James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

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

S.S. (Kung & Hokusai.) (Intro. Remarks.) You may well wonder:

Why do I begin with these two? What can they have in common?

Both LS; both regarded now as highly original works, as "masterpieces" of artists. (Afternoon session.)

More importantly for my present argument, both made deep impact, deeply admired by western viewers, at early stage in our study of East Asian, when traditions they belong to were little understood. (In case of KH. not nec. this very picture, but something like it by the artist.)

Finally, and most to the point, western viewers who were so struck by them didn't realize, at that early stage, that part of reason they seemed so accessible to western eyes is that both artists had incorporated strong elements of western, or European, style into their pictures. In both cases, I believe, the response of western viewers, mostly unconscious, was tinged with a recognition of strangely familiar aspects of the images, which made them more visually acceptable, saved them from seeming entirely alien.

Hokusai's great Red Fuji (Fuji at Sunrise. "South Wind. Clear Weather"):    What were familiar to western eyes, but original & striking to Japanese, were the blue sky w. white clouds, and the effect of morning sunlight & shadow on the upper & lower parts of mountain. Familiar to Japanese but strikingly new to western eyes were the flat, shaded areas of color, without dark shadows, and the boldly simplified, strongly patterned composition—for which, if there were time, I could show precedents in Jap. representations of particular places--shinkeizu. Melida's subject—and espec. Mt. Fuji. Edmond de Goncourt wrote about this print in 1896: "Fujiyama colored brick red with a few snow lizards at its peak, against an intensely blue sky lined with layers of white clouds like a beach with the tide out. A print of considerable originality in which the artist has tried to render the effect he has seen [that is, in nature] in all its barely credible reality."

S.          Goncourt was aware of Hokusai's series of westernized landscape prints, done some twenty years earlier, around 1810; he writes that these landscapes "have a Dutch feeling about them." But to account for the striking coloring in the Red Fuji, coloring that was quite outside the Japanese landscape tradition, he makes the European assumption that Hokusai had simply imitated the coloring of nature, as any observant artist might do. About the whole Views of Fuji series he wrote, "The series . . . with somewhat garish colors that were chosen to match as closely as possible the colors seen under every light in nature is currently the source of inspiration for the landscapes of the Impressionists." So Europe was getting back what it gave, somewhat altered.

S.         (another of the westernized series, for the shading.) I oversimplify the responses, of  course, to make my point--which is that aspects of the image that fit w/in one's own tradition make the picture acceptable and readable, even comfortable, while those that are adopted from another trad. supply a special visual stimulation, a sense of newness, and so save it from banality, from being just another picture of Mt. Fuji.

S. KH, (Drenowatz Rietberg) Arthur Waley ended his 1923 Introduction to Chinese Painting book with this extraordinary paragraph, perhaps the first perceptive thing that a western viewer had written about a post-Sung Chinese painting: "He |Kung Hsien] saw Nature as a vast battlefield strewn with sinister wreckage. His rivers have a glazed and vacant stare; his trees are gaunt and stricken; his skies lower with a sodden pall of grey. Many of his pictures contain no sign of man or human habitation . . . Such houses as he does put into his pictures have a blank, tomb-like appearance: his villages look like grave-yards. With this tragic master I conclude." Words that fit this picture, whether or not Waley knew it (he could have, from re prod.)

S.         Waley had no way of knowing that behind Kung Hsien's most striking effects, and behind their relative accessibility to western eyes, lay Kung's familiarity with European prints--I have suggested even that his “Myriad Peaks & Ravines” was a brilliantly original reworking of the print at right, the “View of Tempe” from Ortelius's atlas of 1679 (?). It was the western-derived elements that must have struck Kung Hsien's Chinese contemporaries most forcefully: the highly unusual composition, and the strong effect of light and shadow, achieved by a system of applying ink in a manner closer to western stippling than to Ch. texture-strokes (ts'un-fa). Yet Kung Hsien could claim that his ptgs were solidly in the lineage of such great early Chinese landscapists as Tung Yuan and Mi Fu, and Chinese viewers could know exactly what he meant, recognize traits of those styles in his ptgs and accept his works as acceptable departures from tradition.

I begin with these two examples, although they don't fit properly into our theme of crosscurrents in East Asian ptg, to make as forcefully as I can my principal point: that adoptions by artists of elements from a foreign pictorial art, far from reducing the originality of their works (as is sometimes charged), more often permit strikingly innovative effects exactly by incorporating unfamiliar materials or techniques into a native context; and that doing this broadens and deepens the appeal of such works to viewers of diverse backgrounds and tastes.

S.S. And typically, the process takes place in two stages: a relatively straightforward imitation of the foreign model (as here, a section of an early Kung Hsien hand scroll and a European print of the kind he is imitating) is followed by a transformation of it into something that is both more original and more congenial to those within the artist's absorption and “Japanizing” of styles from the continent. But I hope to give this familiar, almost hackneyed formulation a somewhat new spin.

The view that borrowing heavily from a foreign art reduces the originality and value of an artist’s work is often made in a nationalist spirit, and is meant to be protective of the native tradition; it is sometimes accompanied by the equally nationalistic argument that admitting non-native elements of style into one's works sullies them, muddies the purity of a purely indigenous practice. While we outsiders need to be sensitive to such feelings, we needn't and shouldn't share them, or allow them to guide our thinking, since to do so would, among other things, hamper scholarly investigations of just the kind this symposium and exhibition are meant to encourage.

S.S. When cross-cultural transmission is joined with cross-medium, the effect of newness can be enhanced. In talking about East-West exchanges in art, I have sometimes shown van Gogh’s oil copy of a Hiroshige print (the one with blossoming trees in Ueno Park), pointing out that this is mostly a curiosity, an exercise that was useful for Vincent but of minor artistic interest; but then is obviously inspired by the Japanese work but no longer overtly Japanized—Vincent’s lessons from the East has been absorbed into European painting, to its enrichment.

For the present symposium, I can make the same point by juxtaposing a leaf from the Chinese Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (pub. in Nanking, 1679) beside a "Red Cliff" ptg (Freer Gallery) by Ike no Taiga, in which Taiga, while not copying the print imitates closely in brush painting its techniques, idiomatic to color woodblock, of shaded color washes within heavy black outlines, and

S. (detail) tree foliage rendered with shaded-color washes over a misprinted pattern. This is interesting, but far less exciting than some of Taiga's other paintings,

S. such as this one from 1748, in which these same techniques are reconciled with the native Rimpa tradition.

S. Detail. The fluid handling of ink and color, the decorative flattening of the stream, remind one of Korin. Some of Taiga's dullest moments come when he is being dry and didactically Chinese; his most entrancing, when he moves into a quasi-Rimpa manner, as here.

S.S.    I would like to be able to show some similar transmission between Korea and either of its two neighbors, China or Japan; but while such episodes certainly occurred and are important and have been studied, I have neither the slides nor the knowledge to do it. Recently I've heard one paper and read another by Burglind Jungmann about how Japanese Nanga artists such as Gion Nankai and Ikeno Taiga drew on sources in Korean painting;¹ and others have suggested the same for Japanese Muromachi ink painting. As for Korean painting itself, its adoptions from China are heavy; but, as is the case with Japanese painting, it’s more independent moments are likely to be most interesting to outsiders. And as Amy Poster suggests in her catalog essay, pictures of the local scenery are especially valued in Korea, as they are in China and Japan. These observations can be illustrated by such a pairing as this: Chong Son "Diamond Mts. (anon, screen of same subject in show) and Sim Sa-jong, "Winter LS in Style of Shen Chou," which can represent the kind of Korean ptg that sometimes mediated bet. Chinese literati ptg and Japanese Nanga.

S.S.    I will use the rest of my time, then, for another China-Japan episode, this one another true back-and-forth, and rather extended. In 1995 I was invited to give a lecture on Japanese ptg at LACMA, and decided to take on once more the large problem of Sesshu and his relationship with Chinese ptg. Ming and Sung. As is well known, Sesshu spent two years in China from 1467, visiting Ningpo, Hangchou, Yangchou, and Peking. His contacts w. artists there seem to have been chiefly with the so-called academy and (Tie-school masters who were active in those places in the mid-15th century. He mentions Li Tsai as one of the two contemporary Chinese ptrs from whom he could learn something; and some of Sesshu's ptgs done soon after his return from China, such as the LS at left from a series of LS of 4 seasons, do present him as a kind of provincial Che-school master. (Ptg by Judo in exhib. appears to be based loosely on Sesshu’s picture—configurations of mt & tree, in particular, quite close. Rest is different.)

S.S.    I have been inclined over the years to see Sesshu that way, and  have (or used to have) a kind of reputation in Japan for offering this view of Sesshu as essentially a Ming painter at symposia and other occasions. That went decidedly contrary to the version of the matter one gets from Sesshu's own writings, in which he plays down what he learned from his Ming contemporaries and claims to have gone back directly to the Sung masters; and this is the version accepted and argued by Japanese scholars. I would use comparisons such as this one, a section of Sesshu's "Long scroll" in the Mori collection with its distant model, Hsia Kuei's great "Pure & Remote View of Streams & Mts.," to point out that Sesshu was far closer in style to Ming recensions of Hsia Kuei’s composition than to the original. Hsia Kuei depicts the erosion by water at the base of the cliff subtly; Sesshu exaggerates it. Hsia Kuei gives a relatively natural scale of figures to landscape so that one must look carefully to find them (point out: two at base of cliff, two in cave),

S.         Sesshu, like a Ming painter, enlarges them, diminishing greatly the grandeur and naturalism of the landscape. The two figures in the cave attract the viewer's attention more than the surrounding rocks.

S.         Here they are in details: prominently exposed in Sesshu's picture; tucked away in a tiny corner in Hsia Kuei's.

' Paper for session at AAS? 1998? and "Ike Taiga's Letter to Kim Yusong and his Approach to Korean Landscape Painting." Review of Korean Studies I. Sept. 1998, 180-195.

S.S.    In Sung paintings of the Ma-Hsia school these paired figures stand for outdoor conversations or communions between two old friends, and can even be the central matter of the picture, as in Ma Yuan's picture at right (signed leaf, fan ptg., in Boston MFA). In imitations of Ma Yuan like the one at left they are conventionalized, and in typical works of Sesshu.

S.         such as this sec'n of the scroll in the Asano col., they take on even more strongly the character of conventional signs. And that transformation—from meaningful images to conventional signs—has seemed to me the essence of Sesshu's relationship with Sung painting. Japanese scholars typically attribute Sesshu's greatness to his deep understanding of nature, writing for instance of the Mori

scroll as "the synthesis of the artist's life-long experience of penetrating into the secrets of natural beauty," and so forth; I have always seen Sesshu's achievement as somewhere else, but haven't known quite how to define it.

S.S.    In the course of preparing the LAC MA talk and going through

Sesshu's works more carefully than before, 1 came upon several that seemed to give more substance to his claim to have bypassed the Ming and gone back to Sung originals. In particular, an album of 22 leaves, in So. Sung styles (+ Kao K'o-kung, sep. problem) which for me has been a major discovery. (2 leaves in style of Ma Yuan.) 1 know it only from a reproduction album pub. in 1910, in which the leaves are reproduced in colors on silk by some skilful process; ten of the leaves are reprod. in collotype in Tajima Seiichi's Masterpieces of Sesshu from the same year. The album was—is?—in the Hosokawa collection. Tajima writes about it, "There are many pictures done by Sesshu still existing; among which the long scroll belonging to Prince Mori comes first, and next to it the present album. When we look at the pictures in this album we readily understand that Sesshu was far superior even to the great artists of Sung China, such as Ma Yuan. Hsia Kuei, etc. . . no other work by Sesshu can be compared with them."

S.S.         (two more leaves, Li T'ang style.) And indeed, while we can dismiss as nationalism and hyperbole Tajima's claim that Sesshu here surpasses the Sung masters who created these styles, we are still left with a very impressive set of paintings, which handle the Southern Sung academy manner with more finesse and fidelity than Ming-period Chinese artists are ordinarily capable of. The discovery of this album even makes me think of attempting, at this late & highly incautious stage in my career, something that is properly unthinkable: a gaijin's Shin Sesshu-ron. (trans.: like Jap. scholar & Leonardo...)

S.S.    (two more leaves, styles of Kao K'o-kung ).  Another problem taken up in my LACMA lecture…) The album raises several big questions. One is why, after being considered the #2 surviving work of the master, it has been ignored so completely over the nine decades since then—even the large corpus volume for Sesshu edited by Nakamura and Kanazawa, with a supplement reproducing works known only in old reproductions, doesn’t include it.²  From similar cases, one can guess that some dai-sensei long ago questioned its authenticity, and no one since has challenged that judgment. If so, it is certainly time for a reconsideration.

S.S.          (Two leaves in the Yii-chien manner, with skilful uses of ink wash that make them much more atmospheric & evocative than the better-known works by Sesshu in this manner that we'll see in a moment.) But more importantly, the existence of this album seems to upset assumptions, at least my assumptions, about the formation of Sesshu's style, by testifying to Sesshu's ability to work outside the normal stylistic boundaries of his Ming Che-school and academic contemporaries and get back more closely to the Sung originals. And if he possesses this ability, then it follows that the high degree of conventionalization and formalization and flattening that characterizes his late style, as seen in the works always reproduced to represent him, was arrived at through a deliberate process, and isn't simply an end-point in a Ming-like hardening of style. And admitting that obliges us to try to define what lay behind this conscious choice. S.S.    An exploration of the implications of this discovery such as I attempted in my LAC MA talk is impossible here for lack of time; let me simply outline it. At left, a late Sung fan painting attrib. to Yü-chien: at right, the well-known leaf after that artist in Sesshu's series of copies after Sung ptgs, which would appear to be based on this particular work. The success of the late Sung paintings of this kind as evocations of spacious, atmospheric scenes, with the parts readable, although seen through haze, as hilltops and groves of trees and so forth, depends on the areas of ink being blurred, amorphous, with the individual brushstrokes not distinct, well-shaped, neat; on the contrary, they are ragged, run together, and because of that powerfully suggestive. Sesshu, by contrast, emphasizes the formal elegance of the brushstrokes; and the sheer beauty of ink tonalities, which are not directed twd separating forms in space or rendering their volume, but twd pure visual beauty.

²Ref.

S.S.          And this is the direction that Sesshu will continue in his production of haboku or "splashed ink" landscapes, which became one of his favorite types. (Showed series in lecture; just two here.) On left, one in Seattle Art Mus., perhaps a bit over the edge in dir. of abstraction; at right, small masterwork of genre, haboku LS in Tokyo NM dtd 1495. What began as a highly evocative image of an evanescent passage of scenery has been transformed into a tightly organized, stable structure of broad, essentially non-descriptive brushstrokes. The identifying features of the scene, insofar as they till readable at all have been turned into conventional signs; the motif of the two seated men facing each other is now placed in the boat, where it is anomalous—who rows the boat? Wrong question. And even more than before, the shapes of the brushstrokes and their ink values take on a certain independence of descriptive purpose: they work as pure form, visually very satisfying.

The transformation, then, is completely knowing and deliberate. And if I were to sum up the direction of it in a phrase, it would be: the Japanization or the accommodation to Japanese taste, of once-potent Chinese landscape imagery. What do I mean by Japanization? We used to use the term "decorative," but the word has too much of a pejorative sense, which I certainly don't intend. What Sesshu does is subject the imagery of Ch ptg to a radical formalization, a reduction of pictorial themes and motifs once loaded with meaning to more or less abstract conventions and brush configurations. This process drains the imagery of most of its original meaning, so that the scene can be read almost as pure form, very cool, disengaged, and elegant. In later times the Rimpa masters. Sotatsu & Korin & others, would do the same for the old narrative imagery of Yamato-e; Nanga artists would do it again for certain imagery from Ming-Ch'ing ptg and printed pictures. What survive of the intellectual and emotional content of the earlier pictures are only faint echoes, or resonances, which evoke a kind of nostalgia, along with the pleasure of visual recognition without emotional engagement. This is a quintessentially Japanese process--I remember reading a modern fashion commentator amazed at how the Jap. dress designers could present in their showrooms models in costumes of Hitler maidens, or the American drug culture, all drained of their original implications, presented as pure style. But this is no longer a specifically Japanese phenomenon, peculiar to the "Empire of Signs," if it ever was; the cool, disengaged manipulation o£ imagery is exactly what we live with, like it or not, in what we like to call our post-modern condition.

S.S.         Another, later example: The almost magically evocative image of "A Mountain Village in Clearing Mist" by the 13th cent. Chinese master Yü-chien is turned into a composition for a two-fold screen by Ogata Korin (Seattle Art Mus.) which does not draw the viewer into attempting to read it as a spacious, atmospheric scene, but exists only as patches and brushstrokes of ink on a gold ground, which itself denies a spatial reading. The commonly-made argument about the special Japanese sensitivity to the aesthetic properties of materials might well be applied here: the inkiness of Japanese ink ptg of the later centuries has no real counterpart in later Ch. ptg, even when the Japanese works appear to draw on Chinese imagery.

S.      It can be recognized and admired in Tohaku's great pine-tree screens,in which, however, the pines are not reduced to conventional signs – only to the special use of ink or in Uragami Gyokudo’s landscapes, such as his Toun Shisetsu, “Snow Sifted Through Frozen Clouds.” That there are no proper counterparts to these in later Chinese painting is partly because of the Chinese literati critics’ insistence on what they considered “good brushwork,” a requirement that this kind of painting almost necessarily violates – as the landscapes of Yü-chien and other Ch’an/Zen artists did in their time, earning them scornful dismissal of critics.

S.S.         And so on to Tomioka Tessai, who in his most brilliant works, from the late years before his death in 1924, uses ink and paper and color as though he had invented the medium. More than forty years have passed since the major Tessai exhib. that I organized as a Fulbright student in Japan (it opened here at the Met & was later shown in 12 other U.S. cities), and we are still far short of fully assessing the greatness and the impact of this extraordinary master.

S.      I refer particularly to his impact on modern Chinese landscape painting, in which massed puddles of deep black ink are often combined with fine drawing, sometimes with color, in a Tessai-like manner. There is ample evidence that this manner was primarily inspired by Tessai; it was transmitted partly through Chinese artists who studied in Japan, such as Fu Pao-shih (don't have best slides to demonstrate this, tried to in article in Oriental Art several years ago)

S.         and partly through reproductions of Tessai's work to be seen in

China, along with a few originals. Li K'o-jan, who didn't study in Japan, acknowledged the Chinese artists' admiration for Tessai, and the impact of his art on theirs, in an essay for the catalog of a Tessai exhibition that we organized for China in 1988? I think it was. (Ptgs by Fu Pao-shih, Li K'o-jan.)

S.S.         Chang Ta-ch'ien, who studied in Kyoto in the 1920s and certainly knew Tessai's work first-hand, appropriates ideas from his paintings throughout his career, but especially in the ink-splash paintings of his late period. And so we have come full circle again, with a manner of painting imported originally from China, transformed fundamentally in Japan, and re-introduced to China in its new form, where it seems fresh and powerfully arresting, qualities that Chinese painting by that time had come to need.

The same points I have tried to make here could be made with numerous other examples of back-and-forth movements of styles and techniques and motifs between China. Korea, and Japan (not to speak of other places). These do not in any way diminish the importance of those internal developments that take place mostly within the cultural tradition, relatively free from borrowings from abroad, such as Chinese literati landscape painting from the Yuan masters through Tung Ch'i-ch'ang to the FourWangs and beyond, or Japanese Rimpa painting. But even these will usually prove to be not entirely self-contained: Dick Barn hart has recently made a strong case for something I myself suggested without elaborating: that some part of the formation of Tung Ch'i-ch'ang style was affected by his viewing of European prints in the crucial formative period; and Yamane Yûzô and others have shown how the Japanese Rimpa masters derived a significant part of their imagery from Chinese pictorial printed books. What we must recognize, I think—in the face of protective attitudes toward national traditions--is that these cross-cultural transfers were not only very common but were entirely healthy, sometimes re invigorating the internal developments at points when they had begun to falter, lose impetus, turn repetitive. Because it is just at those points that good artists, like Kung Hsien, Hokusai, Tung Ch'i-ch'ang. Sesshu or Fu Pao-shih, are most receptive to new pictorial ideas, whatever their source, that prove to be useful to them and beneficial to their artistic tradition. Thank you.

CLP 26: 1997 "Foreign and Local Traditions in the Collecting of Chinese Paintings” Univ. of Oregon, Eugene Symposium

CLP 27: 1997 "The Japaneseness of Japanese Nanga Painting." Lecture, Seattle Art Museum

Tokyo ptg, of motif of two people facing each other in boat. Has conflated fisherman-in-boat motif from Ch. work with two-people-facing motif from Ma Yuan and Hsia Kuei-doesn't make a lot of sense representationally-who rows the boat? but who cares? not kind of thing Sesshu is concerned with by now. In Cleveland ptg, brushstrokes even more independent of rep. or even suggestion of specific things, they are locked stably together into highly formalized configuration; light & dark don't work to define planes of distance. What began as a highly evocative image of an evanescent passage of scenery has been transformed into a tightly organized, stable structure of broad, non-descriptive brushstrokes. The identifying elements of scene, insofar as they are still readable at all, have been turned into conventional signs. And even more than before, the shapes of the brushstrokes, and their ink values, take on a certain independence of descriptive or representational purpose; they work as pure form, visually very satisfying.

S. Detail of LS attrib. to Sesshu in this museum. Without getting info authenticity questions-which I'm not competent to deal with-can note even further degree of transforming of coherent, spatially readable scene into structure of brushstrokes. Too far in this direction to be real Sesshu? or Sesshu himself pushing this aspect of his ptg almost over the edge? Won't try to decide. Will only say that we see here is somehow very Japanese, and, I would argue, it marks the real beginning of a great development of Japanese ink ptg as largely independent of Chinese. I made this argument some years ago, on occasion of a big exhib. of Jap. ink ptg.; didn't credit Sesshu for his role as a major initiator of it, as I would now be inclined to

S.S. One could follow through by showing Tohaku's pine trees, ink ptgs by Sotatsu and Korin,

S,S.  by Taiga and Gyokudo (left, LS by Gyokudo in west-coast collection), all the way down to Tessai and (right) Murakami Kagaku (as I did at another symposium last year), always making basically the same observations about the relative divorcement of brushstrokes and ink values from the representational purposes that they served in Chinese painting.

S.S.  We can see it also, at the highest level, in Yosa Buson's great painting of the city of Kyoto on a snowy night, in which virtually every Chinese rule for how brush and ink should be employed is sublime effect. Even though the line of poetry is Chinese (The color of night over storeyed halls, snow on the myriad houses), Buson's poetic vision is entirely Japanese. We will deal with Buson, and how he develops the capacity to create such works as this, later on.

S.S. Pursuit of this “decorative” quality, sheer beauty of ink values and repetitions of shapes and brushstrokes, has its equivalent of course in colored ptg – in fact, usually located there, in Rimpa school of Sotatsu & Korin & their followers. (Here, Korin & Roshu doing Utsuyama scene.)  This is the kind of ptg that we think of as being quintessentially Japanese, for late period.

S.S It is part of the genius of Ikeno Taiga to be able to carry out a kind of Rimpafication (to coin a word) of the Chinese styles and themes, transforming them into patterns of flat color and repeated strokes entirely in harmony with the Japanese tradition, and espec. Kyoto, tradition, he knew so well.  Here, ptgs of 1748 (left, Red Cliff, based distantly on some Chinese model) and 1749, LS w. trees & man on bridge.

S. Detail of 1749 . With enough time & slides I could demonstrate how he derives this style from woodblock colorprints in Mustard See Garden manual-have done this in other lectures; we even planned an exhibition (etc. – never carried out).

SS. This side of Taiga’s style is taken up by, among others, his friend & follower Duwayama Gyokushu, notably in this album of landscapes.  There is a danger in this stylistic direction: can quickly turn decorative in negative sense: thin, flat expressively as well as formal, lacking in tensions that hold our interest in good art. S. Another follower, Kanryo, exemplifies this pitfall, I think; his ptgs can be visually lovely but seem in the end expressively empty. This was one of the traps that forever beset the lesser Nanga masters—as well as others, for instance later Rimpa artists.

S.S. (Mokubei, 1826, "Listening to Wind in Pines.") Best painters escape this in a number of ways; Aoki Mokubei, by vigorous, seemingly "wild" brushwork and inventive compositions. (Two people walking in mist, only upper parts visible.) Lively, visually stimulating  style.

S. Upper part. Yet even Mokubei's "wild" brushwork doesn’t have real implications of powerful tension or unrest that charges brushwork of such Chinese masters as Hsu Wei, or even Yangchou painters. Mild, pleasing, undisturbing.

S.S. Nanga artists understood, I think, this pull twd dilution of Chinese styles as one aspect of Japanization, some of them tried to resist it by understanding the Chinese styles better and imitating them more closely. Another way to construct history of Nanga is through this process. But not by any means a matter of steady "progress"; already some close imitations of Chinese models at beginning, espec. in works of Sakaki Hyakusen, who could be almost Chinese in some of his works? (Describe.)

S. Would be hard to find anything clearly Japanese in either of these. (Hyakusen was of Chinese lineage? Maybe.) Nor would any Japanese artist approximate the Chinese styles so closely again until much later in the history of Nanga.

S.S. In fact, seen from viewpoint of success in imitating Chinese styles, history of Nanga can be said to have a dumbbell shape: thick at ends, thin in middle. By the second decade of the 19th cent, or so, much more Chinese ptg to be seen in Japan, including more truly "Southern School" works, closer studies possible. (Here, Tanomura Chikuden, 1830, work in this museum: he had access to Ch ptgs from which he learned dry-brushdrawing & other techniques.

S.S. Or this wonderful "Bamboo Groves and Waterfall" by Yamamoto Bafitsu, a bit later, around middle of century-spatial effects, refinements of brushwork, scarcely possible in Nanga before.  He had access to good col. of Ch. ptgs. in Nagoya, where he worked, could when he chose draw on Ch styles in this way. S.S. And by later 19th cent., e.g. in this 1864 work by Hine no Taizan (Monsen? Now this museum), Japanese ptgs could "pass," virtually indistinguishable from Chinese. So, Nanga artists achieve their goal; and Nanga ptg as vital, independent mvt. virtually ends, except for Tessai and a few others. (Fine ptg-using to make art-historical point. Not put-down.) Strongest period of Nanga lies between these two points of high sinicization.

S.S.   An interesting chapter of Nanga is the pursuit of the Yuan master Huang Kung-wang by some of the Japanese artists. Huang Kung-wang was recognized as the quintessential "Southern School" painter, whose innovations in compositional method and in a certain kind of built-up or overlaid brushwork were enormously influential in later Ch ptg. (LS by Wang Shih-min at right exemplifying both.) This is what some Nanga artists-in my view, not the most interesting group-were determined to capture. But had no good models a few Chinese amateurs

(such as I Fu-chiu, woodblock pictures. A late version of Huang’s 1341 "Stone Cliff at Pond of Heaven (at left) was in Japan at least by time of Hyakusen, who wrote colophon for it, copying info, on artist from P'ei-wen-chai shu-hua (Couldn't find slide-now in Fujita Mus. in Osaka.)

S. One of artists engaged in this determined pursuit was Noro Kaiseki, who saw copy of Huang k-w ptg 1810, and immediately felt he had risen to new height in mastery of "So. School" style—this is his 1811 “Autumn LS,” based on it.

S. (Det. of upper part.) Kaiseki doesn't understand how to use this manner for volumetric renderings of landscape forms; but had indeed come to some understanding of kind of repeated & overlaid brushwork used by Orthodox school masters in China. But once mastered, what then? Kind of dead-end. Already by mid and later 18c, this Orthodox landscape manner scarcely being practiced with any fresh energy in China; unlikely  to have any notable creative Hopment in Japan. S.S. Another by Kaiseki, 1819; LS by Rai Sanyo, who was more Confucian scholar than painter, and never got beyond this dilute version of "Southern School" style. Lots of ptgs of this kind; easy style to learn & practice; they make up least interesting side of Nanga. (Story of Japan Times reviewer who complained of Nanga exhib. that too much of ptg was flat & boring & uneventful; and was chastised in letter from another (U.Mich. grad student) pointing out that in So. School ptg one. look at picture, one admire formal qualities & brushwork-quoting me. I thought: oh my god, what have I done.)

S.S.  In hands of Nakabayashi Chikuto, contemp. of Baiitsu, Huang Kung-wang style (by way of late Ming artist Lan Ying) undergoes final dissolution into repeated geometric forms; not unpleasant, but one tires of it quickly when hung on one's wall.

S.S.  Once more, great artist can use more or less same elements of style to make exciting pictures. Here is Uragami Gyokudo, in early work ("Green Pines & Russet Valleys" of 1807) taking up the practice of repeated brushstrokes and overlaid, built-up brushwork and making it his own, charging it with extraordinary nervous energy. What began as quiet applications of horizontal strokes along contours have become energizing repetitions of larger strokes set diagonally and hovering outside the earth masses. If anyone in China had been able to do anything comparable to this with the Orthodox manner, the later history of Chinese landscape would have been quite different.

S.S. Idea of layered applications of brushwork for effects of depth underlies, I think, Gykudo’s great work titled Toun Shisetsu, or "Fine Snow from Eastern Clouds" (col. of Kawabata Yasunari, in whose house in Kamakura I first saw it; later took Wen Fong there, and he was equally struck by it, sat gazing at it for long time-I commented that this was probably first time in history that Chinese connoisseur had spent more than one minute looking at a Japanese ptg.) One could build whole lecture on "Japaneseness of Nanga Ptg" around this one picture, looking at it from various angles, including distinctive use of ink tonality. But I want to get on to my final section.

S.S. My final section has to do with a more elusive aspect of late Japanese ptg, including Nanga, in its relationship to the Chinese ptgs that were its models. I have offered in several recent writings and lectures the opinion that Chinese artists of the later centuries on the whole suffered under more strictures-things that they were enjoined by critics and theorists not to do, and could do only at considerable risk to their standing and reputations-than Japanese artists of the same period. And the Japanese artist I have used to represent on the highest level the achievements permitted by the relative freedom that Japanese ptrs enjoyed has been the 18th century poet-painter Yosa Buson. Those artists within Nanga who aspired to the "pure Southern School" ideal were aware that some of their compatriots were violating it-Nakabayashi Chikuto, for instance, two of whose relatively arid landscapes we saw a bit earlier, belittles Buson's works as having too much of "the flavor of haiku poetry" in them-he hates this haiku flavor, he writes. Chikuto had read enough of Chinese theoretical writings to understand that paintings imbued with poetic sentiments and human feelings were considered by the lofty-minded Chinese arbiters of taste to be rather vulgar, or low-class. (Again, in various recent writings, I've tried to show that these qualities are not entirely absent from late Chinese ptg, but only from Chinese literati ptg, which we have wrongly come to think of as the part that deserves our more or less exclusive attention and admiration. But that is another lecture-which in fact I delivered yesterday at the U. of Washington.)

But it is exactly the poetic flavor, or haiku flavor, which makes Buson's late works, especially, so engaging, and raises them far above any level that artists like Chikuto could attain. It can be felt even in some of his earlier works, such as the screens of horses dated 1763 in the Kyoto National Museum (detail at left)-these are copies after the Chinese artist Shen Ch'uan, but through small changes, such as the drawing of the foal and inject small touches of feeling into Shen's rather cold style. And Buson never so insistent as Shen Ch'uan in his use of European-derived highlighting—Shen was one of Ch ptrs heavily affected by European illusionistic pictorial devices. So Nanga was also spared that.

S. Busons’s foal appears in his late-period paintings, notably the one from which this is a detail (1780s), in the broader, looser, slightly whimsical drawing of this late period.  Another part of what makes Buson’s ptgs lovable, Shen Ch’uan’s on the whole not.

S.S. A small, late (1781), lovely painting by Buson of "Visiting Tai"--the well-known story of how Wang Hsien-chih traveled by boat on a snowy, moonlit night to visit his friend Tai K'uei, but when he reached Tai's house, never went in-he had come carried by feeling, but then the feeling ran out, and he went home. Anecdote stands for virtue of spontaneity, letting feeling overcome logic. While I was working in Japan on an article on Buson and Chinese painting, I found in a Kyoto store the very picture that Buson's must be based on, the work of a minor Chinese artist, unrecorded but probably 18th cent., named T'ang Hsien-tzu. (Buson only reversed composition; otherwise very similar.) I made slides but left it there in the stone; whereas I would have given a lot to own the Buson. Why is one so successful, other not? It has to do, again, with Buson's light, playful drawing, and with his subtler handling of ink washes etc.; but also

S.S.  with the way he characterizes the simply-drawn figures, in equally subtle ways, imparting to the picture what we can legimately call a poetic mood. Related to haiga, the spontaneous, simple pictures done to accompany haiku poems-Buson was great master of these as well.

S. Hyakusen, from whom he learned a lot, could also catch momentary moods in simply-drawn figures-here, two boatmen relaxing as they float down the river on a raft. And Hyakusen was also a haiku poet and haiga painter-this quality in ptgs of Hyakusen and Buson is indeed related to haiku, and haiga-Chikuto was right in that, at least.

S. How Buson reached his great period, what he learned from Hyakusen and from Chinese paintings, was principal subject of third chapter of book I published last year, The Lyric Journey: Poetic Ptg in China and Japan. I don't want to repeat that account at length, but will insert a quick outline of it here, since it is basic to what I want to say about this aspect of Japanese Nanga ptg--its ability and willingness to capture the mood and feeling of some momentary, everyday experience. In China, more difficult for artists to break away from established thematic categories; portrait of everyday life and momentary feeling were seen there as trivializing the art of painting.”  In Japan, Hyakusen had opened the way in pictures that used special systems of brushwork to evoke agitation and excitement of walking in rain, or of wind blowing over grassy slopes. But he died young, never entirely realized potential of this new expressive capacity of brushwork, which was quite new to Japanese ptg.

S. Buson makes it all work perfectly in best of his late works, such as this small picture on satin, "Clearing After Rain in Spring," in which he pursues and attains poetic effect of sun breaking through clouds, lighting up field of yellow flowers at right while grove of trees in lower left is still dark. Beside this, Hyakusen's picture looks, tentative and more than a bit awkward.

S.S. Another early Nanga artist who studied Chinese paintings and understood how to make Chinese-style brushwork serve Japanese poetic purposes was Kō Fuyo, a Confucian scholar, poet, and painter who was a friend of Ikeno Taiga. (He inscribes the picture at right as in Taiga's manner.) In a few of his works, such as this pair of small tanzaku paintings, he reveals an unusual sensitivity, for the time, to nuances of brushwork,

S. and how they can be used to evoke specific, momentary experiences-here, of being in a waterside, pavilion while the wind blows the trees and agitates the water. But Kō Fuyo seems to have painted only a few works, and had little influence on others.

S.S.  Another aspect of this development of a specifically Japanese kind of poetic painting that I tried to trace was a great change from early to later Nanga in the themes chosen for figure ptg. Typical of early Nanga was a type that aimed at conveying Chinese literati idea of eremitism (seclusion) unworldliness in depictions of ideal Chinese personages engaged in their very Chinese pursuits – T’ao Yuan-ming under the pine in Nakayama Koyo’s picture, or the Taoist woodgather in Mochizuki Goykusen’s, reading one of the classics while resting – themes that had little to do with Japanese culture or the everyday experiences of their viewers. Ptgs. Expressive of sinophile feelings of time.

S.S. Hyakusen did these, and Buson in his early period-scholars getting drunk in a garden, a Taoist alchemist refining cinnabar in the mts. To make the elixir of immortality or, more likely, to produce some potent home brew—both seem to be images of intoxication, which was a common metaphor for an unworldly state of mind, or an easy means of achieving it.

S.S In Buson’s later figure paintings, even when they are of Chinese themes, the figures and their activities are given a greater sense of immediacy, and more relevance to Japanese life.  This depiction of immediacy, and more relevance to Japanese life.  This depiction of the T’ang poet Li Po and his friends partying in the Apricot Garden was done for the Sumiya, the famous brothel in the Shimabara district of Kyoto that Buson frequented, and was surely understood by the Sumiya’s customers as likening their own drinking and poetry parties to this great precedent.

SS. The figures that appear in many of his late paintings, however, are not Chinese at all—they participate in what appear to be no more than intimate scenes of everyday life in the Japanese countryside: an old farmer brings feed to his horse, while a weasel runs along the roof; a woodcutter chops branches from a tree while a young deer trots below, undisturbed by the sound. The implications of this shift—a parallel development in poetry and in poetic theory, the popularity among city-dwellers of the bucolic ideal they depict, just at a time when this ideal of reclusion in nature is becoming difficult, for most people impossible-l deal with in my book, and must pass over here. But I would argue that the change from adopted classical Chinese subjects to what seem, at least, to be familiar scenes of Japanese everyday life is another marker of the coming of full maturity to Japanese Nanga painting, and its independence from China. (Paper by young scholar named Emanuel Pastreich given at AAS mtg last month traced way early 18c Japanese scholars such as Ogyu Sorai advocated reading vernacular Ch. lit.; later, Ueda Akinari and others rewrote Chinese narratives as Japanese themes, or made new stories in the Chinese mode. The vernacular Chinese allowed, as Pastreich put it, a "defamiliarization" of everyday Japanese experience. Something like that accomplished in these ptgs, which allow depictions of the everyday to transcend the mundane.)

S.S. The main argument of my "Lyric Journey" book, as the suggests, is that just as Chinese and Japanese lyric poems typically imply a passage by the poet through the landscape, during which he registers or reports poetic sensations that are (whatever practical objectives may also be involved) the real justification for the travel, so does traveling in nature become an underlying theme in poetic painting of the late Sung and late Ming in China, and some Edo-period painting in Japan, notably the late works of Buson. Both gentlemen and rustics participate in this one of the former fording a stream at right, a farmer returning home (a part of the same theme) at left—both are late Buson paintings, from the few years before his death in 1784, when he used the name Sha-in.

S.S. From slightly earlier, the late years of the period when he used Sha Shunsei signature, i.e. the middle or late 1770s, is this painting (in the exhibition) in which two motifs that in China would never be conflated are conflated (as frequently happens in Nanga painting): in the central section, a scholar living in reclusion receives a visit from a friend in a house built over the stream; in the foreground a traveler fords the stream, and will make his way upward to where, far above, the road continues and disappears. The composition is structured, that is, to allow the viewer a visual passage that parallels the traveler's. This is a jewel of a painting, in my biased view (I own it, through circumstances too complex to recount here), which will repay your unhurried and prolonged attention.

S.S My book ends with this superb Buson landscape in the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth--a work that I was responsible for their acquiring, from the excellent Tokyo dealer Kumita Shohei-but in deference to my hosts I will put it next-to-last tonight. The line of Chinese poetry that inspires it, written in upper right, is "A single road through cold mountains, among the myriad trees." The traveler, with his minimal luggage on a stick over his shoulder, crosses a bridge over a stream that runs swiftly among rocks. The green color on the traveler's coat is the only touch of color in the painting, but is enough to impart a cool resonance to the ink-washes around it. The painting seems totally free of brush mannerisms and overtly derivative forms, and reads as a fresh, unmediated report of an exhilarating experience in nature.  Of course, not really that; but effect, and not easy to create at this late period.

S.S.   Once more, the road reappears at the top of the composition, after winding its way "among the myriad trees," signifying the traveler's passage out of the scene.

S.S   Buson's "Travelers in a Cold Forest" in this museum, another of the major Buson works that have entered U.S. collections in recent years (and around which our doomed exhibition was to have been build), bears the unusual signature "Sha Ro," which cannot be precisely dated-none of the few "Sha Ro" signatures is accompanied by a date; it is probably from around 1778. (Apologize for hard slide of whole, made from reproduction-my original is too dark to use.) No line of Chinese poetry accompanies this painting; I suggested that it might recall a Buson haiku reading: "Mountains have darkened,/ And the field, in a twilight/ With pampas grass" (Yama wa kurete/ no wa tasogare no/ susuki kana.) Another traveler, this one on horseback and accompanied by a servant, rides through a field of tall grass, on a road that will wind through tall boulders and reappear in upper right, to disappear again in a misty tree grove.

S.S. The ability to paint landscapes that can be read so convincingly and movingly as space and three-dimensional form and strongly differentiated textures, I argued, the painterly techniques that permitted such achievements as this, Buson had learned from the study of certain Chinese paintings, especially late Ming works by Suchou-school artists, which by this time had come to be disparaged in their homeland by adherents of the "Southern school" ideology of Tung Ch'i-ch'ang so powerfully as to discourage later Chinese artists from attempting such visually persuasive effects. Japanese painters, fortunately, were unaware of these critical prohibitions or chose to disregard them, and they underly some of the triumphs of the best Nanga masters.

S.S. Restrictions of time keep me from following up that observation with examples, which would range through works by Buson's followers such as Goshun and (more rarely) Kinkoku, as well (Toyohike) as later masters from Tani Buncho to Tessai. A single painting by Buncho's follower Tachihara Kyosho, painted in 1811, will serve to represent them. The woodcutters in the picture are not the idealized and heavily symbolic figures of the Chinese tradition; they do not read books or engage in philosophical discourse. They have built a fire and warm themselves before it—the wine-gourd held by one of them does, to be sure, read as a faintly sinophilic touch; but perhaps Edo-period Japanese woodcutters really carried their sake in wine-gourds. In any case, the picture persuades us that they did. The pine n foreground are Japanese in lineage, echoing Rosetsu,

S. as does the three-stepped move into distance at the top. In this side of Nanga painting the more engaging and moving, and in characterizing it as poetic and essentially Japanese, I am of course revealing a personal bias, no doubt conditioned by my late-period boredom with the Orthodox manner of landscape in China and other manifestations of the high level of conventionalization in ptg there.. I wish I had time to continue this account, a personal narrative presented as a passage of art history, into the later periods, especially into the works of Tomioka Tessai-the painter who, although he had been dead for thirty years when I encountered him in Kyoto during my Fulbright year there in 1954-5, still seemed intensely present, and set the direction of all my later ventures into the field of Japanese painting. But that would take us beyond the bounds of this lecture, and even further over my allotted time. Thank you.

CLP 15: 1991 "Five Notable Figures in the Early Period of Chinese Painting Studies." College Art Assn. Appended are three pages of notes for inserts, filling out the paper to lecture-length (for delivery to Society for Asian Art, S.F

Five Notable Figures in the Early Period of Chinese Painting Studies

(Paper by James Cahill for Jason Kuo's CAA 1991 session "Four Decades of Research on Chinese Painting in the West")

(SLIDE: 1946 conference at Princeton on "Far Eastern Culture and Society": group photograph.)   Reconsidering the achievements of major pioneers in Chinese painting studies in the West confirms what we would in any case assume, and what we all know from experience: that a richly pluralistic art history, made up of diverse contributions from people with different backgrounds and strengths, is in. the end more productive for the field than any unanimity of approach we might imagine as an ideal. In this belief I want to consider five of these pioneers, all people who were in some sense my teachers, trying to assess their particular contributions. Not included in my brief consideration are others who might be of comparable importance but with whom 1 did not study directly: Ludwig Bachhofer, George Rowley, Alexander Soper, others. Nor do I include, since he is not properly an academic teacher,   Wang Chi-ch'ien, although he was a strong and beneficial influence on me at formative stages in my career. The five I will speak about are Archibald Wenley, Osvald Siren, Laurence Sickman, Shujiro Shimada, and Max Loehr. Of these five, only Shimada is still alive and active.

(SLIDE.) Archibald Wenley. director of the Freer Gallery for many years, will seem to some an unexpected choice to head my list. His publication record in the field of Chinese painting is slim, and he is seldom cited today, except in reference to particular paintings. His strengths were in integrity—nothing he did was facile—and in a deep sense of public service, which he imparted to the Freer and its curators.

Wenley, born in Ann Arbor in 1898, studied at the University of Michigan and then at the New York Public Library. When he was introduced to the Freer's first director John Ellerton Lodge, he was looking for a job as a librarian. Lodge reportedly asked him whether he was interested in Chinese art, to which Wenley answered that he couldn't know if he was interested since he knew nothing at all about the subject. That, Lodge replied, was the best qualification he could have, and took him on immediately as a trainee for curatorship at the Freer. Lodge's action can be understood when we realize that it was still a time when most sinologue scholars believed that any area of Chinese studies was potentially accessible to them through their mastery of the language and research materials; they were inclined to mistrust, even to score, disciplinary approaches. (This polarization of the field was reflected in the well-known 1947 article "Sinology or Art History? Notes on Method in the Study of Chinese Art" by the Freer's third director John Pope.) Wenley was accordingly sent to China for two years of language and other sinological studies, 1923-25; this was followed by three years in Paris, where he worked with Paul Pelliot, and two years in Kyoto. When Wenley joined the Freer staff in 1931 he was, in the words of John Pope's posthumous tribute, "the first museum man thus solidly trained in the languages, literature, and history of China and Japan to embark on a career in Far Eastern art."

(SLIDE.) Wenley was appointed director of the Freer in 1943, and worked to make it more effective as a "center for research in Oriental art," as Freer's will had specified. He built up a great library, started the series of publications called Freer Gallery of Art Occasional Papers, and was co-author of the 1946 catalog of the Freer's Chinese bronzes. Apart from this and a few published articles, Wenley's work is preserved in numerous folder-sheets in the Freer files, careful studies of objects, heavy on documentation, virtually-unconcerned with style, although he had a good eye for quality. He was, as John Pope put it, "a man of strict conservatism and absolute integrity." He gave the Freer a feeling of stability; he and the curatorial staff (including, from 1958, myself) all ate lunch together every day, then made a tour of the galleries together, during which Arch Wenley would tell the same jokes, at which we would all laugh. As these comments will suggest, I did not appreciate him then so much as I do now.

Wenley believed strongly that the Freer, as a public institution and part of the Smithsonian with its motto "For the Increase and Diffusion of Knowledge Among Men," had a deep responsibility to serve both the scholarly community and the general public. He would spend hours of research in answering letters from people who wanted information on objects they owned, or translations of inscriptions on them. The Freer's storage room was more accessible to visiting scholars, or even interested laymen, than any other museum storage 1 have known.  Most importantly, copies of whatever materials the Freer might possess or acquire—photographs, slides, printed materials—were unhesitatingly made available at cost to everyone who could use them, and information freely shared. This was at a time when the common practice among scholars, whether Western or Asian, was a possessive hoarding of research materials. The belief in scholarly openness was Wenley's own, perhaps derived from his library training—his predecessor John Ellerton Lodge had come from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where a different view on accessibility has traditionally obtained. Some of the openness and cooperative spirit, even a sense. of community, within our field we owe to Wenley's model, and the Freer's; it has advanced our studies just as the older practice of exclusivity and possessiveness has retarded them, and still does wherever it survives. We live in a world, or at least a country, in which the idea of altruism grows ever weaker, that of "enlightened self-interest" ever stronger. When we hear of someone working on an artist or a problem for which we have in our keeping materials not generally available, let us remember Archibald Wenley.

(SLIDE.) Osvald Siren is more difficult to characterize in purely positive terms; he lacked Wenley's generosity, and did not willingly further the research or careers of others. He aimed at being the Berenson of Chinese painting, without ever quite developing a comparable connoisseur's eye.   But Siren was a tireless gatherer, organizer, and publisher of information, translations, photographs, building for our studies a store of available material on which we all have drawn.

Siren was born in Finland in 1879, and became Curator at the National Museum in Stockholm in 1901, and also Professor of the History of Fine Arts at Stockholm University from 1908-the first art history professor in Sweden. His original specialty was Italian painting, but trips to the United States in 1916-17 exposed him to Far Eastern art in collections here, and he began working in this new-region of art history, perhaps the first true art historian in the West to do so. His mentor Berenson encouraged him in this direction. (Berenson himself was in this period an enthusiast for Chinese art and a small-scale collector of it; later he was to dismiss it, with most of the rest of non-European art, as insufficient in tactile values, ideated sensations, and life-enhancing content.) Years of travels in Japan and China filled out Siren's knowledge and allowed him to amass a huge store of   photographs, books, and information, and also to build collections of Chinese sculpture and paintings, both for his museum and for himself. His publications on Chinese sculpture, Chinese gardens, Chinese architecture, early Chinese art, etc. are well known and still highly regarded, but we are concerned here only with Siren as a pioneer Chinese painting specialist.

(SLIDE: Siren in his garden in China.) For painting, his publications were monumental without being penetrating or ultimately enlightening. He had a distressing way of saying more or less the same things about most of the paintings and artists he wanted to praise: I have always suspected that his Theosophist religious belief underlay his apparent conviction that anything, if raised to a high enough spiritual plane, meant the same as everything else. He seems never to have mastered Chinese in more than a rudimentary way. Working with him in Stockholm on his seven-volume Chinese Painting in the spring of 1956 and trying to explain to him why a certain translation needed revision, I felt the frustration of someone trying to explain a chess problem to another who does not play chess. The translations in his books, done by everyone from the great sinologues of Europe to his Chinese houseboy, varied widely in quality and reliability, and the texts he cited tended to be the standard ones, used more or less uncritically. I recall visiting Jan Fontein in Amsterdam after my three-month stay in Stockholm and talking with him about the feelings of us younger scholars in the field toward Siren: he was, 1 suggested, like someone who goes through the blackberry patch picking all the berries that are easy to get at, leaving it for others who come later to scratch their hands going after the ones that are harder to reach.

(SLIDE: Siren and Shimada at the Kurokawa Institute in Ashiya, 1954.) Siren, unlike Wenley and others I will speak of, was not a well-loved figure. One eminent Chinese art specialist in Sweden, during my stay there, told me he had made his way in the field in spite of Siren, not because of him, and that the same was generally true of others there. The tribute to Siren on the occasion of the presentation of the first Freer Medal in 1956 was brief and cool; on his 80th birthday celebration in 1960, letters attesting to his achievements came from scholars around the world, but they were not warm; and on his death in 1968, the question of who would write an encomium for him was, so far as I know, never resolved—I, for one, declined. However, I dedicated the session on Chinese painting at the Brundage symposium in San Francisco in the autumn of that year to Siren, and invited his son Erland, an architect practicing in San Francisco, to attend. On the morning of that session, Erland unexpectedly asked to speak. Those who were present, including most of the major Asian art specialists of the time, are unlikely to have forgotten that movingly bitter tribute, in which Siren was presented as someone who had become a great scholar at the cost of diminishing his personal life and the lives of his family. "It was not easy," Erland said, "to be the son of Osvald Siren." I still have a tape of that talk, which should be part of the history of our field, a cautionary footnote to records of scholarly achievement.

Nevertheless, Siren merits our respect for laying, in his extensive publications, a kind of foundation for our studies. A foundation is something that you stand on, and build on, but it is there when needed, and work like Siren's serves an important function at one stage in the evolution of a field of study. We might wish he had done it better, but no one else was willing or able then to do it at all, on such a scale.

(SLIDE: 1973 "Archaeologists" delegation to China.) Laurence Sickman. by contrast, was immensely supportive of young scholars, and as generous a man as I have known. More than any other Western specialist of his generation, he absorbed Chinese attitudes and tastes during his years in China, and made these accessible to the rest of us. He understood the special values of Ming-Ch'ing painting at a time when these were only dimly perceived by most other Occidental scholars, and, in his writings and his collecting for his museum, he played a central role in setting the direction our recent studies have taken.

(SLIDE: Sickman as young man.) Born in 1906 in Denver, Colorado, he studied from 1926 at Harvard, at that time the only university in the country offering courses in Chinese and Japanese art. They were taught by Langdon Warner—or, as it happened, at the time Sickman arrived, by Warner's sabbatical replacement Paul Pelliot. As Sickman said in his acceptance speech for the Freer Medal, "the study of Chinese art at Harvard in the late 20s had about it a distinct Japanese aura." With Warner as his mentor, and Okakura and Tomita as imposing figures across the river, he could easily have been absorbed into the Japanese- and Buddhist-oriented studies of that time, in which, as he wrote, "the art of [Chinese] painting seemed to end rather abruptly with the 14th century." Fortunately for us, he was too sinicized to be quite persuaded, as others at the time were, by this Japanese version of Chinese art. Sickman was in Peking from 1930 to 1935, on a Harvard-Yenching fellowship, and during that period, in 1933, was appointed (on the recommendation of Langdon Warner) as an advisor to the newly-opened Nelson Gallery of Art, the present Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum in Kansas City.

(SLIDE: Sickman in Beijing.) The outcome of this we all know: a collection of Chinese art unsurpassed, scarcely equalled, for all-over level of quality,

containing many of the masterworks we use constantly in writing and teaching. In a lecture given at the Nelson Gallery some years ago, with Sickman in the audience, I offered the opinion—and will repeat it now-that the collection of Chinese paintings he assembled there represents the greatest achievement in collecting in our field, at least among Western holdings. It is more surprising that, according to his own testimony, the paintings were "with a few notable exceptions assembled from Japanese and American sources." I remember once looking with him at the newly-published catalog of Chinese paintings in the Liaoning Museum, in which some of the early handscrolls taken from the palace by P'u-yi were published for the first time; on seeing the first in the catalog, ascribed to Li Ch'eng, Larry groaned and told of how he and Langdon Warner (representing the Fogg Museum) had once arranged to purchase a group of these so-called "lost paintings," including the one ascribed to Li Ch'eng, from P'u-yi for their museums. The sale was aborted when Warner, out of New-England fastidiousness, refused to pay the expected sum to the go-between, and the paintings stayed in China.

(SLIDE: Sickman as we knew him.) Tom Lawton, in his eulogy at the memorial service for Sickman, told of visiting the Nelson Gallery as a graduate student to see Chinese paintings, and finding that he was being shown them by the director himself. Others of us had the same experience, and remember with pleasure hours spent in the storage room there as Larry pulled paintings from the cabinets and we unrolled them and talked about them. Larry had learned from the Chinese a free-and-easy attitude about handling and showing Chinese paintings—the very opposite of Japanese practice, which can turn a painting viewing into a ritual nearly as taxing as their tea ceremony. I remember also, while I was working at the Freer, writing him for photographs of a Sung Hsü handscroll in the Contag collection, then stored at the Nelson Gallery, for use in a study I was doing. Instead, I received the scroll itself in the mail some days later, wrapped in brown paper, to be kept as long as I needed it. The same happened later with a Hua Yen album belonging to Harold

Acton. Perhaps that degree of generosity is unwise in today's risky world; but like Wenley's, it can be a model of scholarly openness and helpfulness.

(SLIDE) Shujiro Shimada exemplifies supremely the great Japanese tradition of sinological and Chinese art studies: meticulous attention to objects, rigorous but subtle uses of texts, awesome erudition in Chinese history and literature, avoidance of facile formulations. In particular, his recognition of lesser currents in Chinese painting along with the grand sweep-in part forced on the Japanese by the special nature of their holdings—has been an essential corrective to the Chinese and Western "great masters" approach. Shimada's acceptance of foreign students during his periods in Japan, and his years of teaching at Princeton, justify his inclusion here in a session on Chinese painting studies in the West.

When I went to study with Shimada as a Fulbright student in 1954, he was a curator at the Kyoto National Museum, but teaching at Kyoto University, a course that consisted of a careful reading of Kuo Jo-hsii's T'u-hua chien-wen-chih. with Soper's recently-published translation as a guide.   Shimada was characteristically cool and distant with me at first, but after a time undertook to introduce me to the great Japanese collectors of that time, taking me, sometimes with others, to the homes of Sumitomo Kan'ichi, Takashima Kikujiro, Hashimoto Sueyoshi, the novelist Kawabata Yasunari, and others. It was an exciting year.

A self-imposed constraint on Japanese specialists of Shimada's generation was their reluctance to write about any works they had not studied first-hand; and since opportunities for foreign travel were rare then, this meant in effect that they concentrated on Chinese paintings in Japanese collections. For us foreign specialists and for the field as a whole, however, the effect of that concentration was positive, since Japanese holdings in early Chinese painting, besides being generally of high quality, supplement in important ways what has been preserved in China. Paintings in mainland collections represent chiefly the tastes of Ming-Ch'ing collectors; what lay outside their limited range of taste had a poor chance of being preserved, and large, important areas of Chinese painting, as we all know, have been virtually wiped out there. Some of these are recoverable only through the historical accident of transmission to Japan. So the kind of Japanese scholarship that Shimada represents on the highest level, by concentrating on those areas, has been instrumental in filling in extensive, otherwise-lost terrain that surrounds the islands of "high-taste" appreciated by the Chinese. To have studied with Shimada thus provided an invaluable supplement and corrective to what we learned from Chinese writings and Chinese scholars.

Shimada taught at Princeton for a year, 1958-59, and then, after some years in Japan, returned to join the faculty there in 1965, teaching until his retirement in 1975. Ostensibly holding an appointment as a specialist in Japanese art, in practice he taught the early history of both Japanese and Chinese painting, and the relations between them, especially in the medium of ink monochrome painting. Now living in announced retirement near Kyoto, in fact he remains active in writing and, as President of the Society for International Exchange of Art-historical Studies, in overseeing a series of annual symposia, in one of which I participated last June. Watching him then, I thought about how astonishingly little this man has changed in the three-and-a-half decades I have known him, and wondered whether that might be how ancient worthies got themselves reputations as immortals. At the beginning of this year he received a richly-merited recognition when he was presented with the Asahi-sho, an award for his contribution to scholarship worldwide.

(SLIDE) Max Loehr I have written about at some length for another, happily non-posthumous occasion, and can speak of more briefly here. In his readings of paintings, heavily stylistic but going often beyond style into penetrating analyses of their representational and expressive content, he set another model for us. While he did not believe in the kind of contextual studies we are now attempting, his work serves as a necessary foundation for those, helping to define the issues we still argue.

There are various ways to define Max Loehr's contribution to Chinese painting studies. One is to say that more than anyone else of his generation (excepting perhaps Alexander Soper) he overcame the "sinology vs. art history" problem by bringing both sinological and art-historical expertise to bear on the subject in an exemplary way. Or, one can emphasize the art-historical aspect of his work and say that he brought Chinese art history into the domain of general art history: if Larry Sickman introduced Chinese attitudes toward art to the West, Max Loehr can be said to have introduced Western (especially German) art-historical method to China, or at least to Chinese art history. A multiplicity of objects that had thitherto preserved their Asian mystique, a certain exotic incoherence, sorted themselves in Max Loehr's mind and lectures and writings into intelligible art-historical patterns. Even lowly spearheads and daggers became objects of style within coherent systems. Yuan painting separated itself from Sung painting—not as separate but equal (that had to wait for another generation) but at least as separate, not just "Sung only not as good" as it had been in writings by Loehr's predecessors, including his own teacher Bachhofer.

(SLIDE) In treating Chinese painting, Loehr was perhaps at his best in large patterns and in finely-nuanced details; his 1970 article on "Phases and Content" was full of the former, and his book TheGreat Painters of China full of both. He was less strong in the intermediate zones of schools, movements, correlations with social and economic history, where much of the most interesting work is going on now. Max Loehr had no patience with these—he saw art as preeminently the product of individual talent or genius, at its best when untouched by considerations of the real world. Here even his students have had to respectfully disengage themselves from his position, while continuing to use the stylistic and interpretative formulations he gave us.

And this, of course, is as it should be: it would be a mistake to take Loehr or the others as models to be imitated, rather than transcended, and to remain enmeshed in the style-and-documentation approach or any other. As Fan K'uan began his move toward mastery of landscape painting by learning from Li Ch'eng but then, making a memorable pronouncement, went on to learn from nature and from his mind (as Li Ch'eng had done before him), so we can acknowledge the contributions of these and other pioneers in our field, absorb what they have taught us as a foundation for our own work, go back to the paintings and the texts to see what they are saying to us now, and proceed to build on that foundation, expanding and enriching the study of Chinese painting, contributing to its diversity according to our own individual bents and abilities.

Expanded "Five Notables" for SAA, May 6, 1991

A. Identify on slide:  Wenley & Warner; Siren; Rowley; Bachhofer; Rowland & Plumer; Pope & Sickman; Salmony; Wilma Fairbank; (Ch'en Meng-chia); Alan Priest. (Lots of other notables, but not art specialists.)

Soper not there (why?). Soper's "Early Ch. LS Ptg" 1941 (Art Bulletin). "Life-motion and the Sense of Space in Early Chinese Representational Art" 1948 (after 1948 conference).

Bachhofer's Short History of Ch. Art 1944.

Pope's "Sinology or Art History? Notes on Method in the Study of Chinese Art," 1947 (HJAS).

Schools & Issues:

Langdon Warner. Benjamin Rowland. James Plumer: Harvard; Coomaraswamy, also strongly inf. by Japanese (Okakura, Tomita). Okakura (Ideals of the East. 19 ): "Asia is One." Coomaraswamy also. Lee opens book with it; etc. Idea that "Asia" is an entity, set off from west by its spirituality, in contrast to Western materialism. Fostered by Asians themselves-Tagore, Chinese, Japanese inf. by them-as response to colonialist intrusions of west, industrial revolution, etc. Historically understandable; scarcely taken seriously today.

Pope & Sickman. Studied at Harvard, w. Warner and others; but spent time in China. Knew John & Wilma Fairbank, Arthur Wright, etc.: historians. Sinological approach.

Alan Priest: maverick, hsieh-p'ai or "heterodox school"--heterodox in more ways than one can count. Studied at Harvard, spent time inChina & Japan; came back, became curator at Met. Wrote pretty good book on Ch. sculpture, around pieces he'd bought for Met; but in later years slipped into dilletantish, over-precious approach, went on for years w/o doing serious scholarship. Aschwin Lippe working under him for years: I learned from both.

Bachhofer. Salmonv. later Loehr: German art-historians, attempting to apply German art-historical method, better developed than any other school or kind of art history, to study of Chinese art. Scorned by sinologuues, incl. Pope, Wenley, Maenchen-Helfen (German, but politically anti-German, Marxist, unlike others.) Sinologically trained, felt his closest ties with sinologues on campus. 1 took his courses 1948-49; solid, not inspiring.

Rowley really an art-historian, trained in Italian art studies, couidn't read Chinese, had his limitations; but highly intelligent, willing to take on large problems. 1947: Principles of Chinese Painting. Marred by his lack of first-hand familiarity with Chinese texts, and by a-historical approach; but valuable in its time. He produced at least two major pupils: Alexander Soper, Wen Fong. Also, his controversy w. Soper crucial to dev. of field (hope that mine with Dick Barnhart will be seen as similarly stimulating and fruitful, whatever posterity may decide about who was right.)

Siren I will speak of later. Somewhat outside these issues; as if occupying some higher plane. 

Now, very briefly, so you will understand my relat. to these people, a quick outline of my own movements in this period. In 1946-48, was in army, in occupation in Japan & Korea. Returned in 1948 to UCB, graduated 1950 in Oriental Languages; took courses in Ch. & other Asian art with Maenchen-Helfen. 1950-51 at Freer, learning from Wenley and Pope; in 51 -53 at U. of Michigan, learning from Loehr and Plumer (and meeting others); 1953-4 at Met, on fellowship, learning from Priest, Lippe, C.C.Wang; 1954-56 in Japan, learning chiefly with Shimada (Siren came for visit, also Chang Ta-ch'ien); then for several months in winter-spring of 1956 in Europe, mostly in Stockholm working with Siren; 1956-65 back at Freer, with Wenley & Pope etc. Wenley died 1962. 1965 on: here.

B. Sickman & Dubosc vs. Priest.

1949: Wildenstein exhib. of Ming-Ch'ing paintings.

1950: Dubosc's article "A New Approach to Ch. Ptg." pub. in Oriental Art. Direct attack on Priest, and on his support of purchase of Bahr collection: mostly fakes, names of early artists attached. Priest pushed through sale anyway (1954?) Huge sum for time...

Sherman Lee.

B. 1918; 1948-52: Arts & Monuments division of GHQ, Japan. Chance to see lots of great Japanese and Chinese art. 1948-52: Seattle, Assoc. Dir. of Seattle ARt Museum, teaching at U.Wash; 1952-58.

Curator at Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958-1983: Director. 1983 on: Adjunct Prof, of Art, U. of N. Carolina in Chapel Hill.

1964: History, of Far Eastern Art (now in 4th ed., still best we have.) Impressive for breadth of his knowledge and "eye" for Asian art; hard to match. Made mistakes, but because he went out on limbs, bought things others afraid of. Had experience with both Japanese and French of believing and acquiring objects that native scholars didn't accept, paid no attention to; later accused of "smuggling out" ptgs that should have stayed in country, even a warrant for his arrest, issued by French govt, in 1984, for his purchase of Poussin ptg; had been doubted by experts, including Anthony Blunt; Louvre passed up opportunities to acquire it; but once it had entered Cleveland Museum and was recognized as genuine, big outcry. Can't go back to Paris; says he doesn't want to anyway.

C. More on Shimada

Shimada always an outsider in Japanese scholarly circles; belonged to great tradition of sinological studies in Kyoto, but didn't get position at Jimbun Kagaku Kenkyujo that would have been proper for him (same with Kohara later); never cooperated much with others. Wrote slowly, didn't meet deadlines. Upon return from Princeton, expected to get job at Kobe U.; but thru academic politics, failed to. Jobless in Japan, in bad way (wife died suddenly); Wen Fong rescued him with offer from Princeton. Long, important career there. Then back to Japan; finally being accepted by Japanese scholarship; has been head of Society for Exchange of Art-historical Studies. Has finally published work postponed for years (Sung-chai mei-p'uk others underway; one hopes he will finish them.

C.C.Wang. Studied w. him, informally, from 1953; together in 1959 looking thru Palace Mus. collection, also 1962-63 in Taichung & Taipei, during great photographing project. Still living in N.Y., travels a lot, gets better and better as painter. Represents great tradition of Ch. connoisseurship; people who have spent time looking at ptgs with him have learned a lot from him. (Story of Hsieh Shih-ch'en ptg.)

Chang Ta-ch'ien. (Exhib. planned at Sackler Gal. in D.C. for ; also took on him by Carl Nagin, in press? and film by him and Carma Hinton. Worth watching for.