CLP 29: 1998 "The Beauty's Face in Later Chinese Painting." Lecture at Univ. of Chicago

The Beauty's Face in Later Chinese Painting (James Cahill lecture, April 23, 1998, Chicago.)

Intro. Happy to be speaking on eve of symposium. Hope, however, that no one has come in expectation of something really methodologically ambitious, something that aims at laying out issues and state-of-field proposals abt this topic, to be developed in two days that follow. This will be, like my whole approach, somewhat old-fashioned, theoretically low-powered--not at all, in this respect, on level of some, at least, of papers we will be hearing during next two days. In fact, kind of lecture that could almost dispense with words altogether. Old art historians, of generation before mine, for whom style and imagery and visual aspects of work of art were primary objects of concern, were drawn to idea of delivering a wordless lecture (my teacher Max Loehr talked of this): assembling slides, juxtaposing them in right way, letting them and their relationships speak for themselves. Even thinking about such a lecture betrays a faith in power of images to speak for themselves, at least collectively. But unrealizable, in my experience--we always need, in the end, to talk, however superfluously. Please understand, though, that principal attraction of my talk will be great series of slides that I've assembled over some years of working on representations of women in late Ch. ptg. I hope that these, and the few relatively simple things I have to say about them, will serve to point others in fruitful directions for more focused investigations.

SS. (Details from Ch'iu Ying, Ku Hung-chung paintings) One of familiar truths abt Chinese ptgs is that while the faces of men in them are permitted to exhibit particular traits that give the effect, at least, of revealing indiv. character, women's faces are simply depicted according to some type of beauty, and within a given period and school of indiv. style are more or less uniform, indistinguishable. But, like most familiar truths, this one has its limits, isn't universally applicable. The kinds of ptg about which we make this point are works such as these: Ku Hung-chung, Ch'iu Ying,

S -- The faces will of course differ by period, and according to individual style--as Ch'iu Ying's differ from his contemporary T'ang Yin's (his "Beauties of Shu") in ways that any good connoisseur can define. Within a particular period and school and individual style, however, they tend to be more or less uniform. But not always. What I want to do today is explore briefly the exceptions, types of differentiation in depictions of women's faces, concentrating on the 17th and 18th centuries, the period of my current interest. First, I will look briefly into the phenomenon of how the somewhat blurred and permeable line that divides portraits of women from generic pictures of beautiful women permits crossovers, both real and fictional. I will also argue that there is a period from late Ming through mid-18th century or so--which is the period in which most interesting ptgs of women are done, the ones on which my study concentrates--when even the generic depictions of beautiful women, the genre called in Chinese mei-jen hua, exhibit subtle but significant differentiations, nuances that can signify or at least suggest distinctions of mood, situation, social class., and so forth It is true that the social identities and roles of the mei-jen depicted are usually left largely unspecified, so as to leave more room for the construction of male fantasies around them. But mostly they can be thought of as belonging to the broad class of concubines and courtesans, who in this period could be presented in literature and painting as objects of romantic love and sexual desire, as proper wives ordinarily weren't. (Exceptions, of course.) And the possibility of romantic encounters and liaisons is exactly what most of the pictures are meant to conjure up.

,S. When the period of my main concern is over, that is by late 18th-early 19c, what remains are the familiar winsome, simpering beauties that any traditional Chinese painting specialist or collector will immediately think of if you say shih-nü hua, the all-embracing term for pictures of women. (Fei Tan-hsü 1821, Ku Lo a bit later.) When I tell them I am interested in late-period pictures of beautiful women, I sometimes have to spend the next hour looking at these, without much enthusiasm. This is another category that my talk tonight, like my larger study, will mostly leave out as relatively uninteresting. They are the "respectable" side of beautiful-women painting--decorous, associated with particular name-artists--where the ones I will show are mostly not respectable objects for collecting.

S,S. (Details from Sou-shan t'u scroll). In narrative painting of all periods, the roles and situations of the women may sometimes require that the artist alter their usually impassive expressions, as here in the Sou-shan t'u (Clearing Out the Mountain) scenes in which the demon-women are attacked by fierce birds and beasts. (Details from the late Sung example in the Palace Museum, Beijing.) But these are special cases, exceptions that lie somewhat outside our subject.

S,S. Turning to one of our central problems, the ambiguities or cross-genre slippages that permitted portraits to be read as mei-jen and vice-versa, we can begin by noting several cases in which generic beautiful-woman pictures have been misrepresented as portraits of particular women--the well-known example at the right furnished with an interpolated inscription claiming it as a portrait of Liu Ju-shih, the courtesan-poet of the Ming-Qing transition; the one at left, in the British Museum, cataloged and published as "Portrait of a Lady." These are deceptions fairly easy to detect--the settings and postures and attributes of the figures belong to the conventions of mei-jen, chosen to present them as sexually inviting and accessible, and are quite unsuitable for portraits, even of women who had emerged, as Liu Ju-shih had, from the world of the bordellos. (The setting of the so-called Liu Ju-shih portrait has been cut away, but can be reconstructed from another version of the composition, known through an old publication.) These indicators of accessibility would not have been tolerated, I have argued, in their portraits by the subjects themselves. The pictures have in fact been "upgraded," that is to say falsified, in later times by dealers or other owners to make them more respectable and saleable.

S,S. In a similar way, a set of twelve paintings of beautiful palace ladies in their chambers, done as panels of a screen in the late K'ang-hsi period, were misidentified as portraits of the "Twelve Consorts of the Yung-cheng Emperor" and published and exhibited as that, until their true character was clarified through the discovery of a document revealing their true origin.

S,S. (Faces of "Liu Ju-shih," BM ptg.) I would like to be able to say, then, that distinguishing portraits from pin-ups presents no real problem, if only one understands the codes of signification for the two genres that were familiar to the artists and their audiences. And for these examples, that should be true, I think. But the matter is not so simple. The very fact that the deceptions went undetected for so long testifies, at least, that the codes had been largely forgotten by the time the pictures were transformed, moved from an uncollectible category to a collectible one.

Recent writings by Judith Zeitlin have presented cases in Ming-Ch'ing fiction and drama in which the crossovers between generic beauty and portrait are crucial to the story. (Examples: summarize.) This might sometimes, we can speculate, have been a literary device for praising the woman's beauty: she was so lovely that a true portrait of her was indistinguishable from a beautiful-woman painting. I am inclined to believe, in any case, that for the painters and their immediate clientele, cases of confusion would have been rare and exceptional. When the artist portrays the woman ambiguously, as sometimes happens, it is for a deliberate purpose.

S,S. The face of the woman who appears in the portrait of Ho T'ien-chang by Ch'en Hung-shou, for instance, although she is presumably to be identified as Ho's wife or a favorite concubine, appears to belong to an ideal type rather than to a particular person--this in contrast to the face of Ho T'ien-chang himself, which asserts an individual identity.

S --. The painting attributes to her only a kind of provisional status, seeming to occupy the world of art--again in contrast to his substantial presence and individualized face. As is all too common in works of this kind, the woman is included more as an attribute or possession of his than as a person in her own right, and in representing her this way the artist is in effect complimenting Ho.

S,S. Ch'en Hung-shou, although he presents Ho T'ien-chang's consort here as a pretty face, on another occasion could portray a woman he knew (I do not have the slide here) in a way that recognized her individuality and intelligence. In others of his paintings, moreover, Ch'en Hung-shou regularly sets women in roles that do not subordinate them to men, attributing to them literary, musical, and other talents and according them a measure of instrumentality in their lives. (A fan in the Metropolitan Museum at left, in which the man and his wife listen to the lutenist as equals; his well-known 1638 birthday picture for his aunt in which she is identified with a woman who gave lectures on a certain classical text, delivering an interpretation that had been transmitted only in her family.)

Ch'en is one of several men (the others I think of are the later litterateurs Li Yü and Yüan Mei) who, in this period when women's independent accomplishments are being increasingly recognized but also debated, take an ambivalent stance: on the one hand notorious womanizers, they also exhibit a respect for women's achievements that is rare among their male contemporaries, at least as attested in their preserved writings and recorded behavior.

S,S. (Mme Hotung again; anon. ptg in Met) Even these men who advocated education and freedom for women seem to have continued to hold a fundamental belief that beauty was women's prime attribute, and pleasing men with it their principal function. The early Ch'ing litterateur Li Yü, although he offers in one of his writings the opinion that a woman's beauty derives less from her physical attributes than from her deportment and from an elusive "charm," believed that a light complexion, smooth and unblemished, was of prime importance in a woman's appearance; he cites approvingly a line from the Book of Odes, "Ah, paleness makes for beauty." Next, in Li's opinion, are the eyebrows, which must be gracefully curved, and the eyes, which must be clear, with a steady gaze. After these come the hands and feet.[1] Literary conventions for describing beautiful women offer endlessly-repeated similes: hair like clouds, eyebrows like moth antennae or distant mountains, a mouth like a cherry, flesh like snow or white jade, and so forth.[2] The woman is characterized in terms that tend to emphasize transitory loveliness: she is like the willow beneath a spring moon, or a lotus rising from the water.

S,S. Yüan Mei, like Li Yü, admired and actively supported the engagement of women in literary composition, and had many gentry women writers among his friends and students. His practice of giving some of them poetry lessons in his Sui-yüan Garden in Yangchou, instead of in their homes, was considered scandalous by strict Confucianists such as Chang Hsüeh-ch'eng, for whom a literary (instead of a properly classical) education for them was already an affront to traditional morality.[3] A handscroll painting portraying a gathering that Yüan Mei and a group of woman poets held at the West Lake in Hangchou in 1792 allows us to visualize, although the place is different, the gatherings in the Sui-yüan Garden, idealized and overlaid with literary and pictorial resonances.

-- S (another section) The composition evokes such precedents as the "Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden," in which the eleventh-century Su Tung-p'o and his friends are seen practicing painting and calligraphy, and the "Orchid Pavilion Gathering" in which the calligrapher Wang Hsi-chih, seated in a pavilion at one end of the scroll, writes a preface to the poems composed by the other participants. Here it is Yüan Mei, at the age of 76, who sits in the pavilion with paper before him and brush in hand; the women engage in such long-established literati pursuits as fishing, painting a branch of blossoming plum, playing the zither and the flute, inscribing a banana-palm leaf, and leaning on a stalk of bamboo. The two minor artists who collaborated on the scroll, a portraitist and a landscapist, differentiate the figures only a little by age and facial type, although they are intended as portraits of particular literary women.

S -- (a distorted detail of a painting we'll consider later.) Like Li Yü, Yüan Mei saw women ultimately as sexual objects and had his own strong beliefs about criteria for choosing among them; also like Li Yü, he placed a good complexion uppermost among these. He may have shared in principle the belief that "beauty is only skin-deep,"[4] but in moments of decision he goes for great skin. Criticizing a man who had rejected a concubine because her feet were too big, he pronounces loftily that men who are really "enlightened in sexual matters . . . know that a girl's face, eyes, and skin complexion are far more important than the size of her feet."[5] Moreover, he carries that preference, presented there as a universal aesthetic judgement, into the particulars of his own life. In 1748 he went to inspect a young girl whom a fellow-official had offered him as a concubine. "She was eighteen and had a very good figure," he writes. "She let me look her up and down, draw back her dress and lift the hair from her temples without seeming to resent it in the least. I had half a mind to take her. But her complexion was not quite up to the mark, and I gave up the idea."[6] In 1754 he rejected another girl, who had been taken into his household on the assumption that she would become his concubine, because she had caught smallpox and was pock-marked; he gave her instead to a Mongol general, whose may have been less fastidious in his tastes.[7]

-- S. How Yüan himself looked--somewhat later in his life, to be sure, and portrayed with a strong element of caricature--is revealed in the famous 1781 portrait by Lo P'ing. This is the man for whom the two young women lost their chances of becoming concubines through having less-than-perfect complexions. Blemishes in physical appearance could be tolerated in a man, but not in a woman, especially a woman who was to become one's property; one would not acquire a painting with mildew spots, or a ceramic vase with a badly stained or pitted surface.

S -- In 1790, when Yüan Mei was 75 (by Chinese count), a certain Sung-p'o asked him, on their initial meeting, to compose an inscription for an anonymous mei-jen or beautiful-woman picture. Sung-p'o may have been a newly-rich Yangchou merchant too unsophisticated to know that eminent literati were not ordinarily asked to inscribe such low-class paintings. Yüan, presumably after accepting some gift that obligated him to the man, dashed off a quatrain spontaneously, ending with the line "We don't know what man she is thinking of in her heart." And he concludes his prose note by saying that if the beauty could read his inscription, it would add to her artful smile. Imaginary though the woman may be, Yüan's urge is still to engage himself somehow with her, to be the imagined lover in her thoughts. Like other beauties in mei-jen paintings, she conforms with Yüan's ideal in the unnatural whiteness of her face and breast, presumably achieved by the application of cosmetics (her exposed hand is a more natural color.) The woman's face: reveals a slight inwardness, a bit dreamy. We are to understand, of course, as always in such pictures, that she is dreaming of her lover, awaiting his coming... (etc. Flower on banana tree.) The picture belongs, then, to the category of meiren or beautiful woman paintings.

S,S. A few more instances of portraiture, and quasi-portraiture, before we return to the generic meiren. By "quasi-portraiture" I mean to designate imaginary portraits of women of the past, a category that appears, understandably, to occupy a midway position between real portraits from life and the generic pictures of beautiful women, neither so individualized as the former nor so absorbed into a type as the latter. Good examples are the two surviving portraits of the Sung-period poet Li Ch'ing-chao painted by Ts'ui Hui, an artist active in the north in the early 18th century who is taking on an unexpected importance in my study, because of the quality and distinctiveness of his work. Both are in the Palace Museum, Beijing. The smaller of the two portrays her reclining on a rock, as a male poet might do in a painting, looking out at the viewer interestedly but not invitingly. The image has some resemblance, not unexpectedly, to a sub-type within the meiren genre, the literary woman as pin-up (the British Museum picture shown earlier is a good example.)

S,S. But the other, much more interesting depiction of Li Ch'ing-chao by Ts'ui Hui is a hanging scroll that bears only his seals. She is represented in her study, standing, pulling back the chair, welcoming a guest who, we assume, is a fellow poet, whether male or female. Nothing here suggests sexual invitation. The face is that of a poised, self-sufficient person; a touch of concern is expressed in the slanting eyebrows and piercing eyes. In such a picture as this, as in certain real portraits we will see, the artist adapts the formula of the "beauty's face" as it was current in his particular time and school to the needs of representing a subject for which the formulaic face would be inappropriate.

S,S. Imaginary portraits of famous courtesans of the past are to be seen in some number, and are of lesser interest, since the artists, with no visual information about how their subjects looked, feel no requirement or basis for departing more than slightly from the formula. Real portraits of courtesans done from life, or at least during the person's lifetime and presumably reflecting some first-hand knowledge of her physiognomy, are rarer; in fact, I know only two. Both support, I think, the argument that real portraits and generic pictures of beautiful women were kept distinct by the artists and most of their audiences. This one, a joint work of the early Ch'ing masters of Nanking Wu Hung and Fan Ch'i, portrays K'ou Mei or K'ou Pai-men, a courtesan of the Ch'in-Huai pleasure district in Nanking who was a contemporary of the artists. An inscription written later on the painting supplies information about her: she was bought out at the age of 18 or 19 by a high official named Chu Kuo-pi and became his concubine. When, upon the fall of Nanjing to the Manchus in 1645, Chu was put under house arrrest and suffered the confiscation of all his property, K'ou Mei repaid him by purchasing his freedom with a thousand pieces of gold. When went back then to the life of prostitution, presumably to recoup her fortunes and provide for her later years. She would drink all day with guests, and when by evening she was inebriated shewould give vent to her feelings in singing and weeping. It is at this stage of her career that she is portrayed, presumably from in the portrait, done in 1651.

She sits under a tree, as male poets do sometimes in their portraits, her gesture and tilted head seem expressive of some inner state or feeling, not directed outward to some imagined viewer; she seems in fact to be comfortably alone in nature, perhaps composing a poem. Her face, while simply drawn, reveals the "refined, quiet beauty" praised in the inscription, and is the face of an individual, not accomodated to some impersonal ideal of beauty. Sexuality is de-emphasized in the picture, and the gender-specific avoided; these aspects of it are important, but cannot be explored here.

S,S. The other example known to me is a small but remarkable picture bearing the title "True Face of Courtesan Tung." Another woman of the Ch'in-Huai district in Nanjing, Courtesan Tung herself had it painted around 1560 by the well-known artist Ch'ien Ku, to send to her lover Wang Huai, an official who came from a prominent family of Hsiu-ning in Anhui. The poet and collector Huang Chi-shui provides this information in his preface composed in 1561 for a long series of poems that accompany the painting; two other noted literai of the time, Mo Shih-lung and Hsiang Sheng-mo, wrote titles for it. According to Huang Chi-shui's account, she was worried that her lover's memory of her face would fade over a separation of several years, and had this "true image" of it made to send to him, to remind him of her beauty. Through the sensitivity and artistic skill of Ch'ien Ku she also reminds him, and persuades us, that this beauty was more than a surface attribute. Her hair is done up plainly in a bun; her adornments, earring and hairpins, are similarly modest, as is her unornamented jacket. She turns away in a reserved three-quarter view, not looking outward toward us--or, more properly, toward her lover Wang Huai, the intended viewer of the picture. And once more, the drawing of her eyes, eyebrows, and mouth indicates intelligence and character more than conventional prettiness.

-- S. As Judith Zeitlin points out, when the beauty in a story or play has her portrait painted, or paints it herself, it usually portends her imminent death--she is leaving a pictorial record of her beauty before it is too late. The classical case is in the play Mu-tan T'ing or Peony Pavilion, to which this is an illustration: the heroine Tu Li-niang paints her self-portrait by observing her face in a mirror and simply copying it (a version of how portraiture is accomplished that itself calls into question the writer's understanding of it.) We can hope that the portrait of Courtesan Tung, so far as I know the only extant work that can be recognized as the outcome of such a resolve on the woman's part, presaged no such tragic end for her. (I haven't pursued the matter enough to know for sure.)

-- S. The seeming informality and modesty of Ch'ien Ku's portrait might persuade us that it is drawn directly from life; and it may indeed have been. But normal practice in China was for the portraitist to make a prelimary drawing that the sitter would approve before the finished portrait was done. Lo P'ing's portrayal of Yuan Mei, shown earlier, was an example; another is this, one of an album of late Ming portraits of famous men of Chekiang province in the Nanking Museum. The "warts-and-all" realism of these prelimary drawings would presumably have given way to smoothed-out, blander faces in the finished works. If we had a similar series of portraits of women done from life, would they prove to be raw representations like these?

S,S. Although no series of sketch-portraits of women survives from so early a date, to my knowledge, some part of an answer might be seen in a set of albums, of undeterminate date (but probably late), owned by the calligrapher-scholar Huang Miaozi, who bought them in Beijing in the 1950s with the understanding that they had come from a famous portrait studio located in the north part of the capital. Which of them are from life and which posthumous, from the corpse or even (if we can believe popular accounts) from descriptions of the deceased offered by family members, is beyond determination. In any case, they offer evidence that where male portraits could be strongly differentiated and unflattering, those of women, at least of younger women, deviated less from the ideal of feminine beauty. In appreciating them we can recognize the double charge faced by the portraitist of these subjects.

S,S. (Two more.) On the one hand, we can imagine, the women and their husbands or lovers (as in the "Courtesan Tung" picture) must have appreciated having them portrayed in images that conformed enough to the "beauty's face" ideal of their time flatter them slightly by ascribing to them some measure of beauty; on the other hand, they wanted their portraits to be recognizable as representations of themselves as distinct individuals. Any artist who has made portraits of younger women, in whatever tradition, must surely have learned to maneuver between these two sets of expectations. By defining in this way the problem faced by portraitists of women we can both understand the occasional ambiguities that allowed portraits to be mistaken for meiren or the reverse, and recognize that the distinction, both in intent and in outcome, was nonetheless real and normally unproblematic for those conversant with the code.

S,S. (An early 18th cent. portrait of a woman in the Nelson Gallery, K.C.) It is clear that far less deviation from the ideal was tolerated in portraits of women. Ch'ien Ku, then, had the double charge or "painter's brief" (in Baxandall's term) of conveying Courtesan Tung's beauty, the very purpose of his painting, and at the same time conveying enough of her distinguishing features to make the picture recognizable as her portrait. And the features that answer to the latter of these two requirements are the ones that distinguish the picture, and other portraits from life of women, however beautiful, from generic mei-jen paintings.

S,S. Two more examples, details from group portraits of families, late 17th and 18th centuries, to conclude this section of my talk. Portrait faces, especially of women, understandably exhibit no distinct facial expressions; any woman having her portrait done would surely have preferred the infinite options of an impassive face to the narrower characterization imposed by a particular expression. But the generic meiren paintings, because they ordinarily situate the women within particular implicit narratives, do allow a degree of facial expressiveness, an opening that was exploited to good effect by some of the artists who painted them from the late Ming through the middle Ch'ing period. I will conclude with a look at the kinds of differentiation we can find in them.

S,S. The ability of Japanese print designers, notably the late18th century master Utamaro, to START HERE

Put in Yü Chih-ting here: bitter look, vs. (ptg that could almost be companion piece) drowsy pleasure.

(Then on to: Huang Shih-fu)

A picture titled "A Fairy Beauty at Quiet Rest," painted in 1640 by a minor master from Fukien named Huang Shih-fu, portrays the charming girl seated on a garden rock, wearing a see-through gauze jacket over the apron-like undergarment called mo-hsiung. This is not a portrayal of a woman waiting for her lover to come; her look and gesture imply the presence of a beholder, and the poem confirms this, beginning "Dimly one perceives a wafting of faint fragrance" and containing the lines "She does not speak, yet her love is sincere;/ She blushes but entices a tacit intimacy." Her dishabille in the presence of a man (with whom the viewer of the painting identifies) implies her sexual availability, which is again underscored in the poem, and in her face, with narrowed eyes and little finger touching her mouth. The artist's inscription dedicates the picture to a certain "Old Mr. Ts'an" and notes that it is the eighteenth scroll, presumably of a series. Were these portraits of old Mr. Ts'an's concubines, or famous courtesans of some pleasure district, or a catalog of types of beauty, like the print series designed by Utamaro in 18th-century Japan? We can only guess; but we can recognize in the picture one type of particularized facial expression: the woman aware of being looked at by a man, her lover or potential lover. Here, the male viewer of the painting can occupy this position in imagination.

(my ptg, turning out light)

S,S. But even when a man is represented in the painting, as in this picture of Yang Kuei-fei bathing, probably by Ku Chien-lung of the early Ch'ing, the viewer can still be enticed into a feeling of complicity by the woman's look, directed outward toward him, and by her self-conscious smile which the the imperial voyeur himself cannot see, since her face is turned toward us and away from him.

S,S. Such complicity with an implied viewer outside the painting would be unthinkable when the male lover portrayed is not a figure from the distant past, but the reigning emperor--here Ch'ien-lung, for whom this pair of paintings was done, probably as a collaboration between Chin T'ing-piao and Lang Shih-ning or Castiglione. The expression on the face of Ch'ien-lung's consort is a response to the imperial gaze, indicating her consciousness of it in her raised eyebrows and slightly crooked smile: Yes, it says, I know you are looking at me, and am entirely receptive.

S,S. (what? 8 Consorts of T'ang Yin.) A mid-18th century writer named Chiang I, in a note on paintings of beautiful women (one of the very few references to them in the literature), advises that "their eyes can be large or small, their eyebrows sparse or heavy; their faces are all unlike each other. But any of these can be the ultimate in beauty. You only have to capture their essence in their gaze." (Tu-hua chi-wen, in Hua-yüan pi-chi, 3b.)

S.S. Cf. Ukiyo-e prints (or ptgs) in Japan. Similarly, women's faces tend to be uniform in any one period & style; but

S,S. (Utamaro) When it's to artist's purpose, (etc.--class; mood. Two pairs?)

S,S. In China, facial expression on women usually indicated low social class, or (as here) demonic status; used when narrative required it. (explain). But well-born women, presented as possessions of men, could only ...

How to escape this? Portraits, of course; but that's beyond our subject. Portraits of courtesans, done during their lifetimes: only two known to me. (Show, discuss.)

Another type that permits escape from "pretty face" picture: imaginary portraits of women of past. Most interesting of these known to me are two by little-noticed artist named Ts'ui Hui, active in north in late K'ang-hsi/Yung-cheng, somehow assoc. w. Chiao Ping-chen and Leng Mei. (Two pictures of Li Ch'ing-chao, Sung poet.) That this was a period when women had more access to literary education is now known through quite a few studies, including those of Dorothy Ko. Also big issue of controversy among men, bet. those such as Li Yü and Yüan Chiang who favored giving them a literary education so that they could compose poetry and prose--as indeed they did, again subj. of much recent scholarship--and those such as Chang Hsüeh-tseng who argued strongly (and angrily, Yüan Mei being one of his targets) that education for women should be limited to Confucian moral texts, both to guide them in their own deportment and to make them more effective as teachers of their children, especially male children. (Etc.) We would like to know about audience and patronage for such ptgs, and would like to locate it somewhere within the coteries and networks of literary women that were highly dev. by this time. But no firm evidence. Can only say that while images of literary women can be intended as objects of desire by men, as in examples we'll see later, these don't appear to be that--these women make none of enticing gestures, have none of come-hither attributes, that identify those other paintings.

Under "Mme Hotung" etc.: note that although face remains nearly expressionless, tilt of head, posture, can change whole effect: in this, like Nô dance-drama and Bunraku puppet theater in Japan: masks, but can be made subtly expressive by angle of view. Kuan-yin seems to express compassion, "Mme Hotung" allure, etc. In family scene, expres. of concern?

References in the text

[1]Ch'en Tung-yüan, "Feng-chien she-hui nan-tzu yen-chung ti nü-hsing mei yü Ch'ing-tai ti hsiao-chiao k'uang" (Female Beauty as Perceived by Men in Feudal Society and the Ch'ing Dynasty Craze for Footbinding,) in Shansi People's Publishing House, ed., (Widowhood, Remarriage, Footbinding, etc.: An Investigation into All Aspects of Women's Lives in Ancient China,) Hsi-an, Shansi People's Publishing House, pp. 183-84, includes a long discussion of Li Yü's views on feminine beauty and charm. Paul Ropp, "The Seeds of Change," p. 6, summarizes Li Yü's views.

[2]Levy, Mist and Flowers, p. 8.

[3]Ellen Widmer, "Epistolatory World," pp. 1, 32-34.

[4]Judith Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale Stanford, 1993, pp. 125-6, cites stories from Liao-chai chih-i and Lieh-nü chuan that have this as their underlying moral.

[5]This summary of Yüan's view is by Paul Ropp, in "Seeds of Change," p. 14.

[6]Waley, p. 46.

[7]Ibid. p. 84.

CLP 25, 1997 “Toward a Remapping of Chinese Painting.” Hume Lecture given at Yale University

Toward a Remapping of Chinese Painting

I'm grateful to Yale's Council on E. Asian Studies for inviting me to give this year's Hume lecture; it's not only an honor (as one sees immediately in looking over the list of previous Hume lecturers, a daunting lineup) but also a timely opportunity for me to attempt to pull together some themes that have been appearing persistently in recent years in my own work and that of some of my students and colleagues, and to see them as making up a large phenomenon, potentially and ideally a change of direction in Chinese ptg studies, instead of just a cluster of small ones.

Let me begin with a general statement of my argument, which is in a sense scarcely new, since it's based on things we've known all along. We've all known from early on that the version of the history of Chinese painting presented to us in Chinese writings is heavily slanted toward those types practiced by the literati or scholar-amateur artists, since the writers were themselves of that status and persuasion, and that their constructions of quasi-art-historical lineages were designed in large part to support their own positions. We've known that the body of paintings presented as meriting our attention, assembled and passed down to us by collectors, preserved today in museums and serious private collections, recorded in catalogs, published in reproduction books, was made up principally of works judged to be reliably from the hands of a succession of prestigious name artists, whose names and affiliations any traditional account of Chinese painting history will supply-- and they will all supply more or less the same lists. Our own collecting has tended to follow the guidelines laid out in the Chinese writings that we translated and tried to interpret for our readers; we took pride in the acquisition of pieces that would elicit approving nods when we showed them to visiting Chinese connoisseurs. (I recall taking the first official emissary from P.R. China after the thaw, Huang Zhen when he came to Berkeley in the early 1970s, around an exhibition of works by the Yangchou Eccentrics at our University Art Museum, and watching with pleasure as he expressed surprise over our having acquired so many genuine works, including a top-class ink plum ptg by Chin Nung.)

But we have known also that these authentic name-artist works, as we might call them, comprise only a small part of the huge corpus of surviving Chinese paintings. The rest can be divided into at least five overlapping categories--which could, instead, be listed as causes for exclusion or neglect. First, anonymous works, which the Chinese catalog under the term wu-ming chia or "master without a name"; secondly, works by lesser and minor artists, hsiao-ming chia or "small-name masters" in Chinese. Old and fine works in both these categories have been admitted into serious collections, but those from later periods are likely to float about more or less unnoticed, or still worse, to be lost. Third, the copies and forgeries of name masters' works, which on the whole occupy the same art-historical hinterland as forgeries of Rembrandt or van Gogh; these can occasionally be good or even great paintings, like some of the now-deposed Rembrandts, but for the great majority of them, the loss is small when they are shunted off into obscurity. In the old days in Hong Kong or Taipei or Tokyo, one could spend many hours looking through hundreds of these in the shops or apartments of lesser dealers, in the hope of finding one that repaid the search. And no amount of egalitarian rehabilitation effort will make me regret not having bought more of them.

Two other categories are not to be so quickly dismissed, and are the ones with which I am principally concerned today. The fourth is a large category of paintings that did not originate as forgeries at all, but were caught in a particular Chinese trap: too high in quality and pictorial interest to be discarded, but lacking the name identifications that would place them in the ranks of marketable and collectible commodities, they have had their original identifying marks removed and have been fitted out by dealers and owners, over the centuries, with wrong attributions, spurious inscriptions and seals, misleading identifications of subjects--all designed to move them, however dishonestly, out of undesirable authorial and thematic categories and into desirable ones. Paintings of this kind are found in large numbers in old collections, especially those assembled by discerning collectors such as Charles Lang Freer whose eye for quality was not matched--could not be, in their time--with the kind of expertise that would permit sound judgements of date, school, and authorship. Paintings in this group might equally be assigned to the "anonymous" category, and in fact enter it once the misleading markings are stripped away from them. The fifth category--or, since it overlaps the others so much, a fifth reason for exclusion--is made up of paintings that, for a diversity of reasons having to do with their subjects and styles and original functions, were excluded from the range of what was held to be art, or fine art. (And yes, let me simply assert without quibbling over language that Chinese critics and connoisseurs did make a distinction similar enough to ours between art and non-art, as well as good and bad art, that we might as well stop fussing and use the words.) Out of a huge output of pictorial matter, the Chinese arbiters of taste and quality in any period dictated what should be preserved and collected, mounted and remounted as the need arose, appreciated and written about, rescued from the burning house--what should, in short, make up the history of Chinese painting.

S,S. In a paper delivered several months ago I used a large, messy metaphor, seeing the whole of Chinese painting as it was produced over the centuries as a great underground river flowing down through time, with islands or eruptions above the surface for works of the kinds judged to be worth preserving--the visible, so to speak. "My term 'underground,'" I said, "implies a metaphorical surface, somewhat permeable but mostly opaque, separating the visible part of Chinese painting--what critics recognized and valued, what collectors chose to preserve--from the more or less invisible, what was not considered worthy of notice and preservation, and is now mostly unrecoverable. What is below the surface is vastly greater in quantity than what is above." We can sometimes obtain glimpses of the sub-surface regions through chance survivals of types for which the likelihood of transmission was small. We also have occasional windows--the two examples I offered were the bodies of paintings by masters of the Chekiang region in the Sung-Yuan transition, 13th-14th centuries, including what we loosely call Ch'an or Zen Buddhist painting, which through historical accident was preserved in Japan and has come to be incorporated into histories of Chinese painting written outside China; and paintings by 17th century Ch'an monks of the Huang-po or Obaku sect who came from the coastal regions of Fukien to Japan, where they continued to practice their amateurish ink-monochrome painting, and where their works are also preserved in some number. These, by contrast, have not been welcomed into our histories, and probably never will be, except for passing mentions, since the works are mostly amateurish in the most negative sense and do not hold one's interest for long. (Chi-fei, 1666; Mu-an, 1682.)

S --. If we had a similar window into the practice of this kind of painting in temples of the Jiangxi region in the same period, I suggested, we would presumably understand better the origins of Pa-ta Shan-jen's imagery and style. (I assume that for this audience, I don't need to identify Pa-ta Shan-jen, since most of you will have seen the major exhibition of his work organized by Dick Barnhart and Wang Fangyu in 1990.) But the minor monk-amateurs of this period, whether in Jiangxi or Fukien or elsewhere, never achieved the stature of Pa-ta--failed Pa-ta Shan-jens, I termed them--and go unrecorded and forgotten in China, and their works untransmitted. (These are not, of course, Ch'an ptgs, and I put them on only to illustrate the difference between a real amateur and a real painter.)

S,S. Similarly, innumerable paintings by other kinds of amateur artists--literati, officials, merchants, whatever--have disappeared--the great majority of them, we can assume, to no great loss. (Li Chung-lüeh, late 12c scholar-official amateur at left.) And the same is true of the fast, minor, more or less repetitive works turned out in great numbers by skilled artists as well, for repaying small favors and the like, works of the kind that can be called "occasional paintings" by analogy with occasional verse or music (one by a painter in the imperial academy, Ma Shih, at right); they doubtless gave pleasure to their original recipients, but the few that survive today suffice to represent the type--we would feel no great urge to fish any large number of them out of the underground river, even if that were possible. (Throw them back as too small.)

S,S. (Leaf from album of copies of old master ptgs on left, w. Tung C-c insc. proclaiming it a genuine work by 10th cent. Tung Yüan; 1616 ptg by Tung C-c himself at right.) For the purpose of my argument today, I want to propose a different metaphor, one more in keeping with the terrain imagery implied in the "remapping" of my title. In this one, we can think of the whole of Chinese painting as it was produced and partly preserved as an extensive, richly variegated landscape, until Tung Ch'i-ch'ang and his army of believers, along with their predecessors and successors, tramp across it, arranging selected mountains and boulders and trees--artists and paintings-- into neat rows and patterns, uprooting and relocating them much as garden-makers in China would relocate selected natural materials such as rocks and trees and watercourses and arrange these to make a garden, taking care to assign them names as well as locations. The end product is manageable and intelligible, like a garden; one of the main attractions of the established history of Chinese painting is its neatness. What is excluded, left outside the wall, need no longer be looked at. We can admire the garden; but when we turn our gaze beyond it, what we see left behind is a grievously reduced, somewhat denuded landscape, since the army, scorning most of what they found, have allowed it to waste away through neglect, besides erecting tall walls to discourage later people from looking at it. In this they have done nothing other than what we have done, at least until recently, with our own art. But we need not remain bound to Chinese criteria for separating art from non-art, good art from bad.

S,S. In trying to persuade a lecture class some years ago that the art/non-art distinction is not a simple matter of quality and interest, I contrasted--an unlikely pairing--George Price and Jonathan Borovsky. The late George Price, who has always seemed to me our most brilliant social and political cartoonist, our Daumier if you will, created in his late drawings complex and incisive pictorial structures of a high artistic order, quite apart from their trenchant commentary on the problem-ridden relationships of people and objects. But George Price's works would never make it onto our art museum walls (he did not, for one thing, adopt the conventions of modernism as did his contemporary Saul Steinberg, who accordingly makes it onto MOMA walls).

S --. (another George Price, the American Legion, from George Price's Ice Cold War.) Jonathan Borovsky, by contrast, whose large-scale exhibition had just closed at our University Art Museum (spring of 1985) after taking over much of its space--a young artist of limited talent and technique who apparently devoted the time he should have spent practicing drawing to writing numbers, up to several millions, and depositing them, as I recall, in a jar--Jonathan Borovsky (if there are admirers of his in the audience, I apologize to them, I am using him only to make a point) Jonathan Borovsky was not only on the museum walls, but could not easily be got off the museum walls--he had pasted a huge, clumsy figure drawing (similar to the one in the slide at right) to one of our largest concrete surfaces so that it could not be removed without destroying it; and that the museum was reluctant to do. We lived with Borovsky's piece, uncomfortably, for what seemed to me a long time. I have no idea what became of it in the end.

S,S. The analogy is not inappropriate--one can similarly contrast amateurish, even inept Chinese paintings that fall within the Chinese critical category of fine art largely because of their authorship, or through their exhibiting some agreed-on characteristics of high art--the late Ming scholar-artist Li Jih-hua, perhaps, who was represented in the "Ming Scholar's Studio" exhibition of 1988 by the landscape handscroll of 1625 (at left) titled "Rivers and Mountains in My Dream," highly praised in the catalog as a work in which "the landscape serv[es] as a vehicle for the poet-painter to express his desire to rise above the vicissitudes of the mundane world." (cat. p. 43.)--one can contrast this with others of far greater interest and accomplishment that fall outside the pale, because they fail to rise above the mundane world, choosing instead of represent it in loving detail. Since I was putting together an outline of this lecture around New Year's, I chose this New Year's picture, and will speak about it in a bit.

Before getting into specific types of paintings that will take their places in my remapping, however, I want to conclude this over-long introduction by setting myself clearly apart from two positions which, although based on very different assumptions, stand in the way of a proper assessment of the material I'm talking about. On the one hand, the Chinese connoisseur's position that denies high-level artistic quality to virtually all painting outside their canon, charging it with bad brushwork, vulgar subject matter, insufficient obeisance to the past. On the other, the position common among present-day writers on art who reject not only the canon but also the very notion of artistic quality, preferring to speak of "visual culture" so as to take in not only the whole surviving body of pictorial matter, including prints and designs on ceramics, but also, in extreme cases, maps and charts and the like. This approach has a lot to recommend it if one's purpose is ethnological, or oriented toward general cultural history, or if one is engaging on ideological grounds in the project of art-history bashing, or for other reasons; I've used some form of it sometimes myself. But in the end, and for now, I'll simply say, since this isn't the occasion to argue the issue, that both positions seem to me in the end to demean the good artists and paintings. I'm not by any means, that is, denying our responsibility to make judgements, distinguish original and interesting work from the repetitive and dull, skillful from inept, high quality from low, art from non-art. We can make the divisions looser and more blurry while continuing to make them; we can expand the boundaries, broaden our criteria, try to break through biases, recognizing in the case of Chinese painting that a great deal of what has been dismissed as trivial and low-class is as worthy of our attention as what has been included. Before we relinquish altogether the category of Chinese painting--and there is a movement now underway in just that direction, driven by the usual charges that setting it apart from designs on ceramics and lacquer and carved jade is elitist, exclusionist, and so forth--we might well take a moment to reconsider just what comprises Chinese painting, both in the historical sense of what was produced and in the more immediate sense of how we deal with what has survived, much of it unnoticed and fundamentally misunderstood. This large project has been behind most of my writings in recent years.

S --. (detail of 1st sec'n) Now, I want to spend the remainder of my time presenting examples of areas of Chinese painting that open up and prove to be unexpectedly absorbing, once one begins looking for them and at them. Rereading recently a familiar passage in the mid-12th century Hua chi of Teng Ch'un, the one about how the author's father, in the course of examining paintings in the imperial collection, comes upon workmen using a Kuo Hsi landscape to wipe the table, I noticed an interesting term: Among the categories of paintings his father was examining were chia-ch'ing t'u, literally "family auspicious pictures," a term presumably designating paintings done for hanging or presentation on certain auspicious family occasions. I've been watching for later uses of the term--there are two in Yüan writings--and even more, for pictures that will fit into this category, and am somewhat surprised at how many there prove to be, once one begins looking. (The same is true, in my experience, of other subject categories that have not been pulled together--we believe they aren't there because we haven't paid attention to them.) This one is in the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, among hundreds of paintings considered "study pieces," below the level of what could be exhibited and published--until, in late 1994, we organized an exhibition titled "New Interpretations of Ming and Qing Paintings" made up in large part of just such works, and published a catalog in which they were taken seriously.

S--. (left part.) Among this painting's qualifications for neglect is an attribution to the early 16th century Suchou master Ch'iu Ying, who obviously did not paint it; once it had been judged a forgery, a "Suchou p'ien" in the dismissive term that connoisseurs apply to such works by later followers of Ch'iu Ying and T'ang Yin, it could be rolled up and forgotten. But once unrolled again and looked at, it proves to be a delightful work, which apart from its artistic merit supplies a lot of detailed information about how New Year's was celebrated in a large, well-off family in late Ming or early Ch'ing China. It is obviously not a good parallel to George Price, since it's quite devoid of irony, or any questioning of the ideal tableau it presents. But that's the nature of these paintings--they tend to be aesthetically innocent in their depictions of the mundane world.

S--. This is the main sec'n of another, abt a century later, mid-18th. Sig. of Leng Mei, but prob. not his--appears not to match his reliably signed works in style. Studio work by follower.) Whether intended for the occasion of a birthday or New Year's (or a combination of the two), it appears to be, like the other, a generic scene rather than a specific representation of a particular event or family. Pictures of these categories were ordinarily offered to a general clientele, we can assume, not produced on individual order. This mode of production, together with the well-known Chinese bias against anything functional, were additional counts, in the eyes of critics, against paintings of this kind.

S, S. Given these circumstances of creation, the sensitivity to human feelings and relationships that infuses the best of them is remarkable--here, the women of the household & the younger children. The portrayal of the women, in particular, attributes more dignity and individuality to them, along with a sense of momentary feeling, than Chinese paintings commonly do.

-- S. In another lecture I juxtaposed this picture with a roughly contemporary painting of roughly the same subject, a collaborative work (typically) by several masters of the imperial academy, including Lang Shih-ning, representing the Ch'ien-lung Emperor and his consorts and children, to make the point that the academy production seems, by contrast, cold and formal, its high polish precluding any effect of spontaneity or direct expression of feeling.

--S. In fact, however, what is embodied in these pictures is not the particulars of the occasion celebrated but an ideal vision of it, or of the future it portends. This example in the Portland Art Museum, with a reliable inscription by Leng Mei, was probably intended for a wedding; but it is a wedding with children already in place, the father a successful scholar-official, two sons already headed toward the same career, as their actions and attributes tell us. It predicts, and in some sense participates in bringing about, these blessings for the newly-married couple.

--S. An example in the British Museum, presumably another birthday picture, also bears a Leng Mei signature, but is too clumsy to be his work, its parts formally unintegrated, and in the wrong style. The argument being made today, with some vehemence, that denounces questions of quality and authenticity as elitist concerns, would like to divorce itself from connoisseurship to use the pictures as more or less undifferentiated carriers of pictorial information about social beliefs and practices. But the unstable positioning of the Chinese works, many or most of which are in some way misrepresented in period, authorship, and subject, presents to those inclined this way the hard fact that until the pictures are sorted out in some old-fashioned art-historical manner and set into their proper positions and relationships, a task requiring, alas, some exercise of connoisseurship, we will find them being introduced as referents or data for the wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong situation. It will sound self-serving to say that usages of these paintings by specialists in other areas of Chinese studies will be insecure until the art historians have done their work, but it's nonetheless true.

S,S. This is the right point to credit the good work done by my colleague Dick Barnhart in rescuing a lot of misunderstood "fake Sung" paintings from neglect by reattributing them on the basis of style to particular later masters. He has done this, among other places, in my own old favorite site for this kind of storage-room archaeology (still another metaphor!), the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington. In doing this he has restored the works to a respectable status and augmented the oeuvres of artists such as Wang Shih-ch'ang (left) and Yeh Ch'eng (right.) But the project of reattributing works by style to name artists, worthy as it is, is not my principal concern today. I am also leaving out the large category of later Buddhist ptg, since many excellent and neglected examples were introduced several years ago, and the whole category well studied, by Marsha Weidner in her Latter Days of the Law catalog.

S,S. (If I hear scarcely suppressed groans from some in the audience who have heard, in one form or another, my lectures on representations of women in late Chinese painting, and are muttering to themselves: no, please, he's not going to give us those again! --relax, I am not. They will be off the screen soon, and won't be followed by others of the type.) In this large study, which has occupied me for some years and will eventually become a book, the first task that underlay all the rest was to cut through the facades of misdirection that have attached to these paintings over the centuries and try to see them as what they are. The work with which the whole project began, on the left, for instance, bears an inscription that would, if trusted, make it a portrait of the famous courtesan-poet Liu Yin, painted in 1643, after she had become the concubine of the prominent scholar-official Ch'ien Ch'ien-i. But any account that accepted and used the painting as that--and there have already been several--falls into the trap set by some Chinese dealer. In fact, it demonstrably dates from about a century later, is by a follower of Leng Mei, and is a generic picture of a beautiful woman, not a portrait of anyone in particular. Moreover, it has been cut down from a composition that originally placed the woman in an elaborate interior, as another version (at right), similarly misrepresented as a self-portrait of the late Ming courtesan-artist Ma Shou-chen, betrays.

S --. This in itself would call into question the 1643 dating, since the placing of mei-jen or beautiful women in interior settings, their boudoirs, cannot on firm evidence be shown to antedate the K'ang-hsi period--this example, dated 1697, is by Yü Chih-ting--and was probably stimulated by contacts with European pictures of such subjects. It should not be necessary to point out that stripping away the falsifications, as in the case of the so-called portrait of Liu Yin, in no way reduces the attractiveness of the work, once we have given up the attachment to names, but only, like removing the mask of the Happy Hypocrite in Max Beerbohm's story, reveals an equally likeable face underneath.

S.,S. Continuing with pictures of family gatherings and observances, these are details of the upper and lower parts of an anonymous work, of some elegance, probably 18th century in date, in the British Museum. It is a group portrait of a family, of which the female members are set within the house and on the verandah, while the male members, seen outside, display different degrees of mobility in their placement and postures.

-- S. The oldest of the males, presumably the father, has ventured out with a boy servant to gather herbs. This picture, by contrast with those shown before, appears to portray a particular family. Assembled and sensitively read, a series of such works (and there are others) could open up understandings of the dynamics of the family in late-period China that would supplement what is written sources reveal.

S,S. A handscroll in the [Tientsin Historical Museum?], which I know only from a small, unclear reproduction (from which these slides were made), appears to be a complex and probably visually splendid portrayal of members of a rich family shown within the lovingly-depicted buildings and gardens of their villa. I hope to see the original on some visit to China; meanwhile, because of the exclusionary attitudes outlined earlier, such a work is unlikely to be well reproduced or receive serious scholarly attention in China.

S,S. Another category of paintings that has not been effectively mined is the erotic albums, of which many examples survive from the later centuries, at least from the early Ch'ing on. Dismissed by mainstream sinologues as crude and prurient, they have been written about chiefly by people with scanty qualifications to deal with them, even to separate the larger number that are indeed crude and repetitive from those examples that are in no way inferior in quality to paintings of other subject categories in the same periods. These are two leaves from an erotic album, sold recently at auction, by Hsü Mei, who was one of the artists called to court to participate in the production in 1713 of a handscroll titled Wanshou tu celebrating the 60th birthday of the K'ang-hsi Emperor. It takes a sharp-eyed viewer to spot the erotic imagery in them--voyeurism facilitated by translucent pants in the garden scene, a tiny glimpse of engaged genitalia in the further room of the other--but these, too, are revealing images--somewhat slanted and special, to be sure--of family life in early Ch'ing China, of a kind that are not otherwise easily to be found.

S,S. The same is true of the leaves in two albums, apparently from the same hand or at least the same studio, dating around a half-century later, the mid or later 18th century, that passed in recent years through New York auctions (where I made slides of them) and then disappeared, at least from my view--if anyone can tell me where they are, I'll be grateful. I've shown and discussed the openly erotic leaves of these albums on other occasions; here are two in which the couples are engaged, not in sex, but in romantic and domestic pursuits that are presented with genuine tenderness. Again, where else can we find these qualities in Chinese painting? The best of the erotic albums, as a group, may offer the closest pictorial equivalents to the Hung-lou meng in portraying subtle interrelationships within an upper-class Chinese household. One might argue that it was exactly the illicit status of these paintings, their association with outright erotica and their dismissal as pornography from the realm of polite aesthetic appreciation, that freed the artists to transgress as well the established boundaries of taste that barred them from depicting subjects of this kind, and even more from investing their depictions with such nuances of feeling.

S,S. Of the hundred leaves of illustrations to Chin P'ing Mei published years ago as Po-mei t'u, the Hundred Beauties, twenty-five (and perhaps more that I don't know about) are available now in western collections, and can be used by social and literary historians of the Ch'ing, whether they are concerned with Chinese sexual practices or the operation of a brocade shop.

S,S. If some colleague had asked me, even a few years ago, where to find illustrations for a paper on childbirthing in China, I would have drawn a blank. Now I can name two: another of the Chin P'ing Mei illustrations, and a fen-pen or preparatory sketch by the late 19th century Shanghai master Ch'ien Hui-an (in the foreground of which the males of the family are being ejected from the room, while the newborn baby is left untended in a tub of water--very unwise.) The same is true of many other subjects that should, when they become known, excite considerable interest among colleagues in other areas of Chinese studies.

S,S. The artists who did these paintings belong mostly to a large, unstudied class of Ch'ing-period painters that I am calling, since there is no established term, urban professional masters. (the Japanese have a term: machi-eshi; if there is one in Chinese, I haven't encountered it.) They produced pictures for a diversity of needs in studios located in the bustling commercial and entertainment districts of cities, especially the great cities of the Chiang-nan region. They have been regarded, when noticed at all, as deriving their styles, including elements of European style, by a trickle-down process from the imperial academy in Peking. I would rather turn this version on its head and recognize that it was from the ranks of these urban professional masters that the academy was in large part staffed--some were summoned to participate in particular collaborative projects and returned to their cities, others stayed on--and that they brought with them at least as much of painterly techniques, styles, and imagery as they took back. The well-known picture at left, representing the three principals of the Hsi-hsiang chi or "Western Chamber" story, is anonymous, but closely related in style with others ascribed to Leng Mei and probably by followers of his; the one at right, which is ten feet wide and represents eight prostitutes on the balcony of a brothel making enticing gestures to passers-by, bears a cyclical date probably corresponding to 1736 and the signature of a small master named Hua Hsüan, who was active in Wu-hsi, and, like most of these painters, did portraiture along with other genres. These, however, belong to a different lecture, and I introduce them here only to sketch out another large region that must be incorporated into our remapping of Chinese painting.

-- S. If we wish we could see what the inside of the brothel looks like, an anonymous work recently published in a volume devoted to an old European private collection may serve. It is described there as a picture of "distinguished ladies" engaged in their domestic occupations, but this is another misdirection--I will not take the time here to explain why. The Hua Hsüan picture (at left) was similarly said to be a group portrait of the six consorts of the Ming artist T'ang Yin, and was first published in the 1920s catalog of the Shanghai dealer E. A . Strehlneek (who also sold the Freer Gallery's "West Chamber" picture, presumably to Freer himself;); the anonymous one was acquired, probably in the 1930s, by the Munich stage designer Emil Preetorius. These and similar examples present us with another curious pattern: just as the Japanese, with their special tastes associated with Zen Buddhism and the tea ceremony, have rescued for us types of Chinese paintings that came to be depreciated in China and have virtually disappeared there, so did the low tastes (as the Chinese saw it) of western collectors and dealers in the early part of this century permit the survival of a lot of paintings that otherwise might well have been lost. When a detailed history of the collecting of Chinese painting is written, it should include a section titled: In praise of bad taste. S,S. Within portraiture, a number of special types can be found that have not yet been pulled together and studied as groups. One, which as I seem to recall has been discussed by Dick Barnhart [where?], presents an official being received at the imperial court; examples are in the Historical Museum, Beijing (left) and the British Museum (right), the latter by the Ming painter Chu Pang.

S,S. The depiction of the central figures makes it clear that these are not generic pictures, but portraits of particular people, perhaps done to congratulate them on appointments to high posts--although it is possible that the rest of the pictures were ready-mades, and only the portraits, or even the portrait faces, changed from one to another.

S,S. Simpler forms of essentially the same type include these two, an anonymous representation of Tung Ch'i-ch'ang at left, a portrait of Huang Tao-chou by a certain Tsao Fang, dated 1645, at right. Both are seen waiting for audiences with the emperor. These pictures should be of interest, in both their substance and their function, to those who work in the political and institutional history of China.

S --. And what of this, a painting I know only from a small, blurry reproduction in an auction catalog (and again, any information on its whereabouts will be welcomed)? It would appear to represent a grand occasion on which some great household is receiving the visit of a high-ranking guest, perhaps the emperor--the figure about to enter in lower right may be wearing a dragon robe. It might have been painted to commemorate the occasion, and we can guess that it was kept in the family to record a peak moment in its history. Or did it illustrate a story that included such an event? In either case, it could be the subject of a long and interesting study. But pictures of this kind pass through auctions and disappear; neither private collectors nor museums see them as desirable acquisitions, and Chinese studies programs and libraries typically have no funds for such things.

S,S. If the pictures are of erotic subjects--for instance, this album of illustrations to Jou-pu t'uan that appeared in a New York auction several years ago--the chances are even smaller that they will end up in a public collection or one easily accessible to scholars. Corresponding recently with a colleague who is making a study of printed illustrations to Chinese fiction, I wrote about the numerous painted versions of these, with which he was unfamiliar; but I could not tell him where to find more than a few of them published, and could only say, weakly, Come and go through my slides.

S,S. A large category of paintings which, while not altogether rejected from the canon, has been consistently denigrated and unappreciated is made up of works in which the artist undertook some unusual, and for Chinese critics unacceptable, representational project. These were likely to "break the rules" in a double sense: by utilizing illusionistic techniques that could be seen as implicated in the forbidden pursuit of hsing-ssu or form-likeness; and by sacrificing--necessarily, given the artists' purposes--elements of style such as brushwork and stylistic allusions to earlier masters that, for traditional connoisseurs, more or less defined the upper levels of quality in painting. Works of this kind have typically come down to us innocent of the collectors' seals and appreciative inscriptions and colophons that more prestigious kinds of old paintings have accumulated over the centuries. I have sometimes used, to exemplify this phenomenon, the extraordinary portrayal of bamboo, old tree, and rock at left, in the Shanghai Museum, a painting that still has found no comfortable place in Chinese accounts of early painting. For the late periods, it is exemplified by artists such as Chang Hung of the late Ming, who has now begun to take his well-earned place in exhibitions and studies; and Lu Wei of the early Ch'ing, seen at right in one of his strange paintings in which he uses new techniques that I called, in an article on him, "brushlessness and chiaroscuro."

S.S. Other early and middle Ch'ing artists, such as the early 18th century master Ch'en Mei, who served in the imperial academy but did paintings (such as this one) for a non-imperial patronage, also drew on European illusionistic techniques to create effects of space, light, and a striking immediacy in their works. But for this they paid the penalty of rejection by critics of their time and later. This extraordinary painting was on the New York market in the 1950s with an attribution to the 11th century landscapist Hsü Tao-ning; I tried to persuade the Freer Gallery's director John Pope to purchase it, but was successful only after I had attached a name to it, identifying the artist through stylistic comparisons with signed works. It is now exhibited proudly by the Freer as a Ch'en Mei. S,S. (If this lecture seems more than usually disconnected, it is because I am trying to present a broad range of painting types without having, or wanting to have, any clear principle of order for arranging them--a principle of order would bring us back to a more structured mapping of Chinese painting than I am arguing for.) Ming-period depictions of particular people's villas and gardens, usually more or less schematic in character, by prestigious name artists such as Wen Cheng-ming (left) have been published in some number. But nowhere among published pictures, except, again, in an auction catalog, can we find anything like the one at right:

S --. (detail) the high-level work of some specialist master, perhaps, dating around the 14th century (Dick may have a firmer opinion), it presents to us a far more informative and enchanting picture of the appearance and layout of an elegantly designed riverside villa and garden than any of the literati works. Perhaps it was too conservative and Sung-like to win the artist enough recognition for his name to remain attached to it. My argument throughout (with the Jou-pu t'uan album as a possible exception) is that expanding the "visible" regions of Chinese painting need entail no lowering of quality, only some rethinking and broadening of criteria of quality.

S,S. Returning to the question of court and city paintings in the late period: a number of the large collaborative works produced by academy artists, sometimes with help from painters temporarily engaged from outside, have recently begun to be studied and included in our histories. Notable cases are the two series of long scrolls depicting the southern tours of the K'ang-hsi and Ch'ien-lung Emperors, the objects of special research by Maxwell Hearn. They are splendid productions, especially the Ch'ien-lung series--these are two sections from the scroll in the Metropolitan Museum depicting the Emperor's visit to Suchou, ending with the Tiger Hill outside the city. The project was accomplished over a period of six years, between 1764 and 1770, by the court artist Hsü Yang--who himself came from Suchou--no doubt with the help of assistants, who go unnamed. The scrolls include a lot of detail of street scenes and urban activities, but the figures and buildings are rather repetitive and stiff. These scrolls may in the end leave us with a desire to escape from the grandiose display that was laid on everywhere the emperor went, to look into everyday urban life as it continued after he had gone home to the palace.

S,S. The same Hsü Yang had painted another panoramic scroll of Suchou for the Emperor in 1659, again ending with the Tiger Hill; this, too, is remarkable and informative as a cityscape but offers only a rather cool and distant view, in which the figures and shops and boats have a somewhat ready-made character and lack liveliness, as the detail at right reveals. It is as if the artist and his assistants were not really much interested in the daily life of the city, besides being too respectful of the emperor and the court to inflict such trivialities on them. We may wish that we could move in for closer and more intimate inspection of some of the activities portrayed, and persuade the people engaged in them to relax a bit, act as they do when off camera.

S, S. Here, again, one of the forgotten urban-professional artists obliges. Around the same time that Hsü Yang and his workshop were producing the "Ch'ien-lung's Southern Tour" series, in 1768, an unnamed painter, presumably a small master of Suchou, was engaged to do a scroll commemorating a visit to the Tiger Hill by Su Ting-yüan, who had served for five years as viceroy of Chiang-su, and who was invited on an outing to the eastern suburbs of the city by a Mr. Lao. We see Su and some of his entourage in this detail from near the beginning of the scroll. His is a much more modest procession than Ch'ien-lung's, the central part of which appears in the slide at right.

-- S. More of Su's party. The faces of his companions appear to be portraits, and presumably include his host Mr. Lao, the one who engaged the artist (unnamed but designated in the accompanying inscription as a hua-shih, professional master) to do a pictorial record of the visit. Whether the painter accompanied the group and made sketches as they moved about or simply was familiar with the shops and restaurants at the foot of Tiger Hill is not made clear. The scroll, not surprisingly, is in a western collection, that of a retired British diplomat living in the suburbs of London.

S,S. The outriders leading the procession, with standard-bearers proclaiming the coming of the Viceroy of Chiang-su, pass by an antique shop; below, gentlemen are seen partying in pleasure boats on the canal, eating dinner and playing music. Further on we find a welcoming party including an elderly couple and what appear to be two beautiful entertainers, who are being ogled through a kind of monacle by one of the waiting men. The boat below, empty except for the boatmen, is ready to accomodate Su, his guests, and the entertainers. The contrast between this and the imperial scrolls typifies the relationship between "high" and "low" in paintings of this kind: it is the "low" example that provides an abundance of particulars specific to the time and place, along with a kind of witty social commentary,

S,S. and even betrays some interest in the feelings of the people who appear in it. Servants in a restaurant by the canal buy fish and prepare dishes, carrying them to banqueters in the upstairs room, while a female servant hangs the laundry and two women eat their dinners as they wait, we imagine, for a call to entertain guests. Another woman entertainer, in the detail at left, gazes moodily out over the water as her child tugs at her; three simple bird-and-flower pictures pinned to the wall behind suggest a way of life that is [austere] but not without its small refinements. Such a scene may recall the lovely entertainers in Japanese prints by Harunobu (in exactly this period) who have come out from the party to stand alone on the verandah, subtly expressing melancholy in their postures and faces.

S,S. It is paintings like this that allow us to escape somewhat the conventions of the iconic mei-jen type of single beautiful-woman pictures, designed as those are to cater to the special desires of male gazers, and see more deeply into the lives of the women--although, of course, these too would no doubt be seen to follow other conventions if we had more of them. A group of richly-robed, geisha-like women with gold hair ornaments, again accompanied by children, pass the time between entertaining guests in a boat; a boat-girl waits below a bridge, hoping to attract a passenger, while her little boy peeps through the door.

S,S. In a shop selling dolls, the bespectacled artisan touches up the head of one of them; in another selling roly-polys, like the Japanese Daruma dolls, the shopwoman is observed by a man with spectacles, while in the back room an older woman sews costumes for the toys. Pictures like this one persuade us that there was a Chinese equivalent to ukiyo-e, but that unlike the Japanese works, subjects of a vast literature, it has gone largely unnoticed. How far it can stiill be recovered is a question for the future.

-- S. Finally, at the entrance to a temple, behind a row of monks, is a booth selling objects not easily identified, where one can also buy unmounted mei-jen pictures, the Metropolitan Museum's so-called T'ang Yin beauty on a banana leaf, a bird-and-flower picture, or a landscape in the manner of Ni Tsan, according to one's tastes and needs. And these are only a sampling of the delights offered by this scroll. No misdirection is involved here--the painting presents itself as nothing other than what it is. But its honesty goes unrewarded; it bears the compounded stigmata of anonymity, functionalism, popular style, and engaging subject matter; no respectable Chinese connoisseur would do more than glance at the opening passage before rolling it quickly up again.

The point I want to make strongly, and have tried to make in relation to the series of works introduced today, is that it is not merely a matter of the excluded categories of Chinese painting being, on the whole, equal in quality to the more familiar kinds, if we can expand our criteria of judgement; they exhibit qualities that cannot easily be found among the accepted categories. This is because the artists who did them were permitted, by their very exclusion from the realm of "polite" painting, to infuse their works with expressions of human feeling and warmth, incident and drama, close observation of the world around them, more relaxed renderings of scenes of everyday life, that were taboo for their critically more elevated contemporaries. High quality in Chinese painting has been implicitly defined as the absence of just those qualities, which marked the lower levels of the art, since true connoisseurs should not succumb to such blandishments; and we have unthinkingly and uncritically accepted this version of the matter. Another generation of searching out, reattributing, re-ordering and re-assessing these paintings will be needed before we can make with confidence the kind of statement I am about to make as a conjecture. What we have assumed to be deficiencies in Chinese painting, the absence of areas of subject matter and expressiveness that are taken for granted in the European and American painting tradition, may prove to be absences only within the confines of the "official version" of the art. Much of what we have felt to be missing from Chinese painting, that is, may well prove after all to be there, once we look outside the conventional boundaries, beyond the walls that the Chinese literati critics have erected.

S,S. I will conclude with a brief look at another little-known handscroll, which will serve today to represent the large class of historical pictures of a kind that are usually preserved, if at all, in historical museums and archives, carefully segregated from the works of art.

At the end of this scroll is a false, interpolated signature of a recorded artist named Chiang Tzu-ch'eng (YCH p. 1356), who served in the imperial court in the early 15th century, and a date corresponding to 1428. Based on this, the authors of two colophons written in 1956 speculate that it represents a Japanese raid on the China coast that happened in 1419. But this is another misdirection: the real subject of the painting was identified first by Fang Chao-ying, and later conclusively by Gary Ledyard (whose detailed study of the scroll is unpublished), as the Battle of the Noryang Straits, which took place on the coast of Korea between October and December, 1598, in which the combined Korean and Chinese forces drove off the last remnants of the Japanese troops from Hideyoshi's attempted invasion. (The opening section, at right, depicts the arrival of Chinese troops by sea.)

S,S. The following section, which represents a staff meeting involving both Chinese and Koreans, could be used to illustrate the Chinese ideal of the wen or civil dominating the wu or military: the civil official sits at a table at the pinnacle of the triangle, flanked by two generals. It illustrates also the extraordinarily fine figure drawing, which cannot be matched closely in any other Chinese painting known to me. The reason the scroll continues to be little-known is that the owner when I first saw it, and the present owner as well (reportedly a collector in Hong Kong), refuse to relinquish the wrong attribution and identification, and so will not allow it to be exhibited or published.

S,S. The central section portrays the assault on the fortress of the Japanese general Konishi. Fang Chaoying speculated, and Ledyard agrees, that the artist, because of his detailed familiarity with the trappings and actions of warfare, might have been a specialist on the staff of one of the Chinese generals or admirals.

S --. The defenders are firing muskets (which alone would make the early 15th century dating impossible); the attackers are carrying cowhide shields. Such details, along with inscriptions in cartouches on the scroll, match up with written accounts to confirm beyond doubt the identification of the subject. The dominance of the Chinese forces in the picture, and the playing-down of the Korean participation, would seem to rule out the possibility that it is a Korean painting.

S.S. Toward the end of the scroll is the terrible scene that Ledyard calls "The Noryang Inferno," the great naval battle in which the Chinese fired rockets and threw faggots onto the Japanese ships, and the sea was filled with Japanese soldiers who jumped overboard to escape the flames, only to be killed with spears and arrows, or captured and beheaded.

S -- (closer detail). In my Painter's Practice book I quoted Alexander Soper on the disappearance of references to battle pictures from the literature of Chinese painting after the T'ang, and their near-absence from the corpus of surviving paintings as well. This is true enough; but, like most generalizations about Chinese painting, it applies to the respectable kinds, not to the totality of what was produced. Once more, we can wish that more works of this kind had survived, since they serve as well as paintings can in providing visual information and reportage for China before the late 19th century, when, as Jonathan Spence and Annping Chin's recently-published The Chinese Century richly demonstrates, photography takes over this function.

S,S. (Dark slides.) There will no doubt be some in the audience, and in other audiences, who, after seeing and hearing all this, will feel that the Chinese connoisseurs were right all the time, that what I have shown is indeed low-class and trivial, afflicted with bad brushwork, and so forth. But that response only testifies, in my own thoroughly biased view, to the success of centuries of indoctrination. My hope is that those people will be outnumbered by others who are open to liking and admiring these pictures, as I do. Those among Chinese painting specialists, and especially younger ones, who share my enthusiasm for them have their task ahead of them, a task for which I have only pointed the way. It is nothing less than a radical expansion of the visible regions of Chinese painting, a remapping that incorporates the kinds I have shown and others. The remapping will always be spotty in some areas for which the survival rate has been poor, for reasons I've suggested. But even these areas are not altogether beyond recovery, and will certainly reward our efforts. In addition to the little-explored holdings outside China, there are many lesser, little-known collections in China, belonging to art colleges and other institutions and individuals; and even when the committee of distinguished connoisseurs currently making its rounds of mainland collections has gone through their holdings and published those pieces judged worthy of attention, or the institution itself has published a volume of what it considers to be its best paintings, we can be sure that these will still be confined mainly to the name-artist category, and that works of the excluded kinds will continue to languish in obscurity, until attitudes change and someone takes the trouble to dig them out and make them accessible. In any case, we can assume that each of the paintings I have shown represents what was originally a large category, and even allowing for the bad survival rate, there usually will be enough others extant, if we can locate them, to permit a kind of reconstruction of the type or genre, and the addition of it to our understanding and our histories of Chinese painting.

Other difficulties will arise in the study of these paintings, however, even after they have been located and set properly in place through the practices of connoisseurship and art-historical analysis. Paintings of the hitherto excluded kinds are likely to present interpretative problems more difficult than those posed by name-artist paintings, at least as those problems have been construed in our studies. Taking an artist as a focus greatly facilitates the formulation of a research plan: one can look into his biography and his writings, go about seeing and studying his works, analyze his style and his development. Whole symposia have been held, in China and here, that never got beyond those concerns. Paintings of the kinds I've talked about today don't offer such easy handles for grasping; they raise harder questions--but for me, at least lately, and for a growing number of others, they are very absorbing questions, opening new areas of research. And specialists in the future will identify and address still more interesting and complex questions, beside which mine will appear simplistic and naive. But one must make a beginning, and my talk today has been meant as no more than that.

Thank you.

CLP 28: 1998 “Later Chinese Painting: Innovation After Progress Ends.” Lecture, Guggenheim Museum, NYC

(Introductory congratulations, espec. to "hired guns," Sherman Lee, Howard Rogers, Jane Debevoise.)

In putting together this lecture, I had the slightly uncomfortable sense that it was more or less fated to fall between two stools. Those in the audience who know a good bit about Chinese painting are likely to respond by thinking: this is all familiar; why is he giving us this old stuff again? And those to whom the subject is unfamiliar will think: how can he expect us to accept these large claims while presenting so little evidence? If you can imagine being faced with trying to back up some large and controversial proposals about the whole of European painting with only the slides and arguments that will fit into a 50-minute space, you can imagine my predicament. Nevertheless, since I did make some large and controversial claims in my catalog essay, and since there are sure to be readers of it who would like to see some attempt at substantiating these, however hopeless it may be, I'm determined to try. Most of what I will say can be found, greatly filled out, in my own writings and those of others. If I refer a number of times to my own writings, then, it's not purely conceit (altho that too); I want to take responsibility for the views I'll express, and indicate when I've made the arguments more fully elsewhere.

My argument, to state it baldly, is that the succession of large stylistic shifts that make up a kind of developmental or quasi-evolutionary pattern within a tradition of pictorial art, based in part in a cumulative mastery of representational techniques that make the picture seem more and more lifelike, or true to nature--a developmental pattern, with the idea of progress more or less implicit in it, of the kind that the older historians of European art constructed as a succession of style-periods, from medieval (Romanesque to Gothic) to early and late Renaissance to Mannerist to Baroque to Modern (with whichever others you want to insert--Rococo, Romantic, whatever)--that the equivalent to this kind of developmental succession of style-periods can be seen to have happened in Chinese painting quite a bit earlier, ending around the 10th-11th-12th centuries. And that Chinese artists after that were not, on the whole, primarily concerned with augmenting or refining their techniques of representation, but turned instead in a very conscious way to kinds of painting that were more expressive than descriptive, and that recalled and manipulated the past in creative ways. I'm perfectly aware of all the traps presented by stating the matter that way, and I'm perfectly willing to be seen as falling into all of them, as being hopelessly mired in outmoded ways of thought about representation, and so forth. No help for that.

(Insert: In recently pub. book by colleague, bought this morning, the above argument summarized in Preface, called "one strand of the received wisdom" about Chinese painting--if he received it from anyone other than myself, I'd like to know about it--one can always use an ally in such a situation. He goes on to separate himself from this argument, on grounds that he doesn't want to "position art in China as somehow 'really' winning the race to be 'modern' with that of Europe. . ." I don't think that's the point of my argument, now or before; it's rather to counter the belief current among non-specialists in Chinese art that Chinese painting passed into state of stagnation after Sung, while European ptg went on to great achievements we all know. Seems worth doing, espec. if no one else will--not to be put down so easily.)[1]

S,S. Early in my career, in the 1950s, I went about giving lectures with titles like "The Contemporary Relevance of Later Chinese Painting"--I did that one here in New York, and there may even be oldsters in the audience who heard it. I was reading a lot of Harold Rosenberg and other critics of the time, and was excited over the ways in which some later Chinese paintings seemed to anticipate Abstract Expressionism, both in style and in theory: the idea that the brushstroke, as a record of movement, answered to the painter's nature and feeling, in ways that had little to do with the subject portrayed. (Sec 'n of handscroll representing grape vines by 16c master Hsü Wei--not in exhib., wish it were. He's one of the two so-called "mad artists" in Chinese painting--we'll see the other later.)

Then as now, there were people who saw this as an empty exercise, since Chinese painting--or Asian art more generally-- was for them rooted in basically different premises, cultural assumptions, ways of seeing and picturing. That disagreement still confronts us, and bedevils us, and won't easily be resolved. As tonight's lecture will reveal, I continue to believe that certain patterns and concepts and practices in art can properly be seen as recurring, loosely, across temporal and cultural boundaries, allowing us to observe them comparatively in different contexts.

S,S. I don't believe, for instance, that pioneer scholars such as Ludwig Bachhofer, Alfred Salmony, Max Loehr, and Alexander Soper were altogether wrong in trying to apply classical art-historical concepts of the morphology of style, and stylistic sequences that exhibit an internal logic--derived as these are, to be sure, from constructions of European art history--to the Chinese materials. They saw their task to be, in the words of Hans Belting (writing about 19th century western art historians), "that of ordering the works of art . . . into a sequence which appeared to be governed by a lawful development of form." It was easy enough then to charge these pioneer Chinese art historians with attempting to impose the principles of Wölfflin and Winckelmann onto Chinese art (clever undergraduates did this in term papers), just as it's easy enough now to bring the much-overworked charges of Orientalism and Eurocentrism against their writings (as today's clever undergraduates do, and some of their elders.) But none of these facile put-downs reduce the value of what they accomplished in laying the foundations for our later studies, which would be foolishly adrift without the underpinnings they provided. Although art historians today are disinclined to attempt any such projects, there are few of them, I hope, who would wish that it hadn't been done by their predecessors.

[ Somewhere: we need a careful stylistic account of this early phase of Chinese painting, to bring it up to somewhere approximating the state of studies of European ptg history. Our field stopped short of this, moved off prematurely in other directions. Pioneers, e.g. Loehr, diverted into wrong directions; next generation disinclined to attempt anything so large-scale, took to writing abt indiv. masters etc. Consequence: we can't argue e.g. authenticity issues on sound consensual grounds. Absurdities pass w/o challenge--things that should be as obvious as early Ren. vs. high Ren., or Ren. vs. modern fabrications. Kôtôin "Li T'angs", Met "Riverbank," etc. Shouldn't be so difficult to resolve.]

To be specific: The development of successive systems for creating a sense of space in the pictures, over the early centuries of Chinese pictorial art from the pre-Han period to the 10th century or so--beginning with simple intervallic space between paired, confronting figures, continuing through what the old art historians called space cells, and the joining of these into more extensive openingings of space, culminating in some 10th century works that create elaborate spatial systems, inviting prolonged visual exploration--is not merely a conventional and culturally biased formulation that western art historians imposed on the Chinese works, but is a deep concern of the artists who made those works, and of their audiences, manifested in the pictures themselves, as any sympathetic and perceptive consideration of them over time must recognize. And these successive conquests of spatial rendering enable, in turn, more and more complex narrative and expressive effects. (R is rubbing from Han dyn. tile, 2-3c; L is an early copy of "Han Hsi-tsai's Night Banquet" by Ku Hung-chung. If we had the original, it would make my point much better, I'm sure--by the time this copy was made, probably in the 12th century, artists were no longer much concerned with such matters.)

S,S. Other representational techniques developed over these centuries include ways of making the objects in the picture appear substantial and their plastic forms readable, and differentiating them by texture and color. Surviving Chinese paintings from the 10th-11th century that best testify to such achievements in creating deeply naturalistic portrayals of subjects in nature include the pair of paintings of "Deer in an Autumn Forest," one of which was shown at last year's exhibition at the Met from the Palace Museum in Taipei; these are generally accepted as works of that period, probably by an artist of the Liao dynasty. These and a few other paintings of bird and animal and plant subjects from this period come as close to an effect of totally objective portrayal, without human intervention or commentary, as Chinese painting was ever to accomplish.

S.-- Another is the "Bamboo, Old Trees, and Rocks" ascribed to the 10th century master Hsü Hsi, but really an anonymous masterwork of that period or a bit later. In these, all conspicuous traits of brushwork and style are suppressed as the artist's hand and vision seem to be totally absorbed into the imagery of his painting. Techniques of modeling with light and shadow are employed more strikingly and effectively than they ever will be again, until the 17th century when interest in these devices is revived under the impact of a sudden exposure to European pictorial art.

S,S. Two details. That the artist appears to be somehow dispensing with conventions and portraying his subject in a way unmediated by style is of course only another effect, but it's a powerful one. In this it's like some 17th century Dutch paintings about which my colleague Svetlana Alpers writes: "It is as if visual phenomena are captured and made present without the intervention of a human maker." And she writes of the "selflessness or anonymity that is characteristic of Dutch painting"-- and equally characteristic, we can note, of these Chinese works. The complex overlappings of leaves and twigs is representationally effective but technically bewildering: how was it done? Remember that when one works in ink on silk, nothing can be corrected or painted over, as it can in oil ptg. To say that the artist used some kind of resist technique may be true, but doesn't carry us far in accounting for the picture. The unassuming technical mastery goes with the effect of visual exactitude--quoting Alpers once more, "To appear lifelike, a picture has to be carefully made."[2] No pictures in China will ever be more carefully made--as pictures, that is--than these.

S,S. Landscape painting of the 11th century, although it's closely associated with a few great masters whose trenchant observation and capturing of natural phenomena are praised in the texts, seems similarly directed outward at the world rather then inward at the artist's interior life. It is in works such as this, the great handscroll in Kansas City ascribed to Hsü Tao-ning, that the long development of landscape representation in China reaches its apogee. Techniques of diminution in scale, atmospheric perspective, spatial interrelating of parts, deep distance, are all handled consummately. And, given the proclivity of Chinese culture to turn away from any pursuit just at the point of complete mastery of it, it's not surprising that landscape painting begins around this time to take divergent directions. I cannot, obviously, discuss them all here, but will mention only one that is well represented in the exhibition.

S,S. "Misty River and Layered Hills" by Wang Shen--this is the ending section of the scroll, and a detail of it--is a fine example of a mode of courtly archaism that arises in the late 11th century. By that time, this manner of painting with decoratively repeated outlines and flat washes of mineral green and blue color belonged to the distant past, or to pictures of the visionary scenery of paradise, and was no longer used in up-to-date pictures of the real world.

S --. We see it, for instance, in a handscroll ascribed to the 7th-century master Chan Tzu-ch'ien. The flat, curling clouds in Wang Shen's picture similarly allude to the archaic style, and are a rejection of all the advances in atmospheric rendering that had been made since then. A mid-11th century scholar writes dismissively of the effects of height and distance in landscape painting, calling them the tricks of the professional masters, and nothing with which a true connoisseur need be concerned. Wang Shen, as an aristocrat-artist--he was son-in-law of one of the Sung emperors--had access to old paintings, and a cultivated taste for them, which he assumed also in his specialized audience.

S.S. The handscroll "In the Spirit of Poems by Tu Fu" by the 12th century official Chao K'uei, also in the exhibition, represents another departure from the mainline of landscape painting, this time into a somewhat rarefied poetic mode in which the diversity and drama of the pictorial materials in typical Sung landscape painting are suppressed, almost to the point of risking monotony, from which the picture is saved by a subtle narrative program, along with in-and-out movements between foreground and middle distance, and nuances of spacing and ink tonality.

S.S. The whole of Southern Sung academy painting, on which I've written quite a lot recently, will have to be skipped over here, so that we can get on to our main topic, painting of the later periods. If we were to single out the most consequential representational advance made in the period, it would be the shift to a more optical mode in which a grove of trees, for instance, is presented as the eye perceives it, fused into a single image, instead of as an assemblage of discrete objects--exactly the change that Leonardo is credited with introducing to European painting three centuries later.[3] Equally momentous is the development and refinement of expressive means for arousing in the viewer highly focused poetic sensations, through rigorous selection and combining of pictorial materials. Hsia Kuei is the great master of the first, both he and Ma Yuan of the second,

-- S. along with Ma's son Ma Lin, in whose hands this poetic mode is brought to the edge of preciousness. I have always been fond of musical analogies, and have sometimes used, in talking of this aspect of late Sung painting, that moment in late 19th-early 20th century music when the expressive means for evoking certain nostalgic and otherwise pleasurable feelings poignantly in the listener have become so effective and so accessible as to virtually force some artists of the period that follows--Stravinsky for music, Chao Meng-fu for painting--to reject them in favor of conscious moves into harshness and dissonance.

S,S. The early Yuan scholar-artist Chao Meng-fu is crucial in making the break. Two of his major artistic strategems provide models for all later artists. In one, represented by his 1295 "Autumn Colors on the Ch'iao and Hua Mountains," archaistic allusions to old styles are turned to the purpose of a very sophisticated primitivism that denies all the representational advances in landscape painting made during the Sung and confronts us with a deliberately spaceless, awkwardly scaled, graceless scene. The other, represented by his 1302 "Village by the Water," introduces the strategem that we might term stylistic extremism--pushing to an extreme, far beyond what could be sustained in a properly pictorial approach, some feature of style--here, the elimination of color and washes and pictorial variety and solid substance so as to leave only an expanse of dry, crumbly brushwork that only minimally evokes the simple scenery. It would be difficult to find in world art, at so early a period, any comparably radical and complex stylistic moves that are more than sports, or dead-ends--that are followed up, that is, by whole new lines of pursuit that prove to be themselves productive and innovative.

-- S. I don't say "lines of development," and want to emphasize that development, of the kind that exhibits some degree of continuity and a seeming logic, has ended with the end of Sung--nothing comparable to the stylistic sequence we can trace, for instance, from 10th century landscape to Fan K'uan to Li T'ang to Ma-Hsia and Ma Lin will happen again. For later Chinese painting we might call these lines of pursuit, adopting a term from a 1962 book by George Kubler, "linked series" (although his term was meant to include properly developmental sequences along with other kinds.) Following through a few of these linked series, or whatever we call them, will indicate how later Chinese painting might more effectively be seen as a bundle of such vertical strands, each extending over centuries, so that at any given moment, to find the equivalent of a "period style," we would have to make a horizontal cut, exposing something like the cross-cut ends of a multi-strand bundle of wires. Nothing that looks much like a "period style," to say the least.

It's worth noting here that what I've outlined as the developmental or evolutionary phase of Chinese painting, ending with the late Sung, is accompanied (like its counterpart in the west) by a rich art-historical literature, which can be seen as beginning with a few relatively brief critical and theoretical writings in the 5th-6th centuries and reaching an early climax in Chang Yen-yüan's imposing "Record of the Painting of Successive Periods" in the 9th century, a work comparable in scope and sophistication to Vasari's in the mid-16th century, which is hailed as the beginning of western art history. Chang Yen-yuan's work is followed by a succession of substantial texts each aimed at bringing the history of painting up to date for its period; but these continue only to the 12th-13th century, after which no one attempts any such broad account. Without meaning to offer a reductive explanation of the reasons why not, I can quote Hans Belting on the problem of writing about western art after 1800: "An art which is already produced under the welcome or unwelcome awareness of its own history, which it then seeks either to escape or to reapply, is not very well suited to an art history interested in demonstrating stable principles or evolutionary patterns."[4] All entirely applicable to Chinese painting after 1300--nobody attempts a history of it because it doesn't exhibit a history, or historical development.

Chao Meng-fu's new mode of applying spare, dry-brush drawing to the plainest, most unexciting of scenery is taken up by major Yuan masters such as Huang Kung-wang and Ni Tsan, whose "Six Gentlemen" of 1345 is in the exhibition. We should recognize that what we observe in Yuan painting is the situation in which a succession of highly creative artists are throwing artistic ideas back and forth, so to speak, each grasping quickly what the others have done and making some new and unexpected move outward from that point, in a very complex interaction over time that leaves simpler pictorial concerns far behind. Sometimes the back-and-forth appears to happen in rapid succession, as here; at other times it extends over centuries, with long periods of lull.

S --. Huang Kung-wang, in his masterwork of 1348-50 "Dwelling in the Fu-ch'un Mountains," employs the spare, dry-brush manner in building more complex, volumetric structures, without sacrificing the improvisatory-looking drawing and rich brushwork textures that make his landscape forms still appear natural and un-schematic.

-- S. Ni Tsan, inspired in some part by these structural innovations of Huang Kung-wang, explores ways in which the dry-line drawing can be used in defining readable masses that are put together out of modular units of convex and semi-cubic forms. (A small painting dated 1352, present whereabouts unknown.) Ni Tsan writes modestly of his landscapes as "nothing more than a few random brushstrokes," but some of them, at least, prove to be carefully-made constructions of forms in space, not random at all.

S --. Shen Chou in the late 15th century is perhaps the next to follow this line of pursuit seriously, as in his "Walking with a Staff," ca. 1485 (which is based more, to be sure, on Ni Tsan's standard composition with near and far river shores and trees in the foreground.) But the next truly radical move within this series is made by

S --. Tung Ch'i-ch'ang in the early 17th century, the late Ming, as in this section of his "River Landscape After Huang Kung-wang" in the Cleveland Museum of Art. He credits Huang, in his inscription, as his model, and wishes that the old master could see his painting. Throughout this series, it is as if the system of forms is being progressively stripped of its softening and naturalizing overlays of looser brushwork to reveal the stark underlying structure. And this movement obviously accompanies an ever-increasing tolerance, or even preference, for unnaturalististic, all-but-abstract form.

-- S. Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's radical reworking of the Yuan masters' styles was a principal model for the Anhui school in the early Ch'ing, along with the works of the Yuan masters themselves, as we can see in this 1659 work by the greatest of the Anhui artists, Hung-jen (not the one in the exhib. but similar.) Now even the schematic light-and-dark shading of Tung's style has disappeared, and the sense of substantiality, of three-dimensional mass, depends only on volume-defining devices of drawing possible within the linear manner.

S --. The sequences are of course not really unilinear; the strands interweave, join and separate constantly. Hung-jen, in the mid-1650s, rediscovers the Northern Sung monumental landscape manner, and learns from it how to create effects of space and mass and towering height, as he demonstrates on a sublime level in his great "Sound of Autumn" in the Honolulu Academy of Arts. How crucial aspects of this work derive from Northern Sung landscape I traced in the treatment of Hung-jen in my 1982 Compelling Image book. The achievements of the later Chinese artists can often be described in terms of reconciling seemingly opposed choices, and more specifically, as following up some stylistic direction into the range of extremism without reducing the power of the picture as an image. It is as if Hung-jen were saying: I can stay within the dry linear manner and still create landscapes that have the old qualities of spaciousness and monumentality.

-- S. Some part or aspect of a style can, in turn, generate another radical move by suggesting a hitherto-unthought-of departure. I also suggested, in the Compelling Image section on Hung-jen, that a configuration such as we see in this detail of the "Sound of Autumn," in which a clearly-marked recession along one side of a mass is denied by a sheer drop on the other side, might inspire the artist to attempt a whole composition based on that unsettling but stimulating formal contradiction.

S --. And so we arrive, I think, at such a painting as this--another that is now whereabouts-unknown--Hung-jen's "Landscape of the Nine Bends Gorge." (Show.) A single painting exhibiting such a configuration might be dismissed as simply a product of the artist's miscalculation or clumsiness. But a group of them reveals that it's a calculated effect, with which different painters experiment. This may be its most extreme form, among surviving paintings.

This single series--and we could trace any number of others--may suggest why I respond with exasperation when another western art critic puts down post-Sung Chinese painting for its failure to develop. Yes, it fails to develop, in much the same way that European painting from the mid-19th century on fails to develop, in the old and traditional sense. If that's taken to be sufficient grounds for dismissing the one, it's also grounds for dismissing the other. As I don't think we are about to do. Chinese painting of the centuries corresponding to Giotto-to-Gauguin in Europe didn't somehow miss the chance to make comparable representational advances; it was no longer concerned with making them. As the artists themselves might have put it: Been there, done that.

-- S. Let's return to the Yuan period and start another of our non-developmental sequences. The landscape paintings by Ni Tsan's friend and contemporary Wang Meng, who was a grandson of Chao Meng-fu, stand at an opposite pole from Ni Tsan's in a number of ways, as this one exemplifies: "Forest Grottos at Chü-ch'ü" (which was in last year's Met exhibition)--fully packed instead of empty, highly unstable instead of stable, textures rich to the point of oppressiveness, incoherence instead of clarity, heavy color, active figures (at least seven of them in this picture)--and so forth. How the subjects and styles of Wang's landscapes seem to correlate with his political stance, as Ni Tsan's do with his, is a problem beyond this lecture. I introduce this late work by Wang Meng only as preface to

-- S. his masterwork of 1366, "Dwelling in the Ch'ing-pien Mountains," which, to our great good fortune, is in the Guggenheim show. It's not a large or imposing picture; one can pass it by without stopping and becoming absorbed in it. Anyone who does so, and later comes to realize the greatness of the picture through studying it longer in the numerous reproductions and reading the accounts of it by Richard Vinograd and others, will be very sorry to have missed the opportunity--it would be like passing negligently by Giorgone's "Tempesta" and then reading books about it and spending years afterwards kicking oneself.

S --. Very briefly: Wang embodies in it his deeply disturbed responses to the turmoil accompanying the Yuan-Ming dynastic change by representing his family retreat at Mt. Ch'ing-pien (in a region that was just then engulfed in warfare), employing a compositional formula that normally expressed a sense of security and escape from the outside world, but powerfully subverting the established implications of such a composition. The picture follows classical models in early landscape--Tung Yüan, Kuo Hsi, others--that had presented intelligible, accessible worlds. But Wang Meng's picture, while echoing the formulae that encouraged that kind of reading, does not permit the viewer to move easily through it, to find one's way into and out of the retreat; it's full of spatial and formal ambiguities, blocked passages, unnatural and disorienting shifts of light and dark.

S --. In the upper part (one reads such a landscape upward), the animated earth masses and warped, constricted spaces between them do strange and powerful things to one's vision as one attempts to understand the picture in the old, naturalistic way. Whether any such sophisticated and radical violation of established expectations can be found so early in western art is for others to say; I don't know of any.

S --. Skipping over the early and middle Ming imitations of Wang Meng's style by Shen Chou and others, I'll jump to Tung Ch'i-ch'ang, whose own huge 1617 painting of the Ch'ing-pien Mountains, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art, betrays a familiarity with Wang Meng's work, and probably one by Chao Meng-fu of the same subject, now lost. The points of correspondence will be obvious, as well as the great differences; Wang Meng's "Ch'ing-pien" and others like it are the genesis (along with their own predecessors) for a whole series of tall, crowded compositions in which the earth masses are made to generate more turbulence than the frame seems able to contain.

-- S. How the tensions of Tung's painting are achieved, once more with self-contradicting configurations of form and space, I have written about more than once, and won't do it again. (Sighs of relief from some in the audience.) Similarly with the question of how Tung's work fits the historical circumstances of its time, as Wang Meng's does for its time--a line of argument totally absent from tonight's lecture.

-- S. Tung, however, does not mention Wang Meng's or Chao Meng-fu's pictures in his inscription on the work (he does this in another, recorded inscription); instead, he claims as his point of departure the style of the 10th century landscapist Tung Yuan (a name one utters with some unease just now, in this neighborhood--assassins may come out of the wings.) This is a copy of a painting Tung believed to be (as his inscription on it states) a genuine work of Tung Yuan, and of "divine quality." It is clear that Tung Ch'i-ch'ang grasped, and situated himself in, the linked series from Tung Yuan to Chao Meng-fu to Wang Meng to himself, with each earlier stage containing in more moderate form the features that the later ones would manipulate more radically. And each artist in the series must have felt that he was pushing the implications of the style & imagery out to the furthest point possible--as indeed he was, for his time. What could possibly be done within this sequence beyond Tung's painting was in 1617 unimaginable; what in the event was done, we will see. (I mean, of course, one of the realizations of what were in effect an infinite range of possibilities--no kind of determinism is implied.)

S,S. Matching up Tung's paintings with works of the kind that underlie them is an instructive exercise that needs to be done more than it has been; the juxtapositions illuminate, I believe, the nature of Tung's achievement in a way that is missed if one limits one's consideration to the individual work in itself. Wang Meng's "Forest Grottos at Chü-ch'ü," shown before, stands in that kind of relationship to this 1623 leaf in Tung's album now in Kansas City. And again, Tung recognizes certain formal possibilities in the earlier painting that he can exploit to powerful effect in his own.

S,S. For others of his paintings, the underpinnings are harder to discern. In the case of this harshly powerful work of 1597, I've suggested that they lie partly in debased Ming imitations of early painting, especially the largely imaginative late attempts to re-create the style of the 8th century poet-painter Wang Wei. My esteemed colleague Dick Barnhart, in an article to appear soon, argues convincingly that Tung's exposure in Nanking, shortly before this, to European engravings brought by the Jesuits was also a major factor. The likelihood of European pictures having had such an impact on Tung's early style I have myself suggested several times, but without developing the idea as thoroughly as Dick has done.

S,S. However one understands the process by which Tung arrived at the point of doing such paintings as these (here, a handscroll of ca. 1605), a problem that is of the same order of complexity and interest as tracing "the roots of Cubism", it can only have been through brilliant and sometimes violent manipulation of materials and "stylistic ideas" from earlier painting, in which layers of conventionalization, overlaid onto what was once imagery from nature--for instance, patches of fog against a mountainside--are transmuted into forms that are self-consciously bizarre and highly unnatural, but expressively powerful. The periodic attempts by some writers to "rescue" Tung from the stigma of being estranged from nature, on the grounds that great painters in China can only learn directly from their experience of real scenery (a cultural stereotype), represents, I continue to believe, a profound misunderstanding of what he is up to.

S,S. In a lecture given at the Met a few years back, after the great international symposium on him in Kansas City, I attempted this kind of multi-layered analysis of Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's "Poetic Feeling at the Ch'i-hsia Temple" of 1626, which is the work I chose to represent Tung in the Guggenheim exhibition. Again, I cannot repeat the exercise here, and will only say again that much of the richness of such a painting lies in the multiple readings it allows--one of which, to be sure, sets it in a relationship, however tenuous, to the actual place it purports to represent, a mountain near Nanking on which a famous Buddhist monastery is located.

S --. More to the point, however, are Tung's attempts to recapture the styles of early masters, particularly Wang Wei--or, more properly, to demonstrate in highly schematic or diagrammatic form his understanding of them. That his understanding was based largely on other, earlier attempts to re-create these styles, by artists who knew no more about the real Wang Wei than he himself did, doesn't in any way reduce Tung's achievement. Linked series need not include only good or genuine paintings; they frequently offer examples--and the history of art is full of them--of how good or even great art can be based on bad. This is Tung's landscape in the manner of Wang Wei, painted five years earlier, in 1621 (collection of C.C.Wang.).

I've spent a lot of time tonight on Tung Ch'i-ch'ang, and hope I've left those of you for whom he is a new name with some sense of how he stands as a towering figure not just in Chinese art, but in world art--if we try to imagine how he would fit into any late 16th-early 17th century context in European painting, we will arrive, I think, at another useful perspective on the purported backwardness and derivativeness of later Chinese painting.

S.S. Linked series of other kinds can be recognized for other subjects, such as birds and animals and fish and plants. A paper of my own in press attempts to do this for a number of these subjects, tracing them from the 13th-14th century ink painting of the kind done by Ch'an or Zen Buddhist monks, among others, to the 17th century, when the great Individualist master Pa-ta Shan-jen takes them up and turns them to his own very special purposes. Whether or not Pa-ta suffered real madness at some points in his life (still a matter of controversy), it is clear that he acted mad, in both his life and his paintings. (How paintings can "act mad" is the theme of an older article of mine.) Some of his album leaves from the 1680s--these two, the crabs from a 1683 album, the cat from another around the same time--push the devices of calligraphic abstraction and expressionist distortion beyond anything seen earlier in Chinese painting--and are scarcely to be matched elsewhere until the 20th century.

S,S. The motif of paired mynah birds, used for purposes already somewhat enigmatic and a touch sinister by the 13th century Ch'an monk artist Mu-ch'i (as preserved in an early copy, a section of a handscroll, which should have been at right--couldn't find the slide!) becomes a favorite of Pa-ta Shan-jen, whose pursuit of a cryptic kind of expressiveness they suited perfectly.

-- S. The ambivalence that this compound image carries, in the way the birds seem individually self-absorbed while at the same time engaged in some undefinable interaction, induces us to try to read it as a commentary on the possibilities of communication between individuals. (Leaf from 1694 album in Shanghai Museum.)

S --. This painting by Pa-ta, done in 1696, is the work of his in the Shanghai Museum that I tried to have included in the exhibition. They sent another, a picture of lotus and ducks, also fine but perhaps less strikingly sardonic. In this one, Pa-ta's depiction of the rock and the tree, repeating each other confusingly both in their outlines and in the splotchy treatment of their surfaces, as well as the oddness of their point of tangency, are meant to confound them (and the viewer) visually; the birds' seemingly off-balance poses and the failure of their intent looks to connect with each other are also unsettling, and upset any simple reading of the picture as just another image of birds-in-a tree.

17th century Chinese painting offers numerous other examples of what can properly be called expressionist warpings and distortions of received imagery. But I want to return to my linked-series argument.

S,S. One might assume that Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's style, which became the basis for the development of the Orthodox school of landscape, would be uncongenial to an artist like Pa-ta Shan-jen, but in fact he seems to have been attracted to it, and imitates it in many albums and hanging scrolls. In this leaf from the great 1694 album in the Sumitomo Collection he takes up Tung's oddly posturing foreground trees, and the way the movement they generate is continued in the further shore and hills.

S,S. The most remarkable of Pa-ta's Tung-derived landscapes, by far, is this amazing work in the Akaba Collection (on the left; Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's "Ch'ing-pien Mts." returned at the right.) These two were hanging in adjoining rooms at Asia House Gallery in my 1972 (?) exhibition "Fantastics and Eccentrics in Chinese Painting," and I was able to direct a colleague to them when, at a symposium held there, she professed not to understand how I could write that the Individualists, as well as the Orthodox masters, took up aspects of Tung's style. Of course we can't say that Pa-ta knew this particular painting by Tung, but the corresponces are striking: foreground and further tree groups, the hollows with houses, the way Tung's device of having fog eating flat patches out of the uppermost peak is repeated by Pa-ta in a way even further removed from any observable phenomenon in nature, most of all the division of the picture space into oddly-shaped segments that strain against each other, and the tight packing of these with smaller, active forms. Tung's work, so radical in the context of its own time, now appears rather static and conservative, with its disciplined brushwork and more moderate warpings of space.

-- S. I do not mean to suggest that the relationship with Tung's painting (or, once more, another like it) is the key to understanding Pa-ta's; more central, perhaps, to an adequate account of the later work would be the calculated incoherence of its pseudo-geology, or its execution in brushwork that Gustav Ecke characterized, long ago, as "brush delirium." But in spite of all the current distaste for art-historical approaches that are "diachronic," tracing lineages and drawing relationships over longer or shorter stretches of time, that kind of study continues to be indispensable, I think, to understanding later Chinese painting. One of Harold Rosenberg's lines that I liked best was his saying that one had to pay special attention, in our time, to what the paintings were saying among themselves. The same admonition can be made about later Chinese painting, except that the conversations are sometimes between paintings separated by centuries. And if you don't listen to them, you aren't getting it. or not completely.

So, how can all this end? Or does it ever end--must the aftermath of "the end of the history of art" or "the end of progress" continue more or less indefinitely, in an end-game pattern? No answers to these questions; but it's obvious that what I've been showing and attempting to trace, besides producing a lot of exciting and deeply satisfying paintings, can be seen as a vast, enormously intricate game played by the artists (or, if you will, by the paintings) among themselves, in some ways like Hesse's Glasperlenspiel but far less hermetical, more productive. And it's equally obvious that that game will last, be carried on or played, only so long as the good artists are absorbed in playing it. For China, it could be argued (as I've argued myself in various writings over the years) that it lasts only until around the early 18th century or so, and what comes after is something else, the definition of which is far beyond our topic tonight. And its end is marked--note that I don't say caused--by the appearance of a staggeringly prolific and versatile and creative and potentially revolutionary master, Shih-t'ao.

I might have posed another rhetorical question to introduce him: what happens if, in the middle of this grand program of linked-series, manipulating the past, and so forth, a great and original artist appears who isn't happy occupying the tag-ends of a bundle of linked series, however much room for creativity that condition allows him, and decides to break out of it? And all the knowledgeable people in the audience would think: he's about to spring Shih-t'ao on us. And they would be right.

S,S. Shih-t'ao was another descendant of the Ming imperial family, like Pa-ta Shan-jen, and was similarly open to suspicion of engagement in anti-Manchu activities in the early Ch'ing. He, too, became a Buddhist monk, then returned to secular life in his late years, from just before the turn of the 18th century to his death in 1707. He is represented in the exhibition by two paintings. One (on the right) titled "Clear Autumn in Huaiyang" (that is, Yangchow, where he lived his last years) is a fine, relatively conservative work in the Nanjing Museum, painted late in his life and (according to Jonathan Hay's research) responding to a flood that the city suffered in 1705. It exhibits the remarkable technical facility that permitted Shih-t'ao, when he chose, to produce quasi-topographical works of this kind, compositionally stable and spacious as well as descriptive. The other, "The Clear Sound of Hills and Streams," must have been painted earlier, probably in the 1680s, when Shih-t'ao was living in Nanking and affected by the stylistic practice of artists working there, notably Kung Hsien.

--S. Here he sets up a more intense visual excitement by raising the level of nervous energy in his brushwork, especially the large black splotches scattered as if randomly over the surface (tending to cling along the contours of masses, but also somewhat detached from them--the element of real randomness, crucial to the effect, is indicated by the way one of them landed right over one of the figures--an overlapping and effacement probably not intended by the artist.)

--S. Shih-t'ao's famous handscroll titled "Ten Thousand Ugly Ink Dots," painted in 1685, is a somewhat looser and wilder performance in the same manner. "The Clear Sound of Hills and Streams" is not only more disciplined in its execution, but follows roughly the old compositional scheme for the monumental landscape, with the principal masses vertically centered and recessions opening back at the sides, one deep, the other closed off in middle distance.

S.S. ( A section of his handscroll "Gazing at Mountains. in Yü-hang," Shanghai Museum.) By this time, and even more during the following decade or so, Shih-t'ao had mastered an extraordinary range of painting techniques and conventions and local styles. And, again following the favorite Chinese pattern of mastering and then discarding, he decides to cut loose from these comfortable underpinnings and paint as if he were situated at the inception of the art of painting. Or at least to see what the outcome would be of attempting to do so. He begins to take an outspoken stand against the practice of consciously imitating the old masters. He rails against artists who do this, and critics who praise them for doing it, adding "I could spit on them." He makes his famous statement about how the old masters' beards cannot grow on his face, their guts cannot fit into his belly (he's not one to avoid visceral imagery.) Among the stylistic directions in which he experiments are new uses of color, as here,

S.S. (Two leaves from his famous undated album for Old Yü) and the capacity of wet, suffusing brushstrokes to render atmospheric effects--a large step beyond the optical approach of Hsia Kuei and others, noted earlier..

S,S. Two more leaves, almost excessively familiar. While of course he hasn't really cut loose from the past and moved into total independence--an album leaf by Kung Hsien, for instance, underlies the familiar image on the left--the pictures are not consciously placed in relation to any precedents, in such a way that recognizing the precedents, and the positions of the works in some linked series, contributes significantly to one's experience of them. One could without exaggeration see Shih-t'ao as opening up a wholly new mode of painting, or set of modes--and potentially, a whole new age of painting, when the artist could approach the act of creation as if situated somewhere beyond the place where all the linked series had run out, or been cut off.

S,S. It was not, of course, to happen that way. I stirred up a small storm by referring, at the end of my Compelling Image book, to the "magnificent failure" of Shih-t'ao "to bring about single-handedly the emancipation of painting from the weight of the past." A surprising number of people, who apparently have difficulty reading a sentence all the way through, mistook this to mean that I consider Shih-t'ao to have been a failure as an artist. He failed only in his attempt to re-direct the whole course of painting, a feat that no single artist, however prodigiously gifted, could have accomplished. Why it was that Chinese artists after Shih-t'ao went off in quite different directions, without even attempting to realize the possibilities opened up by the finest of his works, is too complex a question to even raise here--I've attempted lengthy but still only partial answers to it in several writings. But I'll conclude by making a single observation, which Shih-t'ao's case can be taken to illustrate. Even while he was undertaking his radical departures from established practice, Shih-t'ao could also produce such a painting as this, his great "Waterfall on Mt. Lu," an homage to the 11th century landscapist Kuo Hsi and an entirely un-art-historical re-creation of the monumental landscape type, with its imposing earth masses, misty hollows opening one beyond the other, strong effects of light and shade, and whole impression of believability. (A great deal could be said about this ptg--an entire session of papers was devoted to it several years ago.)

The earlier pattern of linked series, even while it restricted artists to achievements that were somehow rooted in those of previous players in the series, was a continuing source of strength, guaranteeing each later master a solid base and a context within which his moves would be grasped and appreciated. What Shih-t'ao advocated, and in his late years attempted to practice, relinquished that strength--whether or not to the detriment of his late works is a vexed issue. In any case, it's clear that Shih-t'ao exemplifies a familiar, although to some an unwelcome, truth: that most of those breakers of traditions we most admire do their breaking from a base of mastery of the very traditions they reject. Could any artist after Shih-t'ao have painted this picture? I would argue not, and see that circumstance as underlying the paucity of real masterpieces, paintings that move us deeply and invite prolonged and multi-level appreciation, inspire whole symposia, in the later periods. (Those who have been down to Soho will immediately think of Jen Hsiung's self-portrait, from the mid-19th century. Yes, but try and find another one like that.) Later artists, whose aims and achievements are on the whole much more modest, are in a fundamentally different situation, in that even the most independently-inclined of them are not so much breaking free as floating free, a very different matter.

Nevertheless, I urge everybody to go down to see the excellent representation of 19th-20th century painting that Judy Andrews and others have managed to get together at the Soho Guggenheim--which, largely for reasons of availability, as well as sheer weight of numbers, provides a far fuller and better representation of that late period than the painting galleries in the uptown Guggenheim can possibly do for the early periods. If we could have realized a dream-list for the early centuries to the extent that Judy did for the last two, a lecture like this one would hardly have been needed. As it is, I hope it has filled out some important aspects of later Chinese painting that may not be apparent from the works in the exhibition alone.

Thank you.

References in the text

[1]Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China, Princeton, 1997, p. 10. Part of Clunas's purpose is to deny, rightly, that Chinese painting can be taken as unitary--or, less rightly, to deny the validity of working with the concept of Chinese painting at all. I would be the first to grant that a great deal of the painting done in China after Sung isn't self-referential or expressively oriented etc.--have been writing a lot on that theme myself lately. ("Twd a Remapping of Chinese Ptg" etc.) But, for present purpose---

[2]The Art of Describing, pp. 30, 83, 72.

[3]James Ackerman, "Leonardo da Vinci: Art in Science," Daedalus, Winter 1998, 223-4.

[4]The End of the History of Art?, p. 41.

CLP 22: 1995 “Exploring the Zhi Garden in Zhang Hong’s Album.” Lecture LACMA

Exploring the Zhi Garden in Zhang Hong's Album

The present exhibition, by re-uniting (if only temporarily) the twenty leaves of Zhang Hong's 1627 "Zhi Garden" album after several decades of separation, not only allows us to see and admire this extraordinary work in its entirety, but also permits a detailed consideration of the program that underlies this set of paintings, how it "works" as a pictorial exposition of a great Chinese garden. It proves to be, in this respect, absolutely unique and nothing short of amazing.

The album appears to be unrecorded until recent times. The original separation of the leaves was done in the 1950s by a dealer who had acquired it; he kept the eight leaves he liked best and sold the other twelve to the Cambridge, Massachusetts collector Richard Hobart. The eight, after being included in an exhibition of Chinese landscape painting in 1954,[1] were purchased by Franco Vannotti in Lugano, Switzerland; the twelve owned by Hobart passed after his death into the hands of his daughter Mabel Brandon. More recently, the same dealer who was responsible for breaking up the album bought back eight of these leaves from Mrs. Brandon, who kept four of her favorites; the present writer acquired six of the eight from this dealer in a trade for other paintings; and the remaining two were sold to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The eight Vannotti leaves were purchased in the 1980s by the Museum für Ostiatische Kunst in Berlin. The twenty leaves are thus dispersed among four collections, public and private, in groups of eight, six, four, and two.

I have a dim memory of having seen the album while it was still all together, during my graduate student days, in the storage room of a museum that was considering it for purchase, and of not being much impressed with it. I was working hard during those years to understand and absorb traditional Chinese criteria of quality in their painting, and Zhang Hong's album did not seem to stand up well to orthodox Chinese standards for either "good" compositions or "good" brushwork. Quite a few more years would pass before I would come to realize that the same was true of much of the so-called Zen or Chan painting of the Song-Yuan period, and of other kinds of Chinese painting that were excluded by traditional connoisseurs and collectors from the orthodox canon of what the cultivated gentleman should appreciate. I came to recognize also that excellent artists could choose deliberately to employ "bad" brushwork and compositions, i.e. varieties that departed from the orthodox, in pursuit of certain ends and effects that they could not have achieved within the orthodoxy. In doing this they risked, and frequently suffered, critical disparagement. A good example is the great early Qing landscapist Gong Xian, whose mysterious visions depend in part on textural and light-and-shadow effects accomplished with the unorthodox technique of stippling. The resulting "bad brushwork" charge has attached to him down to recent times.

In Zhang Hong's case the effect being pursued, to which "strong" compositions and brushwork were necessarily sacrificed, was a kind of visual truthfulness. In an inscription on an album of "Scenes of Yue" that he painted in 1639, Zhang relates that when he went to the places in question, "about half did not agree with what I had heard. So when I returned home I got out some silk and used it to depict what I had seen, because relying on your ears is not as good as relying on your eyes."[2] The empirical, visual-exploration approach suggested in this statement, highly untraditional for a Chinese painter, is carried through in others of Zhang's works, and is the key also, as we will see, to the method of the Zhi Garden album.

Since Zhang Hong has not been much appreciated in Chinese writings on artists and paintings, we know little about him. The recent discovery of a notice on him in the local history of the county in which he lived, written around the time he painted the Zhi Garden album (the preface of the book is dated 1629), fills out somewhat his shadowy image.[3] According to this source, Zhang "read books," or studied toward the official examinations, while a boy--this information only confirms what was already indicated by the long, literate inscriptions on some of his paintings. But he was unsuccessful as a scholar, and turned to painting for his livelihood, attaining fame "all over the world." He lived in a hamlet on the east side of Hengqi County, located between the Shihu or Stone Lake and the Taihu or Great Lake west of Suzhou. His family was terribly impoverished, but he himself preserved his pride, remaining aloof from worldly concerns: when his shoes were broken, he didn't change them; when his clothes were dirty, he didn't bother to wash them. He cared for his parents, and after their deaths*********ation" have a conventional ring, but there is doubtless some truth in them.

The Zhi Garden album was done, probably on commission, for a certain Huishan Cizong, who is named in Zhang's inscription on the last leaf. The term Cizong means a man skilled in literary composition, and presumably was used to flatter the patron, who must have been the owner of the garden. He has not been identified, nor has the garden; the name Zhi Yuan or "Garden for Stopping" was used for several gardens of periods before and after the late Ming, but none can be matched with the one represented in Zhang's album.[4] It was obviously very extensive, and, judging from the canals seen in the paintings, was probably located in Suzhou. Whether Huishan Cizong approached Zhang Hong because he knew of the artist's special penchant for "depicting what he saw" instead of producing the usual series of conventional compositions, or whether the mode of representation was entirely the artist's choice, cannot be established. In any case, Zhang Hong undertook a project that had never been attempted before, judging at least from extant works: a series of paintings that would together provide a surprisingly comprehensive, integrated, and persuasively "accurate" pictorial account of the garden. (For the purpose of this essay I am ignoring the theoretical problem of how a painting can be "pictorially accurate"; what I mean by it will become apparent in what follows.) The Zhi Garden album stands as incomparably the best visual evidence we have for a major garden from the great age of gardens in China, only a few years before the designer Ji Cheng composed his Yuanye, "The Craft of Gardens," written between 1631 and 1634.[5]

This is a large claim, which depends on an understanding of how gardens had been represented prior to Zhang Hong's time. There were essentially three options, corresponding to the principal forms that Chinese paintings take. A single, comprehensive view of the garden could be presented in a hanging scroll, since the old convention of representing the terrain or scenery from an elevated vantage point allowed the artist to lay out the garden in map-like fashion within the space of his painting. In the handscroll or horizontal scroll, which one reads while rolling it from right to left, the painter typically provided a pictorial analogue to the more linear or discursive experience of entering the garden through a gate shown at the beginning of the scroll, walking leisurely through it and observing its principal features, and leaving through another gate at the end. Variations on this scheme are seen in a number of garden handscrolls, including those by two of Zhang Hong's contemporaries, Sun Kehong and Wu Bin.[6] In the third form, the album, the imagined experience was sequential: successive leaves would typically present designated and poetically named "scenes" in the garden--pavilions, ponds, rockeries--with the name of each inscribed on the leaf. An early example is a twelve-leaf album of scenes of the Shizi Lin or Lion Grove Garden ascribed to the late Yuan-early Ming master Xu Ben; another is the Zhuozheng Yuan ("Garden of the Awkward Politician") album by Wen Zhengming.[7] Fine as all these may be as paintings, their inadequacies in providing comprehensive and believable visual accounts of the gardens, because of problems of spatial disjuncture and conventionalization, are obvious.

Zhang Hong follows none of these schemes, not even that of the garden album. What he has in fact done can be introduced by asking how we might make a visual record of a garden that would convey enough information about it to allow an approximate reconstruction. Imagine that as a specialist in Chinese gardens, you are given a single wish by a genie from a lamp, and your wish is to return to some great late Ming garden with a camera and make a series of color photos or slides of it. You are permitted a free choice of vantage points, even unnaturally elevated ones that would today require a helicopter. But the genie has craftily put only a twenty-exposure roll of film in the camera. You would use your initial shot for an all-over or bird's-eye view, and for the remainder, would roam over the garden selecting views that together make up a more or less comprehensive portrayal of it, choosing angles of view that were especially revealing. You would make a point of interlocking the photos spatially by including in each some visually identifiable materials--buildings, striking clusters of trees or rocks--that appear also in others. To the same purpose, you would take care that the area covered in each of the photos could be identified within the bird's-eye view.

And that, in effect, is what Zhang Hong has done. To put it less anachronistically, it is as though he had gone around the garden holding up a rectangular frame and painting what appeared within it, from a fixed vantage point, without trying to arrange the visual materials into "good" compositions. He adopts a determinedly un-literary stance, not even writing identifying labels on the leaves, since, contrary to standard practice, they do not focus on particular designated "sights" or "scenes" of the garden. And he eschews "strong brushwork"--of which he was eminently capable, when he chose to play that game--in favor of a flexible system combining line drawing with a pointillist technique of applying ink and rich colors sensitively in rendering the sensory surfaces of the garden's components: water, rocks, blossoming trees.

The morning after I presented my newly-arrived-at understanding of how the Zhi Garden album "works" at a symposium on Chinese gardens held in San Francisco in 1990,[8] another of the participants, Dr. William Wu (a more serious student of Chinese gardens and their history than myself), phoned me to say: "Jim, I've decided that Zhang Hong doesn't really understand the Chinese garden." Later he expanded on this opinion in a seminar I gave on Chinese paintings of gardens. What he meant is that Zhang did not follow, and so presumably did not truly understand, the established practice of choosing designated "scenes" in a garden and focusing his paintings on these. Chinese gardens, as he argued, are organized around such named focal points, and to de-emphasize them so thoroughly in a representation of the garden seems to miss the point. But here, again, I would be inclined to counter-argue that Zhang Hong always knows what he is doing, and violated accepted practice in order to carry out his project of quasi-objective visual reporting.

It is virtually beyond question that Zhang was in some part inspired and encouraged in this project by certain European pictures that were to be seen in China in his time; a "View of Frankfort" from a series of engravings of cities of the world published in Cologne in the late 16th and early 17th century and brought to China by Jesuit missionaries appears to underlie the first leaf, the bird's-eye view. Others of Zhang Hong's paintings similarly betray clear adoptions from European pictorial art. But that is a matter I have argued at length elsewhere, and cannot repeat here, for reasons of space.[9] It is worth noting, however, that the only really comparable project in Chinese painting, a series of pictures in which a systematic attempt is made to overcome the spatial limitations of Chinese pictorial practice by making multiple representations of a single subject from different vantage points, is roughly contemporary with Zhang Hong's album, and is similarly the work of an artist otherwise known to have borrowed heavily from European pictorial sources. This is Wu Bin's handscroll, painted around 1610, made up of ten views of a fantastic scholar's rock that had just been acquired by his patron Mi Wanzhong.[10] The effect is of turning the rock in space and representing how it would look from each angle. Wu Bin, in this remarkable work, similarly broke the rules for how rocks should be represented and how ink applied to paper with the brush; and he, too, produced thereby a kind of masterpiece. It would seem reasonable to suppose that both projects, un-Chinese and seemingly empirical as they are, were inspired by some European model, perhaps a series of scientific or architectural illustrations that presented some subject from different angles; but no such model that the two artists might have seen has been identified.

It is time to begin our tour of the garden. There is no set order to the leaves that can be determined; the numbering proposed here provides an orderly progress into, through, and out of the garden. The bird's-eye view is obviously Leaf 1, with the title "Complete View of the Zhi Garden" inscribed on it, along with the artist's signature and seal. The scenes presented in all the other nineteen leaves, with perhaps one exception, can be located within this first leaf, as indicated in the diagram (fig. 1.) Leaf 2 also bears a title and the artist's seals; it draws us closer to the main entrance to the garden seen in the lower right corner of the bird's-eye view (hereafter BEV.) Looking over the dike with willow trees, on which figures are now visible, we see the wall of the garden, with the main gate at left and a smaller gate at right. In Leaf 3 we have moved over the wall and gaze down, across the tops of the tall, leafy trees that grow just inside it, to where a path from the gate crosses a plank bridge with a red railing; a low stone wall parallels it. In the lower right is a gatehouse, visible in the BEV but now seen to be occupied by two men, presumably the master and a guest, who will reappear in later leaves. Groves of tall bamboo grow on the shore of the pond and the waterway that stretches upward to the right.

To the left of this passage in the BEV are two large ponds, each with an open pavilion on the far shore. (Ji Cheng advises that about three parts in ten of the area of a garden should be given to ponds.) Leaf 4 presents the first of these ponds, taking care to include at right, smaller now, the bridge, low wall, and bamboo groves from the previous leaf. A tall rockery appears behind the far building; a small, rocky island with a tingzi or kiosk is in lower left; a roofed promenade or gallery lined with willows in upper left separates this pond from the next. In Leaf 5 this same gallery is again seen in upper left, but from the opposite side: we are now located at the far end of the second pond, looking back across it. In fact, we must be situated either in or just above the pavilion overlooking this pond; the two-level terrace with stone balustrade onto which the pavilion opens, clearly depicted in the BEV, is at the bottom of the picture, just within our range of vision. And the top of one of the two gate buildings that appeared in leaf 2, as well as in the BEV, is now visible in distance, above the willows and leafy trees that line the pond, along with the roof of another building seen in the BEV. We begin now to realize the complexity but also the logic of Zhang Hong's project: what he sees from any vantage point is what he portrays. Or that, at least, is the impression that the paintings convey; and the relative absence from them of familiar type-forms and compositional conventions encourages us to believe that we are really seeing the garden, more or less as it was, through his eyes.

For Leaf 6, we are above and slightly behind the pavilion that overlooks the first pond, looking down between it (at left) and the large rockery that was dimly seen over it in leaf 4. The host and guest appear again, seated at a table beside a cobblestone path that leads into a tunnel in the rockery and will emerge onto a terrace above, on which two barrel seats are set. A two-storey ge or belvedere in the lower right of this leaf faces onto a smaller pond, clogged with lotus or water-lilies. That pond and the open horizontal building beyond it are the subjects of Leaf 7, which reveals also two women in a boat, presumably picking lotus roots or water chestnuts. For the first time (apart from the BEV) the top of a pagoda is seen above; it will reappear in later leaves. Leaf 8 reverses the view across the same small pond, looking back over it (once more, with a terrace and railing at the bottom) to the open belvedere and the large rockery, which is seen now from still another angle.

The scene of Leaf 9 is not so easily locatable, but proves to be nearby: without changing position, still situated above the same building, we now look leftward, over what appears to be a lattised greenhouse and a bridge across the canal that bisects the garden, to another two-storey gate, the main entrance into the left section of the garden. To the right of this (above it in the BEV) is a clump of tall deciduous trees, and under them a thatched pavilion that evidently overlooks another pond, beyond the boundaries of this leaf. For Leaf 10 we have moved rightward (or upward, in terms of the BEV) and are looking over this same pond. Lining it at right are many thin trees, uniform in height, with leafage sprouting only at their tops; these appear at the uppermost edge of the garden in the BEV, to the left of the pagoda.

This pagoda is portrayed clearly, at last, in Leaf 11, surmounting a rocky knoll; below it to the right, drawn simply in the BEV and now in more detail, is a stone lantern. In the lower right are buildings that are hidden by trees in the BEV. Leaf 12 is another that is difficult to situate within the BEV, but must portray an area of rocks and leafy trees just beyond its limits in upper right; the pagoda appears dimly at the top. A servant is seen kneeling inside a roofed porch, waiting for guests, while another approaches below. The pond that appears in Leaf 13 is at the uppermost right corner of the BEV, on the edge of the garden; both the knoll in lower right, grown with vegetable-like stubby stalks, and the pavilion with terrace and railing at the back, are partially visible in the BEV.

For Leaf 14, we move over into the left portion of the garden, where the principal residential buildings are located, and look down into a courtyard with rocks and brightly blooming flowers under a canopy. The host and guest appear once more, inside the porch, with a boy servant gazing out over an elaborate balustrade. The buildings and trees are probably the same that appear in the upper left of Leaf 10; they are mostly concealed by trees in the BEV. Now, as in other leaves, we are given a privileged view behind and around the obstacles, permitted to penetrate the hidden parts of the garden in a series of small revelations. The building seen in Leaf 15 is just to the left of these, and appears to be the main audience hall, the "Great Hall" which every garden must have, according to Ji Cheng's treatise. The courtyard is now occupied, not by flowers and trellises, but by rocks and cypress trees, and the two men seated in the hall in earnest conversation wear scholar-officials' hats. From the areas of relaxation and pleasure-seeking we have entered the sterner one of formal visits, where the master of the garden receives fellow officials and exercises his status and power. But this lasts only for a single leaf: in Leaf 16 we move leftward again to look down into another courtyard with a rockery and servant women picking flowers. A two-storey pavilion opens onto this, its upper floor, where an antique bronze sppears on a table, shaded with a canopy propped out on poles. With more space we could analyze how the oblique angle of view and cut-off architectural elements impart a sense of immediacy and veracity.

If we now turn to look back, i.e. rightward in terms of the BEV, as we are doing in Leaf 17, we gaze down at an angle on the same large pavilion with two-level terrace and railings, overlooking the largest pond, that was our vantage point for Leaf 5. The trees around it are now blossoming, indicating seasonal change. The smaller pond behind it, and the tall, spindly trees, were featured in Leaf 10. Turning then to look downward, without changing position, we see in Leaf 18 the left edge of the large pond (in terms of the BEV) and another V-shaped division with tall bamboo that almost repeats the composition of Leaf 3.

Nearing the end of the tour we encounter the only painting, Leaf 19, in which no visual materials appear that can be clearly identified also in other leaves. It must represent the rear gate of the garden, behind the trees at the upper left of the BEV. We are looking back now from outside the garden, and so have returned to the world of practical affairs: a fisherman beside his net-raising apparatus, a boatman sculling his boat to transport a passenger with his luggage?--the image is unclear. The last, Leaf 20, is similarly a view from outside the garden, this time from across the canal, to balance Leaf 2. The central storeyed hall or lou, with master and guest seen for the last time in the open upstairs room, can just be discerned among the trees in the upper left of the BEV; appearing over the trees on the left side of the leaf is the pavilion with two-storeyed porch that was featured in Leaf 16. The season is now winter, in accordance with an old convention, probably originating in 12-leaf "months of the year" albums, of ending with a snowy landscape. That we have emerged from the ideal realm of the garden, from which all commerce is banned, is indicated again by a boatman in grass raincoat and hat poling his laden boat along the canal, and by a flag protruding from a rooftop at the bottom, indicating a wineshop or inn. The longest inscription is on this leaf, and includes the date, dedication, and signature.

A great deal more could be written about the album as a work of art, and, now that the mode of pictorial exposition is understood, about the design of the garden. But your tour guide has run out of space. ******orthodox scheme for his album--which even he himself was never, so far as we know, to repeat--that are to be thanked.

References in the text

[1]Sherman E. Lee, Chinese Landscape Painting, exhibition catalog, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1954, no. 82.

[2]For a longer treatment of the album and reproductions of four leaves, see Cahill, The Compelling Image, pp. 16-19. This chapter, along with the section on Zhang Hong in Cahill, The Distant Mountains, pp. 39-59, offer fuller discussions of this artist and his achievements, along with questions of his adoptions from European pictorial art and of "truth to optical experience," than can be given here.

[3]The book is titled Hengqi lu, compiled by Yao Ximeng, whose preface is dated 1629, ch. 3, pp. 15a-b. It is included in Zhongguo difangzhi jicheng, vol. 5, in a volume devoted to sub-county gazetteers. I am grateful to Joseph McDermott for calling it to my attention.

[4]Mr. Chen Congzhou, a leading Chinese specialist in the history of gardens, informed me that the Suzhou calligrapher Zhou Tianqiu (1514-1595), a disciple of Wen Zhengming, gave this name to his garden; and a garden in Yangzhou with this name was depicted in a handscroll by Yuan Jiang in the early 18th century (private collection, New York.)

[5]Ji Cheng, The Craft of Gardens, translated by Alison Hardie, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988.

[6]Sun Kehong's painting "The Stone Table Garden," dated 1572, is in the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; see James Cahill, The Distant Mountains: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Dynasty, New York, 1982, colorplt. 7, pl. 25, and pp. 67-68. Wu Bin's 1615 depiction of "A Spring Party in the Shaoyuan," Mi Wanzhong's garden in Peking, is in the collection of Wango H. C. Weng, Lyme, New Hampshire; see his Gardens in Chinese Art, New York, China Institute, 1968, no. 9, fig. 13.

[7]The album ascribed to Xu Ben is in the National Palace Museum, Taipei; published as Xu Ben Shizilin tu, Peking and Shanghai, 1928. The Wen Zhengming album exists in two versions, which do not correspond in contents. For the 8-leaf album now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, dated 1551, see Roderick Whitfield et. al., In Pursuit of Antiquity, Princeton, N.J., 1969, no. 3, pp. 66-70. The other version, dated 1533, now whereabouts unknown, was published in Kate Kerby, ed., An Old Chinese Garden, Shanghai, ca. 1922.

[8]The two-day symposium, organized by the Society for Asian Art, took place at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco on February 9-10, 1990

[9]See The Compelling Image, pp. 13-25, and fig. 1.20 and 1.22, which juxtapose the first leaf of Zhang Hong's album with the View of Frankfort from Braun and Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum.

[10]Reproduced completely in Sotheby's New York auction catalog for December 6, 1989, "Fine Chinese Paintings," no. 39.