lecture on connoisseurial mistakes I have made, some of them quite embarrassing. I am only saying that if we can bring ourselves to look at the paintings as pictures, as they were originally intended, and look for what I now call pictorial integrity, we will often--not always, but often--find the solution to our problems at hand.

S,S. Finally, and briefly, the problem of the deliberate forger. For European painting, the most famous of recent times was Hans van Meegeren, the Dutch artist who in the 1930s forged Vermeer and other 17th century Dutch painters, and whose success, for a limited period of time, has stimulated a whole reconsideration of the problem of forgeries. For Chinese painting, it is without question Zhang Daqian, who died in 1983. (Describe photos. Zhang, whom I knew well, was much more likeable and stable than van Meegeren, who seems to have been embittered and neurotic.) A major painter in his own right, Zhang Daqian was also a dealer--many genuine old paintings passed through his hands--and knowledgeable enough as a scholar to construct elaborate provenances for his forgeries, a function usually performed in the west by people other than the artist. As a forger Zhang was more brilliant and versatile by far than van Meegeren, since his fabrications covered most of the history of Chinese painting, at least from the 8th century to the 18th, and an astonishing number of artists--a circumstance that obviously calls into question any confidence in the “artist’s hand” as an indicator of authorship. For certain painters, notably the great 17th-18th century Individualist master Shitao, determining a reliable oeuvre is even today made difficult by the danger of including Zhang Daqian’s forgeries in it.

S,S. Most interesting for the art historian, however, are Zhang Daqian’s fakes of early paintings. Early in his career he visited the cave temples at Dunhuang and copied many of the Buddhist wall paintings; on this basis he went on to produce also quite a few forgeries of Dunhuang portable paintings on silk, of the kind that were found in some numbers in the caves. One, at left and in the detail, was ably dealt with in the 1962 article by Wen Fong, who recognized it as copied from one of the published wall paintings at Dunhuang (at right in the double slide.) As Fong points out, the ability of the nameless Tang master to render three-dimensional form readably in volumetric line drawing (for instance, in the Bodhisattva’s ear and hand) proves unrecapturable for the 20th-century artist, however skilled he may be for his time. I could not easily tell you why, even if time permitted; except to say it’s the same reason we cannot compose a completely convincing Shakespeare sonnet or Mozart quartet, or paint a Raphael or a Vermeer that will hold up for long. Wen Fong recounts how this painting was put through exhaustive technical analysis in Tokyo, and passed so swimmingly that “There were . . . plans afoot to publish the findings as a standard textbook analysis of a T’ang painting.”

S,S. Another of Zhang’s Dunhuang forgeries was offered to the Freer Gallery of Art while I was curator there, in 1957 or ‘58, and fared less well under examination: the yellow pigment proved to be a chemical compound not used until the 19th century, and our then-scroll mounter Takashi Sugiura immediately pronounced the silk to be modern Japanese. Technical examination of paintings can sometimes supply negative evidence; it can virtually never prove authenticity.

S,S. When Zhang was copying an earlier picture--and his sources were many and varied--his forgeries can sometimes be detected by identifying his model. He might begin, as here, with a woodblock print from an 18th century Japanese book, and turn it into an 8th century Chinese painting;

S,S. or he might adopt the composition of a painting by the modern Japanese artist Hashimoto Kansetsu, done in 1929, and transform it into a long-lost work by the Tang (also eighth century) figure master Zhang Xuan. I have identified the sources of quite a few of Zhang’s forgeries, and my colleague Fu Shen identified others in the catalog for his 1991 Zhang Daqian exhibition, in which some of Zhang’s forgeries were included as such.

S,S. Hans van Meegeren raised an embarrassing problem for art historians in the European painting field; Zhang Daqian has done the same for us. Van Meegeren’s “Disciples at Emaus,” the most successful of his “Vermeer” forgeries and the one on which he expended the most time and care, both in painting it and in aging it, not only convinced major specialists at the time, but still has its defenders, who insist that it should be exempted from the list of spurious works. And yet any good graduate student in that field could write a convincing essay now on why it cannot be a work of Vermeer or of the 17th century; and not simply by hindsight--it “looks” wrong, and is demonstrably wrong, in style. Among other criteria, our graduate student would use van Meegeren’s later and more quickly painted forgeries, such as the “Christ Among the Doctors” at right, to identify the forger’s style and hand and recognize them in the “Disciples at Emaus.”

--S. The same is true of Zhang Daqian’s forgeries--collectively, they serve to betray each other. This painting, supposed to be by the Tang-period horse specialist Han Gan, was purchased for an unprecedentedly high price by the French government in the 1950s; this was before others of Zhang’s forgeries in other public collections came to be identified and available for comparison. An impressive list of eminent art historians and sinologues endorsed the purchase. While I was teaching at Berkeley, I regularly used the work (in this slide) as a test piece for students in my early Chinese painting class, and the sharp-eyed ones wrote about why it could not possibly be a work of Tang date. (Show what’s wrong.)

S--. (Another by van Meegeren: The Last Supper. Exactly the same fault: fails to set figures convincingly in space.)

How to reconcile these judgements? I’m certainly not claiming that my teaching methods turned my students into better connoisseurs than their well-established elders, any more than the hypothetical grad student in European painting is better than the experts who authenticated the van Meegerens. I can only echo the common observation that forgeries have a limited life, and that impressive finish and an appearance of great age can divert even sophisticated viewers of a work of art into failing to subject it to a skeptical visual analysis, or to accept the outcome easily when it proves negative.

Those of you who keep up with events in the art world will be aware that I have avoided, as Jerome probably will avoid, touching on a work that has been a center of heavy controversy over the past two years or so, a work that I would regard as Zhang Daqian’s “Disciples at Emaus” in that it’s his most carefully done, most successful forgery, so much so that many people who recognize the others still balk at this one. I suspect that the choice of “Chinese Art and Authenticity” as the theme for tonight’s meeting may have been suggested by the numerous reports of this controversy in the popular press, and the buzz about it in academic circles. Both Jerome and I felt, however, that we’ve talked and written and published enough about that painting and its problems already, and that a more general consideration of larger issues was in order. And yet, much of what I’ve said tonight is directly relevant to that work; especially in this last section, I have in effect been talking around it without mentioning it. There is quite enough to read on that subject for anyone who wants to pursue it. And now, with great anticipation and confidence, I yield the podium to Professor Jerome Silbergeld.