CLP 171: 1989 "Chinese Painting, the Court, and the Imperial Power.” Lecture, Ohio State U

Columbus Lecture
(in symposium "Art and the Emperor," held at Ohio State U. in conjunction with exhibition The Son of Heaven, April, 1989)

Chinese Painting, the Court, and the Imperial Power

Great exhib. (etc.) Ptg in one sense less strong than other kinds of objects included: can only bring later pieces (Sung-Yuan not allowed out.) But fine examples, never seen outside China before.

Someone doing lecture of course not limited in way organizers of exhib. were, can talk abt ptgs not in show. Nevertheless, I will emphasize ptgs in exhib., as kind of introduction to some of them. Will adopt someone artificial scheme like that of catalog, which sets up categories of imperial art under sections: the altar, the outer court, the temple, the inner court, the tomb. I'll use ptgs in exhib., wherever possible, to represent kinds of relationships that painters, and paintings, could have to imperial power.

But I'll begin further back than any of ptgs in exhib., with two well-known anecdotes. One from Chuang-tzu, 4th-3rd cent BC. A certain lord wanted to have pictures ptg, called together ptrs. They rec'd his commands respectfully, stood about licking brushes and mixing ink. One arrived later, unhurried, rec'd commands respectfully but didn't stand in attendance; found sitting with loose robes and legs spread out, half-naked., Lord said: He will do; he is a real painter.
Other: concerns Yen Li-pen, 7th cent. ptr active in court; held oficial rank, but also employed as painter. Conflict. (Story)

Both anecdotes, while pointing in different directions, raise issue that is inescapable when artists and rulers come together: that of subservient artist vs. artist of more or less independent status. Former raises fewer problems for ruler, but latter often turns out to be the better artist; so, at least, in theory.

Issue that is related to this, but broader, is that of power and prestige of court, hereditary aristocracy with emperor at top, vs. bureaucracy based (in theory) on merit, learning, virtues: judged by exams, recommendations. "Inner court" vs. "outer court", in sense slightly different from that of catalog sections. In ptg, can be seen loosely as dif. between court artists (highest level of professional artist tradition) vs. literati artists or scholar-amateurs.Now, to set up matter in this way is simplistic, admittedly; complexities. But useful set of distinctions to make at beginning, I think.

S,.S. Martin Powers's studies of Han art and society: in dec. arts (inlaid bronze) and mortuary art (Wu-Liang-tz'u engraving). Don't want to talk about this in presence of Powers himself (as I do more freely in class and public lectures), but: (etc.)Now, ptg done in & for court was mostly going to be of first kind: rich in materials & techniques, opulent.

S,S. In T'ang period, 7th cent., two famous court artists: Yen Li--pen, figure specialist (one anecdote was about); Li Ssu-hsun (det. from ptg later but in his style).) Ptgs that typically strengthened, legitimized imperial power. (Tibetan emissary).

S. Another attrib. Yen shows foreign emissaries bringing tribute. Ptr. of these works for definable purposes on order of emperor, subservient; except that when ptr had some status himself (as Li did, distant member of imperial family, or Yen, through official rank) caused tension.

S,S. Court artists also depicted rulers and ministers of former dynasties, other exemplary figures. Great examples were wall ptgs; none survive, except in copies, such as "Portraits of the Emperors" scroll in Boston MFA attrib. to Yen Li-pen (on right). Ptg. in exhib., of rulers of past, one of set executed ca. 1460, echoes that tradition.

S,S. Court artists also, of course, portrayed emperors themselves: one of Hsuan-te Emp., early 15c., by court artist named Shang Hsi (det. of large ptg in Palace Mus., Beijing, showing emperor & attendants on hunt); portrait of CL Emp. as young man by Lang Shih-ning (& others?) No question of ptr's independent status and personality being at issue here; ptr supposed to subdue his own temperament & indiv. style to produce work that fulfils clearly-defined purpose.

S,S. Fine technique, in this kind of ptg, enhanced functional value of work, as preserving likeness (like photograph--not really, but that's another issue I don't mean to go into here), or ptg. as source of information, or as making some argument through kinds of visual rhetoric. Two masterworks of chieh-hua manner (describe) have this character. In some ways, like objects in early China with inlaid precious metals and complex designs, which Powers writes about: these sent message of imperial power (or princely power) by displaying amt of time and skill required to make them; also implied leisure to read them. (develop).

S,S. A whole category of imperially-sponsored ptgs. I'm going to mention only briefly, since they are best-studied (notably in writings of Julia Murray), are ptgs done early in So. Sung period, to legitimize rule of new emperor Kao-tsung after his re-estab. of capital at Hangchou, or to urge virtue of loyalty on subjects. Court artist Li T'ang ptd his famous picture of two brothers, Po-i and Shu-ch'i, who withdrew at beginning of Chou dynasty (11th cent. BC or so) and starved to death rather than switch their allegiance to new ruler who had committed unvirtuous acts. Acc. to a colophon, meant as criticism of Chinese who switched allegiance to Chin.

Another, series of ptgs attrib. to Li T'ang's disciple Hsiao Chao, depicts auspicious omens sent by heaven to proclaim Kao-tsung as rightful ruler. Several others of this type.

S,S. Auspicious pictures also done by court artists under previous ruler, Sung Hui-tsung, also belong to trad. of ptgs that have rhetorical force somehow supportive if imperial institution. When, in year 1112, flock of cranes flower over palace, some of them alighting on roof, Emp. Hui-tsung had some court artist record this highly auspicious event, wrote long insc. to accompany. (Ptg. attrib. to emperor himself, but unlikely.) In following year, 1113, 18-yr-old artrist named Wang Hsi-meng ptd long LS handscroll in meticulous, highly colored blue-and-green style; insc. by Prime Minister, Tsai Ching, and others. Altho rep. 10,000 Miles of Yangtze, in fact gives ideal vision of rich, prosperous empire under rule of Emp. Hui-tsung. Heavy mineral color assoc. w. Taoist paradise scenes, enhances this message.

S. Great ptg in Palace Mus., Beijing, attrib. to Chao Po-chü, court artist active under Emp. Hui-tsung and Kao-tsung, presum. intended to carry same meaning. This style of LS originated, or at least popularized, in T'ang, espec. in hands of Li Ssu-hsun (seen at beginning); continued to be assoc. with court, auspicious wishes. This ptg presented to first Ming emperor by group of mounters who discovered it; no doubt with this meaning, wishing him long and prosperous reign. Also done by court artists in Ming, etc.

S. At same time as Wang Hsi-meng & Chao Po-chü, something very dif. was going on among group of scholar-amateur or literati ptrs. Mi Fu (etc.) No fine detail, no color, no show of skill; whole dif. set of values (not our main concern today, but still worth introducing.) Also has auspicious meaning, but of dif. kind (describe). Corresponds to inner & outer court dichotomy again, roughly; issue that continues thru rest of Chinese dynastic history, in various forms. Both style and imagery involved here in generating meaning: blue-and-green color, visually rich character of Wang Hsi-meng's ptg, suggests opulence, assoc. w. paradises, etc., as mentioned before. Mi Fu's ptg, prob. done for some high official, sort of person Mi assoc. with. Inscription (etc., spell out.)

S. Su Shih, or Su T-p, Mi Fu's friend, was central figure in this new mvt of ptg by scholar-amateurs; he himself had political career w. much ups-and-downs, varying relationships to imperial power. Becomes ideal model for scholar-official who is also cultured, artistically creative man. His ptgs amateurish, in some part deliberately so. Complicated issue; again relates to arguments made by Martin Powers for Han, in which people aspiring to positions in bureaucracy would present themselves as simple, unostentatious people, produce or sponsor art that had same character, to convey idea that they were without pretentions and ambitions, just sincere people devoted to their jobs.

Such ptgs of course stood in sharp contrast, even opposition, to court ptg that was contemp. with it; and contrast mirrors, I think, the same separation of imperial power--hereditary, absolute--from bureaucracy made up of people who came to power (in theory) through merit, indiv. ability.

S. Raising issue of amateurism reminds us that Emp. Hui-tsung was himself a painter, amateur; why didn't he paint like Su T-p and Mi Fu? He was dedicated to fine, representational style, courtly tradition; his values, quite apart from success with which he could realize them w/in limits of his technical skill, were those of court ptg. A few ptgs attrib. him in looser, ink-monochrome style; but never anything like Su T-p etc., intentionally amateurish. Not concerned, in his position, with projecting that kind of message.

S. Emp. Hsuan-tsung of Ming, rep. in exhib. by this ptg of 1000-year-old pine, done for mother, wishing her longevity, must have thought of self as reborn Hui-tsung; revival of court ptg on Sung models carried out in his regime. This not for public display; gift (prob. birthday) for mother. Unlike Hui-tsung, doesn't try to match court artists on their own ground, but works in "amateur" style himself. Interaction of status of ptr + status of recipient made certain styles & subjects suitable, others unsuitable; complex set of questions we are only beginning to answer.

S. Ptg supposed to be by Wu-tsung (= Cheng-te Emp.) less convincing as work of imperial hand; looks like court artist at work; emperor signs, presents to some minister to reward him for something, perhaps, wish him happiness (two mynah birds = shuang-hsi, double happiness), long life (pine).

S,S. Ptgs. in exhib. by Wang Yuan-ch'i, Chang Hao. In Ch'ing (Manchu) court, as earlier, two kinds of artists working in court, rep. by these two: (describe). Recent essay by Howard Rogers on Ch'ing court ptg, after making this distinction, argues that ptrs of both kinds were all subjects of emperor, vastly below him in station, so that from his pt. of view, differences in status irrelevant. This true as far as it goes, but: emperor obliged to treat people acc. to station, to command and hold their loyalty. Also, had differing expectations of dif. kinds of artists. Problem of how artists related to Emp., and to imperial power, as I said earlier, only special instance of larger problem of how people in general did. Ideal relationship was like that of spirited horse & master (etc.) Horse often depicted as visual metaphor for this relationship. K'ang-hsi Emp. presumably respected Wang Y-c in this way; wouldn't have given him demeaning assignments that would misunderstand nature of his abilities as ptr. K'ang-hsi, on advice of Chinese ministers, promoted Orthodox style of ptg, of which Wang Y-c was leading practitioner, at court as part of program to persuade Chinese that Manchus were adopting Chinese institutions and values; part of program of legitimizing Manchu dynasty, making it more acceptable to educated Chinese.

Chang Hao, by contrast, was person of much lower status but great skill as ptr, kind of skill that permitted him to produce such a picture: when CL Emp. wanted ptg to commemorate imperial banquet given on island in Western Garden, Chang was one commissioned to do it (no doubt with some assistance--such works were ordinarily studio productions. Hand of artist wasn't crucial element. Ptg valued as visual document, t'u rather than hua in distinction made by Kung Hsien (etc. )

S,S. A few cases to be found in hist. of Ch ptg in which nature of artist's gifts misjudged, unsuitable things asked of him. Notable one is that of Chao Yuan, active at end of Yuan and early Ming. WAs moderately good ptr of LS, following WM and other greater masters; no ability in figures, judging from extant ptgs. But after Ming dyn. founded, summoned to court, ordered to paint portraits of notable men of antiquity. Hung-wu Emp. Chu Yuan-chang, displeased with Chao's pictures, had him executed. Kind of ptg Emp. presumably wanted rep. by another of ptgs in exhib., anon. work of about a century later, "Former Confucian Worthies and Sages." Artist who did this must have been figure specialist, perhaps specialist in temple ptgs; prob couldn't have ptd good landscape in literati style, as Chao Yuan could.

S,S. Wang Hui, rep. in exhib. by LS at left, ptd in 1703, fared better at court--in fact, was great success, altho person of lower social standing than Wang Y-c. He was also LSist in Orthodox manner; because of his great fame, brought to court and given job of supervising series of hs, done in 1680s, rep. K'ang-hsi Emp's Southern Tour (or imperial progress). Two? more? in Met, others China etc. Wang quite versatile artist, prob. could have done figures & architecture etc. himself; but prob. restricted his hand to LS setting, leaving rest to specialists. (Unclear how much of LS he did either.) Done by team, with some suppression of individual styles. Not work of very high quality--

S,S. By CL period, in later 18c, academy style better established, done on higher level of refinement. CL Emp. made Southern Tour in 1751; ptgs done in 20 years following that, mainly by court artist named Hsu Yang, but again, prob. as workshop production.

S.S. Returning to question of dif. kinds of artists (social positions) and relat to kinds of ptgs they did: one can also note anomalous or "crossover" patterns, in which artist of one type undertakes ptgs of other type. Ptgs of particular places, topographical ptgs, often map-like, done ordinarily by profes. masters; artists of Orthodox school, as matter of prestige, ordinarily ptd. only generalized LS. Absence of specific ref. to place saved their ptgs, in their view, from any taint of functional or utilitarian. But emperor could, as we noted earlier, command an artist to do ptg of type not "natural" to him. Wang Y-c did at least one topographical ptg (in Liaoning Mus., handscroll) for emperor. Here (right) is ptg by Tung Pang-ta, high official, member of court acad. (Hanlin); held ministerial posts in late years. Followed Wang Y-c as landscapist (typical ptg by him at right). Here, given job of ptg 16 Views of Pan-shan, hills east of Beijing where imperial retreat located, to accompany poems by CL Emperor. Prestige of style important here; not just a portrayal of place, but an investiture of place with certain special status through representation of it in this style.

S. Very interesting precursor for this phenomenon was series of 8 Views of Environs of Beijing ptd in 1414 by Wang Fu. Yung-lo Emperor, 3rd Ming emperor, was planning to move capital to Beijing, from Nanjing; did so in 1421. Seven years earlier, took with him, on one of his trips to north, group of scholar-officials & poets along with painter Wang Fu. Their job, as I would understand it, was to invest city of Beijing with some cultural coordinates through their poems & ptgs; and so render it more suitable for becoming imperial capital. Wang Fu chosen because he worked in prestigious styles inherited from great Yuan masters; educated man himself, with some official status. If emperor had wanted functional depictions of place, would have brought artist of quite different kind.

Ptgs we've shown generally present positive view of serving emperor and regime, court service. Waht of ptgs that express opposite ideal, that of living in retirement, avoiding involvement w. officialdom, bureaucracy, "public life": what of them? Many such in Chinese ptg, including imperial collection; very common theme. Might seem at first antithetical to interests of emperor and court; but clearly weren't. How to reconcile?

S,S. Shen Chou, "Enjoying Chrysanthemums," 1480s-90s; Wen Cheng-ming, "Thatched Hut at Hu-ch'i," mid-16c. Both in exhib. They were both ptrs active in Suchou, great center of culture in mid-Ming, very rich city. Ptgs of this kind, done by Suchou artists, celebrate elegant pleasures of life there, and espec. of living in retirement in one's rustic retreat, engaging only in aesthetic pursuits, escaping contaminations of great world. Again, highly idealized images; but dif. ideals from others we've been looking at. Done for members of Suchou gentry-literati, as well as members of merchant class living there. Yet these men also tried, in many cases, for official careers; Wen c-m himself attempted for years to pass exams, have official career; finally did, briefly, in period 1523-26; altho scarcely a success as official, enhanced his reputation greatly; he became "retired scholar", having had some government service to retire from.

S,S. Tu Chin, "Lofty Scholars of Bamboo Grove," T'ang Yin "Eight Immortals of Wine Cup: also images of idealized reclusion, men who withdrew from world to escape its pollutions in Wei-Chin period, or who spent time drinking and composing poems in T'ang (Li Po and friends). Always a tension between ideals of service and retirement. In principle, Confuc. scholars preferred to live quietly and devote selves to study of classics, self-cultivation, etc.; but impelled by their sense of responsibility to enter public life, when circumstances suitable and seemed to require their participation. From ruler's p.v., such men were ones he most wanted, those reluctant to serve, free of personal ambition, motivated only by public-spiritedness. This was usually, of course, a polite fiction, used by people seeking power and wealth to mask their real motivations. But preserved carefully by all parties concerned; reflected in poetry and ptg. assoc. with scholar-official class. (Dissertation by Scarlett Jang). We should respect these ideals, I think, living in time when disinterestedness in government scarcely respected even as ideal; better to have such ideals, even when not completely realized, than to be without them.

S,S. This myth of reclusive man who comes out of seclusion to serve virtuous ruler lies behing many ptgs, espec. by court artists in Ming dynasty, which depict ruecluses of antiquity, exemplars for this practice; invited to court by rulers of time; either refused indignantly, or accepted, depending on virtue of ruler, other circumstances. Ptgs of this subject could be presented to some high official to honor him, carrying message: You are really like the famous hermit so-and-so.S. One of these ptd by Hsuan-te Emp. himself, for presentation to (fill in)

S,S. Tung Cc, rep. in exhib. by ptg on right, "White Clouds Over the Hsiao and Hsiang Rivers," held high official positions at dif. times in his life, including that of tutor to crown prince. But, like others of his time (time when service at court could be not only unrewarding but highly perilous) followed strategem of "advancing and retiring" acc. to circumstance, and his judgement of what would best further his interests. "White Clouds" painted in 1627 when he was just back from some years of govt. service, presumably done for some other official to praise the man's effectiveness and benevolence as an administrator--same visual metaphor as in Mi Fu ptg seen earlier, and same subj. and style; Mi Fu the model for this kind of ptg. Other ptg by Tung, at left, done in 1611, "Calling the Hermit at Ching-hsi": acc. to Tung's inscription, ptd for man who was, like Tung himself at that time, living in retirement after period of govt. service. Tung and this man both express, in their inscriptions attached to scroll, their determination to avoid govt. service in future. Neither held to his resolve. But issue of serving vs. retiring underlies subjects & styles of these two ptgs. In loosest way, dry, dessicated styles convey idea of disengagement, for which great model was ptg of Ni Tsan; used most often in ptgs that carry that kind of message. Wet, rich styles the reverse.

This may seem, to some of those here, over-reading the ptgs, or over-simplifying the issues; and I would plead guilty of that, while saying in self-defense that limits of time, and state of our studies, partly dictate such simplifying. But the ptgs did have such resonances, as we begin to see more and more clearly, for the people who ptd them and people who received them; these must be "read" with great subtlety, more than I've used today. Understanding these implications of the ptgs, even imperfectly, will enhance our own experience of them, not (obviously) by making them aesthetically any better, but by allowing us to interpret their meanings in richer ways than we have tended to do in past.

Thank you.

Dear Judyl
Maybe you can help my failing memory. Trying to resurrect some very old files, I find a lecture text labeled "Columbus Lecture" and titled "Chinese Painting, the Court, and the Imperial Power." Columbus could only be you. It was on the occasion of an exhibition--in Cleveland?--that must have consisted of court objects, the paintings only Ming-Qing (i.e. no Song-Yuan). Paintings in the show that I talk about include:

. Shen Chou, "Enjoying Chrysanthemums," 1480s-90s; Wen Cheng-ming, "Thatched Hut at Hu-ch'i," mid-16c. Tu Chin, "Lofty Scholars of Bamboo Grove," T'ang Yin "Eight Immortals of Wine Cup". It was a show from the PRC. Have you any memory of such? My text doesn't include a date.

Wll appreciate any clue; ideally with date (at least year)

Jim

CLP 157: 2006 "The Pleasures of EAL: An Art Historian's Recollections." Talk for fund-raiser for East Asian Library, U. C. Berkeley

The Pleasures of EAL: An Art Historian's Recollections

(James Cahill talk for EAL fundraiser, May 21, 2006)

If I say that I'm happy to be speaking here, I mean that as more than a conventional opening. This room has lots of pleasant associations for me, During my late undergraduate years the Griller Quartet, which was in residence here for several years from 1947, gave free public rehearsals in the Morrison Library in late afternoons—a lovely break from academic pressures. During my thirty years here as a professor, quite a few receptions and other elegant events were held in this room. And these were in addition to Morrison's main function, as a quiet place to read. The last thing I would have guessed is that I would find myself here speaking to an audience of such distinction. But I'm very pleased to be doing it, because my subject is close to my deepest feelings about Berkeley, East Asian studies at U.C., and the East Asiatic Library.

With that opening reminiscence I've already begun to establish my credentials as an old Berkeley person, and I'll continue in that direction for a bit before arriving at my proper subject. I was born and spent my early years in Fort Bragg, up on the Mendocino coast, when it was a lumber and fishing town of some 3,500 people without much of cultural refinements. Mendocino then was an even smaller town, almost a ghost town, that one drove through without stopping, on the way, perhaps, to the big cities. After living in other parts of the state, I came to Berkeley around 1940 and was at Berkeley High for my last two high school years; I was president of the Manuscript Club of aspiring writers, won a prize at the Berkeley Poets' Dinner, and, along with a friend, spent my graduation night in the Berkeley jail. Those are only three of a hundred more or less entertaining stories I could tell but won't. Another is about how another friend and I, after enrolling at U.C. Berkeley only a few months later, made our contribution to the annual Freshman-Sophomore Brawl by hanging a forty-foot-long sign with the Freshman motto on the Campanile. That's another of the stories. Later, when I was a professor, I would see latter-day sign-hangers attempting the same thing and making a mess of it, and I was always tempted to go up to them and say "That's the wrong way to do it! You have to hang it from the first window below the clock, so it doesn't get tangled in the clock." But I never did.

Now, getting closer to today's subject: This friend and I, needing money, worked as shelvers in Doe Library, spending long stretches of time within the huge nine-storey structure of glass floors and metal shelving that used to occupy the central space in this building, more recently gutted. Since it wasn't a mentally challenging job, we used our time memorizing long stretches of Lewis Carroll and Gilbert and Sullivan—another story to be passed over quickly. (Please, don't push the buttons for the Walrus and the Carpenter or the Major General's song or we'll be here all day.) We also devised ways to get into locked cases, especially the notorious Case B, where the erotica was kept. I won't divulge our secret—useless anyway, since all that has long vanished, and much more lurid things than Case B contained are easily available now—except to say that it involved climbing perilously down window wells from one floor to another. As for monetary reward, I remember the happy day when our pay went from fifty cents an hour to sixty-five.

Moving still closer to my proper subject: after two years at U.C. I was drafted into the army in 1943 and sent to the Japanese Language School in Ann Arbor, having prepared for this by taking a single course in Japanese language in my last semester as a sophomore here. Since all Japanese people had been moved inland to the relocation centers, the course was taught by the great Peter Boodberg—of whom more later—a philologist of numerous Asian languages, including ancient and obscure ones; if he hadn't known Japanese already, he must have taken off a weekend and learned it. He taught the course together with the only available help he could recruit: a Korean, Mr. Choi. whose wife had a Korean restaurant, and a red-haired American young woman who had grown up in Yokohama and spoke an American children's Japanese. When I arrived later at the school in Ann Arbor and talked to the true Japanese teachers there, they were fascinated and appalled by my pronunciation of their language: they could detect the Korean, and echoes of the American young woman, but the Russian threw them (Boodberg was a White Russian from an aristocratic family.)

I took this course in Japanese, in the midst of being an English major who still wanted to be a writer, on the advice of this friend who was a few months older than I, so that he was drafted earlier into the army. He had been raised in China and, because he had a headstart through knowing Chinese, had been sent to the Japanese-language school. He wrote me letters about how comfortable the life there was, and how we would be commissioned as officers after a year—such was the ignoble beginning of my career as an Asianist. Leaving aside my years in the Occupation in Japan and Korea—lots more good stories—I end my long preamble with my return to Berkeley in 1948, when I enrolled as a student, still an undergraduate, in the Oriental Languages Department, to continue studies of Japanese and Chinese. By that time, East Asiatic Library had come into existence, and we come closer to my proper subject.

East Asiatic Library (or EAL, as I'll call it for short) was founded in 1947 by bringing together all the East Asian-language books in the U.C. Berkeley library, which had been acquired through several large donations and miscellaneous purchases and gifts, and hiring a librarian to head the new entity. By great good fortune, this was a remarkable woman named Elizabeth Huff, who is the real hero of my story: the present eminence of EAL owes a lot to her. She had taken her MA at Mills College and Ph,D, at Harvard. Like myself, she seems to have been powerfully drawn back to the Bay Area after some years away—in my own case, I described it to friends as feeling like a fish back in water. She had her office on the fourth floor of this building (where the Art History Dept. is now), and since the Oriental Languages Department held some of its seminars and classes there, I saw her often.

Especially important for my theme, how an art historian has used EAL, is the fact that Elizabeth Huff had majored in Chinese art history at Mills, and had taken courses at Harvard with Langdon Warner, a pioneer scholar in the East Asian art field. As it happened, neither of my two predecessors as Chinese art history professors at Berkeley, Otto Maenchen and Yvon d'Argencé, was properly an art historian by background or inclination. Maenchen was another eminent philologist—scholar of old texts. that is--best known for his studies of the Hsiung-nu or Huns in and around ancient China. He sometimes remarked that he didn't really like art, and since I took several of his courses, I can testify that he taught the subject as someone who didn't like art. And d"Argencé was a general cultural historian. Neither was seriously engaged with images in art, and neither took much part in acquiring for EAL the expensive kinds of art books with lots of plates that other kinds of art historians such as myself can't function without. It was Elizabeth Huff who pursued those, spent lots of money on them, and built up the impressive holdings that now make U. C. Berkeley one of the best places in the world for doing research in East Asian art history. I remember her with fondness and gratitude. The acquisition of East Asian art books continued under later heads of EAL—I certainly encouraged it and took part in it during my time here as a professor--and it continues today.

Another notable episode in the history of EAL was the acquisition in 1948-49 of the hundred-thousand-volume Mitsui Library. This was the achievement principally of another remarkable person, Elizabeth or Betty McKinnon, who was hired only a few months after Elizabeth Huff to take charge of Japanese materials. She had been born and educated in Japan and was as close to being perfectly bilingual as anyone I have known. She made several very successful buying trips to Japan, on at least one of them accompanied by Professor Denzel Carr of the Oriental Languages Department, whom she was shortly afterwards to marry. As it happened, I was taking a course in early Japanese literature with Denzel Carr, and heard of these exciting events as they were happening, in the way students love to be "insiders" in the private affairs of their professors. We began this course by reading through a brief chapter of Genji Monogatari, "the Tale of Genji," which existed in translation; but then, as our other major text, turned to Yamato Monogatari, which didn't. Professor Carr assigned us to prepare five pages of this text by the next meeting. We almost killed ourselves doing that; but Carr, very fond of digressing into the many areas of his erudition and experience, took us through so many by-ways (very educational; in themselves) that by the end of the semester, if my memory is correct, we had made our way through three pages of Yamato Monogatari. But we learned a lot else along the way. Betty McKinnon came often to our classes; I endeared myself to her and Denzel Carr, not by exhibiting any brilliance in deciphering early Japanese texts, but by producing a full translation of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" into rhyming Japanese in the original meter, which I had made during three otherwise idle months waiting for a military assignment in Tokyo. (A sample: the stanza beginning "The Walrus and the Carpenter/ Were walking close at hand/ They wept like anything to see/ Such quantities of sand" I rendered as: "Kaizô to Daiku, futari-de/ sampo shite ita/ Kaizô wa "Kono hama ga/ Suna-darake da./ Sôji shitara, donna ni/ Kirei deshô ka na!" The acquisition of the Mitsui Library, to return to that, is not irrelevant to EAL's holding in art materials, since it included a major collection of rubbings from Chinese stone engravings, some of them pictorial, and the unique collection of old Japanese maps, some of which, as you see today, are themselves works of art.

The Oriental Languages Department faculty in the late 40s was a gathering of giants, led by the great Peter Boodberg, whom I mentioned earlier, but including also the linguist Chao Yuan-jen or Y. R. Chao, Ferdinand Lessing, Ch'en Shih-hsiang, Edward Schafer (famous among many people outside Chinese studies for books such as The Golden Peaches of Samarkand), Denzel Carr, and for a time Leonardo Olschki, who gave a course about medieval travelers in Asia. In more recent years, photos of some of these have been hung inspirationally in a departmental meeting room called the Chaos Room, after a well-known anecdote (which many of you know, but I'll tell it for those who don't): Y.R. Chao and his wife were good friends with the English philosopher Bertrand Russell; and once when the news reached Russell that they had had another child, he responded with a postcard on which he had pasted a newspaper headline reading: "The Causes of the Present Chaos in China" –which, since their name was spelled Chao, could also be read as "The Causes of the Present Chaos in China."

To study with these people was to be lifted beyond one's earthly capacities. ¥ears later, coming upon a long paper I had written for Boodberg in the semester before I graduated, I found that its borrowed erudition and density of argument made it very difficult reading for my later self: I could scarcely follow it. It was the work, not so much of James Cahill as of a high-level but short-lived Boodberg disciple. Still, the examples they set, however far out of reach for the rest of us, have continued to inspire us.

During those years I used EAL constantly, but was working for pay in another book-lover's heaven, or haven, located just outside the campus. This was Creed's Bookstore, one of the row of shops that stretched at your right to Telegraph Avenue as you came out of Sather Gate, in the space occupied now by the ASUC complex. Creed's, as I hope some of you will recall, was an old-style, rambling multi-roomed, somewhat disheveled store, hung with the special fragrance of old books, that was also a hang-out for literary and artistic people from the larger Berkeley community. I was the librettist, and a friend from Berkeley High days the composer, of a comic chamber opera about Creed's and Berkeley intellectual life more generally. Five of us performed it, taking thirteen parts and playing the piano accompaniment when not onstage; after several performances in the rented house where we all lived, we did it once on campus and finally on Radio Station KPFA. It is still remembered, and a recording occasionally played, by a diminishing few old Berkeley people. KPFA, which I believe was the first listener-sponsored radio station in the country, was then in a fledgling stage, dependent in large part on volunteer help: For a time I disk-jockeyed a weekly program of classical French music, based mainly on records I had acquired while stationed in Japan and Korea; the detective story writer Anthony Boucher did a program of rare opera recordings, and so forth. In more recent times my daughter Sarah carried on the tradition with her own program, familiar I hope to many of you.

All this proves relevant to my theme, however much it may seem to have wandered, when I reveal what my talk today is really about, which is why Berkeley and its great university are the spiritual home for a great many who have studied and worked here; why its East Asian programs, in the broadest sense, are ones that I and my colleagues are very proud to have been associated with, as are the legions of students they have trained; and how East Asiatic Library has been, and will continue to be, an underpinning for all this. I am invoking, perhaps, and unashamedly, a Berkeley mystique, one that many of us cannot help slipping into whenever we talk about our times here.

I took my Bachelor's degree in Oriental Languages in 1950, and fifteen years later, after taking higher degrees at the University of Michigan, studying in Japan and Europe, working as a curator at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and authoring a popular book on Chinese painting, I returned to Berkeley as a professor, with the aforementioned feeling of fish-back-in-water. (Soon after arriving here I was informed that some malicious person had looked into departmental files and found that I had received a C+ in my first exam in Maenchen's Chinese art course. Well, if you can get Cs at Yale and still become president, anything is possible.) Boodberg, Schafer, and Chen Shih-hsiang were still teaching when I returned; Elizabeth Huff was still Head of EAL. The successive losses of these people in later years tore holes in my comfortable feeling of continuity with my past. But there were new bright stars in Berkeley's East Asian faculty who became good friends; several in the Oriental Languages Department who, it turned out, were in charge of Faculty Club Christmas Party performances, and who invited me to join them. We did these for several years; Our most ambitious production was in 1967, a Gilbert-and-Sullivan style operetta using G&S songs with new lyrics set in a libretto by myself, titled "Dan Destry's Dilemma, or Publish or Perish, or Both." Cyril Birch, an eminent Chinese literature specialist, was Dan Destry, and Ed Schafer, no less, was Phoebe Grindsby, the Oldest Grad Student in the Department. In 1983, when Berkeley was in the midst of a financial crisis, we offered "Dan Destry's Return, or the Academic Beggar's Opera: An Entertainment for Academic Beggars," based on the 18^th century Beggar's Opera of John Gay. This time we enlisted our Chancellor Mike Heyman to play the part of his ancestor Mike Highwayman, leader of an outlaw band that was turning the university's special skills and resources to making money in illegal ways. Still later I joined Berkeley's world-class early China specialist David Keightley in doing funny songs for the Center for Chinese Studies New Year's parties. For the 1990 party our assignment was to write songs supporting the funding drive then underway for the new East Asiatic Library building. I certainly won't try to sing mine through, but will offer only two brief excerpts. Set to the music of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," it began with a reference to the ephemeral nature of digitized texts: "We live in the age of the micro-computer/ But books are what a scholar reads,/ Your Mac with its mouse, though it couldn't be cuter/ With its smiley face/ It may erase/ your database. . ." A later verse referred to the necessity for EAL, cramped as it was for space, to store much of its holdings in the storage facility out in Richmond, to be recalled only with a two-day wait. The lines went: "E A L/ Would serve us well/ With a building that suited its needs,/ But meanwhile they're sent in/ From out near San Quentin,/ The books the Asian scholar needs."

We have returned, by another roundabout route, to our subject. The great strengths of EAL in East Asian art books was one of the factors that drew me back to Berkeley; working in other libraries of the kind over the years had made me aware of what a remarkable asset it was. I and my students made heavy use of it during the thirty years I taught here, up to my retirement in 1995. Students in my lecture courses were expected to spend two or three hours a week in EAL, reading and using the reproduction books laid out for them (all this has changed, of course, in our digital age), and I often held graduate seminar meetings there.

The art book strengths of EAL are in both Chinese and Japanese art, and to a lesser extent Korean—lesser not by choice, but because the art-historical literature on Korean art is still less developed, and because Korean art, for historical reasons such as warfare and the forty-year occupation of that country by Japan, has been less well preserved. I discovered this when I spent nearly two years in the occupation in Korea, 1946-48, and spent a lot of time searching out surviving Korean art collections and monuments. Japanese art is far better preserved, especially the sculpture, painting, and architecture of the Buddhist temples, which are among the glories of world art. The Japanese buy more books per capita than do the people of most other countries, and are especially fond of art books; publishers love to put out multi-volume series of large, heavy volumes under such titles as "Complete Collection of Japanese Picture-scrolls" (Nihon Emaki-mono Zenshû) or "Japanese Art in Full Color" (Genshoku Nihon no Bijutsu). Well-off Japanese families display these proudly in glass-fronted cases in their reception rooms, but they are also of scholarly substance, since established specialists are engaged to write the texts for them. Large sets of this kind can be a problem for libraries, first because they are expensive, but also because on the one hand their contents can largely duplicate what is already available in other publications, and on the other they contain enough new material to be necessary for a complete study collection. An older series was devoted to the Buddhist temples of Nara, with a large volume of superb gravure plates devoted to each of the major temples. EAL, I'm happy to say, has a complete set of that important series, and most of the others as well. More recently, as China's economy has produced a class of affluent and upwardly mobile bookbuyers, publishers there have been producing similar series, and EAL continues to acquire them.

I taught Japanese art history as well as Chinese for my first ten years or so at Berkeley, but at last we were granted a separate position for Japanese art. I used to take candidates for this position around EAL both to tempt and to test them—I would show them the strengths of the collection as an inducement for those we hoped to lure here, and would judge the seriousness of their engagement with different areas of Japanese art from their responses to the books. One modernist whom I took around showed no interest, for instance, in our remarkably full holdings in Buddhist temple art and other traditional Japanese art, and was dropped from my list. I should add that for people we really wanted, in whatever field, I would sometimes, if time permitted, take them on day-long outings to Point Reyes and its beaches in Marin County, in the belief that anyone who, after viewing that sublime and spirit-lifting scenery, chose to live anywhere else was not someone we wanted anyway. Day-trips to the Point Reyes beaches, and sometimes overnights (one of the older students had a cabin on Tomales Bay), were a regular feature of our graduate program in Chinese art, well remembered by those who went through it—I used them to foster a spirit of community among us. One particular walk, northward from McClure's Beach to the tip of the peninsula, with Tomales Bay on the right and the Pacific Ocean on the left, often seen through fogs and on less fortunate occasions through downpours of rain, came to be known among the students as The Long March.

So, what were my students and I up to during these three decades, apart from going on great outings? We were, collectively, carrying the study of Chinese painting into new areas of scholarly inquiry. Others in other places were doing the same, but we were generally recognized as being on the forefront of these new approaches. Berkeley in 1965, when I began here as a professor, was still in the middle of the FSM or Free Speech Movement, with all its ramifications. From the balcony of my office upstairs I could look out over Campanile way, and between Wheeler and Dwinelle Halls, past Sather Gate to Sproul Hall Plaza, where demonstrations were often going on; or I could watch processions of protesters carrying banners and shouting slogans making their way along one or another of the campus avenues. There were times when tear gas fumes made it difficult to stay outside, even so high up; at other times I would join the demonstrations as a faculty observor, presumably able to give a neutral account of any clash between students and police.

One of many positive side-effects of this politicizing chapter in U.C. Berkeley's history was in turning the students, and some of the faculty, in new directions of humanities research and writing. More than before, students were saying: We don't want to go on hearing about art as a self-contained system, about style and iconography and so on; we want to learn about it in a social-political context. One of my best students in my early years—named, coincidentally, Suzanne Cahill—I always referred to her, when announcing exam results, as Suzanne no-relation Cahill—she's now a professor at U. C. San Diego—married a radical young man who was contemptuous of her studies of art, asking: when did art ever put food into people's mouths? and she wrote me asking: How can I reply? I did the best I could, but I had little respect for Marxist art history as it was practiced at that time, and I was still basically committed to the kind of stylistic studies I had learned from my teacher Max Loehr, so I wasn't of much help. But by 1971, when I held a seminar leading to a notable exhibition at our University Art Museum titled "The Restless Landscape: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Period," I was ready not only to turn loose the remarkable group of eight graduate students who made up that seminar—all women, as it happened--but to encourage and advise them in the new directions they were determined to take. The highly innovative essays published in the catalog included Yoko Woodson's on "The Problem of Western Influence," Patricia Berger's on the paintings in the light of late Ming intellectual history, Judith Whitbeck (from the History Dept.) writing about "Political Culture and Aesthetic Activity" in late Ming, and Marsha Weidner, who had come to us from Mills College, on "Regional, Economic, and Social Factors in Late Ming Painting." With virtually no support or models in previous writing, but with considerable help from Berkeley faculty in other areas of Chinese studies—I remember that Fred Wakeman was especially supportive and helpful--they explored these new aspects of our subject in ways that are still recognized as ground-breaking. Yoko Woodson has for years been a curator at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco; Judith Whitbeck has had a career of teaching and curatorship, most recently at the Chinese Scholar's Garden on Staten Island in New York; Marsha Weidner (now Haufler) holds the prestigious professorship at the University of Kansas and has herself organized ground-breaking exhibitions on such themes as Chinese women painters and later-period Buddhist painting; and Patricia Berger is my distinguished successor here at U.C. Berkeley.
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I should add that we were able, with very modest funding, to make a trip to the East Coast to see collections and choose pieces for our show. Because of the leftward leanings of several of the seminar members, and the general reputation of Berkeley in those years, East-coast colleagues were referring to us, as I learned later, as "Cahill and his Red Detachment of Women."

Another, similar seminar-exhibition project carried out a decade later, in 1981, produced an exhibition and scholarly catalog titled "Shadows of Mt. Huang: Chinese Painting and Printing of the Anhui School." Again, there were eight highly qualified graduate students who wrote the catalog essays on this important regional school in 17^th- 18th century Chinese painting; and again, five of the eight students have gone on to professorial or curatorial careers—Cheng-chi or Ginger Hsu at U.C. Riverside, Hiromitsu Kobayashi at Sophia University in Tokyo and Haruki Yoshida as a curator in Ashiya, Julia Andrews at Ohio State U,, and Scarlett Jang at Williams College. Their essays related Anhui-school painting to the merchant culture flourishing then in that region; to painting theory of the time; to the spectacular scenery of Huangshan or Mt. Huang, the subject of many of the paintings, and to the technically and artistically high-level pictorial woodblock printing for which the Anhui region was famous in Ming-Qing times; again, these essays were recognized by scholars in the Chinese art field as well as in other fields as innovative and exemplary. Moreover, a colleague in Chinese history carried a copy of the catalog to Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province, where he was to spend a year doing research, and it caused quite a stir. In fact, the first international symposium on Chinese painting held in China, in Hefei in 1984, devoted to the Huangshan or Anhui School, was a response by the Chinese specialists there to the surprising news that foreigners were seriously interested in their local school of painting. It produced in itself a major exhibition, which supplemented ours by showing works in Chinese collections that had of course been unavailable to us, and it generated a new wave of activity and publication.

For roughly the first half of my three decades as professor, I lamented the lack of a special seminar room for East Asian art history and archaeology, similar to the ones that most of my colleagues and their students enjoyed at Michigan, Harvard, Princeton, and other universities, where specialist reference books could be quickly available, rare and fragile books kept safely, and large folio volumes of plates spread out on tables. During that period I and my students made do with a room adjacent to my office, room 419 in this building; this was the now-famous 419A, connected to my office by a closeable window. The walls of 419A were lined with books from my own library for the use of grad students in East Asian art, along with boxes of exhibition catalogs, offprints, and xeroxes; also in the room were our photo archive for Chinese painting, and a big collection of old and rare Chinese collotype reproduction books of Chinese paintings, which I had assembled in bookstores in Japan and China over many years. (These last I gave last year to EAL, to fill out their already-rich collection of them.) To speak of the importance of these may seem old-fashioned in this digital age, and the time may come when one can call up all these images on one's computer screen. But that time is still far off, and meanwhile there is no substitute for spreading the books open on a large table to consider together the works of an artist, or pictures of a given subject, or whatever other visual materials your research sends you to.

419A is now only a memory, Camelot-like for some of us. But around 1980, largely through the efforts of David Keightley, I was at last given my seminar room—partly as a reward for turning down an offer from Harvard. (I don't say that to boast; many Berkeley professors have been tempted in this way. I once suggested that we should form a group on the model of Alcoholics Anonymous in which those undergoing the temptation could be counseled by those of us who had gone through it and resisted, or gone there and come back.) The new seminar room was located first in the basement of Durant Hall, home of what is now the East Asian Languages Department (Oriental having become an unpolitic word) and is still the home base of EAL. Later the East Asian art seminar would be moved to the basement of California Hall and combined with what was the newspaper and periodical room in much more spacious quarters. I'm happy to say that an East Asian Art and Archaeology Seminar is an important feature in the plan for the new building; it will receive heavy use from my successor in Chinese art history Patricia Berger and her students, our Japanese art history specialist Greg Levine and his students, and a great many others from inside and outside the University. It will be, I believe, the largest and finest facility of its kind West of the East Coast, and it will draw researchers in East Asian art studies from all over the world as a place where they can work on the highest level, surrounded by a remarkably complete assemblage of the materials they most need—and, nearby, a community of eminent scholars in related fields with whom they can consult.

Among those who deserve our gratitude for the support and planning up to now of the new EAL building, foremost probably is the late Changlin Tien, with whom I had the pleasure and honor of working for some years on our China exchange program and others--a wonderful man. David Keightley and David Johnson of our History Department devoted a lot of their time and energy over some years to heading the planning committee, and many others have played important roles in it.

If my talk today has sometimes slipped into a kind of elegiac tone, as if lamenting a bygone past, I can only protest that that's a common failing of old people, who turn their pasts into golden ages. Some student or professor who is active here now will no doubt slip into a similar tone when reminiscing, a half century or so in the future, about the great days of U.C. Berkeley and its East Asiatic Library in the early two-thousands (or whatever people decide to call these years.) That person's fond reminiscences will no doubt be about the exciting time when EAL, after years of planning and through the great generosity of many good friends, was able at last to move to its new building, and about the golden years that followed. That will be a really good story, and I'll end by thanking everyone involved for their help in making it a true story.

Thank you.

CLP 172: 2000 “Seeing Paintings in Hong Kong” Kaikodo Journal XVIII, 2000, pp. 20-25.

Kaikodo HK

"Seeing Paintings in Hong Kong} (Ching Yuan Chai so-shih III)
Pub. in Kaikodo Journal XVIII, 2000, pp. 20-25.

From 1956 until well into the 1980s I was able to make a number of visits to Hong Kong to see collections and exhibitions of Chinese paintings there, pursue various lines of research, and enjoy the many pleasures that this very cosmopolitan city offered during those years. The account that follows depends largely on memory, with some help from notes scribbled at the time, now scarcely legible even to myself and preserved on the yellowing pages of a drawerful of dog-eared spiral notebooks. Since the single-mindedness of my pursuit of paintings ensured that I kept virtually no notes on other matters, all the rest must be reconstructed from a very fallible memory, and should not be taken as well-researched or substantiated fact; we are in the perilous realm of reminiscence. My apologies go to anyone who is somehow misrepresented herein.

My first visit to Hong Kong was in early 1956, when I stopped there for about a week at the end of my Fulbright year in Japan, on my way to Europe where I was to work for Osvald Siren. I had not yet begun either to keep dated notebooks or to make color slides of what I saw; some now-irretrievable notes on the paintings, written on 3x5 slips of paper, were later entered into Siren’s “Annotated Lists,” which I was already planning to supplement, but I have no record of the collections we visited then. One, I recall, was that of Ho Kuan-wu, familiar to me as an excellent connoisseur of Ming-Ch’ing paintings from the presence of his neat, unobtrusive seals on many of the best, and from the publications devoted to his T’ien-ch’i Shu-wu or “Field and Stream Library.” Another, more ambitious but far less sure of eye, was J. D. Chen (Chen Jen-tao), whose collection seals were by contrast large and conpicuous, rivalling in their pretentiousness (one of them in particular, his double-coin seal) those of the Qianlong Emperor. Reports had it that Chen’s collection had originally been stronger, and that he had given up too many of his best pieces to Chang Ta-ch’ien in return for works purportedly by early masters but actually made by Chang himself. Seeing (and seeing through) Chen’s “Tung Yüan” and “Chü-jan” forgeries, displayed by the owner with great pride and lofty claims, was an early step in the long passage toward my present ability--alas, still not universally acknowledged--to spot the identifying characteristics of Chang Ta-ch’ien’s fabrications of early paintings. I was to see more of Chang’s forgeries in Europe, and still more on returning to the U.S.

Three people had generously offered to introduce me to Hong Kong collectors when I came there: the dealer Walter Hochstadter, the collector-dealer Cheng Chi, and the journalist-critic Chu Hsing-chai. Not wanting to say no to any of them, especially since they had access to different collectors, I ended up going on alternate days with Hochstadter and with (together) Cheng and Chu. I had heard the story of how Hochstadter and Chu became bitter enemies: someone had complimented Hochstadter’s good eye for paintings by suggesting that he was “the Liang Ch’ing-piao of our time” (referring to the great early Ch’ing collector, 1620-1691), and Walter had replied, intending modesty, that he could make no such claim, but that he would like to be thought of as “the Kao Shih-ch’i [1645-1704] of our time.” Chu Hsing-chai had thereupon published a mocking article about the foreigner who calls himself “the Kao Shih-ch’i of our time.” So I was not surprised when, each morning, my guide of that day would inquire about where I had gone and what I had seen the day before. Walter would ask “Where did those two crooks take you yesterday?” and respond, when I mentioned a collector or dealer, “He has nothing but fakes. Don’t believe anything he shows you.” And Cheng and Chu would be equally scornful of the collectors I had visited through Hochstadter’s introduction. Being caught between them worked to my benefit, and I saw as much in my Hong Kong week as anyone could have hoped for.

My dated notebooks begin in the early 1960s and continue, at least for the present essay, until 1981--Hong Kong after that was for me a different place, as was Japan. By then I had begun spending more time in mainland China, and the possibilities of buying Chinese paintings for affordable prices had dwindled markedly. It was during the 1960s and early 70s that I traveled regularly with my close friend the late Hugh Wass, who was also a collector but on a smaller scale and with different tastes, so that it was only infrequently that we had to flip a coin to decide who would buy a piece we both wanted. (I usually won, to his chagrin: “Luck of the Irish again!”) Hugh was living for most of those years in Tokyo, and we would begin our rounds there, looking at Japanese paintings (especially Nanga) as well as Chinese. After some days we would make our way by the Shinkansen train to Kansai to see what was new among Kyoto-Osaka museums and collectors, and thence, typically, to Taiwan or Hong Kong, driven partly by our longing for better Chinese dinners than Kansai (famously inadequate in this regard) could offer. After a week or so in Taiwan or Hong Kong we would fly on to the other, and thence back to Japan, completing the triangle. These were in many ways happy and productive times.

Arriving in Hong Kong with Hugh was a tense drama: he was extremely nervous about takeoffs and landings, and the approach to the old Hong Kong airport, as I recall it, took us through a cleft between two mountains and then, with a sharp leftward veer, down rather abruptly onto the landing strip. On our first few visits we stayed at the Hilton Hotel, which had an educator’s discount and was conveniently located--the dealer Chang Ting-chen was nearby, as were the best bookstores. Later, after we were introduced to it by J. S. Lee, we always stayed at Sunning House, a small, inexpensive and likeable hotel across Hysan Avenue from Lee Gardens. It disappeared years ago, replaced by a huge, glass-fronted I. M. Pei building. From the hotel we would make phone calls to collectors and dealers to schedule our days, and then set out for the first of the great dinners.

Looking over notes, I cannot understand how we did as much in a few days as they record--not only dealers and collectors and exhibitions but also bookstores (Tsi Ku Chai and others offering the latest mainland publications), makers of suits and shirts and eyeglasses, visits to friends. For a time in the 1960s Nick and Sheila Platt (he of the Foreign Service) were in Hong Kong, and kept a junk in Halfmoon Bay (if memory serves) on which fortunate guests would enjoy elegant picnic dinners and drink martinis, after which, happily tipsy, they could float in the warm water gazing up at the moon, troubled only by small stinging jellyfish (nothing is perfect.)

Among those who showed us paintings, we soon learned to distinguish between true collectors who were not interested in selling, so that one didn’t think of asking prices (for instance, J. S. Lee, Huang Pao-hsi or P.H. Wong, and Ho Yao-kuang); genuine collectors who nevertheless were more than willing to part with some or even most of their holdings (J. D. Chen, N. P. Wong, Lee Kwok-wing); dealers posing as collectors (Ma Chi-tsu); and straightforward dealers (notably Chang Ting-chen, but also Yen Sheng-po.) Sessions with Ma Chi-tsu could be uncomfortable, since his teenage daughter who served as interpreter talked constantly about how much her father loved these paintings, all the while that he was hanging in quick succession dozens of pictures among which only a few could be described, however charitably, as lovable. Hugh and I devised a code for communicating about them without letting Ma’s daughter know our real opinions.

My most piercing feeling, on rereading notes from those years, is: Why didn’t I buy that painting? Works that are now treasured by major museums could have been had for modest sums, but were dismissed by me as dubious in authenticity or unimpressive in quality. For some of them, those judgements still seem valid, but my failure to go for others is now painful to think about. I wish also--who today doesn’t?--that I had bought more good contemporary paintings by artists such as Fu Pao-shih, Huang Pin-hung, and Ch’eng Shih-fa, which were available for prices from fifty or seventy-five dollars to a few hundred from Tsi Ku Chai and other Hong Kong galleries.

J. D. Chen lived on the “other side” of the island in a big house overlooking Deep Water Bay. His furnishings (typified, in my memory, by a plaster sculpture of a nude woman with a clock set into her belly) were in sharp contrast to his paintings, which evinced some taste, even though there were dubious pieces and outright forgeries among them. On a visit in February, 1964 when I was accompanied by C. C. Wang (we had come from Taiwan, where I was engaged in the Ku-kung photographing project), we were shown about seventy paintings. I bought five (by Wang Hui, Fa Jo-chen, Hung-jen, Chang Hung, and Fang I-chih) for lowish prices, and got photos of the wonderful “Sun Chih-wei” (T’ai-ku I-min) handscroll now in the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum, to recommend it, strongly but unsuccessfully, as an anonymous Chin work to the Freer Gallery.

This insatiable pursuit of paintings was mostly for the purpose of augmenting my visual store and my slide collection (with a Nikon and its trusty Speedlight and a supply of Kodachrome I could shoot slides as fast as the paintings appeared, all leaves of albums and all sections of handscrolls, with lots of details.) But it was also to find pieces for potential purchase. Buying good paintings on these trips at prices even I could afford (and, of course, looking for pieces worthy of consideration by the Freer, during my years there) was the adventurous, cloak-and-dagger side of my life, balancing the academic: following leads into unlikely places, matching eyes and wits with wily dealers, managing to avoid the traps they set. It was the best eye training I could have received. An important side-benefit, moreover, was that it meant spending time with some very interesting and mostly likeable people, the collectors and dealers. They included:

Ho Yao-kuang, the Chih-lo Lou collection, especially strong in works of the late Ming and early Ch’ing Individualist and i-min or loyalist artists of the transitional period. An important symposium on the i-min masters was organized around this collection (fill in: James Watt, etc.) Apart from the high level of quality of the paintings and the hospitality of the owner, what I recall especially about Ho’s apartment is a life-size and disturbingly lifelike colored (wax?) bust sculpture of him, complete with glasses, the work of some unsung Chinese Duane Hanson (minus the irony), that occupied a glass case looking out at you. To see the bust and the real person together was somehow an unsettling double-image experience.

N. P. Wong, or Wang Nan-p’ing. I have written briefly about visiting him and seeing his paintings, first at his flat in one of the mountainside mansions on Tai Hang Road and later on Leighton Road, not far from Sunning House (see The Jade Studio, p. ---.) Wang Nan-p’ing’s tastes were basically those of the traditional (late-period) connoisseur, and accordingly favored the circle of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, the Orthodox masters, and other Ming-Ch’ing name artists.

Liu Tso-ch’ou (Low Chuck Tiew), whose Hsü Pai Chai collection, rich in Ming-Qing paintings of good quality and firm authenticity, is now in the Hong Kong City Museum (check). He was said to have bought heavily from Ho Kuan-wu, an excellent source. I met him in the late 1960s through the introduction of Wong (Huang) Pao-hsi, and visited him to see paintings several times after that, sometimes in the company of James Watt, who was always unfailingly helpful in arranging visits to Hong Kong collectors. An especially long and impressive viewing was in 1975, when Howard Rogers was with me.

Others, who will be given only brief mentions here, include Cheng Chi, who in the 1960s was frequently in Hong Kong but in later years lived mostly in his Tokyo house, where I spent many enlightening and entertaining hours with him (besides being a good connoisseur, he is a great raconteur and purveyor of gossip of the field); Hsü Po-chiao, a major source of paintings for some other buyers but, for whatever reason, never for me; Lee Kwok-wing, a smaller but quite knowledgeable collector-dealer who would show paintings mostly of modest size which he had acquired mainly from sources in China, and which he had remounted and meticulously researched; V. C. Kuo, who ran a business in Aberdeen selling diesel motors from Japan for the fishing fleet there, and who had amassed large numbers of good works by major recent and contemporary mainland masters; P. T. Huo, owner of the famous ghost scroll by Lo P’ing, which I saw and photographed in 1969 at the Bank of Canton through the arrangement of J. S. Lee; Jacson Yu, a painter who also collected, and sometimes sold, paintings by recent masters such as Wu Ch’ang-shih; and Chang Pi-han, a discerning and modest collector to whom I was introduced by C. C. Wang, and who moved in the 1980s? to Piedmont, California, near enough to Berkeley for me to take my graduate students to enjoy his hospitality in painting viewings. I remember, on one of the Hong Kong visits to his pleasantly rural hillside house with C. C. Wang, eating great li-chih (lychee, my favorite fruit) and learning from him how we had come at exactly the right moment, when those from a particular tree in Canton, marked with a distinctive yellow-green stripe, had appeared for sale. This, again, is from memory; lychee afficianados can correct me.

My stay in Hong Kong in 1970, longer than the others, was especially exciting and fruitful. The great “International Symposium on Chinese Painting” at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, the first in a series of large-scale events of this kind, had just been held, and many of the participants and attendees moved on afterwards to Hong Kong, where local collectors had prepared further visual feasts for appetites already near satiation. An exhibition of Ming-Qing paintings from Hong Kong collections, organized by the Min Ch’iu (“Assiduously Seeking”) Society, was held in (check), and a number of private viewings at the collectors’ homes were arranged. These included Lee Jung-sen or J. S. Lee (a remarkable assemblage of really fine pieces, testifying to his good eye--no one else I have known has so successfully balanced the responsibilities of wealth with sensitivity, knowledge, generosity, and personal involvement in the projects he supports), P. H. Wong or Huang Pao-hsi, N. P. Wong, Ho Yao-kuang, and Chang Pi-han. With smaller groups I visited, with purchases in mind, dealers including Chang Ting-chen (Wai-kam Ho, who was with me, was taken by a 1764 Lo P’ing portrait-in-landscape which is now in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Eight Dynasties no.271), Lee Kwok-wing, Ma Chi-tsu, Chu Hsing-chai, and Yen Sheng-po. Wen Fong, who had been buying on a large scale, principally for the Elliott Collection (with the Princeton Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art as ultimate recipients), showed us in his Hong Kong apartment some seventy paintings--a marathon viewing with many surprises.

Yen Sheng-po I had known about for some years, as a dealer who sometimes sold important paintings but was notoriously “tricky.” He was, for instance, the previous owner of the two Chang Ta-ch’ien forgeries, “Chü-jan” and “I Yüan-chi,” that had gone to the British Museum through the (even trickier) painter-collector-dealer Chiang Er-shih. It was Yen Sheng-po who told me the story of how the large Wu Pin “Landscape with Palaces” (Distant Mountains, pl. 90) which I had acquired the year before from N. P. Wong (for a price more than twice as large as I had previously paid for any Chinese painting), had come into Wong’s hands. Smuggled to Macao from the mainland, reportedly cut into four pieces, it was remounted cheaply and badly in Hong Kong and bought by J. D. Chen. Yen Sheng-po next acquired it, then Chu Hsing-chai, who offered it to the Swiss collector Franco Vannotti for $2,000. Vannotti turned it down, as did Cheng Chi, and it was finally bought by N. P. Wong. Cheng Chi, revising his opinion of it, then offered $4,000 for it, but Wong by this time wanted more, perhaps surmising correctly that he could get still more (not a lot more, fortunately) from an American scholar-collector, myself, who was just then fascinated with Wu Pin and intent on promoting him as a neglected major master (in my 1967 “Fantastics and Eccentrics” exhibition and elsewhere.) Wong sent me a small, muddy photograph of the work, and on the basis of that I sent him half the asking price and received the painting on consideration. A first viewing made it clear why Hong Kong collectors had rejected it: a skimpy, inept mounting, with too-light backing paper used in a misguided effort to overcome the darkness of the silk, had thinned the ink tone and reduced greatly the impact that the work should have had--and later came to have. After much agonizing I sent Wong the remainder of the purchase price, and took the painting on my next trip to Tokyo, leaving it with Cheng Chi to be remounted by his favorite mounter and mine, Meguro Sanji of Kôkakudô, who was well known to a few Chinese and western collectors for his seemingly magic ability to make silk purses out of sow’s ears. In this case he was greatly aided by a fortuitous circumstance: Cheng Chi had just brought back from a trip to Beijing a supply of Chinese backing paper ideally suited to this job, and generously let Meguro use enough of it for the large painting. It strengthened the ink values and, together with Meguro’s handiwork, produced a powerful picture that has awed everyone ever since. Cheng Chi, accompanied by Meguro, brought the newly-mounted painting to the 1970 Taipei symposium, where it was hung, along with two others from my collection, in Wu Pin’s first “one-man show,” organized at my request to accompany my paper on the artist, and made up (apart from my three) of all the Wu Pin works in the Palace Museum, including one “Anonymous Sung” painting, “Steep Ravines and Flying Cascades,” which I had persuaded the Palace Museum curators to include as by Wu Pin. (It was exhibited as that again in the Metropolitan Museum’s “Splendors of Imperial China” exhibition of 1996, pl. 207 in the Possessing the Past catalog.)

The Hong Kong dealer whom I most liked and respected, and from whom I bought the most, was Chang Ting-chen. He had been with the famous Yü-ch’ih Shan-fang or “Jade Pool Mountain Chamber,” a painting and calligraphy store at Liu-li-ch’ang in pre-P.R.C. Beijing, and had relocated as an expatriate in Hong Kong. Nostalgic always for his old haunts, he would reminisce about them over impeccably ordered dinners at the best Beijing-cuisine restaurants that Hong Kong could boast. Chang put off for years returning to Beijing, fearful of what he would find, and when he finally went back, in the late 1980s, he returned bitter about what had happened to his beloved city, with no thought of ever going again. Compared to the great painting market of 1940s Beijing, Hong Kong’s must have seemed terribly impoverished, but Chang made the best of a greatly reduced supply of paintings, and always had good pieces to show. When a viewing ended, one simply told him told him which of the paintings one was interested in, and Chang would write out a list with prices, which held firm as long as the works remained in his hands. One never bargained--at least, I didn’t. The whole procedure was straightforward and businesslike, and carried out on trust: one could take the paintings back to one’s hotel room for longer contemplation, and pay for them at some later time.

I have kept for last, in honor of the occasion for which this essay was written, P. H. Wong or Huang Pao-hsi. My first viewing of paintings at his home may have been in September of 1965; at least, I have no record of an earlier visit. I was with Hugh Wass, and we saw some forty-five paintings, including fine works by (among others) Ch’en Shun (the handscroll of flowers), Chao Tso (the 1612 handscroll). K’un-ts’an and Shih-t’ao, the Four Wangs, and Hua Yen (the very lovely 1743 horizontal painting of Su Wu tending sheep, with a nomadic procession, perhaps intended for Lady Wen-chi and her consort and their entourage, in the distance.) In 1967 I was back again with Hugh, seeing some of the same paintings as before (my comments and opinions on them can be observed in the notebooks to change from year to year) but also quite a few new ones, such as the 1577 album of landscapes by Hou Mou-kung (“best work of his I’ve seen!”) and a small, early (1654) Wang Hui landscape “in the manner of Chao Po-chü” that I found enchanting. (Students in my Four Wangs seminar given shortly afterward at U. C. Berkeley similarly fell in love with it.) I was realizing the scope and depth of this collection, which seemed inexhaustible. At some of these viewings we were joined by young Harold, already an accomplished painter, although specializing then in meticulous copies of older paintings. (A portfolio of reproductions of these was published by his proud father.)

The 1969 viewing brought out more works by later artists than before--I may have asked for them, in connection with some current research or exhibition project. They included a series of good works by the 19th century Jens (Hsiung, Hsün, and Po-nien) and by Chao Chih-ch’ien. Striking and a bit mysterious was a Tai Pen-hsiao landscape with figures, done with reddish color and slight washes that gave, as I wrote, “a remarkable separation of planes of depth.” I judged it then to be “a highly original painting,” but when it reappeared at the viewing in the following year, I was told by C. C. Wang that it was in fact a forgery by Chang Ta-ch’ien. When I look now at the slide, I see that he was right. I was still learning--among other things, that even the best collectors make occasional missteps, and that when a premodern work exhibits unusually convincing effects of space and lighting, one should choose carefully between congratulating the artist and questioning his authorship and the date of the work.

The 1970 showing, because it was for the post-Taipei-symposium group including C. C. Wang and several foreign specialists, was especially long and rich, featuring many of the best pieces in the collection. Much of it was familiar to me by now, but there were always surprises. A briefer viewing in 1975 was heavy in works by Hua Yen, presumably because I was accompanied this time by Howard Rogers, who was then deeply engaged with that artist. I made notes on no less than seventeen, with stars beside quite a few. And, if my memory is correct, this viewing ended, as others had before, with a very good dinner, western cuisine served formally as it might be at a British country house.

That was my last visit to the collection. In April of 1976, Sotheby Parke Bernet in New York held the auction of “Paintings by Ming and Ch’ing Masters from the Lok Tsai Hsien Collection.” Browsing now through the catalog, I realize again that some of the finest and most attractive of Huang’s paintings were offered there. Unhappily, negative gossip, in part malicious (a story best left untold), prevented the auction from realizing what it should have, and many paintings were bought in, or went for low prices. The Hou Mou-kung album was acquired by C. C. Wang, a fine group (Wang Shih-min 1638 landscape, Wang Chien 1669 album, Chin Nung 1661 blossoming plum) by the Yale University Art Gallery, and others by small collectors for whom this was a great opportunity--a landscape by Tsou Chih-lin, for instance, was bought for $2,500 by the pianist Gary Graffman, who would later lend it to our 1981 “Shadows of Mt. Huang” exhibition. I myself could not attend the auction, but purchased two of the paintings immediately afterwards: a 1667 landscape with figures on satin by Hsiao Yün-ts’ung, and Wen Cheng-ming’s early (1515) “Chih-p’ing Monastery,” which reached Berkeley just in time for a seminar I was giving on that master.

In the fall of 1977 I was in Hong Kong again briefly, after a month-long tour of mainland China as chairman of the Chinese Painting Delegation; our group was by then too exhausted, and too saturated with impressions of great Chinese paintings, to make any effort to see more of them for a while, and my happiest memory is of being re-introduced on the night of our arrival to the delicious decadence of life outside the P.R.C. by J. S. Lee, who entertained several of us in the cabaret atop the Lee Gardens, where a sultry-voiced songstress blew away the clouds of puritan austerity that we still trailed from a month of immersion in it. In 1981 I was once more in Hong Kong for only a few days, this time on the way to a longer stay on the mainland, and managed to buy a few paintings from Chang Ting-ch’en and Lee Kwok-wing. And I went for the first time to Harold Wong’s Hanart Gallery on Hollywood Road, where he showed me paintings from his new stock. But that is the beginning of another account, in which the drama and discoveries are pursued more on the mainland than in Hong Kong, and so marks a convenient place to end this one.

CLP 112: 1993 “Passing On the Torch.” Talk for “celebration” of three elder scholars in Japanese art history

“Passing On the Torch.”

Talk for Celebration of the retirement of three senior scholars of the history of Japanese painting: John Rosenfield, Nobuo Tsuji, and myself, organized by Joe Price, held on Sept. 18, 1993, and attended by many of the younger specialists in the field, along with collectors and others.

If I begin with the expected opening, saying that I’m very happy to be here on this great occasion as one of the honored retirees, it will be entirely true and sincere, but it will also need some qualification. Obviously, if given a choice, anybody would rather be at the front end of a career than at the far end. As the years pass one finds oneself more and more, by invitation or uninvited, reminiscing about the previous generation for those who didn’t know them, as you did. Then suddenly you are the previous generation—it’s very unsettling. Still, since it isn’t a matter of choice, the best thing is to accept it and try to enjoy the benefits of being at the far end of one’s career. And there are several benefits: much less anxiety, escaping from headachy administrative jobs of the kind I’ve done my share of and John Rosenfield (bodhisattva that he is) has done three times his share; and, if one is lucky, being feted and celebrated and Festschrifted by the next generation. So I’m grateful to Joe and Etsuko and Julie Wolfgram for conceiving and organizing this event, which will allow the three of us to enjoy more of this last benefit than we otherwise would.

This kind of event isn’t without precedent: some years ago, there was a session at the College Art Association annual meeting in which five elders in the field of Western art history were invited to speak, partly because they didn’t appear much in other kinds of sessions any more; the feeling was that younger art historians should have a chance to see and hear them in the flesh, while this was still possible. Some such motive may have been in Joe Price’s mind when he organized this event. If so, we intend to confound him by going on making frequent public appearances, anti-climactic though they might be after his Celebration. Anyway, all of the oldsters in the CAA session did their expected reminiscing and summing-up talks, except one, George Kubler, who gave us a scholarly paper on some difficult point in the chronology of his Mayan codexes. His decision may have been the right one—I think the talks by John Rosenfield and Tsuji-sensei following mine will be more that kind, and certainly will be more substantial than mine. But I’m going to do the reminiscing and summing-up thing.

When Joe first approached me about this, I said my topic would be “passing on the torch,” and to the question of how this should be done, I would reply “Upside down—let them burn their fingers.” But that was only a joke: the image of the scholar as curmudgeon, putting down his colleagues and growling at the young, belonged to an earlier generation, that of Alan Priest, Osvald Siren, and Umehara Sueji (to name three.) I would really prefer to come through as benevolent and avuncular, so that’s the image I’ll try to project. At the same time, since a major purpose of this kind of gathering is to provoke discussion of large issues in the field, I’ll do my best to be provocative—an enterprise in which I’ve had some practice. I should add that since I’m primarily a Chinese art specialist, I’ll speak from that viewpoint, but will try to bring out the applicability of some of what I say to the situation of Japanese art studies, with which most of you are mainly concerned.

At another CAA session held in Washington D.C. the year before last (1991), organized by Jason Kuo and titled “Four Decades of Research on Chinese Painting in the West,” I spoke about “Five Pioneer Scholars in Chinese Painting Studies,” people from whom I’d learned directly, in some sense: Archibald Wenley, Osvald Siren, Laurence Sickman, Shujiro Shimada, and Max Loehr. Only Shujiro is still with us, and he hasn’t been well lately. I could have added Alexander Soper, recently deceased, except that I never studied with him. Anyway, I won’t repeat what I said then about these people individually, but will speak generally, and briefly, about this generation that preceded that of the three of us speaking today.

Their generation, or some scholars in it, represented the first real resolution of the old “sinology vs. art history” split (raised in those words in a review by John Pope of a book by Ludwig Bachhofer, published in Toung Pao in 1947). Before that, the options were: the Giles/Waley/Pelliot/Laufer kind of sinological engagement with art as part of a larger engagement with Chinese history and culture, vs. the Bachhofer/Salmony’/Rowley/Rowland kind of broad engagement with the history of art within which China was a part. Scholars were on one side or the other of a divide. Not all of the six I have named represent an ideal balance: Wenley mainly continued the sinological tradition; Siren was more the art historian by training, having studied with Berenson and others, but he drew skillfully on the work of sinologues. Loehr, in a big step upward from his teacher Bachhofer, epitomized the desirable fusion; so did Soper, similarly moving past what his teacher Rowley was able to accomplish. Sickman, although without much art-historical training, managed through sensitivity and a great eye to function very effectively as an art historian, while never admitting this. The same is true of Shimada. Scholars of their generation were the first to embody the ideal, at least, while manifesting it in varying ways and degrees.

Now, it was the task of my generation to try to consolidate this great move forward, bring together art-historical methods and perceptions, on one hand, with doing research in texts, drawing on work by recent Chinese and Japanese scholars, etc. on the other. All through the 1950s, when I was working on my dissertation (originally on the Four Great Masters of Yuan landscape, later narrowed to Wu Chen), and, in the later part of this decade, also working on the Skira book Chinese Painting—the two projects overlapped—I was reading and scanning all kinds of old Chinese books in the Freer and other libraries, wallowing in texts. My command of them was far from secure, but that didn’t deter me, or prevent me from making, as I still believe, real breakthroughs. I was working on literati painting theory, and on Chinese art theory more generally; I was searching for ways to understand the paintings more as viewers of the artist’s time did (an ideal ultimately unrealizable, but worth trying for) and to communicate these new ways of understanding in my writing.

A big part of my motivation was a passionate opposition to the tendency, very strong at that time, to impose on Chinese art some attitudes that were in fact adopted from other cultures: Japan and its emphasis on Buddhism, especially Zen, or the special version of Indian art and culture promoted by Coomaraswamy, which he tried to persuade people could be applied to all of Asia. These together had dominated a lot of pioneer writing about Chinese art, especially in the Boston-Cambridge sphere, where the influence of Coomaraswamy and Langdon Warner was very strong. My battle-cry was: Let’s try to understand Chinese art as the Chinese did, not as some Zen monks or tea-masters did, or as Coomaraswamy and his followers would like us to. I was helped by the experience of getting to know Chinese connoisseurs, notably C. C. Wang, also Chang Ta-ch’ien, Li Lin-ts’an, and others, looking at lots of paintings with them, hearing how they talked about paintings, observing what they liked and disliked. Also, Larry Sickman was a powerful ally, or model; his early studies with Langdon Warner didn’t hamper him from absorbing, during his long stays in China, Chinese ways of looking at art, and becoming in effect a Chinese-style connoisseur—perhaps the first foreigner to accomplish this successfully—and setting forth his perceptions in admirably clear and persuasive writings.

Others of my generation, at this heady time, were engaged in the same kind of effort: Dick Edwards for Shen Chou and other Ming and Ch’ing painters, Michael Sullivan for early landscape. Both had spent time in China during the war, and were using their knowledge of Chinese language and culture to good purpose. Moreover, as a great supplement and support to our endeavors, a few young Chinese scholars in the U.S. were coming into the field, bringing their greater command of the language and traditional culture to bear on texts and paintings: Chu-tsing Li for Chao Meng-fu and Yuan painting, Wen Fong and Wai-kam Ho for their broader areas of concern, including theoretical and methodological issues. The advances made in our studies since then wouldn’t have been possible without them.

Now I want to make a double proposition that is central to one of my arguments today. First: in our excitement over being able to read and understand the Chinese writings, learn from very knowledgeable Chinese connoisseurs, and apply these new understandings to the paintings, we were inclined to accept the Chinese formulations that we read or heard as the truth about the paintings, the right way to read and understand them. The typical response of people to my presentations of wen-jen hua (literati painting) theory was: At last you have revealed to us how we should appreciate, for instance, the paintings of Ni Tsan (an artist whom Bachhofer had put down, in his 1946 history of Chinese art, as an “arrogant dilletante.”) And, in the context I’ve been outlining, what we were doing was the right thing to do for that time, another big move forward. But, part two of my proposition: it isn’t at all the right thing to be doing now. Without presuming to argue that we’ve come to any really full and adequate understanding of Chinese theories and attitudes about their art, I would say that we’ve come far enough to justify raising questions about them, and distancing ourselves a bit from them.

We knew all the time, of course, that these theories and attitudes represented the special territory of an elite, the Chinese male literati, and that their self-defensive posture against any intrusions on their commanding position within Chinese culture was a major factor behind the directions their arguments took. And we knew in principle that these arguments, made sometimes centuries after the paintings were done and in very different contexts, couldn’t automatically be taken as corresponding with the original meanings and circumstances of the paintings. But we didn’t—if I can speak for myself, and my limited understanding of the thinking of others—realize until more recently the full implications of this, how much of Chinese painting has been lost through the literati biases or near-taboos accepted by later Chinese collectors, how the dominance of this orthodoxy has impoverished both writing about painting in the later centuries in China, and the survival of paintings into our time, since the kinds that were put down as low-class, popular, “vulgar”—which include much of what I and others now find most interesting—didn’t have a good chance of survival. Moreover, the more I’ve read and dealt with the paintings, the more I’ve realized that many of the most interesting and admirable developments in Chinese painting—the ironic uses of old styles by Ch’en Hung-shou and Wu Pin, the moves toward naturalism by Chang Hung and Sheng Mao-yeh, the ways in which portraitists characterized their subjects through attributes, settings, superimposed role-images rather than through penetrating portrayals of the face—that all these go more or less unreflected in Chinese writings even in their own time. In other words, artists at all times were doing things in their painting that writers of their time and later were frequently unwilling or unable to deal with adequately in their writings.

Every study of any importance I’ve undertaken in recent years has been, among other things, an attempt to push somehow beyond the boundaries that the literati critics and theorists have attempted, with remarkable success, to impose on anybody who tried to talk or write about Chinese painting. Without going into these in detail, I will say only that next spring I’ll be giving my fifth endowed lecture series, the Getty lectures at USC, and all these have had that character. They began with the Norton lectures at Harvard (after the second one John Rosenfield advised me that people were saying that while they were interesting, I was taking a very “round-eyed” approach); the Murphy Lectures at Kansas, on political themes, meanings and functions in Chinese landscape, and quickness and spontaneity (an argument against conventional Chinese readings of hsieh-i as pure self-expression); the Bampton Lectures at Columbia (now in press), about what I called all the “unmentionables” of Chinese painting, how artists made their livings, dealt with clients, used assistants, etc.; the Reischauer Lectures at Harvard last April, in which I tried, among other things, to take the practice of poetic painting (painting that is often based on lines or couplets of poetry, and that aims at effects on its viewers somehow akin to the effects that the best poetry has on it readers)—to take this practice, in its highest manifestations, away from the literati, who have always laid claim to it, and award it instead to certain professional masters, from the Southern Sung academy painters to the late Ming masters of Suchou; and the Getty Lectures I’m working on now, on the subject of portraits and pictures of women in later Chinese painting. This last is one of the many fascinating areas of Chinese painting that simply cannot be dealt with sympathetically and penetratingly within the framework of Chinese literati assumptions, so that one has to abandon them, even repudiate them, in order to work on it effectively.

Now, if someone says, as someone will, or already has: some of us never really believed in the Chinese literati arguments about painting anyway, what’s so big about questioning them now?—I would reply that that’s too much like the Belgian writer Simon Leys (to be distinguished from Pierre Ryckmans, a respectable art history scholar) who wrote very dark and negative things about what was happening in P. R. China when others were trying to be sympathetic and understanding, and then, after the new opening-up of China in the late seventies, with revelations appearing about the enormities of the Cultural Revolution, crowed in public about how he had been right all the time, and attacked John Fairbank and others for having been duped. I believe firmly that it’s better to go first through a kind of provisional acceptance (not of the Cultural Revolution, I hasten to say, but of the motives behind some of the policies and choices made in the early years of the P.R.C., which weren’t all bad), in the attempt to understand, even while stopping short of full acceptance, so that one’s departures will then be from a solid base of sympathetic familiarity with the thinking of the particular cultural situation or tradition one is dealing with. (Maybe that’s not a good parallel, but it feels right to me.)

I’m sure that some of you are finding what I’m saying charmingly old-fashioned, and would point out, if you weren’t too polite, that cultural interpretation today is so totally divorced from readings made within the culture and period of the work, and even from the artist’s presumed or inferred intentions, that the problem doesn’t even arise. But I would find difficulties in that too. Sometimes I get very smart and well-read western-art-history grad students in my courses and seminars—our program obliges them all to take one course in Asian art, and some of them choose one of mine; and most of the time they bring valuable outside perceptions and make admirable contributions, often comparative analyses, so that I always welcome them. But it also happens sometimes, on both the graduate and undergraduate levels, that someone comes charging in waving some well-honed methodological sword proclaiming that she or he is going to cut through all the nonsense written heretofore on the subject and get to the submerged truths about it. And the outcomes of those forays don’t, on the whole, satisfy me much; they persuade me again, on the contrary, that one has to make one’s way patiently through the established modes of understanding the works of art, whatever the limitations of these may finally prove to be.

That isn’t, typically, the way it works these days. Being on the committee that reads applications to our graduate program last year, I found myself struck by the number of young art historians who announce as their chosen mission the exposing of hidden ideological assumptions beneath the works of art, and who don’t profess much interest in dealing with other aspects of them, or learning much factual information about them and their makers. As I remarked to a colleague on the committee, Tim Clark, it’s ironic that what we once took to be the quintessentially sophomoric delusion, that by some methodological springboard one could vault high above all the others and gaze down and see through their wrongheaded assumptions, has now become the very basis of a prevailing mode of cultural criticism. I once quoted, in this connection, a late Ming Confucianist (cited by Ted de Bary in one of his articles) writing about the so-called wild-fox Ch’an or Zen doctrines so popular in his time: they offer a short-cut, he observed, and who doesn’t love a short-cut? Especially when it seems to permit you, as I say, to springboard over the others and occupy the forefront, without the trouble of painstaking study. But the readings of works of art produced in this way are usually so partial, so ideologically motivated, so ultimately inadequate to the works themselves, that I’m confident they will eventually be regarded as valuable supplements and correctives to the more established and sympathetic readings, but not by any means as replacements for them. Even when we are convinced, that is, we can still say: Yes, you’ve shown us some hitherto concealed ideological assumption within these works; very interesting: now we can go back to reading them more or less as we did before, with this additional layer of meaning in mind along with the others. A kind of implicit claim that the new readings generated by new methodologies or cultural-analysis strategies are somehow exhaustive, invalidating or driving out all others, seems to me the fundamental fallacy in the whole enterprise.

I hope that these last remarks temper somewhat any feeling that my earlier observations might have aroused, that I’ve turned somehow anti-Chinese in my approaches, or that I and others who think this way have slipped into some kind of “Orientalist” put-down of the native tradition. What we’re trying to do parallels what colleagues who study Chinese history and literature and thought are attempting: what we trying to break through are the screens erected by a literati elite which conceal big areas of the native tradition, including much of the most interesting, behind them; we’re trying to identify and bring out the concerns and voices of members of the culture who weren’t given much voice in their society, so that recovering them is difficult: professional and academy painters, women, the consumers of Chinese painting in the broadest sense, all the people who didn’t accept or fit into the orthodoxies of their time. And some Chinese scholars today, especially the younger ones, are making the same kind of attempt, and I think their work will be prominent in Chinese painting studies in the future. In fact, it’s on the assumption that the future of our field depends heavily on the interaction between good young scholars here and in China that my wife Hsingyuan and I are working with Chinese colleagues on a symposium to be held in China toward the end of next year that will have exactly that as its primary purpose. And I myself, again along with Hsingyuan, have been spending a lot of time in China, working with art history programs there, helping to bring specialists to the U.S., generally trying to expand the options open to art historians in China.

The particular combination that I’m advocating of respect for traditional Chinese formulations and eventual dissatisfaction with them can be illustrated with two anecdotes. The leading authority in China on nien-hua or New Year’s pictures, mostly popular prints, is Prof. Bo Songnian of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Hsing and I were instrumental in getting him invited to Berkeley for a year by the Chinese Popular Culture project organized by my History Department colleague David Johnson; and Bo Songnian was a huge success, with his unmatched, detailed knowledge of the iconography of the prints, regional variations, the intricacies of their making and use. But when, at a seminar organized by David Johnson in which people outside his program participated, two others of our History Department faculty, Professors Fred Wakeman and Yeh Wen-hsin, raised questions about how the prints also could be seen as responding to social and economic factors in Chinese society, Bo Songnian rejected this approach outright: no, he said, the factors treated in his own account of them were the only ones that affected the forms the prints took. One could account for everything in them, that is, on his terms—period, regional variants, elements of popular religion, etc. His proprietory feelings about his subject were perfectly understandable on the basis of his own assumptions as an authority on a part of his own cultural tradition; his readings of the prints were full and adequate, and proof against outside intrusions. From the standpoint of an outsider, the approach suggested by Wakeman and Yeh could have enriched and deepened his account. But his account, his unmatched fund of information on the prints and his particular understanding of them, would have had to be a necessary foundation for anything they might have done.

Similarly, at a symposium on Chinese painting at the Shanghai Museum in 1988, one session was on the Chinese artist in society, and C. C. Wang and another old Chinese painter, Shao Loyang, got the floor to ask rhetorically: what is all this about the artist responding to social and economic factors in his paintings? We pay no attention to any such matters, but just paint what we please. My response (delivered through a very capable interpreter, Kao Mayching, who was chairing this session) was: It’s the proper role and function of you two as artists to paint and talk as though that were true; and it’s the proper role and function of us as art historians to prove, as often as necessary, that it isn’t true. Just at that time, I said, I was showing students in my Modern Chinese Painting class how C. C. Wang’s stylistic innovations, which he took to be entirely personal and independent, fit into a large, definable pattern of the styles developed by overseas Chinese artists in the 1960s and 70s, a pattern that correlated with their circumstances just as the patterns in the painting of artists who stayed behind in China correlated with theirs. How these dual truths of artistic freedom and socio-economic constraints can be reconciled certainly isn’t a matter I want to try to resolve here; but we have to recognize and come to terms with them, and find value in both of them. And the fact that all art history programs in China now are located within art academies and dominated by artists makes for difficulties, which we also must recognize, in their adopting any approach other than the one favored by artists, which assumes complete independence, at least as the ideal condition surrounding the creation of good art. Any account constructed on that assumption will be as lopsided as one constructed according to some socio-economic determinism.

Now, how does all this apply to Japan and the study of Japanese art? Any observations I might make about this question can only be those of an outsider who has scarcely even tried to keep up with recent developments in the Japanese art-history field, and so can speak only from a state of semi-ignorance. But let me make my observations anyway—in the traditional spirit of aging scholars admitting they haven’t kept up and then talking as though that didn’t matter--even though some of what I will say may deserve shooting-down by the better informed.

Something I realized very early on, in working in both fields, was the deep difference between the condition of scholarship on the arts in the two cultures. On the one hand, The Chinese tradition of studying art is much longer and richer, not only than the Japanese but also than the European—if you read Chang Yen-yuan’s ninth century Li-tai ming-hua chi and then realize how many centuries were to pass before anything comparable is produced in Europe, this truth is inescapable; and the later critical and theoretical literature of art in China, in its scope and sophistication, only confirms it. And nothing really comparable to that body of Chinese literature is produced in Japan (with due respect to the few interesting writings.) But all the economic and political and other upsets that China has undergone in the past few centuries, up to and including the Cultural Revolution, have inhibited the development of a coherent, continuous program of art-historical scholarship that aims at more, and achieves more, than simply continuing the old tradition. Scholarship of art in Japan, by contrast, developed in modern times into a large-scale enterprise with meticulous standards (again, within its own assumptions), a great many well-trained practitioners, an economic base for research and publication, and other strengths that the Chinese couldn’t match. So strong was this native body of scholarship that in the 1950s and 60s it was a commonplace observation that dealing with it was the main problem facing any foreigner who attempted to move into the Japanese art history field.

Of course this is no longer true, and the kind of fruitful interaction of native and foreign scholarship that I still hold as an ideal for Chinese art studies of the future has in considerable part been realized already in Japanese art history circles. This was well demonstrated in the state-of-the-field conference held in San Francisco and Berkeley in February 1989, organized principally by Maribeth Graybill, and by the closeness that Japanese art specialists of her generation have developed with Japanese colleagues. In part it’s also due to the greater openness of older Japanese specialists to outside methodologies—I think, for instance, of Professor Tsuji’s recent writings on topographical painting in Japan, shinkei-zu. Moreover, while some part of recent Japanese art history is aimed at overturning old evaluations and assumptions—for instance Chino Kaori’s extraordinary talk at the session in San Francisco, a feminist re-assessment of the relative weighting of the yamato-e and suiboku-ga components of Muromachi painting—I have the sense that the Japanese tradition is not perceived by those working now as exerting quite the oppressive weight that the Chinese tradition still exerts on contemporary scholarship. So any exhortations I might make in the course of passing on my torch will be directed at different problems.

To begin with, while my own work has certainly been heavily affected by association with western-art colleagues and reading their writings—no one in a department that includes Svetlana Alpers, T. J. Clark, and Michael Baxandall among others could escape that, even if he wanted to (as I certainly don’t)—I hope I can continue to say that nothing I have written that was worthwhile was the product of any deliberate application of an external methodology, or system of dealing with art, to the works at hand. Everything that mattered most arose out of direct engagement with the works themselves, and my method has adapted always to the conditions and issues that they raised or represented. This has made for a diversity of approaches, which is as it should be. I once quoted Michael Baxandall on his dislike of being admonished: “On the other hand,” he wrote, “what I do like is there being a manifold plurality of different art histories, and when some art historians start telling other art historians what to do, and particularly what they should be interested in, my instinct is to scuttle away and existentially measure a plinth or reattribute a statuette.” Measuring and reattributing are things one does to objects; and other things we do, such as analysis, interpretation, or cultural embedding, are best done, I think, with immediate and direct application to particular objects of art. And if these projects fail to illuminate the objects, opening up richer understandings of them, sensitizing us to qualities in them and aspects of their contexts of creation that we had missed before, they are of limited value. I know that my esteemed colleague John Rosenfield, in conversations and letters if not in print, has been critical of some recent art-historical work that is divorced from direct engagement with the works of art, and I’m in complete agreement with him on that point.

But the methodological baggage and assumptions one brings to one’s projects will, of course, in some part determine the way one reads the work and the questions one asks about it: no one works in a conceptual vacuum (although there is, to be sure, a lot of writing around that makes one suspect that of its authors.) And the kinds of projects one chooses to undertake are also determined in part, obviously, by the kinds of results one wants to achieve. In speaking of the importance of continually attending to the objects, I certainly don’t mean that one should write about a body of paintings simply because it’s there, and close at hand. That seems to have happened, too much, at a certain stage of Japanese art studies in this country, when collectors and museums were buying in quantities the relatively routine productions of overly-prolific late masters such as Chikuto or Kinkoku, responding to conditions of the market such as price and availability more than to aesthetic taste, and young scholars were paying more scholarly attention to these than I think they merited. Unless the artist himself was seriously engaged, that is, with interesting artistic and cultural issues, anyone writing about his work will probably be beset by the same limitations, and will do the standard biography-plus-stylistic-development things and then sit back satisfied. Melinda Takeuchi kindly gives me credit in her preface for helping to rescue her from doing that with Ikeno Taiga (a much greater master), and I do indeed plead guilty to bugging her mercilessly in the directions that produced, eventually, her admirable book on Taiga’s “True Views.” So I’m certainly not saying that attending to the works of art is any kind of end in itself.

For the same reasons, I believe that in both the Chinese and the Japanese painting fields, too much of our writing energies have been devoted to exhibition catalog texts, and that we have too often written these as though they were comprehensive, adequate treatments of their subjects. A catalog essay concentrates on, even when it is not exclusively limited to, the particular group of objects that happen to be available as loans, or (even more limiting) happen to be in a particular museum or private collection, instead of choosing the pieces of highest quality and importance wherever they may be, those that best represent the subject at hand. Two examples out of many possible: Marilyn and Fu Shen faced with the difficult problem of writing their major book Studies in Connoisseurship around a group of paintings (the Sackler collecion) which in a few cases mightily resisted, shall we say, being proved authentic; and the catalog of the 1974 exhibition of Buson and His Followers by the late Cal French and his students: any reader and viewer might be left with the impression that the followers are more interesting than the master, but this was only because of the inaccessibility of really first-class, representative Buson paintings in any number in U.S. collections at that time. In a proper book on the same topic, with illustrations drawn from the best examples in Japan and elsewhere, Buson would simply have blown the others off the scene, as indeed he does. Cal French’s book on Shiba Kokan, which wasn’t written within the limitations of an exhibition catalog, seems to me a stronger and finer work. My admonition: let’s write more books, and thoughtful books.

The mention of Buson leads me to another observation. I said that the Japanese tradition of scholarship on their art is less weighty and oppressive than that of the Chinese, and I believe that to be true. But going up against the established and unchallenged assumptions within the Japanese scholarly tradition can also have its perils. I myself did that for quite a few years in Japan, appearing at symposia and chattering away in my fluent if incorrect Japanese, characterizing Sesshu as more a kind of provincial Ming Che-school master than as (in his self-constructed image) a continuer of Sung traditions who learned nothing from his Ming contemporaries, arguing that the early Nanga masters adopted more than anybody had recognized from certain kinds of Chinese painting that the Chinese themselves considered low-class; and so forth. This was fun, and I was cheered on by some Japanese colleagues, notably my old friend Akiyama Terukazu, who worked in areas other than the ones to which my revisionist efforts were directed. (Tsuji Nobuo, I say with gratitude, organized special meetings of the Bijutsu-shi Gakkai in Sendai and in Tokyo at which I was permitted, even encouraged, to present my revisionist views on early Nanga and Buson.)

But all this was not without cost. After the great exhibition of the paintings of Yosa Buson that Maribeth Graybill and I and others were organizing—an exhibition that would have fundamentally changed our understanding of this transcendentally great master—was brutally grounded by the Bunkacho in 1987—the official reason given was that they couldn’t do two Edo-painting exhibitions in a single year, and they were already supporting another (which was of Jakuchu—Yosa Buson routed by those chickens? Something deeply wrong here) some of my more honest and sympathetic Japanese colleagues were saying that in some part I was paying at last for those heady years of non-conformity, for playing fast and free with cherished Japanese doctrines about their painting. So, while I still hold as mainly responsible for the whole disaster a younger colleague then in the Bunkacho’s art section, whose tea I would cheerfully poison if the opportunity arose, I would also say to anyone in the Japanese art-history field: don’t be buffaloed into conformity, but be fully aware of the consequences that not being buffaloed and non-conformity may entail.

My admonitions and advices have up to now been mostly negative: what pitfalls to avoid, what not to do. I want to conclude with some more positive advice, gratuitous but well-intended, on writing and lecturing interestingly and illuminatingly about art. I’m asked sometimes abut my working methods, and haven’t had any clear answer, since different projects obviously encourage different methods. But I’ve sometimes begun a seminar by offering the students a schematic model of how one begins and carries out a substantial, serious study, such as a thesis or dissertation, on some art-historical problem. It could be an artist, or a school, or a subject category, or some art-historical issue along with the works of art it affects, or a single important work or group of works, together with all related materials. (I myself tend to urge students now more toward problem topics than toward artist or school topics.) Now, I do this in my seminar with a blackboard, laying out what I call a game-board; but here you will simply have to envision the gameboard as I describe it, like a bunch of tantric Buddhists collectively making a mandala appear in the air above them.

Supposing we are going to carry out a study of an artist, let’s say Ni Tsan. You have a big circle in the center with “NT” written in it (or NZ if you prefer pinyin.) Then, nearby, perhaps below, a lot of numbered smaller circles with P written in them, for Ni Tsan paintings; some of them are DPs, dated paintings. (You eventually include only those which, after a lot of work, you judge to be genuine works.) Elsewhere, perhaps at one side, you have a cluster of little circles, likewise numbered, with F in them, for facts or bits of biographical and other information, some of them DF or datable facts. Elsewhere are circles with Os or Opinions about Ni Tsan, what others write about him: elsewhere a cluster of T circles for Theories, his ideas on art. Outside the Fs or biographical facts you might have a cluster of social and historical circumstances, not immediately about Ni Tsan but relatable to his life; outside the Ps or paintings, other painting of his time and earlier as context; outside the Ts or theories a similar cluster of contemporary and earlier theorizing that would form the context for his writings on art—and so forth. Expanding circles, in effect. (These are actually the kinds of categories and abbreviations I used in research for my own dissertation long ago, with these code letters and numbers written in upper corners of many hundreds of file cards. All this was, needless to say, in a pre-computer age. But the model is still valid, I think.)

Now, the research one does in the early stages of one’s project lays out this gameboard, with lots of searching and reading and translating and so forth. And we try to make it firm, judging the authenticity of the paintings and the reliability and relevance of the texts. Of course the kind of game one means to play affects the way the gameboard is constituted, but one does one’s best to make it fairly comprehensive at this early stage, taking in everything that seems pertinent. When it’s finished (or, more realistically, when one decides it’s finished), if the central big circle represents an artist, we can erase it, since the gameboard is in effect, for us, the artist—it is Ni Tsan—nothing more than paintings and documentation and so forth is available. If it’s a painting, of course it can stay there.

So then we choose our game and play it. We can take a needle and thread and pass it through all the DFs or dated facts in order, then pull it out straight, and that’s the artist’s biography, with some contextual material hanging on here and there. Passing the needle and thread through all the DPs or dated paintings and then pulling it out, with some plain Ps hanging here and there on the basis of stylistic or other affinities, produces, in a relatively straightforward way, an account of his stylistic development. These two, placed end to end, with one or two others, theories and opinions perhaps, once made up an acceptable doctoral dissertation. But these are linear games, and in the end useful but relatively low-level, not much fun for either author or reader.

Having said this, I go on to suggest other kinds of games that can be played, interpretive games that involve arching movements, rising above the gameboard, connecting areas or systems that aren’t immediately contiguous and obviously relatable, especially those that connect the paintings with other systems, until something like a great gothic cathedral is created. The introduction of a third dimension depends on another of my favorite metaphors for admonishing students. Facts are like stones, I say; you can gather a lot of them and lay them out in neat rows or patterns on the ground, but these remain one- or two-dimensional. Ideas are like cement: use them to hold your stones together and you can build great, orderly, spacious structures.

From these observations I go on to lay out the rules of the game, both those that are constants in all well-played games, by which I mean scholarly standards, and those that are particular to one or another game, special methodological assumptions. And I advise some decent regard for the neighborhood, which means expressions of respect for other scholarly work done in the same general area. Putting down all previous treatments of the subject is another sophomoric practice that turns the readers off more than it impresses them.

Finally (and finally also for this lecture) I explain to them a marking I’ve devised and used often in the margins of papers or theses I’m reading.
Again, you will have to visualize it: a V turned sideways, pointing to the right, and inside it the capital letters SW. This is my SO WHAT? mark, meaning: what you write is OK in itself, but what further significance can you draw from it? And that should push the student (rightward, the direction of expansion of one’s writing) to explore more the implications of whatever observation he or she has just made, how it can be used to illuminate some larger issue, perhaps, or how it can be related to some larger concern. Which might, when accomplished, bring on still another SW in a V, pushing them toward further levels of finding significance. I do believe that if we all had stamps made with my SO WHAT mark on them and used them liberally on the writings of our students and sometimes on our own, the literature of our field would instantly become more interesting and more entertaining.

And if you object that being interesting and entertaining isn’t what you’re aiming at, that you have loftier scholarly purposes in mind, I would reply, as always: what’s the use of writing something if people don’t read it—or not enough people read it, or don’t finish reading it, or don’t read it with enough attention that it sinks in? It’s like giving a party to which nobody comes, or everybody leaves early. My use of the gameboard image has another implication, based again on my own experience: that scholarship, however seriously and meticulously carried out, should have a strong element of play in it. By play I mean what fish do in water, in Chuang-tzu’s anecdote, moving smoothly through a three-dimensional world in which they feel entirely at home, so that simply exercising their mastery of it gives pleasure—to those who watch them and presumably to themselves. (I say presumably because to ask whether the fish are really happy would get us back into Chuang-tzu’s dilemma.)

Or, to take another image: one of the most beautiful films I ever saw was a short, made in the London zoo as I recall, that was no more than the filming of a gibbon in a large cage that was fitted out with bare trees so that the branches of them structured the space; and the gibbon had such total control of this three-dimensional environment that simply moving easily through it obviously gave it pleasure—flying through the air, reaching out effortlessly at just the right moment to grab a branch and swing into a new trajectory, occupying through its movements the entire space of the cage, exhibiting a perfect mastery of its bounded—but satisfying because structured—world. This image comes to my mind sometimes when, in the course of working on some subject in Chinese or Japanese painting, some pattern of interrelationships begins to emerge, the pieces come together into some structure of meaning, and the pattern or structure seems not only to illuminate that particular passage of art history or body of materials but also to exhibit a beauty of its own. I have never believed that art-historical writing, when done as it should be done, as the creation of structures of meaning, is in any essential way different from the creation of works of art; and these are the moments when that conviction is most strongly felt.

I submit, then, that if, after we have established our gameboards with scholarly patience and scrupulousness, we play interesting and original three-dimensional games on them in this spirit, our readers will respond in some part as I did to the film of the gibbon, with the pleasure of not only absorbing the content of our writing but also recognizing the pleasure taken in mastery and ease of movement. And, with all respect to other motivations for scholar writing—the accumulation and transmission of knowledge, the righting of the wrong ideas of one’s contemporaries, the attainment of a tenure promotion—this seems to me in the end the highest aim, whether from the writer’s or the reader’s standpoint.

Thank you.