CLP 105: 1990 “A Functional Approach to Chinese Landscape Painting.” Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Munakata Lecture, for Sacred Mts. symposium, November 1990.

Pleased to be here on occasion of this major exhibition, at invitation of my old friend & colleague Kiyo Munakata. I believe I am performing a special function here today, which I’m happy to perform; I think he invited me partly with the idea of having presented another point of view on Chinese landscape paintings, and paintings of sacred mountains. Kiyo tends to be drawn to religious readings of paintings--of which the exhibition and his catalog are wonderful expressions--while I’ve always tended to be drawn to secular aspects or accounts of the subject.

He remarks in his catalog essay that studies of Ch. ptg. have tended in recent times to concentrate on the secular, and that’s true enough; but that, in turn, has in some part been a reaction to an earlier phase in Asian art studies in which the emphasis was heavily on the religious, especially the Buddhist. Japanese scholarship has tended that way, and pioneer U.S. and European specialists were inclined to follow them, besides being strongly influenced by the Anglo-Indian scholar Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, for whom all Asian art was essentially religious--a matter of dogma with him. I, in turn, reacted strongly against that when I came into the field in the 1940s-50s; it was a time when too many people were inclined to credit virtually everything interesting in Asian art to Ch’an or Zen Buddhism--people wrote as though whatever was spontaneous, or intuitive, or witty, or any other of the good things, in Chinese and Japanese art was that way because of Zen. Profoundly untrue; I launched a kind of campaign against this kind of thinking, which Kiyo will remember well. Have softened, but essentially still at it. So you find me here, talking about “A Functional Approach to Chinese Landscape Painting.”

What do I mean by functional? Let me answer that with a reminiscence. Some years ago one of my best students, Cheng-chi or Ginger Hsu, was taking her doctoral oral exam; and one of examiners, our Renaissance specialist Loren Partridge, asked her unexpected question. Ginger had been in his seminar on patronage problems in Italian art--her dissertation was to do the same for 18th cent. Chinese painting--and Loren asked her: why did patrons, or consumers, of Ch. ptg. want so many landscape paintings? why did they want pictures of mountains and trees and streams, that is, on their walls? Ginger was momentarily struck speechless, then responded in rather unsatisfactory way--more or less as I would have; we hadn’t really thought through this question, or investigated it, as much as we should have. We had gone along with general practice of locating meaning of painting, and reason for producing it, always in artist; had vague mode of explanation according to which artist had thoughts and feelings about nature, philosophical or religious or whatever, and felt urge to express these in painting, without caring much about what happened to it afterwards. But if you begin thinking the other way--artist produces ptg of particular kind because someone out there wants ptg of that kind--which is far truer account of how works of art come into existence, at least until quite recent times--other questions arise, like the one Loren Partridge asked Ginger. And they are the ones I mean to address today.

My main point will be that readings Kiyo gives in his catalog essay for landscape imagery, Taoist and Buddhist and geomantic and metaphysical, seem to me perfectly right for early periods; less right, most of the time, for later periods. Kiyo’s essay covers the period from the pre-Han period to the T’ang dynasty, the eighth century; many of the objects in the exhibition, however, are later, and he acknowledges that later people came to the mountains, and depicted mountains, for other kinds of reasons. It is those I mean to explore. So in a sense I am here as a supplement to his impressive achievement, to talk about the other side, so to speak. Not matter of equal time--there will be a whole symposium tomorrow with people giving papers on religious aspects of mountain imagery in China, going on all day, whereas I don’t mean to talk that long, you will be happy to learn.

Although I will speak today mainly about works of later centuries, Sung and after, I will begin with a few observations about early periods.

S,S. Po-shan Lu, Freer. It is this kind of representation of the sacred mountain that Kiyo writes about so enlighteningly--as he has done in the past, in earlier papers. Cosmic mt., “animistic images of the sacred realm” as Kiyo calls related things; will leave for you to read. Accords with early Chinese conceptions of the world as we know them from texts; this excellently expounded in Kiyo’s essay.

--S (Szechwan tile, salt mines.) On the other hand, I would hold that formally similar imagery in the early periods could also serve more worldly ends. This is one of relief tiles from tombs in Szechwan, 3rd cent. A.D. or so. Kiyo points out similarity to LS on incense burners; goes on to say: “It appears that this representation was made as a laud and a prayer to the benevolent power of the great mountains in the region” and writes about “The sure naturalism that made those religious representations so close to descriptions of daily life...”

S-- (Szechwan tile, hunting ducks and harvesting rice.) I would rather suppose, along with the Chinese scholars who excavated them, that these are representations of daily life, emphasizing the wealth and power of the deceased during his lifetime (as Chinese tomb art often did) by depicting ideal scenes that might have been on his estate. Religious reading of these seems a bit forced. Better, I think, if we assume the early development of landscape imagery as a formal repertory, somewhat neutral in meaning in itself, that could be adopted by artists and their patrons for variety of purposes, religious or secular, according to needs of people who had the work done. Landscape imagery appears in wide range of contexts in early China; no time to outline them.

S--(mountain from Ku K’ai-chih attrib., Admonitions.) One of best passages in Kiyo’s essay is one in which he uses this image, from a surviving handscroll attributed to Ku K’ai-chih, to imagine what mountain described in Ku’s essay on “How I would paint the Cloud Terrace Mountain” would have looked like. This is absolutely right, and to the point. But the actual painting is illustration to a Confucian moralizing text, “Admonitions to Court Ladies,” and is accompanied by lines that read: “In Nature there is nothing high which is not soon brought low . . . When the sun has reached its noon, it begins to sink; when the moon is full, it begins to wane. To rise to glory is as hard as to build a mountain out of grains of dust . . .” So, rather literal illustration of didactic text. My point is that mountain imagery could serve Confucian didacticism, Taoist mysticism, or more mundane purposes--

S,S. From around same time, ca. 400, we have text studied by Susan Bush in important article, titled “Record of an Ascent to the Stone Gate,” which is especially revealing of how mountain scenery could inspire religious feelings and serve religious, specifically Buddhist, ends. Tells of how group of believers belonging to community of lay Buddhists led by monk Hui-yuan at Mt. Lu climbed to Stone Gate at summit of this great mountain (in Jiangsi Province), gazed out over the scenery, and experienced a kind of collective exaltation which they then interpreted in a Buddhist light. (These slides taken from summit of Mt. Lu show more or less what they saw.) In Bush’s summary of the last part of the text, “these unsought-for perceptions arouse a selfless delight, which is then analyzed by the group as a correct response to phenomena. At sunset the view from on high suggests the vast scale fo the universe; in turn this stimulates thoughts of eternal time and the remoteness of the Buddha.” The group composes a poem to record their perceptions. Here is a clear case of landscape imagery inspiring a properly religious experience.

S-- (“Ching Hao” Mt. Lu) In view of this account, we can easily imagine how a painting that captures somehow the quality of their experience would serve to arouse the same religious thoughts; so that landscape imagery could indeed serve an iconic function in Buddhist (or Taoist) context. And certainly did, in great many cases; although hard to identify ptgs that we can be sure were made with this function in mind.

--S Great rise of LS ptg was in 10th-11th cent.; crucial figure was Ching Hao, active early 10c, to whom ptg on left attributed. Ptg now on right from a bit later, mid-or later10th cent.; found in tomb in NE of China, then Liao territory. But probably Chinese ptg. Anyway: theme is Taoist paradise ... (etc., describe). Ptg. is read in way that is formal analogue to entering into paradise, or land of immortals, escaping from real world. Is this function of landscape at this time? One might be tempted to say yes; but--

S-- But other ptgs of same time have similar formal structures, different meanings: e.g. this ptg in Palace Mus., Beijing, attrib. to 10th cent. master Wei Hsien. (Describe). Confucian theme. Illustrates my argument: that landscape imagery in itself polysemous, can carry diversity of meanings & messages, religious or philosophical or (as we’ll see) quite practical. Here, landscape serves as kind of matrix for human activity, human virtue. Figures, buildings, relatively large in relation to mountains; midway between human-centered art of T’ang dynasty and “pure landscape” of Northern Sung, later 10th-11th--early 12th centuries.

S--Crucial figure in that development must have been Li Ch’eng, active in mid-10th cent; nothing by him survives, but this ptg in K.C., attrib. to him, may give some sense of what his vision of landscape was. Nature, mountain scenery, is subject; human presence played down, integrated with LS. We see here a pattern that will be characteristic of monumental landscape paintings of Northern Sung period: (Describe).

S,S. Two greatest examples: by Fan K’uan, early 11c, Kuo Hsi, dtd. 1072, titled “Early Spring.” Theme of ascent to temple indicates idea of spiritual quest; ptgs can be read as embodiments of that idea in pictorial form, serving to give viewer that experience. And, in conjunction with Kuo Hsi’s essay, which presents idea that ptg serves to evoke feelings and thoughts that actual scenery of nature would, for people prevented by their worldly responsibilities from living in mountains, we can arrive easily at conclusion that this is function of landscape painting in this period. John Hay has suggested in a recent paper--and perhaps will argue in his paper tomorrow--that these Northern Sung paintings have the same spiritual mapping as paradise scenes in Buddhist painting. This is a convincing and fruitful reading of them.

But rather surprisingly, there is little textual authority for such a reading. Kuo Hsi’s essay says more about landscape as a metaphor for social hierarchies than for religious concepts; early recorded responses to Fan K’uan’s paintings speak of their ability to transport the viewer to the spot, allow a respite from the pressures of human society.

--S. Recently re-discovered section of Kuo Hsi essay, written actually by his son who was court official, tells of commissions his father had for wall paintings in palaces and other buildings. Also tells of ptg his father did representing (etc., describe; Freer picture as stand-in.)

S,S. (Hsia Kuei, anon. in manner of Ma Yuan). Ptg of following period, Southern Sung--12th-13th centuries--very different in character; not intended to permit this kind of imaginary or vicarious participation--viewer not invited in, so to speak; contemplates from outside, presented with scene that evokes sharp, intense sensations and emotions, like line or couplet of poetry. If it can be said to have function, it is that, the evocative; sometimes political and other kinds of messages embodied in it; but that’s large problem, outside our subject today.

S,S. Later Chinese painting can be said to begin with period that follows, Yuan dynasty; and it is this that I chiefly want to talk about today, after this longish introduction. Here are two works by major early Yuan master Chao Meng-fu: early work, “Mind Landscape of Hsieh Yu-yü” on right; “Autumn Colors on Ch’iao and Hua Mts.,” 1296, on left. Artist was himself high official, cultured man, calligrapher & poet besides being painter; eminent example of new phenomenon of scholar-amateur artist. (Really began in 11th cent., but had great development in Yuan and after.) In hands of these artists, landscape became vehicle for expression of wide range of ideas, messages. Like poetry: can have philosophical content, or religious, or personal, etc. And was seen as superior art to figure ptg etc. Mi Fu, one of original group of scholar-painters in 11th cent., said: (quote) Chao Meng-fu, for instance, was able to employ landscape imagery for variety of purposes. (Describe, for these two.)

S,S. Two landscapes by Ni Tsan. He was well-to-do aesthete, collector, poet, painter; in later years, divested self of land holdings and wealth, lived wandering life, avoiding dangers that big land-holders faced in turbulent times of dynastic change. Stayed with people, often painted for them to repay hospitality. He was obsessively cleanly (etc.) So on one level, ptgs are personal expressions of his purity & high-mindedness, his longing for world in which same was true, his hatred of clutter and confusion. On another, served as highly non-descriptive “images” of his friends’ retirement dwellings, villas, houses by river.

S,S. His contemporary and friend Wang Meng also painted many pictures of this type, but with very different character. Here are two: one done for cousin of his who had built his retreat in misty grove of trees, called it ... (etc. Describe compositional structure of reclusion picture. “Landscape of property”; “commemoration painting.” One of distinct functions landscape ptg had in China; especially common in Yuan & Ming.)

S,S. (1366 Ch’ing-pien Mts., Shanghai Museum.) Now, once a type is established, the good artist will always use it for his own special purposes, often undermining its original character to make it serve some new function, while lesser artists go on repeating it. This great and unique painting was probably done by Wang Meng for a cousin, a grandson of Chao Meng-fu, and represents the Chao family estate at Mt. Ch’ing-pien, north of Wu-hsing. (etc.)

S,S. Pursuing the question of functions that landscape paintings could perform in China, we come to the category of topographical paintings, i.e. those that represent actual places in some sense. I had seminar on these; we investigated various uses to which this kind of ptg could be put. Could be kind of picture-map, supplying information to viewers as do picture-maps in West. These are sections of two handscrolls in Freer Gallery of Art, with old attributions to famous 10th and 11th cent. artists, but both probably anon. works of late Sung, 13th cent. Represent upper reaches of Yangtze River; places along the way labeled. Person unrolling such a scroll in preparation for a journey up or down the river could learn something about what he would see, relative positions of places etc. Rather schematic, uninteresting as paintings.

S,S. (Wang Fu, “Eight Views of Beijing,” 1414.) Very different is series of eight paintings of environs of Beijing painted by Wang Fu ... (etc.)

S,S. Chü-yung Gate, and real thing.

S-- By same artist, Wang Fu, is this painting, undated, which has very different character--not because artist was feeling in different mood (as used to be argued) but because it was done for completely different purpose and occasion. Another functional category of landscape painting is farewell painting, done when someone was going off to take up an official post, or returning to capital after serving as local official, or some other occasion of parting. Here, as in landscapes of reclusion, compositional structure of ptg depends on the meaning to be embodied in it. (Describe)

--S (Chang Feng, 1648). When we assemble paintings of this kind--mostly easily identifiable from their inscriptions--we find that they tend to conform to a type. (Describe) But good artists, as always, will adapt type to their special circumstances, tastes of recipient, personal style of artist, etc.

S,S. On another, lower level, functional paintings were being produced in large numbers by professional artists for lesser clients and occasions; these two by Wu Wei & Wang E, both active in late 15th-early 16th cent. Mostly haven’t survived; weren’t considered important enough for collectors to preserve, remount, etc. A few have survived through historical chance of being brought back to Japan by Japanese visitors to China, kept in temples. A group of simple, sketchy pictures found recently in Ming tomb, collected by minor official.

S,S. Still another functional category was that of birthday paintings, done for presentation to someone on his or her birthday--especially the important ones, the 60th or 80th, but also others. This painting is by Ch’iu Ying, active in first half of 16th cent.; unambiguously professional master, who worked on commission, sometimes lived with patrons as artist-in-residence, producing paintings in return for hospitality and some monetary payment. This one done for brother of Hsiang Yuan-pien, great collector with whom he lived in this way; done for Hsiang’s brother, probably as birthday gift. Filled with auspicious signs: (describe).

S-- Another of kind (describe). In works of good artists, this functional character of paintings doesn’t detract from their aesthetic quality; like great painters of Europe, could turn conventions to their purpose, create works of real originality while fulfilling a routine demand. Later, collected and appreciated purely as aesthetic objects; original meanings lost, often hard to reconstruct today. Chinese felt that works of art were demeaned by being associated with mundane situations, subject to economic constraints; preferred to write as though artist was free agent, expressing his thoughts and feelings without regard for practical matters of making a living. Again, this is a position from which we are now respectfully detaching ourselves.

S,S. (Ni Tuan; anon. Ming, “Inviting Hermit” ptgs.) We could continue with other categories of landscape paintings and their social or political functions; one that has occupied me and one of my students in recent years is landscape with figures representing theme of “inviting the hermit.” My student Scarlett Jang did very illuminating, solidly-researched study of these, establishing firmly what I had suspected: that they played some role in process or recruitment of officials in early and middle Ming (when most of them painted, by court artists), used for presentation on various occasions to compliment someone who had received post, or was retiring from one, etc. Virtuous hermits from antiquity stood for different responses to this issue, or problem: whether to accept service, or to decline; when to advance, when to retire. So: ptgs can be related to large political and social issues; take on dimensions of meaning beyond aesthetic; become, for most of us now, more interesting.

Will be obvious from all these examples that Chinese landscape painting as a subject category is polysemous, has the capacity for carrying a diversity of meanings, from loftiest metaphysical concepts to most mundane messages. As Mi Fu said, in passage quoted earlier, landscape painting is construction of mind; and different minds with different casts and concerns can employ it for very different ends. So: any statements about what landscape imagery in China means have to be looked on with some scepticism; equivalent of asking: what does figure painting in Europe mean? Means what one chooses to make it mean.

S,S. Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, great master of late Ming, subject of forthcoming major exhibition with 2-volume catalog, etc.: how does he fit into all this? Answer? as “other side,” someone who wanted to expunge all that was functional, topical, narrative, anecdotal, from landscape painting, seeing these as trivializing a noble art; he set out to restore landscape painting to pure form he believed it had had in earlier periods. Leaving aside question of how far he was right or wrong, his theories and styles had great impact in his time. But to pursue that would take us far beyond our subject.

--S (Map) About two years ago I was invited to take part in conference on Pilgrimages and Sacred Mountains in China, organized by one historian, Sue Naquin, and one specialist in Chinese religion, Yü Chün-fang. I agreed to do paper on “Huangshan Paintings as Pilgrimage Pictures,” dealing with paintings of Huangshan or “Yellow Mts.”, range in Southern Anhui, one of great sacred mts. of China. Intended to do paper that would fit theme of conference; ended up by subverting it somewhat, arguing that for ptgs of Huangshan from Ming-Ch’ing period, from which most examples date, meanings of ptgs, how they were read, why they were painted, all mostly to be understood in secular, literati context. Evidence virtually all points in that direction. Want to end with summarizing what I found. (Mts. I’ll speak about: Huangshan, Lu-shan, Po-yüeh.)

S,S. Very good student of mine named Flora Fu (who will be here tomorrow for symposium) had written masters thesis on paintings of Mt. Lu, and come to more or less same conclusion: that successive versions, or vision, of mountain presented in paintings over the centuries changed from awesome image of sacred mountain to concentration more on literati aspects, secular uses. (Painting attrib. to Ching Hao again; one by Shen Chou, great Ming paster, of “Waterfall on Mt. Lu.” Done in 1467 for teacher of his who came from that region; to honor teacher on his birthday. Whole set of associations, but not religious associations, as in early periods.

S,S. Later paintings also tend to concentrate on the waterfall, and refer to well-known poem on it by T’ang poet Li Po. One by Sheng Mao-yeh, one by Shih-t’ao; latter includes reference also to Sung landscapist Kuo Hsi. Concerns are with poetry, earlier painting; an aestheticized image.

S--Looking for true pilgrimage pictures, i.e. paintings that record pilgrimages or depict them in some sense, I dealt briefly with this painting, which may be one of few identifiable as that. Depicts Mt. Po-yüeh, northwest of Hsiu-ning in southern Anhui province--kind of lesser Huangshan. Artist is Taoist of late Yuan period, Leng Ch’ien, who went there in 1343 in company of well-known statesman of time, Liu Chi, recorded trip in painting. Not great success as painting: tries to include trip itself in foreground, approach to mountain; temples that they visited, in middle-ground; mountain itself rising above, strange shape; and distant peaks of Huangshan, which they say could be seen in distance.

S,S. Another, better-known work which might seem at first an ideal case of a pictorial record of a pilgrimage to a sacred mountain is the album painted in the late 14th century by Wang Li representing the scenery of Mt. Hua in Shensi province, a great Taoist mountain with Taoist temples located in remote places, difficult of access. Wang Li made the climb in 1383 and painted the album of forty scenes after his return. But when we read the accompanying inscriptions, it becomes apparent that Wang, who was a medical doctor, made the trip to consult doctors of the region and gather medicinal herbs on the mountain; he expresses scepticism about Taoism and immortals. So the album represents, at best, a rather ambiguous pilgrimage. What he presents is the difficulty of the climb, and the awe-inspiring scenery along the way.

S,S. He represents the Taoist temples, but as parts of the scenery, not in any iconic way. And his moment of culmination seems to be when he sits down to rest and gazes into a sea of fog (leaf in Shanghai Museum.)

S,S. As for Huangshan, the main subject of my study, paintings we have of it are from Ming and Ch’ing periods; nothing earlier, although literary records of people climbing mountain before that. Really opened up to climbers in early 17th century, when monk named P’u-men restored Buddhist temples and built stone steps and railings etc. From that time, favorite place for poets, artists, literati to go; many travel accounts, paintings. This one by Ting Yün-p’eng, artist from Hsiu-ning, painted in 1614, representing grandest of Huangshan peaks, T’ien-tu Feng or Heavenly Citadel Peak. (Cleveland Museum; in exhibition.) When we read inscription, find it was done for birthday of official. Inscription: “Clouds arise from the dale of the “Dark Plateau”; The morning sun is over the peak of the Heavenly Citadel.” Reference to heavy clouds, in painting and poem, implies that official’s benevolence toward people like clouds that bring rain to farmers; morning sun implies that he still has bright future as official, although he has reached age of fifty. All pretty secular, political. Political implications of Huangshan have in fact been explored in very interesting article by historian Joseph McDermott; was haven for loyalists after fall of Ming, etc.

S,S. 1462, 1607 prints. We can see images of Huangshan in woodblock prints before any paintings; one on right is from 1462, discovered and reproduced by McDermott. McDermott found literary ref. to set of Huangshan paintings done in 1497 for wedding anniversary of wealthy couple in She-hsien; to felicitate them and wish them longevity. Presumably, it was Taoist associations of the mountain that allowed it to carry this message. Huangshan had begun as Taoist mountain; legendary Yellow Emperor had gone there to practice alchemy; peaks all named, associated with Taoist immortals and deities. Taoist presence there gradually replaced by Buddhist; Taoist templesl converted or rebuilt as Buddhist temples. And in still later times, mainly a literati mountain, i.e. one visited by literary men and others, subject of poetry, painting. Joseph McDermott writes that the Taoist and Buddhist “hold over the mountain began to slip by no later than the thirteenth century, when Huangshan began to become the concern of literati from the surrounding prefectures, especially Huizhou.” Literary society founded there, etc. This transformation of mountain, or religious and cultural associations of it, seems to be reflected in images of it. Early images of Huangshan, before late Ming, do present Taoist mountain, with strange peaks where immortals might indeed dwell; seen as more or less inaccessible. This is Huangshan as a numinous vision. Early travel accounts have the same character.

S,S. 1633 Ming-shan t’u; 1648 T’ai-p’ing shan-shui. As time goes on, Huangshan more and more accessible, familiar; this change in people’s perceptions of it reflected in images presented in prints. 1633, 1648. Seems less a divine mountain inhabited by immortals now, more like place one might go for mountain-climbing and contemplation of nature; which is just what was happening. Was Huangshan still site for pilgrimages by Buddhists or Taoists? Presumably so; but haven’t left records, either literary or pictorial, to my knowledge. Other papers in the symposium were about real pilgrimage sites, Mt. Chiu-hua or Nine Floriate Mt. not far from Huangshan, sacred to Ti-tsang or Ksitigarbha; Mt. P’u-t’o, sacred to Kuan-yin or Avalokitesvara, Wu-tang Mt., Taoist Mt., about which Gary Seaman wrote (and will give paper tomorrow.) But none of these, to my knowledge, are subjects of paintings; whereas sacred mountains that are subjects of paintings, such as Mt. Lu, Huang-shan, etc., are the ones that were “taken over” by literati.

S,S. Two sections of handscroll in Boston M.F.A. representing Huangshan (? uncertain, but names written on it are Huangshan peaks.) Mysterious, metamorphic peaks looking like people or animals; seem unscalable, although a few people and buildings do appear near the summits. Strong sense of supernatural. Huangshan shown as series of separate peaks; more iconic character, like succession of images of deities, rather than topographical, descriptive of place. We can imagine ptgs of Huangshan from earlier times that had, like this one, a relicious or iconic character; but they haven’t survived.

S-- Slide of real peaks of Huangshan. Easy to see why they would evoke broad range of responses: religious awe, sense of transcendence (like “landscape of sublime” in European painting), escape from mundane, poetic rapture, etc.

S,S. Two leaves from album by Cheng Min, one of early Ch’ing masters of Anhui province. Majority of extant Huangshan paintings by them. Is this because painters working in this region had opportunity to climb Huangshan, therefore painted it? Some truth in that; but more because it had become specialty for local artists, just as Suchou-region painters depicted scenery around Suchou; people who came there wanted paintings of it, artists supplied them. Rise of this group of painters, in place where no notable painters had been before, coincides (not by chance) with great prosperity of merchant culture there, famous Anhui merchants, who controlled commerce of whole Yangtze Delta region, and beyond. Traveled a lot; Hsiu-ning and She-hsien, south of Huangshan, were centers of this commerce, “hub of wheel” as one merchant-writer describes them. And from these, climbing Huangshan was easy side-trip. I ended up arguing, with some evidence, that explanation of sudden popularity of Huangshan paintings in this period has to do with that phenomenon. This album by Cheng Min, painted in 1681 for patron who had never climbed Huangshan; Cheng had, twice, and he writes in his inscription that his paintings might inspire the patron to make the trip some time in future, using this album as a guide.

S,S. Mei Ch’ing vs. photo of central peaks. Inscriptions and other available evidence, then, indicates that ptgs typically done for people who had made climb and wanted to recall it, show to friends; or for someone who intended to climb it, and wanted pictures of it to prepare himself. Latter especially common. But paintings not properly informative; artists often painted places they had never gone themselves, using schematic images taken from others. Mei Ch’ing, for instance: (describe). Schematic images, in distinctive styles, accompanied often with inscriptions, were what people wanted. Cultural overlay on place, built up over time by visitors, people who wrote accounts; by naming peaks, waterfalls, etc., kind of literary lore of mountain grew up, until people looking at sight would remember what name of it was, what famous person had mentioned it in his travel acount, what some poet had written about it, etc. These are what ptgs communicated; they became, in effect, guides to cultural pilgrimages.

S,S. Last slides: last two sections of great handscroll of Huangshan scenery by Shih-t’ao, greatest of Individualist artists of time, who spent some years in Anhui region in 1670s, climbed Huangshan twice, went on depicting it throughout his long career as painter. This version done from memory in 1699 for monk who had climbed the mountain, wanted to remember it. Paintings of this kind, it would seem, are typically not records of travel, or pilgrimages; they serve less to record any actual event than to evoke or reinforce cultural imaginings or reminiscences of the mountain, to invest it in the viewer’s mind with a set of cultural associations. They help to structure an experience that the person looking at the painting will have, or has had, or imagines having.

This is reading of paintings we arrive at by reading inscriptions, putting paintings together and considering their character, etc. Sober, solidly-based reading. But one doesn’t have to be sober all the time; if anyone wants to say: nobody could have painted such a painting without having religious impulses; Shih-t’ao was Ch’an Buddhist monk (although was leaving Buddhist order by the time he painted this, turning to secular life as painter); that these paintings, whatever the inscriptions may say, are in some fundamental way religious icons: I can’t argue against that. But has to be taken on faith, like religious beliefs themselves; beyond realm of argument, and academic investigation. Anyway, my final argument would be that any account of Chinese landscape painting that limits their content to either the secular or the religious will be inadequate; and when you hear anyone talking in grand, general terms about the meaning of images of sacred mountains in China, remember my arguments for interpretative pluralism, for assuming always that any kind of imagery was being used, in China, at any one time, for diversity of meanings and functions.

Thank you.

CLP 102: 1989 “Adjusting Our Image of the Chinese Painter.” Lecture, U. Chicago

Chicago lecture: Adjusting Our Image of the Chinese Painter

I will begin with a brief consideration of the late seventeenth century master Cheng Min, an artist of the Anhui School.

S,S. Here are two of his works, an album leaf in the Freer Gallery of Art and a hanging scroll in the Ching Yuan Chai collection. Like others of the Anhui masters of this period, Cheng Min painted river landscapes, unpeopled and unembellished by enlivening detail, in a manner that relies heavily on line-drawing, or sketching of contours in dry brushwork, to render the forms. More or less overt references to the Yuan master Ni Tsan are common in his works, as they are in other Anhui-school paintings; his calligraphy style is clearly based on that of Ni Tsan.

These paintings would alone set up expectations about his character and the basis on which he worked in anyone familiar with the signification of styles in Chinese painting; and those expectations would appear to be confirmed in what we read about him. His contemporary T'ang Yen-sheng, who frequently inscribed works by Hung-jen and other artists of the time, writes of Cheng Min:

"The master immerses himself in old books, not caring whether it is cold or hot, living tranquilly, uttering few words, magnanimous in disposition, his mind fixed on distant goals [i.e. unconcerned with day-to-day affairs]. All difficult questions in the classics and histories he can resolve. He is an accomplished seal-carver, using the pre-Ch'in and Han [scripts] as models. His painting style is lofty and antique, completely following the 'engendering movement [through] spirit consonance' (ch'i-yün sheng-tung) mode of expression. Accordingly, he can rival the Yüan masters. In the most refined of his works, whether feelings of sadness and melancholy or complaint and anger: if these were not aroused by his great talents, then they must come from his own experience."

The image of the artist presented here is a familiar one: a person of deep cultural refinement, he lives quietly, caring nothing for worldly matters, practicing scholarly pursuits, doing paintings or calligraphy on an amateur basis, to express his feelings--and, to follow through with the usual implications of scholar-amateur status, presumably giving them to his friends, expecting no recompense other than occasional gifts and favors in return. We have not always accepted this image entirely uncritically--suspicions have been expressed, especially in recent years, that it must often mask some more down-to-earth reality. But we have repeated it and allowed it to underlie our writings and our understanding of the paintings without giving it much thought. Even the most sceptical among us have seldom argued for any really radical mismatch between image and reality.

At a symposium on Anhui-school painting in 1984, Huang Yung-ch'üan presented a paper on the newly-discovered diary of Cheng Min, quoting some passages from it that pertain to his activity as painter and calligrapher. Here are some excerpts:

"[1672] tenth month, fifth day: I did three fan paintings for Fu-wen . . ."
" Seventeenth day: cloudy. Yen-ch'ing and K'uan-chung 'moistened my brush' [gave me money for painting] and I added bamboo and rock for them [to some previously-done painting?]"
"Eleventh month, eighth day: I went into town and wrote a fan for Yen-ch'ing . . . Keng-yü summoned me, and I added to [retouched?] a painting by T'ang Yin for him. . . "
"[1773] sixth month, third day . . . Mu-ch'ien ordered a painting for Hsü Erh-ming, and I used the money for food."
"[1674] second month, sixth day: cloudy. After supper I visited Tzu-yen, and entrusted him with three paintings to sell for me."
"Sixth month, sixth day: I visited Hsüeh-hai, where the owner of the I-kuan [an inn?] . . . summoned me to do a painting for him."
"[1676] first month, sixth day: rainy. Ssu-jo visited me to order a painting, bringing payment [lit. 'moisture,' as above.]"
"Ninth month, eighteenth day: for my 'elder brother' Yin-nan I did a painting on satin. Also did five fans for . . . [names]."
"Twelfth month, fourth day: This line [of poetry] came to me: 'To get through the year, I need the money from selling paintings.'"
"Twenty-ninth day. Snow has been falling for the whole month. Fortunately, I have managed to get through my New Year's obligations with the small income from my paintings. I sit recalling that there are a great many really poor people now, and wish that I had a spacious, myriad-roomed house [to entertain them in]--an empty thought."

Other entries record his carving seals for patrons in return for grain or presents, and borrowing money from one of them to buy food. (Slides off.)

In the cases of most artists, we have no such detailed information about the real conditions of their daily lives, and even if we had it, the disparity between conventional image and what we might call adjusted image would not always be so great as with Cheng Min. But as we uncover more evidence about the circumstances under which Chinese paintings came into being, how they were acquired by others, and how the artist was rewarded, as well as about other practical details of the artist's activity, the degree to which standard accounts of Chinese artists are commonly idealized and untrue to their realities is increasingly apparent. (I am presently giving a seminar titled "The Painter's Practice in China," with graduate students and several Chinese specialists participating, in which we are trying to assemble just this kind of information, mostly from scraps and clues contained in a diversity of materials.) Along with a new, badly-overdue recognition of the implications of this situation for our studies, it is worthwhile, I think, to take a moment to consider how it came about.

The truth, I believe, is that a set of powerful conventions for writing about artists and their works, originating principally in early appreciations of the scholar-amateur painters and in recorded statements by those painters themselves, spread beyond the categories of artists and paintings to which they are properly applicable--the amateur artists and their works--to encompass virtually the whole of Chinese painting. The underlying problem was the mismatch between admiration for outstanding artists who were committed, more-or-less full-time practitioners of the art, and the failure of the traditional Chinese social order to accord honored places for people in that position. Intensifying the problem was the increasing practice of painting on an income-producing basis, from the mid-Ming on, by learned and cultured people, as rising levels of affluence and education created a much larger pool of people qualified for bureaucratic service (the Chinese scholar's traditional occupation) than the bureaucracy could absorb, and many of them were forced to turn to other ways of putting their learning and talents to use in earning their livelihoods. Attitudes and value criteria that pertained properly to the amateur painters, then, came to be applied more broadly to artists of other kinds, until we reach the situation in which a writer scarcely could praise a painter, even an unambiguously professional one, without making some effort to accomodate him, however forcedly and misleadingly, to the amateur ideal. And praise is what writings on artists usually had to be: most of the literature that we depend on for our understanding of them takes the form of encomia of one kind or another: tributes to the painter included in inscriptions to his paintings, tomb biographies, entries in books made up of "biographical information" on artists, and so forth.

The character and limitations of such writings were discussed by Anne Burkus at the beginning of her study of Ch'en Hung-shou--the way they tend to follow the established patterns of what is essentially a literary form, instead of providing, as she puts it, "what has come to be expected of biography in the West, the developmental charting of a life." She was writing mainly about epitaphs and biographies written after the subject's death, but tributes written as inscriptions or otherwise during his lifetime tend to have much the same character. "The interpretation of traditional Chinese biography," she writes, "thus entails a thorough questioning of the text and should disincline the historian from accepting as fact each detail in the biographer's portrait of his subject." And she ends by noting that the artist may, as Ch'en Hung-shou did, accomodate himself to some conventional image, adopting in his poetry and his self-portraits the characterizing qualities of admired figures of the past, ascribing these to himself.

The conventions in writing about artists that Anne was considering are not exactly the same ones I am discussing here, but we are concerned with essentially the same phenomenon, the forced accomodation of artists' lives and circumstances to pre-existing types, and the expunging of whatever actualities fail to fit these types. To give enough examples of this phenomenon to convince everybody would take more time than I have, but anyone working in the field could come up with quite a few from memory. They include cases in which an artist who is in fact a hard-working and prolific professional master is described as one who dabbled in the art, and painted out of purely inner motivations. The eleventh century writer Kuo Jo-hsü considered Li Ch'eng, the great landscapist active a century earlier, to have been productive enough that a collector of Kuo's time could be credited with owning over ninety of his winter landscapes. By the thirteenth century Chao Hsi-ku, a writer imbued with the new literati or scholar-amateur painting doctrines, wrote of Li Ch'eng (along with Fan K'uan, to whom the characterization is even less appropriate) as "scholar officials who, when they were inspired, would leave behind a few brushstrokes." (Let us take a moment to envision the great landscape by Fan K'uan, and ponder how well it accords with the idea of a painter who "leaves behind a few brushstrokes when inspired.")

After scholar-amateur painting came to greater prominence in the Yuan period, it became more difficult to praise artists of other kinds except by distorting their situations. A contemporary of Tai Chin's named Wang Chih describes that fifteenth century master as one who "delights in poetry and calligraphy as ways to seek the Tao,/ Painting spontaneously to cheer his heart." Tung Ch'i-ch'ang describes Wu Pin, an excellent and productive specialist in both figures and landscapes, as a lay Buddhist who "painted in his leisure time." One wonders how the artists, who were meanwhile no doubt hard at work on fulfilling commissions in the practice of their livelihoods, can have responded to this well-intentioned but quite misdirected kind of "praise," which subtly maligned their real situations by implying that these were somehow dishonorable, and so could not be reported truthfully.

Even more numerous are cases, like the one of Cheng Min with which we began, in which the standard accounts are contradicted by other, presumably more reliable evidence. The most often-quoted biography of Pa-ta Shan-jen, for instance, the one by Shao Ch'ang-heng, tells us this about him: "He often used to pass his time at a Buddhist temple outside the town. When the novices there jokingly asked him for a picture and actually tugged at his sleeves or his belt, he did not resist, nor did he refuse when some scholar friend offered him a gift for a picture. But if highly placed people offered him a whole barrel costing many gold pieces, they got nothing. If they brought painting silk with them, he would take it without hesitation but then would say: 'I shall make stockings of it!' For this reason the highly placed people were accustomed to approach the poor scholars, mountain monks, or butchers and inn-keepers when they wanted calligraphies or pictures by Shan-jen, and to buy from them." But, as we know from Jao Tsung-i's study of a Pa-ta album in the Ho Yao-kuang collection, the Nanking collector Huang Yen-lü had no such trouble getting an excellent album from the artist: he sent a sum of money and twelve sheets of paper through one of Pa-ta's patrons, Ch'eng Ching-e, who acted as the artist's agent in getting commissions for him, and in due time he received his album, with which he was very pleased, remarking that Pa-ta would never have given him the kind of rough and hasty sketches he did to repay gifts from the Kiangsi salt merchants. Again, these are two images of the artist that cannot be brought together--that are, in fact, incompatible.

The "amateurization" of artists, or at least most of those who were considered to merit approval at all, in Chinese writings is part of a larger complex of interdependent ideas and attitudes, all aimed at "dematerializing" the art, removing from it all taint of vulgarity, of commercialism, of functionalism, of philistine responses. They include: an all-but-exclusive emphasis on art as personal expression, and a concomitant de-emphasizing of most other factors that motivated the production of art, including, much of the time, those that in fact brought the work into being and constituted the basis for its reception and appreciation in its original context; in connoisseurship, a focus on authenticity, the determination of authorship, and a diversion of attention from the subject of the work and its meanings, its value as representation; and in criticism, a preoccupation with the "hand" of the artist and with style, both the artist's individual style and his uses of older styles, or references to them. These attitudes are, as I say, interdependent: one more or less leads to another. The connoisseur's concentration on authenticity, for instance, allowed the viewer to read the picture as the personal expression of a particular master, and to appreciate the qualities of his mind as manifested in the painting. It allowed him also to ignore, as the prevailing critical theory said he should, the technical prowess of the artist, his representational skill, the decorative values of the work, whatever narrative or symbolic or other human-interest content it might have--the qualities that had originally allowed it, in a great many cases, to function in some social situation of its time. All qualities of the work other than the aesthetic, all motivations other than those of personal expression, tended to be relegated to the lower levels of response, the philistine, the su or banal. Indoctrinated constantly with this ideology, Chinese collectors and painting enthusiasts of the later centuries appreciated paintings, and wrote about them, in ways quite divorced from the original contexts of the works; this "aestheticization" of the Chinese painting tradition makes it difficult, much of the time, for us now to recover the meanings and functions that the paintings originally had.

Some of my colleagues will no doubt feel that I am exaggerating this situation and its consequences for our scholarship; but I do not believe I am. For us to study and try to understand this special slant to Chinese writings about painting is of course worthwhile, even necessary; I have myself been engaged in it over the years, having been, for my sins, one of the earliest foreign exponents of the literati painting ideal as a key to understanding certain kinds of painting. What seems remarkable from today's perspective is the degree to which we have allowed it to pervade our own interpretations of Chinese painting. In our culture, no special stigma is attached to professionalism in art--if a painter has an exhibition and sells all the paintings in it, we see this as cause for congratulation, not disdain-- although it is true that studies that make production for profit central to interpretation of the artist's works, such as Svetlana Alpers' recent book on Rembrandt, can still call forth angry responses from those who feel that the factor of artistic genius has been slighted in the process. With studies of the social and economic contexts of artistic production so prominent in art-historical studies these days, it is all the more remarkable that we in the Chinese painting field seem not only disinclined to recognize the inherited biases that impede our own studies of this aspect of our subject, but even prone to share the traditional Chinese squeamishness about discussing it. We write, too often, as though we were defending or protecting the artists we admire by downplaying their engagement in the somehow shameful business of profiting from their art. The result is a badly unbalanced view of our subject. And it is only balance I am arguing for, not some heavy emphasis on the social and economic factors behind artistic production. Without undervaluing the self-revelatory function of art, we can play it against other, more mundane and socially-conditioned functions, and try to understand how the one impinged on the other; without taking any kind of reductive approach, we can aim at a more clear-eyed recognition of the true situation, often the predicament, of the artist behind the work.

In searching for the roots of the phenomenon I am trying to define we find ourselves confronting, as so often, the figure of Tung Ch'i-ch'ang--certainly not as the originator of this set of attitudes, but as the most powerful exponent of them. The achievements of this great early 17th century painter and theorist that merit scholarly investigation seem almost endless; an international symposium on them was held recently in his hometown, Sungchiang, occasioning a new outpouring of published papers. One area of Tung's activity that may still warrant more looking into, nevertheless, is his advising of collectors, especially some of the newly-rich collectors of Sungchiang, Southern Anhui, Yangchou, and other places where wealth was concentrating in this period. Collecting art, especially the kinds associated with the gentry and literati class, was one of the ways the Hui-chou and other merchant families enhanced their status in society; many of them, relatively new to the game, needed advice on what were the right kinds of things to collect, and once they had made their purchases, on whether they had bought wisely. Books of guidance for collectors appear more than ever before in this period, and people with the expertise to give knowledgeable advice were entertained and doubtless otherwise rewarded by the collectors in return for their opinions. They were, in effect, the art historians of their time (besides usually performing, according to the common Chinese pattern, in a variety of other roles--painters, officials, writers, etc.); and Chinese art historians today are, in important ways, their descendants.

Pre-eminent among them was Tung Ch'i-ch'ang. Their basic act, and what Tung must have done supremely well, was to stand in front of a painting and pronounce authoritatively on its authenticity, along with identifying the stylistic tradition or old master's style that the artist was following. They could also provide information about artists from memory, and talk or write about other works by the same master that they had seen. They could identify, from their visual memories, the individual styles of a great many major and minor masters, and match these against the work at hand, providing an account of its stylistic antecedents and sometimes (in a misattributed work) even of its authorship. We do not always agree with Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's attributions and judgements, as they are recorded in his many inscriptions on extant paintings, but we respect them as remarkable in an age when no photographs or reproductions were available to allow the kind of comparative studies we can make today. This tradition of connoisseurship and scholarship was an honorable one, and we are endlessly in its debt. But perhaps it is time to recognize some of its negative effects, for present-day scholarship, along with the positive.

And the negative effects are, I believe, serious ones: the decontextualizing of a great deal of Chinese painting, the divorcing of much of it from its original meanings and purposes, the distortion of its very character, too often, to make it fit an inapplicable set of ideals. Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's bases for evaluating paintings and painters--judgements of authenticity, the hand of the individual master, rightness of stylistic lineage, the inherent superiority of the amateur tradition--were so widely accepted that artists and paintings that did not conform were regularly, sometimes relentlessly, pressed into doing so, or else rejected. (Let me repeat that I do not mean to make Tung solely responsible for all this, but only to use him as a focus for attitudes that were operative, if less dogmatically set forth, before his time.) Good paintings of undeterminable authorship were assigned to particular famous masters, as if only artists who occupied places in the approved canon could produce first-class paintings. (Traditional connoisseurs of our time are still inclined to follow this way of thinking.) Painters among Tung's contemporaries who began by working in distinct, individual styles ended, sometimes, by being absorbed into his Southern-school orthodoxy. (I have discussed examples of this absorption, in such cases as those of Chao Tso and Shao Mi, in my book on late Ming painting.) And, as we know, artists of the following period who declined to follow Tung's doctrines found themselves consigned, by those who adhered to his ideology, to the discredited realm of the heterodox and "perverse."

We cannot remind ourselves too often that the standard sources on which we depend in studying Chinese painting are inherently biased toward the literati viewpoint, since it was the literati who wrote them; the scholars "controlled the media," in effect, and rewrote history freely, suppressing or altering whatever did not fit their doctrines. When they held official rank, as Tung Ch'i-ch'ang did, their pronouncements were all the more authoritarian. In trying to imagine how the professional masters of their day (who in fact comprise most of the best painters of the time) can have felt about this constant denigration and distortion of their achievements, we find little evidence in writings by any of them (excepting, perhaps, the brief essay by Ch'en Hung-shou) from which to reconstruct their responses. We long to have a Chinese counterpart to the English artist and novelist Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God, that brilliantly bitter attack on upper-class amateurism in the arts and the confusion of critical values it can lead to. But, here as elsewhere in traditional Chinese society, there was no organized voice of opposition, no countervailing force to the dominant faction.

In preparing this talk I meant to include a section on Tung Ch'i-ch'ang as the Deng Xiaoping of painting; my wife exhorted me not to, and I cut it out. I would have presented him as, like Deng, a domineering figure who accomplished a great deal that was positive, taking a major role in some badly-needed reforms (in Tung's case, rescuing painting from the doldrums into which it had sunk by the turn of the seventeenth century); but whose narrowness, ruthlessness toward the opposition, and insistence that his own particular reformist directions were the only ones to be followed, had the bad effect of virtually silencing the opposition for a time, and driving too many of the proponents of alternative directions underground. Then as now, factional struggles in politics ended with the stronger party trying not only to weaken and discredit its opponents but to destroy them; that such struggles have their counterpart in Chinese art is well known to any reader of the writings of Tung Ch'i-ch'ang and his Orthodox-school followers.

If there is any way to bring our perceptions about Chinese painting history into some kind of compatibility with our responses to recent events in China (and even to pose the question immediately exposes one to the risk of sounding absurd--but I want to accept the risk today, in order to say some things that now seem to me important)--if there is any way, it is in this: by recognizing the continual tension between non-conformist impulses of individuals in China and the terrible pressures to conform exerted by their governments and their society, always for the purportedly benign purpose of keeping them from straying into heterodox or revisionist paths. Our admiration for the "harmonizing" or "unitary" mode of traditional Chinese culture should not pull us away from a recognition of its damaging effect on those who were tuned in to different harmonies and resisted being absorbed into the great all-embracing one. I have written, for instance, about the predicament of artists in the later centuries who chose to pursue, against the current, basically representational ways of painting, relatively free of cultured allusions to the past and all the distancing devices that signified a high-minded detachment from the subject, and the difficulties these artists had in being taken seriously by critics and collectors.

My purpose today, however, is not so much to advocate a re-appraisal of the professional painters' tradition in China as to suggest that we do these artists no service when we perpetuate the well-meant Chinese myths in which they are made respectable by being transformed into amateurs. Nor is it useful to adopt the Chinese elegant disdain for the practical and economic realities of the painter's practice. Apart from the desirability of giving as complete and balanced an account of our subject as we can, we will find these realities to be thoroughly absorbing in themselves, if the findings of my present seminar can be taken as an indication. The complex and varied ways in which some seeker after a painting conveyed his wishes to the artist; the equally diverse ways in which the artist was rewarded if he complied (and of course he did not always comply); the dilemma of the artist who accepts too many commissions and must deal with impatient clients while trying to step up his rate of production--these prove to be both interesting and enlightening.

But the ultimate test of the value of this kind of investigation must be, of course, how it will affect our understanding of the paintings. Because the investigation is only beginning, it is difficult to predict what the fruits of it will be, although some good recent studies give us clues. Three of the papers delivered at the Cleveland symposium last May, for instance, the papers by Ann Clapp, Ellen Laing, and Anne Burkus, seemed to me in different ways good examples of the approach I am arguing for.

S,S. Ann Clapp's paper, "The Commemorative Paintings of T'ang Yin," dealt with the circumstances of production of a type of scroll painting commissioned from the artist by affluent Suchou patrons, or by others for presentation to these people, to commemorate their status and achievements. Often it took the form of a depiction of the person's villa, with laudatory colophons attached. Clapp remarks that "This genre of painting was practiced by all the Suchou masters and is especially prominent in the oeuvres of professional painters like T'ang Yin," but that some of the inscriptions on them (S) are "frankly encomia of the painter" and contain "a continual insistence that the spirit of the scholar permeates all T'ang's works--he is a man of the intellect, indifferent to fashion and the marketplace . . ." T'ang was indeed a scholar, but no more indifferent to the marketplace, we can assume, than anyone else dependent on it for his livelihood; this is another obvious case of the artist's real status being bent to fit an ideal. Clapp's study goes sharply against standard interpretations of these scrolls, which treat them as though each scroll was the product of the participants, artist and inscription-writers, coming together socially at a party and deciding spontaneously to produce a collaborative work for the host.

S,S. (Another example, of less certain authenticity). She remarks that "few of the long handscrolls can have been executed spontaneously at literary gatherings or adorned with colophons on the inspiration of the moment, as conventional accounts of literati aesthetics would have us believe," and that such scrolls "required premeditation, and agreement between the patron and the contributors." Clapp's recognition of the true character of these scrolls allows her to read one after another feature of them as directed toward the better achievement of their purpose, not just as one-time aesthetic decisions of the participants. For instance, she points out that the paintings proper are all relatively short in length, and that "one ill-natured critic charged that T'ang's preference for short handscrolls was the result of a disinclination to exert himself," whereas "in fact it was a creative response to the demand for a special genre of painting ... a limit was put to the length of the picture so that the viewer's attention would be fixed squarely on the patron."

S,S. Ellen Laing's paper dealt with paintings done by Ch'iu Ying for the prominent collector Hsiang Yüan-pien, with whom the painter lived as artist-in-residence for several years during the 1540s. Laing proposes readings of the paintings as occasional works done for Hsiang and his family, perhaps on request. A picture of wax-plum and narcissus, for instance, may have been a wedding gift for Hsiang, since the narcissus stands for (among other things) marital happiness. A landscape with figures in the blue-and-green manner is in fact a portrait of Hsiang's oldest brother Hsiang Yüan-ch'i in his garden estate, and was probably done for birthday presentation--a substantial part of Ch'iu Ying's output, as she points out, was done for people's birthdays. Laing concludes by observing that "The painting requests made of Ch'iu [Ying] were entirely directed to the family: copies of paintings in the Hsiang collection, gifts to the Hsiang family, and images of the Hsiang family. In this way, Ch'iu Ying served the Hsiang clan as a painter-archivist."

S,S. Anne Burkus's paper also dealt with birthday pictures, by the late Ming master Ch'en Hung-shou. Her arguments are far too complex and interesting for me to attempt to summarize, especially in the presence of the writer; I will only note her contention that casting Ch'en as either a professional or an amateur "renders invisible the web of social relations in which he acted as a painter," and that Ch'en does not appear in her account as having unambiguously lived by his painting until after the fall of the Ming in 1644. She notes that the monetary value of painting "intrudes upon almost any discussion of art in seventeenth-century texts in a way it never had before," and that "painters . . . were inevitably brought into a commercial relation with those who sought their work." The remainder of her essay is a fascinating account, on new evidence, of the ways in which transactions between artists and clients were raised above commercialism through the use of polite conventions of mutual flattery, stressing of situations in which the artist declines to paint (a stance similar, perhaps, to that of the courtesan who distances herself from the common prostitute by making it clear that her favors are not available to everyone who comes seeking her with money), and a deliberate avoidance of clear stipulation, on the part of the client, of just what he wants. All of this indicates that the "amateurization" of Chinese painting, including the parts of it that were not carried out on an amateur basis at all, affected not only writings about painting but also the conventions by which artist and client conducted their transactions; and that observation is borne out by material my seminar is uncovering. There is, of course, nothing wrong with polite conventions of the kind that smooth everyday relationships between people; it is only wrong when we fail, as scholars, to see beyond them. Anne does exactly the right thing, I think, in investigating and discussing the practice in detail, on the one hand, and recognizing its conventional character on the other.

S,S. My only quarrel with Anne's paper, expressed at the symposium, was that in dealing with high-level, one-of-a-kind birthday paintings with dedicatory inscriptions, she did not allow as well for the possibility that Ch'en Hung-shou, probably working with apprentices or assistants, produced also a quantity of lower-level "ready-mades," perhaps done in multiples (several versions exist of this picture, for instance--one in the Palace Museum, Beijing, another in Taipei, still another in a recent New York auction.) Inscriptions on these sometimes indicate that they were collaborative works. It may well be that clarifying studio practice and the use of assistants will modify our thinking about "the hand of the master," as Svetlana's book did for Rembrandt. (She and I have talked about similarities and differences in our problems, and find interesting resonances across these two very different traditions.) I can imagine, for instance, Anne doing a paper on Ch'en Hung-shou's employment of assistants, and perhaps in the end accepting as studio productions a body of works that she is reluctant to admit into her artist's proper oeuvre.

More attention to the circumstances in which a painting was created, while it obviously won't change the painting itself or affect, in principle, its value as a work of art, will often, I think, lead to revised interpretations of its meaning, its art-historical status, even in some part the way we evaluate it. Let me conclude with an example from a recent paper of my own, an example of how one's reading of a painting, or a group of paintings, will change as one's assumptions about how it came into existence change. (I put it that way because I have in this case no new hard evidence about the historical context of the paintings, but only different assumptions from the usual ones about it.)

S,S. The paintings in question, mounted in two handscrolls, were unearthed in 1982 from the tomb of a man named Wang Chen, who was buried in 1496 at a place called Huai-an in northern Chekiang province. One scroll consists of eight paintings, of generally indifferent quality, two with spurious signatures of Yuan-period masters; these were probably pieces collected by Wang Chen himself, and taken by him into his tomb.

S,S. The second, far more interesting scroll contains sixteen paintings and a piece of calligraphy, which were probably acquired by Wang as a group from an official named Cheng Chün. Twelve of the paintings and the work of calligraphy are dedicated in their inscriptions to Cheng Chün. Most of the paintings are by little-known or unrecorded artists, but in addition to minor works by the bamboo painter Hsia Ch'ang and the blossoming plum specialist Ch'en Lu (seen here), several well-known masters of the so-called Ming Academy and Che School are represented: Ho Ch'eng, Hsieh Huan, Li Tsai, Ma Shih, and Hsia Chih. (Talking about the Ming Academy, in the present setting, allows me to insert a word of tribute to Harrie Vanderstappen for his pioneering and still-basic writing on that subject.)

S,S. And what has struck everyone about the pictures by the Academy masters is that instead of being painted in the academic, technically finished, Sung-derived manner that most other surviving works by them have led us to expect, they are in looser, rough-brush manners, superficially like those associated with the scholar-amateur artists.

So far there is agreement; beyond this is interpretation, and a divergence of readings. A Chinese colleague who first told me about the paintings of the Huai-an tomb find said that Chinese scholars were hailing them as new and surprising evidence for the practice of amateur-like hsieh-i painting, the spontaneous "sketching the idea" manner, among the Ming court artists and Che-school masters. The authors of the basic monographic publication on the find follow this line, writing that "the bird-and-flower pictures all emphasize the hsieh-i manner and . . . stem from the brush-and-ink of the Yuan masters." And the author of the best study of the paintings, Yin Chi-nan, observes that the styles are those associated more with the amateur painting tradition than with professional and academy painting. Foreign specialists who have spoken or written about the paintings tend to agree with these Chinese understandings of them. I would certainly not argue that they are entirely wrong, but only that they tend in a misleading direction, toward a reading of the paintings that is in the end unsatisfactory.

It is a reading that puts them into the context of all that hsieh-i and amateurism imply, in the ways these are commonly understood: spontaneity, individualism, personal expression, the artist as free spirit. It assumes in the artist an autonomy of choice in subjects and styles: he painted that way because he felt that way. It is completely in keeping with the convention described earlier of attributing to professional masters the practices of the amateurs, and writing about them as though they shared the amateurs' greater degree of freedom from economic and social constraints.

So, if this reading of the paintings is misleading, what is the alternative? I introduced my own interpretation of the paintings with a reminiscence: some years ago I was told that an old Chinese gentleman in San Francisco, a former Chinese government official, had a collection of paintings in which most of the leading 20th century masters were represented by works they had given him. I went with some anticipation to see the collection, and found that the report was true, but misleadingly true. Nearly all the major artists were indeed represented, along with many lesser ones; but by fan paintings, leaves in collective albums, minor and conventional works. Because of the man's official position and connections, the artists had all painted something for him; but because his rank was not high or his connections strong, because he lacked the status and importance to elicit better works from them, they had given him their minimal products, pictures of the kind they turned out in numbers for just this kind of use. The Cheng Chün paintings from the Huai-an tomb represent, I think, the equivalent for the fifteenth century: a group of occasional works done for presentation to a minor official. The simple compositions and rough brushwork are less a matter of expressionist fervor than of expediency, a means of producing a minor work at small expenditure of time and no doubt, assuming that the artist was somehow recompensed, at low cost.

The subjects of the Cheng Chün paintings, with a single exception, all have political implications that suit them for presentation to an official: bamboo, old trees, and rocks; blossoming plum, orchids, and chrysanthemums; Chung-k'uei with demons; river landscapes with scholar-gentlemen escaping from their urban and bureaucratic lives to contemplate nature and commune with fishermen; hills-in-clouds pictures in the so-called "Mi-family manner" of Mi Fu and Mi Yu-jen.

S,S. There are three of these last in the scroll; here are two, by Hsieh Huan and Li Tsai. Pictures of this type--and it is a type--carried a thoroughly conventional message in the Ming, praising the official by suggesting that his benevolent care for the common people was like the clouds that bring saving rain to the farmers' fields. What is striking is how like each other they are; along with other surviving examples, which likewise display little of individual variation on the type, they suggest that any competent painter of the time, whether committed specialist or occasional amateur, could turn out one of these on demand without much thought or planning, following an established formula, performing more than creating.

S,S. In this they are like some other kinds of simple occasional pictures, for instance farewell pictures, done as small gifts to a departing official or friend. Here are two of them, of an equally formulaic character, done by Wang E and Wu Wei. Such pictures must have made up a sizeable part, but the least interesting part, of the output of a great many, perhaps most, Chinese artists. That they do not make up a correspondingly large part of what survives is because, I think, they were in a low-priority category when decisions were made about what to preserve--what to keep among the family treasures, remount when necessary, rescue if there was a fire. It is significant that the examples we have mostly have come to us through unusual channels of transmission--through preservation in Japan, or burial in a tomb--not in the orthodox way by being handed down through a succession of collectors.

Out of an enormous output of paintings, or pictorial matter--decorative, illustrative, congratulatory, religious, otherwise functional, or simply expressive--the Chinese collectors and critics chose a small part as "worthy of refined appreciation" and preservation; and pictures of this fast-functional kind--along with other large categories of Chinese painting, including what we now call Ch'an or Zen painting--were not included in the small part they chose to keep. We may regret this, and welcome a find like the scroll from the Huai-an tomb that illuminates an interesting, otherwise lost corner of Ming painting. But I think we debase the ideas of self-expression, and purposeful stylistic innovation and unorthodoxy, when we apply them to pictures of this kind.

S. Those ideas, and the values they represent, are better reserved for paintings like this one--Wu Wei's brilliant "Myriad Miles of the Yangtze River" scroll in the Palace Museum, Beijing--works in which the artist has invested his creative energies deeply, works that delight us with their stylistic inventiveness and fresh, unhackneyed visions of their subjects. A prolific master such as Wu Wei, dependent on painting for his economic and social well-being, was doubtless obliged to turn out quantities of hack work, minor pictures of the kind I call the fast-functional, most of which have not survived--probably to the benefit of his reputation. The stature of such an artist must rest, not on such pictures, but on his truly original, one-of-a-kind creations.

S,S. To conclude, a similar pairing, two works by Wu Wei's predecessor Tai Chin, both in the Shanghai Museum: a relatively formulaic and undistinguished farewell painting, and a sensitive, atmospheric, quite original landscape with a man in a house among misty trees, one of the finest surviving works of the artist.

S. Its superiority to the other is not just because it is free of academicism--Tai Chin also does excellent works in the Sung-derived "academic" style--but because it was done with depth of feeling, loving care, as an unhackneyed, serious creation.

S. Nor was it painted "spontaneously, to cheer his heart," as the false version of the artist's situation would persuade us; the dedication to a certain Yung-yen Lao-shih ("my teacher Yung-yen") suggests that it represents that person in his secluded house among trees, and was probably done, like Anne Clapp's "commemorative paintings" and other works of this genre, in response to a commission or request. But to imagine it as belonging to such a functional category should not in any way diminish our admiration for the artist's achievement, any more than an Italian Renaissance master's fulfillment of a commission demeans his painting.

Readers of Chinese in the audience will have noticed that the picture is inscribed also by Tung Ch'i-ch'ang--it is, so far as I know, the only Tai Chin painting that Tung wrote on--and what he wrote will make an entertaining and instructive conclusion to my talk today. We probably should imagine Tung shown the painting by some collector whose hospitality he was enjoying, expressing admiration for it, and being invited to inscribe it. This was, for Tung, an awkward spot to be put in; what could he find that was positive to say about a work by the founder of the Che School? But Tung was never at a loss, and managed some amusingly back-handed compliments. He writes: "The hua-shih (painters by vocation) in our dynasty all consider Tai Wen-chin to be a great master. [Note that Tung does not advance this as his own view, but attributes it to painters of Tai's class.] This work imitates Yen Wen-kuei [nonsense, Mr. Tung!]. It is reserved and remote, pure and empty, not done in his ordinary, everyday manner. This makes it all the more remarkable (or strange, unusual)."

For this single, inescapably admirable work, Tai Chin is turned into a painter of lofty taste, an imitator of classical styles, somehow escaping from his usual academicism and professionalism. We can do better. We can acknowledge the real status of the artist, so far as we can determine it; see him as a versatile master who can do high-level work in a variety of manners, along with some quantity of hack work; admit freely that he did not paint, or rarely, just to pass his leisure time or embody his lofty feelings (although he did that too, in his better works) but that his paintings are none the worse for that; try to understand sympathetically the real motivations and circumstances underlying his production of paintings, in the conviction that although this will not make them better or worse, it will deepen our interpretations of their meaning; and make our judgements of his success, as we do with any other artist, as free of bias as we can make them.

Thank you.

CLP 104: 1990 “On the Periodization of Later Chinese Painting: The Early to Middle Ch’ing (K’ang-his-to-Ch’ien-lung) Transition.” Taniguchi symposium, Kyoto

Kyoto Paper 1990, Taniguchi Symposium #9: “The Transition and Turning Point in Art History.”

On the Periodization of Later Chinese Painting: The Early to Middle Ch’ing (K’ang-hsi to Ch’ien-lung) Transition

I. Introduction

Although the problem of periodization in Chinese painting studies is an old one, there have been few thoughtful considerations of it. A few obvious points have been made often enough: that art-historical turning-points need not correspond with political divisions; that the Western habit of thinking in centuries inclines us to use that mode of division; and so forth. Max Loehr, in a paper delivered in 1970, saw “pictorial art” in China as divided into two long periods by the Sung-Yüan juncture.[1] That juncture is the “turning point” most commonly agreed on among writers on the subject; multi-volume histories (Osvald Siren’s, Suzuki Kei’s, my own) typically end one volume with the end of Sung and begin another with the beginning of Yüan.[2]

Loehr did not address the periodization of the post-Yüan period, apart from seeing Tung Ch’i-ch’ang as a crucial figure in it, and thus implicitly dividing later Chinese painting into pre-Tung and post-Tung periods; he ends his paper with a general characterization of early Ch’ing painting without attempting to look beyond. Wen Fong in his “Images of the Mind” essay makes the usual Sung-Yüan division, and like Loehr takes Tung Ch’i-ch’ang to be a pivotal figure, adding Wang Hui with his “Great Synthesis” as another. He ends with a consideration of Shih-t’ao or Tao-chi , and concludes that “The deaths of Tao-chi, Wang Hui, and the other great early Ch’ing painters in the early decades of the eighteenth century marked the beginning of the end of the great tradition in Chinese landscape painting.” He sees the eighteenth century masters as not quite matching “the stature and accomplishments of their great seventeenth-century predecessors, whose styles and theories they emulated,” and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a time when “China’s protracted struggle for modernization finally destroyed the Great Synthesis that Wang Hui and Tao-chi worked successfully to achieve.”[3]

In deciding on the divisions between volumes for my own series on later Chinese painting, I chose to make the obvious one between Yüan and Ming, and another in the late 16th century, when the death of Hsü Wei and the decline of the Wu School introduce an undistinguished interim of several decades that ends with the appearance in the early seventeenth century of such great original masters as Ch’en Hung-shou and Tung Ch’i-ch’ang. This latter division would appear to be an example of a significant turning point or transition in art history that was unaccompanied by any correspondingly sharp division in political or social history, unless it be the beginning of the disastrous decline in the Ming imperial power and the effectiveness of the government generally.[4] By contrast, the fall of Ming and founding of the Ch’ing, one of the epochal events in Chinese history, is accompanied by no correspondingly decisive change in painting, although for practical reasons I ended one volume in my series and will begin another at that point.

The present paper will argue (and the argument will be reflected in the division between my fourth and fifth volumes) that another of the major turning points in Chinese painting history, perhaps the most radical after the Sung-Yuan transition, is the one occurring roughly between the K’ang-hsi and Yung-cheng eras, or a bit earlier--I am inclined to locate it, like Wen Fong, around the time of the deaths, within ten years, of the three great early Ch’ing landscapists Shih-t’ao or Tao-chi (1642-1707), Wang Yüan-ch’i 1642-1715), and Wang Hui (1632-1717). More broadly, it might be seen as the art-historical transition from early to middle Ch’ing painting, or (still more loosely) from K’ang-hsi to Ch’ien-lung . My wavering definition of it reflects a disinclination to attempt to pin it down too precisely; I would see it, using the terms argued in the Tokyo symposium on the same theme that preceded this one,[5] as more katoki (transition) than tenkanki (turning point). Tempting as it may be to locate the change at the demise of some master or the end of an era, a sober view will see it as more gradual, with much overlap. Some masters working after it continue in the old ways, as always, but they slip into the sidelines, exhibiting less and less of originality, and the innovations are elsewhere. On the other hand, patterns that can be observed as making up a minor trend before the transition emerge as dominant after it. To put it this way does not diminish the decisiveness of the change; most significant painting after the transition is very different, in definable ways, from most significant painting before it.

II. Changes in Painting

The fundamental changes in the nature of Chinese painting that occurred between early and middle Ch’ing, and which might be said to inaugurate the modern period of the art, can be identified and described in various ways; those I would see as central are:

1. A sharp decline in landscape painting, both in quantity (seen as a proportion of the overall production--although this remains to be proved by any systematic count) and in quality (innovativeness, practice by the best artists of the time). Landscape relinquishes the central position that it had occupied for centuries, and that it was not to regain until the twentieth century--and even then somewhat tenuously. The dominant movement in landscape painting, the Orthodox school of the Four Wangs , produces afterwards no major masters or significant stylistic innovations, and no strong alternative directions in landscape painting replace it.

2. Other subjects gain in popularity, supplanting landscape: figure painting, including portraiture; plant and animal subjects, including some that would have been considered “vulgar” before; narrative pictures; auspicious and symbolic subjects of all kinds. Subjects that can loosely be called popular are painted much more, by leading artists as well as by lesser ones.

3. The fast, spontaneous-looking manners of painting in broader brushwork, the so-called hsieh-i styles, are practiced far more widely than before. Elaborate compositions in the careful, so-called kung-pi manners are still painted; but the two types come to represent extreme positions in an increasingly polarized situation. The great loss is in the intermediate zones of style, which most of the best painting of the early Ch’ing had occupied: the styles of Hung-jen , Kung Hsien , Shih-t’ao at his best, the Four Wangs, and so forth, which cannot properly be called either hsieh-i or kung-pi. Post-K’ang-hsi artists able to move comfortably in this intermediate zone (where most of the great painting of China from the 14th through the 17th century had in fact been located) are fewer: Hua Yen , Kao Feng-han , and Lo P’ing in some of their works, Jen Po-nien later; a few others who achieve it sometimes but less regularly.

4. Paintings tend to be flatter, with surface design emphasized. Writing is more often integrated somehow with imagery in the compositions, contributing to this flatness, and elements of style and principles of design adopted from calligraphy affect, more than ever before, the styles of painting.

5. More artists of this late period, and more of the best, paint particular subjects--bamboo, plum branches, flowers, fish (Hsü-ku ), prawns and chicks (Ch’i Pai-shih ), camels and pandas (Wu Tso-jen )--over and over, as a major part of their output, and do these more repetitively. There had been, to be sure, specialist masters in earlier centuries, such as Wang Mien and others for blossoming plum; but they were usually not accorded places in the first rank. Wu Chen , for instance, painted numerous ink bamboo paintings, but his position as one of the Four Masters of Yuan depends on his landscapes. Small popular and provincial masters, from Sung times on, had produced peony pictures, or plant-and-insect pictures, or fish-and-water-weeds pictures etc., of the kinds best preserved in Japan; these too were judged to be peripheral or ignored altogether by the critics. Now in the 18th century, masters whom we now consider central and major (although some of them were not to be judged that way by orthodox critics until quite recent times) engage in patterns of production that would earlier have relegated them to the sidelines.

6. Painting as a whole, after the K’ang-hsi era, undergoes a marked decline. To say this once more will annoy those of my colleagues who follow the different-but-just-as-good approach, but it is a conviction that underlies much of the discussion that follows, and may as well be stated flatly here. My present purpose, however, is not to document that decline, or even argue for it, so much as to define and contextualize the changes that painting underwent.

The remainder of this essay will be a consideration of ways of understanding these changes. Developments that have been recognized and studied in the social and economic history of the time will be introduced, not to account fully for the changes in painting--no such causal account is intended--but to suggest a setting, a cluster of correlatives, within which the changes in both spheres can be better seen as elements in a densely interwoven fabric of cultural history. The form the essay takes, then, is not simply an enumeration of factors relevant to the transition I am attempting to define; it reflects a real belief that such large art-historical phenomena are not to be simplistically “explained” by single “causes” or even small sets of causal factors, but can be suggestively enmeshed in a context of that kind, and made more intelligible by it.

III. Changes in Chinese Society

Building such a context has been greatly facilitated for the art historian in recent years by a new richness in the secondary and interpretative literature on Ch’ing society. While some issues are still debated among our colleagues in social and economic history, there is enough consensus to allow us to draw from their writings formulations and insights that can profitably be brought to bear on our concerns.

The middle Ch’ing was, first of all, a period in which China was “confident, prosperous, internally at peace, unchallenged at its frontiers.”[6] It has often been observed that the most innovative periods in Chinese art tend to be periods of tension, of dynastic change and social upheaval: the Six Dynasties, the tenth century, the Yüan, the Ming-Ch’ing transition and its aftermath. A certain stagnation in most areas of 18th century painting might be “explained” in that way. When, however, we recognize the more conservative but equally great achievements in painting of the long-lasting dynasties--the T’ang, Sung, middle Ming--we are still faced with the question of why nothing comparable happened in 18th-century China.

Studies of 18th century Chinese culture mostly concentrate on urban centers, especially the cities of the lower Yangtze region: Yangchou, preeminently, but also Suchou, Hangchou, and Nanking. The prosperity and thriving activity of the cities, whether social, artistic, scholarly, or commercial, worked (as it had already in Nanking and Suchou in the Ming) to break through class boundaries, and separations of elite from popular, to create such new hybrid types as the merchant-literatus or the scholarly purveyor of popular literary and artistic works. The level of literacy rose among the general populace; many more books, especially popular books, were published. Increased social mobility was accompanied by physical mobility: educated people moved around more. Scholars and artists came to the cities in search of patronage and a milieu within which their knowledge and skills could support them.

Accompanying these developments, and in some part underlying them, was the development of a market economy, and a shift in the social order by which wealth encroached on the older bases of family background and land ownership as the source of power and prestige. Wealthy families were engaged more in commerce and moneylending, less in acquisition of land .[7] The “money economy and its impersonal values”[8] transformed old patterns of patronage, in ways we will consider below for painting; merchants and craftsmen formed guilds, for which the early Ch’ing was the formative period[9] but which expanded in the 18th century, imperiling the old, intimate, one-to-one pattern for transactions between supplier and client.

The rise in status and self-assertiveness of the merchant class, and the relaxation of the old social disapproval they had suffered before, are phenomena that can be traced from the 16th century and culminate in the 18th.[10] The “absence of absolute barriers between literati and merchants”[11] and the close interaction between them allowed them sometimes to exchange roles. Wealth did not necessarily buy political power for the merchant class, but it could purchase them membership in the landed elite, and access to elite culture, through the education of their sons and through patronage of scholars and artists.[12] It has even been argued that it was official government policy in the Ch’ing to “‘gentrify’ the great merchants by inducing them to adopt scholar-bureaucrat, that is ‘gentry’ ideals and values.”[13] The complexity of this relationship--the question of how far the merchants simply adopted literati values and taste, and how far they asserted their own and affected literati practice--is a matter of some controversy among writers on Ch’ing society and culture. Wakeman argued that the merchants did not “adopt a distinct class manner, or style of life, of their own” because the possibility of upward mobility encouraged them to concentrate on attempting to enter the elite instead of developing an alternative to it, so that in the end they simply emulated the gentry’s life-style on a grander scale[14]. Ropp, while giving proper weight to this argument, suggests that in 18th-century China “one can find more evidence of a distinct urban bourgeoise tradition than Wakeman’s analysis would suggest.”[15] He attempts to define a “third, urban middle-class culture” between the elite and mass cultures. The growth of this urban middle-class is, I believe, crucial to some of the changes we have suggested in painting, and we will return to it later.

As the merchants gained in status, a great many literati and would-be bureaucrats lost it, either because they failed to attain official posts or because their official careers proved unrewarding. The imposition of quotas made it difficult for Ch’ing scholars in the lower Yangtze region to achieve the higher degrees. Also, this old route to officialdom through study and examination success was encroached on by a system of purchasing lower degrees and even positions, a system exploited by the merchants to the detriment of the literati. An over-supply of degree holders, in part a simple function of the great growth in population and wealth, created a situation in which, by 1800, only chin-shih (doctorate) holders could be reasonably sure of getting official posts[16] Holders of lower degrees were forced into a variety of other occupations, as teachers, secretaries, writers, sometimes as artists.

IV.Changes in Patronage, and in the Market and Audience for Paintings

For officials and rich merchants, support of scholarship and individual scholars became “a favored form of status display”[17] The same was true for patronage of artists. Some of it followed the old pattern by which, for instance, rich art-lovers in Ming Suchou had supported painters. We have numerous accounts of this kind of patronage of poets, scholars, and artists by the Yangchou salt merchants and other wealthy and powerful people. At the same time, more widespread affluence made possible a simpler kind of support for artists and others, among a greater number of people.[18] It would appear that more people were able to acquire paintings from artists of this period, including the best, without necessarily having any personal relationship with them or introduction to them. We will consider later the implications and effects of this change.

The radical shift of balance in the subjects treated by painters, and especially their turning away from landscape, might be attributed simply to a shift in taste, whether in the artists themselves or in their audience, or to factors within the tradition of painting itself. Such an account would not be entirely wrong, and we will consider those factors later. But it would be inadequate: this is another change that can be tied to larger changes in Ch’ing society. In a 1981 catalog of Anhui school painting and printing I advanced an argument, together with a group of graduate students, that I would like to repeat and elaborate on here; it has also been argued by one of the participants in that seminar, Cheng-chi Hsü, in two unpublished writings.[19] It is an attempt to understand the prevalence of landscape painting, especially landscape done in the relatively dry and austere manners derived from such Yuan masters as Huang Kung-wang and Ni Tsan , among Anhui-school and other painters active in the late Ming and early Ch’ing, and the precipitous decline in popularity of this kind of painting after the center of activity for painting shifts to Yangchow in the K’ang-hsi era; and to understand these phenomena as responding in part to the rising status, growing self-assertiveness, and changing aspirations of merchant patrons.

The merchants were not, of course, the only patrons for the Anhui masters, or for painting of this kind; southern Anhui had an old tradition of scholar-official culture, and long-established families within which it was transmitted. But when we recall that Suchou had enjoyed a flourishing local school of painting during its economic heyday in the middle Ming, and that another, rival school had arisen, somewhat supplanting it, in nearby Sungchiang just at the time that city was coming to rival Suchou in mercantile activity and textile production--and that, moreover, the output of the latter school was largely and pointedly dominated by the same “pure” literati styles of landscape--we can scarcely avoid seeing the emergence of the Hsin-an P’ai or Anhui school in painting (after centuries in which Anhui had produced few artists and no cohesive school) as closely tied to the great economic prosperity of the region in the age of the Hui-chou merchants . The Hui-chou merchants’ avidity in collecting Yüan paintings by the prestigious masters, along with the works of Ming artists such as Shen Chou who were their stylistic heirs, can be documented, as can the success of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, himself a powerful practitioner and proponent of these styles, as an advisor to collectors who needed guidance in judging the worthiness of their acquisitions as indicators of status[20]

The only hypothesis that fits all the evidence, I believe, is the one argued here: that during the early phase in the development of the merchant culture, when the goal was acceptance into the literati-elite stratum of society,[21] and when the “refinement” or “vulgarity” of taste displayed in the art one collected and supported was taken as an index of one’s cultural level,[22] the choices could not be made simply on the basis of one’s personal preferences, whatever those might be. Landscape painting in itself, and the spare, Yüan-derived styles in particular, were established signifiers of literati culture, and along with others[23] were pursued by the upwardly mobile.

By the end of the 17th century and into the 18th, this situation had changed profoundly. Our belief about what underlay the change was introduced by a cross-cultural comparison--not, as it turns out, original with us--[24] with the merchant culture of Edo in Tokugawa-period Japan. The possibilities of penetrating the upper social levels open to Chinese merchant families were barred to the merchant class of Japan, who could never, for all their wealth, hope for entree into samurai or court-aristocrat status. They settled back and made the best of their situation, creating in Edo and Osaka, with the help of artists and dramatists and others, a rich urban culture that reflected their own social position and tastes.

Taking these two situations as paradigmatic allows us to see the change we are considering, from early to middle Ch’ing painting, as a move from the first model partway toward the second. It was not that penetration into the upper levels of society, literati and scholar-official status, was barred to the Chinese merchant class in this later period; on the contrary, those levels were more accessible than before. But they were no longer so “upper,” so advantageous, nor so set apart from the merchants’ own situation; and the urge to gain access to them, an urge expressed earlier (we believe) in displays of high taste, including the taste for the “pure” literati styles in landscape painting, was no longer strong. Patrons and purchasers of painting, from rich merchants down to the middle-class consumers (to whom we will turn later), seem to have felt enough confidence to demand from their artists pictures of a more popular kind, often of a strongly decorative character, with auspicious subjects, narrative and human-interest subjects, genre and daily-life subjects. Portraits were popular, and one artist (Lo P’ing) gained some renown as a painter of ghosts.

Orthodox-school landscapes were still produced, especially by artists associated with the imperial court, but their production was increasingly dispirited and ceremonial: to swell further the numbers of such paintings in the imperial collection, where they continued to carry the symbolic value they had largely lost elsewhere; or as a leisure-time activity for scholar-officials, who could use them as presents for other officials and friends.[25] But the artists who did these enjoyed nothing like the widespread fame and success of their predecessors such as Wang Hui and Wang Yüan-ch’i, or of some of their contemporaries who painted other subjects. And in urban, commercialized settings like Yangchou where artists responded more directly to the pressures of supply-and-demand, such painting was less popular (with a few exceptions such as Yüan Chiang , who with his followers painted large, elegant landscapes-with-palaces in a Sung mode, or Fang Shih-shu , 1692-1751, himself from an Anhui salt-merchant family, who had some success in Yangchou as a painter of Orthodox-style landscapes.)[26] A 19th century writer, in explaining the poverty of a Yangchou landscapist, quotes an old Yangchou song about painting: “Portraits [bring] gold, flowers silver; if you want to become a beggar, paint landscape.”[27]

The popularizing trend in 18th-19th century Yangchow- and Shanghai-school painting was never so sweeping as in Tokugawa-period Edo, nor did it set itself so openly against the more traditional modes. The ukiyo-e prints and paintings of Edo art are full of irreverent parodies of classical themes; nothing that quite corresponds can be found in the painting of 18th-19th century Yangchou and Shanghai, although Lo P’ing in the late 18th century and Jen Hsiung and Jen Po-nien in the 19th, like Ch’en Hung-shou in the late Ming, do sometimes portray old subjects in a mode of self-distancing and irony. For the most part, painting in these late periods continues to pay respect to literati and high-culture values, even while compromising these with elements of popular style and imagery.

Eighteenth-century Yangchou painting, then, represents neither a simple continuation of the literati-elite culture nor a rude intrusion of merchant culture into it, but exactly the comfortable interaction of these that we identified earlier, as well as the emergence of a new urban middle-class clientele for painting. It offered an attractive reconciliation of what had been divergent directions, rejecting the austerities of the old Anhui-school and Orthodox landscape modes but incorporating enough high-culture allusions and taste to escape the taint of “vulgarity,” and to betray an awareness of old literati values without entirely embracing them.

Two others of the deep-rooted changes in the character of painting in the late period outlined above (section II), the increased practice of the fast, spontaneous-looking manners and the somewhat repetitive production of pictures of particular subjects, can similarly be linked to factors of patronage and the economic situations of artists. For these, the argument first made by Cheng-chi Hsü in a 1985 paper on Cheng Hsieh’s famous price list of 1759 seems most generative of understanding.[28] Noting these characteristics (sketchiness, thematic repetitiveness) in Cheng’s output, and also the lack of dedications in the inscriptions on most of his paintings, Hsü related these to the prices asked by Cheng for his paintings on the price-list, which were low in comparison to what artists received for their works from salt-merchant and other individual patrons. She concluded that all these factors indicate “a different level of clientele,” a largely anonymous, middle-level group who ordinarily acquired the paintings through direct cash purchase and “probably were the principal consumers of Yangchou painting.” Cheng himself contended that selling paintings in an openly commercial way was more honorable than joining the salon of some rich merchant-patron and sacrificing one’s artistic independence and integrity.[29]

In a paper presented in the following year Julia Andrews, building on Hsü’s hypothesis, used a similar argument to account for the volume of quickly-done paintings produced by Cha Shih-piao (1615-1698) in his later years, after he had moved to Yangchou. A “ditty” of the time that she quotes pairs him with a maker of mother-of-pearl inlaid plates, saying: “For dishes in every place it’s Chiang Ch’iu-shui ; for scrolls in every home it’s Cha Erh-chan [Shih-piao].”[30] I have tentatively extended this way of reading to the quick, copious, and often undistinguished productions of Kung Hsien and Shih-t’ao in their late periods, when they, too, were spending most of their time in Yangchou, and noted that one of Cha Shih-piao’s contemporaries in late 17th century Yangchou, the landscapist Chang Hsün , had anticipated Cheng Hsieh in posting a price-list for his paintings.[31] So we appear to be justified in pushing back the beginnings of this mode of production to the late 17th century, at least in Yangchou. And we can trace it as a dominant pattern for many prominent Chinese artists in later periods, down to Wu Ch’ang-shih , Ch’i Pai-shih, and even living masters.

In the old pattern, the artist fulfilled the needs of a limited and personal group of patrons with a smaller output; recipients of the paintings could either be somehow associated with the artist, or be patrons only in a simpler economic sense. In the later pattern, the artist responds with a larger output to a larger clientele of people who want to participate in the level of culture he represents, and are satisfied with a specimen of his hand, even when it may be relatively slight as a work of art. Or else they simply want an attractive painting of an easily accessible subject in an up-to-date style. In either case, the literati values of individualism and personal expression are somewhat commodified. These developments in painting are clearly functions of the expansion and wider accessibility of culture, and the growth of an urban economic middle class, which were noted above as generally recognized phenomena in 18th-century cultural history.

Traditional Chinese writers, of course, seldom account for them in this way; determined to follow the idealizing mode in locating the motivations for artistic choice purely within the artist, they are inclined to explain the popularity of rough and spontaneous styles as reflecting the non-conformist temperaments of a series of individual painters, and the untiring reiteration of a certain subject within a master’s oeuvre as expressing that master’s fondness for that subject. (Cheng Hsieh, in this view, was extremely fond of bamboo and orchids, Chin Nung of blossoming plum, and so forth.) But the serious inadequacy of that kind of account, for developments in painting that clearly correlate with factors of period, place, or the artist’s social position, is obvious: it confronts us always with the absurdity of groups of artists in some time or place or situation all deciding, individually, to follow some practice or set of practices that seem in fact to be more or less peculiar to them. Chinese writers have, on the other hand, sometimes themselves cited economic and social factors in discussing the practice of painters. The writer of the “old song” quoted earlier suggests, not that Yangchou artists suddenly lost their liking for landscape, but that painting it could no longer earn them their livings; and a nineteenth century writer attributes Huang Shen’s adoption of the cursive splashed-ink mode for figure pictures, after he came to Yangchou, to “the fickleness of taste” in that city, which “promoted novelty and favored the unusual.”[32]

V.Changes in Aesthetic Taste; Other Factors

To avoid giving an impression of excessive economic and social determinism to this study, we will end with a briefer consideration of the importance of internal factors, including factors of shifting aesthetic taste.

A striking aspect of much of the best 18th and 19th century painting, its flatness and emphasis on surface design, along with the tendency to integrate calligraphy with pictorial imagery in the work and to employ varieties of brushline that further flatten the forms, can be related to contemporary developments in calligraphy. Calligraphers and collectors in this period were turning their attention from the t’ieh tradition of appreciating and imitating informal works of calligraphy such as letters and casual notes, usually written in the cursive script styles and studied in either originals or rubbings, to the pei tradition of studying rubbings of large or even monumental inscriptions with significant texts, typically written in the more formal script styles, seal script or clerical script (chuan-shu and li-shu ) or special forms of the standard k’ai script.[33] The appreciation of the pei calligraphy, and the imitation of it in one’s own calligraphy, seal carving, and painting, was the basis of what came to be called the chin-shih chia or “metal and stone [epigraphy] masters” movement. In painting it was centered in the Yangchou school in the 18th century and the Shanghai school in the 19th, but its influence was broader than any local movements, and although it might be said to have affected only a segment of late Chinese painting, that segment includes many of the outstanding artists: Chin Nung, Wang Shih-shen , Chao Chih-ch’ien , Wu Ch’ang-shih, as well as others such as Li Shan , Jen Hsiung, and Jen Po-nien in some of their painting; and it had a profound effect on 20th-century painting. The stylistic affinities within this movement between painting, seal design, and calligraphy also encouraged painters of the late period, either alone or with the collaboration of calligrapher and seal-carver friends, to create works in which the three arts are integrated into striking compositions.

In both the Yangchou and the Shanghai schools, the chin-shih chia movement served as a needed corrective to the popularizing tendency , and the penchant for loose and sometimes sloppy brushwork, that could afflict the painting of these schools and open it to critical censure.[34] The antiquarian flavor, strong surface design, and disciplined use of the brush that this movement brought to painting allowed reconciliations of popular and scholarly taste that gave the patrons of its artists the best of both worlds: an air of high-culture sensibility in works that also pleased simpler desires for decorative styles and appealing subjects. Such works could be understood, if we chose to return to the social-history mode, as very emblems of the interpenetration of popular and elite, or merchant and scholar-official classes, that are characteristic of the late period.

In understanding the decline of landscape we could also turn our attention to internal factors and see it more as a self-contained development within the history of painting. We would then emphasize the dominance of the Orthodox school during the period of our transition, its depressing effect on alternate modes of landscape, and its own inherent proneness to deaden creativity in its followers. The arguments made by Orthodox school artists and theorists from Tung Ch’i-ch’ang through Wang Yüan-ch’i and beyond were not simply affirmations of the superiority of their styles, but vehement denunciations of other schools as heterodox and perverse, downhill routes to perdition.[35] At the same time, the degree to which the Orthodox-school doctrine set strict boundaries on innovation within its own ranks all but ensured its quick decline by shutting off new directions that might have re-invigorated it. A few 18th century artists--Li Shih-cho , Hua Yen, Kao Feng-han , Tsai Chia --can paint interesting and original landscapes on occasion, but these are isolated achievements, which did not breathe new life into landscape painting as a whole. And since the major formal and expressive explorations, the real thrust of the whole Chinese painting tradition, had for centuries been located primarily in landscape, the exhaustion of the Orthodox school in the late period had a depressing effect on the whole tradition, contributing to its decline.

It has also been pointed out, as a factor in the decline of landscape painting, that the gradual absorption of most of the great surviving examples into the imperial collection under the reign of the Ch’ien-lung Emperor deprived 18th-century and later artists, excepting court artists, of the access to these paintings that painters had sometimes enjoyed in earlier centuries. It was not until the coming of photographic reproduction in the 20th century, and the opening of the Palace Museum Collection to a wider public, that painters were again able to draw on the masterworks of their heritage.

VI. Conclusion

It would be easy enough to find a great many artists and paintings in the late period that do not bear out the generalizations attempted in the foregoing essay; and the argument might be made that the consignment of all these exceptions to the status of insignificance is unjustified--that Orthodox-school landscape, for instance, continues to be interesting in the late period, if one can only exercise the critical discernment needed to appreciate the fine shadings of style that distinguish one master from another--and so forth. Arguments against decline, or against relative judgements more generally, are easy to make and difficult to counter. Short of organizing an exhibition of one thousand representative late Orthodox-school landscapes, leading a succession of typical viewers through it, and measuring (by pulse rate? eye movement?) the levels of sheer boredom they experience--which would, I contend, be very high--one cannot support in a quantifiable way one’s argument for a drastic decline in this branch of painting.

The same is true of the other arguments made above: they are based on judgements formed over many years of studying Chinese painting, and the judgements depend in turn on criteria for quality and art-historical importance that are far from being universally accepted. My basic belief (one well articulated by Max Loehr)[36] is that what matters in the history of art is what is new, not simply replicated from the past. But I try to steer a course between the over-restrictiveness of Loehr’s judgements (which allowed, for instance, only Tung Ch’i-ch’ang as a truly significant figure in late Ming painting) and the over-inclusiveness of others who decline to make judgements of quality and importance at all, and who write (or organize exhibitions) as though anything any artist produces is equally worthy of our attention. Good artists and excellent paintings are not well served by the latter attitude, nor is our understanding of the history of Chinese painting. Historians of the late period in China are able to define large trends and developments, and argue major issues on a high level and with some agreement about what these issues are. We art historians seem not to have yet reached that stage in the progress of our studies. The foregoing essay is an attempt to lay out a provisional model, and to stimulate the kind of discussion that will move us closer to that desirable end.

James Cahill, Berkeley, April 1990

References in the text

[1]Max Loehr, “Phases and Content in Chinese Painting,” Proceedings of the International Symposium on Chinese Painting, Taipei, National Palace Museum, 1972, pp. 285-297.

[2]Osvald Siren, A History of Early Chinese Painting, 1933; A History of Later Chinese Painting, 1938. Suzuki Kei, Chûgoku kaiga shi, Part I, through Northern Sung, 1981; Part II/1, through Southern Sung (with Liao and Chin), 1984; Part II/2, through Yüan, 1988. My own series, which will eventually comprise five volumes, opens with the beginning of Yüan.

[3]The essay forms the long introductory section of a catalog, Wen Fong, ed., Images of the Mind: Selections from the Edward L. Elliott Family and John B. Elliott Collections of Chinese Calligraphy and Painting at The Art Museum, Princeton University,” Princeton, 1984. The passage cited is on p. 209.

[4]For a provocative, enlightening, and very readable study of this uneventful turning point in Ming history, see Ray Huang, 1587, a Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline, New Haven, 1981.

[5]Periods of Transition in East Asian Art, Tokyo National Research Institute of Cultural Properties, 1988. See especially the comments on this problem by Maribeth Graybill, p. 25, and the final remarks of Nobuo Tsuji, Yoshiaki Shimizu, and Stephen Addiss, pp. 264-268. John Hay’s provocative essay in this volume, pp. 65-84, “Chao Meng-fu: Tradition and Self in the Early Yuan,” is a thoughtful treatment of the Sung-Yuan transition which in the end (and typically for Hay) complicates more than it simplifies by questioning what he takes to be the overly-neat formulations of others.

[6]Albert Feuerwerker, quoted in Frederick W. Mote, “The Intellectual Climate in Eighteenth-century China,” in Ju-hsi Chou and Claudia Brown, ed., Chinese Painting under the Qianlong Emperor (Phoebus 6, no. 1), 1988, p. 18.

[7]Paul S. Ropp, Dissent in Early Modern China: Ju-lin wai-shih and Ch’ing Social Criticism, Ann Arbor, 1981, p. 15.

[8]Susan Naquin and Evelyn S. Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century, New Haven, 1987 (hereafter Naquin and Rawski), p. 56.

[9]Peter J. Golas, “Early Ch’ing Guilds,” in G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China, Stanford, 1977, pp. 555-580.

[10]Cheng-chi Hsu, Patronage and the Economic Life of the Artist in Eighteenth Century Yangchow Painting, Ph.D. dissertation, Berkeley, 1987, II, 262, citing a study by Yü Ying-shih.

[11]Benjamin Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China, Cambridge, Mass., 1984, p. 88.

[12]Ropp, op. cit., p. 28.

[13]Mote, op. cit., p. 36, citing Yen Hsien-en. Naquin and Rawski, p. 16, also suggest that the Ch’ing rulers were “quite comfortable with nouveau-riche merchants and other arrivistes,” and found it easy to “welcome such families into the ranks of the Ch’ing elite.”

[14]Frederic Wakeman, The Fall of Imperial China, New York, 1975, 50-51.

[15]Ropp, op. cit., 48 ff. See also Naquin and Rawski, p. 60, writing of merchants who “did not merely ape the literati life-style but were leaders in it,” and their discussion, pp. 59-61, of the merchant contributions.

[16]Elman, 130; Naquin and Rawski 13.

[17]Naquin and Rawski 51, cf. Elman 100 ff.

[18]Cf. Naquin and Rawski 222: “Although firm support for this is lacking, we hypothesize that the cash nexus may have influenced Qing behavior more generally: gifts, like relationships, were becoming more impersonal.”

[19]Shadows of Mr. Huang: Chinese Painting and Printing of the Anhui School, Berkeley, 1981: my Introduction, pp. 7-15 (especially p. 10), and Sandi Chin and Cheng-chi Hsü, “Anhui Merchant Culture and Patronage,” pp. 19-24. Hsü’s other relevant writings are: “Merchant Patronage of the 18th Century Yangchow Painting,” paper for the workshop “Artists and Patrons: Some Economic and Social Aspects of Chinese Painting,” Kansas City, 1980; and her Ph.D. dissertation, see above. See also my The Distant Mountains: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Period, Tokyo and New York, 1982, 136-37, “The Beginnings of Anhui School Painting and Its Extensions.” To go over this set of arguments again may seem redundant, but I am making them here in a different context, and cannot avoid presenting them at least in outline.

[20]See Shadows of Mt. Huang 11, Distant Mts. 136-37.

[21]Timothy Brook outlines the conditions within which the late Ming merchants "had not constituted themselves as a class" and were not "successful in establishing a measure of political indendence." He quotes Victor Lippert in noting that "the merchants were quite content to be incorporated into the structure and goals of the traditional society." See Timothy Brook, "The Merchant Network in 16th Century China: A Discussion and Translation of Zhang Han's 'On Merchants'," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, XXIV/2, 1981, pp. 165-214; these passages on pp. 184-85.

[22]The statement was made first about Ni Tsan’s paintings, and was later used by the great patron-collector Chou Liang-kung (1612-1672) in his Tu-hua lu for the greatest of the Anhui masters, Hung-jen: “People of Chiangnan say that whether one has [Hung-jen’s] paintings or not determines one’s degree of refinement or vulgarity, just as was said in olden times for a Ni Tsan.” See Shadows of Mt. Huang, p. 34.

[23]Shadows of Mt. Huang 19-24.

[24]It had been used earlier by Wakeman, The Fall of Imperial China, 51. See also Naquin and Rawski 23.

[25]The best treatment of the Orthodox school of landscape in the 18th century is in Chou and Brown, The Elegant Brush, pp. 3-5 and 63-105. Chou and Brown judge these artists and paintings more positively than I would, but this does not diminish the value of their discussions.

[26]Cheng-chi Hsü devotes one chapter of her dissertation to Fang; see Hsü, Patronage, ch. 3, pp. 86-117.

[27]Wang Yün, Yang-chou hua-fang lu, preface 1883, ch. 2, p. 13b, quoted by Cheng-chi Hsü, “Merchant Patronage,” p. 11.

[28]Hsü, “Cheng Hsieh’s Price List”; this argument made in the final pages.

[29]Hsü, op. cit., 9-11.

[30]Julia F. Andrews, “Landscape Painting and Patronage in Early Qing Yangzhou,” paper for College Art Association Annual Meeting session on “Chinese Landscape Painting: Content, Context, and Style,” New York, February 1986.

[31]“Hsieh-i As a Cause of decline in Later Chinese Painting,” in Three Alternative Histories of Chinese Painting, Lawrence, Kansas, 1989, pp. 104-109. The information on Chang Hsün’s price-list is from the entry on him in Chou Liang-kung, Tu-hua lu, ch. 3.

[32]Hsü, Patronage and the Economic Life, I, 122.

[33]For this distinction see Lothar Ledderose, Mi Fu and the Classical Tradition of Chinese Calligraphy, Princeton, 1979, p. 11. See also Shen C. Y. Fu et. al., Traces of the Brush: Studies in Chinese Calligraphy, pp. 52-77, for a discussion and examples of this school of calligraphy.

[34]For a brief discussion of this effect of the chin-shih chia taste on painting see James Cahill, “The Shanghai School in Later Chinese Painting,” Hong Kong, 1988, 54-77, especially 57-61.

[35]For a selection of these writings see James Cahill, “The Orthodox Movement in Early Ch’ing Painting,” in Christian F. Murck, ed., Artists and Traditions: Uses of the Past in Chinese Culture, Princeton, 1976, pp. 169-181.

[36]“The historian is interested in the inception of styles, not in their perpetuation. The importance of a work from the historian’s point of view, therefore, depends largely on his insight into its one-time stylistic newness. A new style is a new idea, a conscious change and creative event, something that marks off one period from all other periods and thus supplies what makes for continuity in history. The mere continuous existence or survival of a style after its prime, by contrast, rather denotes stagnation, and in stagnation we may experience the phenomenon of discontinuity.” Max Loehr, “Some Fundamental Issues in the History of Chinese Painting, Journal of Asian Studies XXIII, 2, Feb. 1964, 185-193; this passage on p. 188.

CLP 101: 1985 “Excellence in Chinese Painting.” Lecture, Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Boston MFA lecture, Feb. 1989 (Quality in Ch. Ptg.)

The charge presented to lecturers in this series is an absorbing one, all the more so because it is so unfashionable: the questions of quality and excellence in art. Has an objectionably elitist ring for lots of people these days. CAA in NYC in two weeks has session called “Firing the Canon” (explain), with, for instance, paper on Harriet Powers’ “Bible Quilt” and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling. well. One of several disclosures and disclaimers I want to make at beginning of my talk tonight: I am confirmed canonist; believe that there are great works of art, good works, OK minor works, bad works, etc.; and that we can & should distinguish between these. Believe that there are works which can occupy our attn. longer, and have a more legitimate claim on our attn.; than others. That there are works that impress themselves lastingly on our consciousness, change our lives. (I state these as aspects of experience, rather than attributes of work, deliberately.)

Certain reluctance among writers on art today to confront what still seem to me urgent questions for people who study and write about art, if ultimately unresolvable questions: what is art; what is good or excellent art. (Excellent, as in title of this series, a useful word: it excels, i.e. is better than, something else. Not an absolute attribute of work. I’ll go with that.) To argue for the validity of the concept of quality & excellence in art isn’t to argue agst. pluralistic approach in making judgments, idea that works of art can be good or great in different ways; that I believe firmly, and will try to demonstrate in talking about Chinese paintings. But to grant that isn’t to say that they are all equally good, or great. I don’t believe that small piano pieces of Eric Satie are equals of late quartets of Beethoven, just different; or that the quilt, however fine, is likely to be the equal of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling.

Basic problem in dealing with quality or excellence in art: we can derive, from what we take to be excellent or successful works of art, thru analysis of kind we do, qualities that appear to make them excel, to produce this kind of high-level aesthetic experience in us; we can observe these qualities recurring in one after another of works we consider excellent; but can’t reverse process, tell artist: if you do this and that, you will produce an excellent work of art. Nor can we say that work lacking these qualities cannot be excellent: will always be exceptions; doesn’t work that way.

But I’m not here, thank goodness, to argue general issues of quality in art; only wanted to get a few general beliefs out of the way before going on to talk about where & how I find excellence in Chinese paintings. Good, I think, that this series is on excellence in Asian art. Doesn’t mean to imply (I assume) that excellence somehow different there; but allows for special ways of defining criteria. One of basic questions, in fact, is: should we adopt criteria of cultures themselves, in dealing with arts of foreign cultures, or apply our own? Proponents of former, adopting criteria of the culture that produced the work, often quite vociferous, bring in emotion-charged issues such as so-called “Orientalism.” Proponents of latter, making judgements by our own criteria (whatever those are) often charged with “imposing Western values on artistic traditions where they don’t properly apply,” and so forth. I used to talk that way, in younger years. Period in which I came into field, early 1950s, was period when more people w. training in Chinese language began to work on Chinese painting; we were so pleased with ourselves for being able to read Ch. texts, critical & theoretical writings, apply these to our understanding of ptgs, that we accepted what Ch. writers said w/o thinking, uncritically, as truth about paintings. If there is anything I’m sure about now it’s that this is bad mistake; I argue now that we should continue to make every effort to reach deepest, most complete understanding of Ch. criteria of judgement that we can; and doing so will of course affect our judgements, open our eyes to qualities we were blind to before. But in the end we have to distance ourselves from Ch. criteria and Ch. judgements, recognizing that they, too, were time-bound and culture-bound, not to be regarded as having universal validity; that there will be wide differences between judgements made by Chinese writers of dif. periods, dif. levels of society, etc. within China; that they had their blind spots too; and that in the end we have to make our own criteria and our own judgements.

When faced w. preparing lecture these days, on any large subject, find myself drawn to typologies and taxonomies: classifying, categorizing. Would that work here? types of excellence? Possible; as I said, I believe firmly in pluralistic approaches to art, even in trying to define what art is and how it works. All good Ch ptgs aren’t good in same way, nor are they good in same way typical Eur. ptg is good. One encounters people who have firm faith in sharpness of their eye, in their ability to discern quality in art wherever and whenever. I think that’s an unrealistic claim, and that people can be, must be, sensitized to special qualities in certain kinds of art; that discrimination comes w. familiarity. One of things we do, as teachers and writers, is “program in” such familiarity, open paths of responses that allow people to appreciate nuances as well as broader distinctions in material we teach.

Enough of generalities; on to the paintings.

S,S. At very beginning of Ch ptg, neolithic ptd pots; these from Pan-p’o ts’un, ca. 4000 B.C.: issues already present. When does Ch art begin? Teaching course on early periods, I begin it here; make point that representation doesn’t equal art. Can have aesthetically barren representation, like one on left; or aesthetically engaging design, like pot on right. (Talk about.) I would argue that the one is art, the other isn’t, or at least not art of any quality or consequence; and that it’s a distinction we should try to make, artifact from art object.

Next step: w/in large category of objects that qualify as works of art, distinction between better and less good ones, excellent vs. mediocre, etc. In dealing with that basic & vexing question, I’ll consider cases of some MFA Chinese ptgs, along w. related works. And want to begin by clearing away several issues that are related to, but not the same as, the issue of aesthetic quality.

S,S. First is issue of importance: art-historical, historical, other. Perhaps most famous Ch. ptg in this museum is this one, “Portraits of the Emperors” handscroll attrib. to 7th cent. master Yen Li-pen. (In portraiture exhibition.) A book could be made out of published studies of this scroll, from Kojiro Tomita’s 1932 article onward, including the treatment of it in the1973 catalog Unearthing China’s Past by Jan Fontein and Tom Wu, Suzuki Kei’s discussion in his book on early Chinese painting, and Jin Weinuo’s recent article in Chinese. Chinese and Japanese scholars as well as Westerners have written about the dating, authorship, subject, style, and preservation of the scroll (the last, preservation, because the first six figures are believed to be a later restoration, or in any case to be from a different period and hand.) This is an unavoidable, inescapable painting, for better or worse; wherever you turn, it’s there. If you study Chinese portraiture, or early figure style, or the T’ang imperial icon, or what kind of ptg was seen & studied by the late Ming artist Ch’en Hung-shou when he served briefly in the court, you come up inevitably agst. this ptg. I tried to escape it--wrote a general book on Ch ptg pub. in 1960 and left it out. And was chastised for doing so in a review by the late Benjamin Rowland of Harvard. Inescapable. Highly important.

Does all this make it a great work of art? No, in sense that great work of art moves us deeply, delights us aesthetically; I don’t think I speak only for myself in suggesting that this one doesn’t. Does one look forward always to another viewing, apart from all these scholarly and pedagogical concerns? I think not. Equiv. for Ch. ptg of great unread books--I remember an article on these that I read long ago, in which the book nominated for the “great unread book” prize on this basis was The Pilgrim’s Progress. The “Portraits of the Emperors” scroll is similarly earnest, important, a bit of a bore.

I could, by contrast, show you aesthetically moving works of art that are of small art-historical or historical importance; but the point is too obvious to need making.

Next, the issue of authorship.

S. Here is a ptg in the MFA collection with an old attrib. to Li Wei, 11th cent. scholar-official who specialized in bamboo ptg. Signature, but partly missing. Seals of 12th cent. emperor Kao-tsung, and of Liang Ch’ing-piao, great 17c collector. I listed ptg in my Index of Early Ch. Ptrs & Ptgs as a “fine late Sung or early Yuan work,” i.e. 12th-13th cent. But I’ve had uneasy feelings abt it, and have never discussed it in publications or lectures until now.

S. Recently my colleague Hironobu Kohara has suggested in a letter that the ptg is really by a Ch’ing dyn. master named Shen Ts’ang; not much known of him; active in K’ang-hsi period, late 17-early 18c. And once suggestion made, seemed to me absolutely right: distinctive style, which I knew well from alb. by him I own myself and another in Princeton Art Museum dtd. 1714. Everything in so-called Li Wei ptg--way rocks and hillsides are ptd, figures, S. Clouds, architecture (which I expect architectural historian could have identified as Ch’ing, not Sung)--all correspond so closely as to be, for me at least, decisive. Can’t take time to convince you completely (altho I think I could); but want to use this case to raise further questions abt. quality. Supposing (as I believe) that it can be proved to have been painted by Shen Ts’ang, in early 18th cent.. Does quality, aesthetic value, of ptg change? In simplest sense, no, since ptg. is same as before; and if we think of quality as immutable attribute of physical object, that’s the end of the matter. Scholars change their minds and their attributions, but nobody tells the ptg about these changes, and it stays exactly as it was.

As a physical object, that is; but as a work of art that evokes a certain kind of experience in people, it does change; and the latter is crucial to aesthetic judgements; what we know abt ptg can’t be separated from those judgements. (For readers of Dewey’s Art as Experience I will be on familiar ground; book I read long ago, which affected my thinking deeply.) Someone who has bought a fake ptg (and I hasten to say that this one isn’t a fake--honest, original and fine work of later artist, misattributed & provided with fake seals in modern times)--someone who has bought fake ptg, when this is pointed out to him, will sometimes say: I don’t care what scholars think, or who ptd it; I like the ptg, and that’s enough for me. I don’t try, in such cases, to argue with him; he has enough trouble already. But know very well it doesn’t work that way: once person who bought, let’s say, fake Wang Yuan-ch’i landscape sees enough real ones to realize truth, or is told by knowledgeable people he shows it to that it’s not genuine, there’s no way he can go on seeing it in same way; for him, not same ptg at all. (Dewey’s paradox). Li Wei ptg not diminished in quality, but seen in different context; obviously very conservative work for early 18c; remarkable, on other hand, that ptr of that period, and little-known one, can re-create Sung style so well. Re-attribution creates new set of critical problems and issues.

S,S. To balance that case, in which MFA ptg declines in age & importance when its true authorship discovered, here is another in which one rises, in my judgement at least. Handscroll w. inscription by Hung-jen, greatest of Anhui province masters of early Ch’ing, active in brief period from late 1640s to his death in 1663. Lovely ptg, but doesn’t match what we think of as Hung-jen’s style, as rep. supremely by great LS in Honolulu Acad. of Arts titled “The Coming of Autumn” When I & eight students organized exhib. of Anhui School ptg in 1981, saw & admired MFA scroll on trip to East Coast, but decided not to include in show because of uncertainly abt authenticity--looked too much like work of one of lesser masters of school; nothing to match it in Hung-jen’s accepted oeuvre.

S. In 1986, scroll by Hung-jen in same style, w. same date--spring of 1663, shortly before death (he died in summer of that year)--appeared in great exhib. at Shanghai Museum. Agrees so well, in so many points, as to force us to reconsider and probably revise our assessment of MFA scroll. Both are depictions of actual places, done presum. for owners of villas portrayed in ptgs. Known that he was travelling in spring of that year, to Lu-shan in Kiangsi province; perhaps further research (I haven’t done it) will reveal that these were ptgs done for people with whom he stayed while traveling--common practice. Ptg would then be read not for semi-abstract manipulation of forms, like Honolulu work but less successful, but for its sensitive, idealizing portrayal of real scenery, or adaptation of artist’s stylistic repertory to depiction of real scene; less radically conventionalized than usual because of this different purpose. In any case, quality of ptg in a sense enhanced by appearance of other one; gives context w/in which we understand it, perhaps removes stigma of suspicion of in-authenticity. But again, of course, ptg itself doesn’t change at all.

S,.S. Altho recognizing work as authentic doesn’t make it better, increases our expectations of quality in viewing it, since authentic work of good artist is likely to be better work, both because orig. artist presumably had some solid basis for his reputation, so that prob. better ptr than imitators; and because doing something for first time seems to endow work w. qualities we speak of as freshness, spontaneity, inventiveness, sense of artist creating before your eyes; whereas ptrs of imitations and copies slip into repetitious uses of mannered forms, and into what one speaks of “dead hand of copyist.” Exceptions: I will speak later of possibility of good or even great artist producing second-rate ptgs, sometimes by imitating himself (Ch’i Pai-shih did this in modern times). Also, always possibility that imitation can be by better artist than one to whom work is attributed. Especially possible in cases of amateur painters, as many of best artists in China were: ptrs whose strengths didn’t lie in technique.

This is famous ptg of “Five-colored Parokeet” by early 12th cent. emperor Hui-tsung, in MFA. Authenticity has been questioned by some; I myself wrote of it “Late Sung or early Yuan copy?” in my Index, on basis of style. But inclined now to think it’s prob. OK, from hand of emperor, fine work. Flatness that worried me then can be accounted for as aspect of amateurism, and of purpose of ptg: quasi-ornithological study of rare bird in aviary in imperial garden; markings and other identifying features more important than roundness, or spacious setting, or sense of life.

S,S. I could make argument for accepting it as authentic by comparison with others; this is one in Palace Museum, Beijing; but that’s not to my purpose here.

S. Seeing this ptg in Japan attrib. to Hui-tsung, quail and bit of narcissus, we may find it has more space, more roundness, more presence, than MFA ptg; but unlikely to be work of emperor’s hand. Ptg of kind brought to Japan in early times, provided with false attributions and often signatures, used as tea-ceremony hanging; other one wouldn’t do for that. Strength of image, along w. a certain subtlety and mystery, were what tea-masters wanted. So, is ptg in Japan better? By certain set of criteria, yes. Chinese would probably prefer MFA ptg; Japanese the one in Japan. Question of function inevitably intrudes on judgements of quality, whether or not we feel that in theory it should. Chinese sometimes thought of ptgs that way: said ptg of Mu-ch’i, for instance, great Ch’an Buddhist master of 13c., not for refined appreciation, good only for hanging in monk’s hut as aids to meditation. A put-down, to be sure; but also a definition of suitability to function as a criterion of quality.

S,S. I show these two details from awful handscroll in Shanghai Museum attrib. to Hui-tsung only to remark that odd argument has sometimes been made--e.g. by Osvald Siren--that most inept ptgs among works attrib. to emperor are most likely to be genuine, since he probably wasn’t very good ptr. Fallacy of that argument doesn’t need pointing out; even as imperial amateur, he needed to do ptgs that would be taken serious in age of great painting; this obviously wouldn’t have been. From acknowledging that less good ptg. could be genuine Hui-tsung, in other words, one might leap, in non-sequitur way, to saying that less good ptg should be genuine Hui-tsung. Idea of amateur artist complicates judgements of quality, but shouldn’t induce us to abandon them altogether.

S,S. Problem of amateurism arises also in case of Chao Ling-jang, slightly earlier artist; handscroll by him in MFA, signed, dtd. 1100. Chao Ling-jang was member of Sung imperial family; practiced ptg as elegant avocation (altho very serious about it--major artist, not just Sunday painter.) MFA handscroll is, to my knowledge, only work of this artist w. reliable signature; makes it important work, the work one begins with in treating him in classes or in writing. But also lovely ptg, in what was for the time a new poetic mode, a break with the dominant trad. of monumental LS. For cultured viewers, also rep. a reversion to the style of the great 8th cent. poet-painter Wang Wei. So we are told in texts; with no evidence for reconstructing the style of Wang Wei, we necessarily miss much of this allusive aspect of Chao Ling-jang’s ptg; some part of its quality doesn’t communicate itself to us. But enough does communicate to make viewing the scroll a quietly moving experience, just because of the absence of dramatic, or strikingly unusual scenery of any sort. Instead, scenery is (as Loehr put it) “Restful and gentle, not heroic but homely and intimate and protected.” In style, quality of cultivated reserve is felt in simple, slightly amateurish drawing and plain subject-matter.

S. This is ptg in same style by Li An-chung, artist of Imperial Academy, done 17 years later, in 1117 (Cleveland Museum of Art). Even though other artist (Li An-chung) is more adept at locating parts of picture in misty space, in making ground plane recede properly, etc., misses the refinements and slight quirkiness of Chao Ling-jang’s, ends up being rather bland.

S,S. (Tung C-c leaves n & r) Without leaving topic of amateurism in Ch. ptg., want to consider album of sketches by Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, done probably in 1620s (he died 1636). No insc. by him, or even sig. or seals; attrib. by style, but perfectly convincing. Its status unclear--done as models for a student, as Kung Hsien’s sketchbooks were, a bit later? Probably not. Sketches from nature? A few leaves, such as these two, might be read that way, and are as far in the direction of naturalism as Tung ever goes. But that assumption doesn’t seem applicable to any but a few of the twenty leaves. It seems most likely, given the nature of the ptgs (and the fact that they are on different paper and of different sizes & shapes) that they are simply records of the artist’s trying out small ideas, with the intent of incorporating them into finished paintings later. And the ideas are of several types.

S,S. (Leaves b & k) There are leaves in which Tung seems to be trying out the effects of different kinds of brushwork, ways of applying the ink to the paper with deft and sensitive touches, or lines, differing in ink values and in wetness or dryness. One important criterion of value in Ch. ptg is that of brushwork; for some traditional Chinese connoisseurs, it was the central criterion: good brushwork = good painting. My friend Wang Chi-ch’ien, distinguished painter and connoisseur, has a favorite analogy for making this point: (etc., about Caruso and voice in opera.) I argue with him that his analogy is faulty at both ends: because nobody who cares for opera goes only for the quality of the singing any more, if they ever did--we demand that the opera work also as drama; and in Ch ptg, a work in which only brushwork can be admired (as in these two sketches) won’t hold one’s interest for long, or qualify as really good ptg.

S,S. (leaves e, s) What we require for good ptg--and Wang, when thus pinned down, agrees--is brushwork that functions not merely as expressive in itself, as the “hand of the artist,” but functions effectively also to render forms. And that combination: brushwork that is in itself expressive, distinctive, strong, and is also effective in building forms that are expressive, distinctive, strong--seems to me a satisfactory initial statement of what, for me and many others, constitutes quality in Ch. ptg. Leaves some questions unanswered--what do you mean by brushwork expressive in itself?--but this isn’t the occasion to branch out into those large questions, except to say: we read Chinese brushwork as traces or records of movements of the artist’s hand, and read feeling and meaning empathically into these movements. And if you respond: “Oh, just like Chinese calligraphy!” I answer: No and no and no! The notion that Ch. callig. is a key to appreciating Ch ptg is a very prevalent delusion, popular because it seems to offer enlightenment without really offering much of anything. Ch. callig. and Ch. ptg are separate arts in just about every way; as I pointed out in lecture on Tung C-c delivered across the river some years ago, Ch. callig. offers no parallel to the kinds of compounding or overlaying of brushstrokes that constitutes “good brushwork” in Ch. literati ptg, quite apart from the fact that the compositional and other problems of the two arts are totally different. So this is, I think, dead end.

S,S. (leaves f & o) As with other ptgs we considered earlier, some leaves in Tung C-c’s album refer back, in their styles, to great masters of the past, enriching their content, for knowledgeable viewers, by these cultural references. Leaf on right is in manner of 11th cent. landscapist Mi Fu (as writer of inscription notes); one on left is a schematic rendering of compositional type that Tung did more completely S. in LS of 1621, designated in his insc. as “in manner of Wang Wei,” 8th cent. landscapist mentioned earlier, whom Tung took to be forefather of literati lineage of ptg in which he located himself. What Tung finds in Wang Wei very dif. from what Chao Ling-jang found in him; seem unrelated, referring to two different artists. Really matter of 17th cent. understanding, based on later imitations in absence of originals, vs. 11th cent. understanding, closer to source.

All this will seem esoteric; cultivated taste, requiring a lot of prior familiarity with ptgs & issues. Very real values, not just snobbism; but hard for outsider to penetrate. Makes ptg into an in-group art; and this is what artists and their associates in scholar-literati class intended. They argued, and traditional Ch. connoisseurs argue to this day, that this is highest taste; but we don’t have to agree. Idea that any kind of art that requires more advanced kind of appreciation, restricting audience to narrow group of cognascenti, is therefore a higher form of art, is another aesthetic delusion, or fallacy, I think. I knew a collector in Japan, a Mr. Hiraki who made his fortune with sewing machines (Brother company, which made sewing machines before they made typewriters), who had fine col. of Ming-Ch’ing ptgs. I visited him several times to see them. Then, when I came to see him one summer, to see what he’d acquired since I was last there, he told me he’d sold his M-C ptg collection in order to pursue another kind of collecting: of chashaku (etc.) So I sat there, for much longer than I wanted to, looking at these dumb little pieces of bent bamboo, and also looking at Mr. Hiraki, feeling sorry for someone who would sacrifice riches of Ming-Ch’ing ptg to collect these. I admit a certain bias myself in the matter; but I want to use this case to illustrate important issue in quality in art. Don’t be buffaloed by people who argue that recherche values are the highest values. (I don’t want to come on like Orson Welles on TV selling Gallo wine, suggesting discrimination is all snobbism; but that’s an element, surely, in too many appreciations of esoteric materials.)

S. Chinese connoisseurs who insist that the austere manner of Tung C-c and other literati ptrs is highest taste w/in Ch. ptgs can be confronted with many kinds of ptg that that taste excludes, and to which they were accordingly blinded; while Japanese, for whom they sometimes profess disdain, or foreigners, even more, have often been the ones who give these artists and paintings their due. Here is wonderful LS by Chang Hung, somewhat younger contemp. of Tung C-c, in MFA collection: “Wind in Pines at Mt. Kou-ch’ü,” painted in 1650. Admiring such a work requires that we shift gears, aesthetically, after looking at Tung Ch’i-ch’ang; we cannot look for “good brushwork” in literati sense, since there scarcely is any; we cannot talk of cultivated allusions to old ptgs, since Chang Hung (although he was quite capable of them) chooses not to introduce any.

S. (Detail: too pictorial for traditional Chinese connoisseurs.) We have to be able to say: in this case the Chinese were simply wrong, in ignoring or belittling the achievement of Chang Hung (as they were wrong about quite a few other excellent artists, over the centuries) We can take pleasure in exactly the absence of conventions and conformities to old standards that disqualifies ptg for trad. Chinese connoisseur, and admire it for freshness, unhackneyed quality, responsiveness to phenomena of nature, sheer originality. (And of course, if honest, we admit that we have our own blind spots and biases, and can be just as wrong.)

S,S. Pursuing idea of highest level of quality in Ch ptg as ideal reconciliation of brushwork values w. certain representational and pictorial values, I show pair of ptgs in MFA by T’ang Yin, great Ming master (d. 1523), which rep. that reconciliation at best. Two hanging scrolls, prob. two sec’ns of screen; sec’n w. his inscription separated, lost. Remaining two used to be catalogued as Anon Ming. Chiang Chao-shen of Palace Mus. in Taipei, later myself in book on Ming ptg, argued that these are fine works of T’ang Yin. MFA version certainly the finest; but version in China (only partly corresponding) looks, from reproduction, to be possibly genuine also. Anyway, finding structures of brushstrokes that will render forms in nature, hover between naturalistic portrayal and calligraphy, was project of Ch ptr at his best. (Putting it this way--seeing artist as if translating natural image into structure of brushstrokes, or finding brushstroke equivalents that convey attributes, visual and other, of natural materials, has brought on me charges of naivete about relations of art and nature; I know the arguments against this way of thinking and talking well enough, but am not deterred by such charges, since still seems to me true to materials themselves and our experience of them, as more “hard-minded” approaches that undermine very idea of representation are not.)

S. Another. T’ang Yin, in any case, did this supremely well: nervous energy of fluid brushline imparted to natural forms--rock, trees, vines, bamboo. Viewer experiences on two levels simultaneously, dazzled by ease with which artist creates feeling of growing life in plant subjects, of tactile surface and atmospheric space, and by fluency of brushwork. But most of all, by how these work together, neither seeming to detract from other. Relatively rare accomplishment in Ch. ptg., at least on this level.

S,S. T’ang Yin’s ptg of “Singing Bird on Branch” in Shanghai Museum has same quality of vitality in brushstroke, execution, charging image with same vitality. Strokes for branch rough, as if undisciplined; don’t connect, but cohere as if magically through continuity of movement, into image of leafy branch still wet with rain; sun comes out, bird bursts into song. Small masterwork; kind of thing lots of Ch ptrs aim at, never achieve. (Another, aesthetically very shaky criterion: artist achieves what others seem to be aiming at without achieving; therefore excellent. Don’t offer this seriously.)

S,S. Great master of this kind of ptg was Hsü Wei, active in later 16th cent: two details from great handscroll in Nanking Museum rep. flower, fruits, and vegetables: melon on vine, pomegranate. Qualities of this kind of ptg communicate themselves immediately to viewer; visually exciting; brush drawing that seems free, spontaneous, but communicates properties of things portrayed.

S,S. Then, what of ptg like this one? Fine work by Ch’iu Ying, T’ang Yin’s contemporary, in MFA: lady on verandah of upstairs room of house, looking out over river. If we adopt rhetoric used by critics to praise other kind of ptg, so-called hsieh-i, this becomes kung-pi, “fine brushwork” manner, supposed to be conservative, duller. But just dif. set of values, not dull at all. Ch’iu Ying a straightforward professional master, not, like T’ang Yin, educated & cultivated man who turned to ptg for livelihood after failing to pursue official career. Ptr in Ch’iu Ying’s situation not encouraged to display temperament in ptg style, brushwork, the way T’ang Yin and Hsü Wei did. One is scarcely conscious of Ch’iu’s hand; what one admires is exquisite refinement of form and sense of reserve in all aspects of ptg. This, too, a poetic ptg, presenting in pictorial form a them endlessly treated in poetry. (Describe). Everything in ptg contributes to perfectly-realized effect.

S. Success of Ch’iu Ying’s picture can be understood if we place it beside another of same theme by some imitator of Ch’iu’s contemporary Wen Cheng-ming; purports to be by Wen, but fake, I think. Clumsy, heavy-handed painting, ineffective in conveying idea work is supposed to convey.In any case, Ch’iu Ying, the professional, supposed to be Wen C-m’s inferior in aesthetic refinement, beats him at his own game.

S. A bit later, in late Ming, Ch’en Hung-shou does same theme a bit parodistically, tongue-in-cheek (leaf in album in Freer Gallery), raises it to high level once more; but invites different response from viewer, as if subtly making fun of Ch’iu Ying’s straight-faced version; or, more properly, at ptgs of this kind. Expression of ptg complicated, playing agst theme at same time it seems to celebrate it. But to pursue values of ironic and parodistic treatments of old themes in ptgs of Ch’en Hung-shou would take us too far afield; will only point out how, in our time, ironic treatment of old, familiar subject will often make it tolerable, even enjoyable, while straight-faced treatment of it wouldn’t be.

S,S. To suggest dif sets of values appropriate for dif. kinds of ptgs, as I’ve been doing, raises further problems; but I don’t see any way around it. Opens possibility of undermining whole idea of critical judgement by arguing always that each ptg is good of its kind, only different. And there are those who make that kind of argument. I have been engaged for some years in controversy w. one of my respected colleagues, who becomes upset when I argue that accomplishments of one ptr are not equal to those of another, or that some ptr was at his best in early & middle periods, weaker in late period, or that some school of ptg flourished at one time and declined at another. He argued in paper written for recent symposium that all judgements of quality are only expressions of subjective personal preference anyway, and that if one can’t write positively about an artist, shouldn’t write about him at all. Case in point, and focus of argument, is great Individualist master Shih-t’ao, and especially his late works, such as album dtd 1703 in MFA.

S,S. (Two more leaves.) (Etc., 1967 exhibition and symposium at U. Michigan.) More recently, in lectures given in 1979, I argued that Shih-t’ao’s works underwent general decline in late period, brought on by age & illness but also by change in way of working--he produced far more ptgs, works done quickly and somewhat repetitively; some of them can be fresh and attractive, others fall down badly--clumsy compositions, brushwork that is messy and doesn’t work to define form, in ways I suggested earlier, and as Shih-t’ao himself had done magnificently in earlier phases of his career.

S,S. (Better leaves.) And this, again, has upset some of my colleagues, who prefer to argue that these works are just as good as earlier ones, only different. Argument hard to sustain, I think, in the face of the ptgs. (Parallel, of course, w. Picasso). But in Ch. ptg., not only in this case; strong feeling agst. qualitative judgements generally in our field. Hangover, I suspect, from trad. Chinese view that any genuine work by good artist is by definition good ptg. Idea we should rid ourselves of, once and for all, I think. Range of quality within artist’s work, even best artists, very broad in China.

S,S. Related case is that of Shih-t’ao’s contemporary Cha Shih-piao. MFA has one of his finest works, done for rich collector-connoisseur Ta Chung-kuang ca. 16 . Ptg to which he devoted some time and thought; original, interesting composition, excellent brushwork by Chinese standards or ours. In later period of his life Cha Shih-piao, like Shih-t’ao, lived in Yangchou, city where people making fortunes in this period tended to congregate; demand for ptgs by new monied class there seems to have encouraged him, again like Shih-t’ao, to over-produce, lots of quickly-done works;

S. (Hackneyed one) And quality , I think, drops sharply, however one defines quality. (Simply: which work can give you most aesthetic pleasure for longer period? Whatever difficulty we have in defining quality, no question abt which ptg does that.) This practice continues in Yangchou ptg of 18th cent., and on down to modern times, when principal weakness of even major ptrs seems to be practice of ptg too many pictures of same kind, serially, relying on facility developed over the years, riding on popularity. Ch’i Pai-shih that way, others, down to our time.

S,S. To avoid ending my lecture on such a downbeat note, I will conclude with a look at a few Southern Sung ptgs in MFA associated w. Ma Yuan and Hsia Kuei, two great artists active in imperial academy in late 12th-early 13th century. These are two signed works by Ma Yuan, both fan ptgs mounted now as album leaves.

Ptg w. willows, in particular, used to be reproduced often, e.g. in general books on art that wanted to include one Ch. ptg. Very accessible ptg; everybody could see beauty of it. Then, a certain reaction against it occurred among specialists--came up at 1961 symposium in New York, and surprising vehemence of opinion agst it--not questioning authenticity, but finding it too sweet, too contrived--like turn agst. late romantic music (at one time; not so much so now.) Chinese connoisseurs tend to consign ptg of this kind to lower level of taste; some of finest examples preserved in Japan, where admiration for this kind of painting more widespread and continuous. (Chinese weak on judgements of Sung ptg; work used to rep. Ma Yuan in most Chinese publications recently is, I think, a Ming imitation.)

S. Another in collection. Such shifts in taste, and they are common enough, certainly don’t invalidate judgements of quality, nor do they lead to conclusion that one judgement is as good as another; they only make us aware that these judgements are necessarily time-bound and culture-bound, and shouldn’t be thought of as absolute or eternal. No way of escaping from this situation; to ask for judgements of quality that will hold their validity over time is like asking for judgement from God; we aren’t going to get it. Ptgs will hold their quality, of course; Ma Yuan will make a come-back, as Mahler has.

S. His contemporary Hsia Kuei has fared better, in both Chinese and foreign critical opinion; artist of greater range and depth, usually escapes from sense of artifice that one feels too often in Ma Yuan’s works. This fan ptg in MFA was discovered, some thirty years ago, to bear his signature (beneath limb of tree at right.) Belongs w. ptgs I showed earlier in which a degree of looseness in execution serves to characterize subject: wind-blown trees and house on shore in rainstorm, boat driven before wind, crests of hills above. Ma Yuan ptg seems a bit static beside it; but dif. theme, still moment in evening, returning farmer. (Hsia Kuei ptg has considerable damage, badly repaired; if mine, I’d send it off quickly to good Japanese mounter; would come back looking far better.)

S. Another ptg in MFA attrib. to him, neglected; deserves more attention. Exists in several versions; this best. LS w. returning fisherman; has moored boat, spread nets to dry; making his way twd thatched house among trees.

S,S. Album leaf (pl. 104), catalogued in old Portfolio of Ch. Ptgs as “Anon. 15th cent.” But this dating too late; good late Sung ptg, I think. Acc. to catalog, has old seals on it reading “Hsia Kuei.” In style, resembles more the works of Ma Yuan’s son Ma Lin (cf. ptg. in Cleveland Museum--less good): kind of attenuated, almost precious versions of man-contemplating-nature theme that Ma Yuan had brought to classical point of perfection--these a bit over the edge. But no reason why Hsia Kuei couldn’t have done such a ptg., perhaps late in his career, caught up in same ending-a-tradition atmosphere as Ma Lin, moving into highly abbreviated manner, reducing ptg to a few telling elements, for poignant, highly rarefied effect.

S,S. Saying that allows me to end with this ptg, album leaf, one of my favorites in MFA collection. Cat. as Anon. Sung (? pl. 142). Autumn scene, with leafy trees on shore blown in wind, leaves flying in air and floating on water; man and boatman approach shore in boat, will moor in inlet; man will make his way along path in middle ground, into foggy depths beyond. This implied passage, and way path disappears into dark, massed foliage of trees, creates remarkable sense of moodiness and nostalgia; recalls deeply-felt, slightly unsettling experiences. Parallels in method & effect with romantic poetry and ptg in West not irrelevant; Wordsworth would have appreciated it, if he could have got past initial feeling of alien imagery.

S. Detail, which conveys some of moodiness and mystery of the ptg. No sig., only a collector’s seal. Because I am so devoted to this small work, would like to be able to attrib. it to greatest artist of time, Hsia Kuei; and not just facetious suggestion; a fairly strong argument can in fact be made for that attribution, I think. Virtually every element of composition can be matched in works of Hsia Kuei.

S. Foreground bank, w. heavy contours and “nail-head” strokes on earth surfaces, sinuous outlining of trees, way of drawing roots, all paralleled in his works, e.g. this signed winter landscape fan-painting in Japanese collection.

S. Crest of hill with bushes, treatment of fog-filled middle-ground, ptg. of leafy tree, three-stage recession along shore, all elements of his style, agree with e.g. this signed ptg. in Palace Mus., Taipei.

And so on, even to such tiny details as use of split-tipped brush to paint flying autumn leaves. Can’t make the case at length here. But supposing I were to make the case convincingly; have I altered our assessment of the ptg? Yes, by placing it w/in oeuvre of major master, making us see it in relat. to his other works; creating proper context for it. And, most of all, by making people look at it, take it seriously, agree or disagree with my attribution: by forcing a reconsideration.

There is a sense in which art historians, if doing their jobs properly, create excellence, by recognizing it, defining it, persuading or even obliging others to recognize it as well, supplying proper context and clues for them to do so. Works will usually survive poorly-done or otherwise bad critical judgements unchanged--suffering only, perhaps, temporary neglect; but they will benefit from good ones, whether they modify previous assessments upwards or downwards. Or, if we can’t properly say that works of art themselves benefit, other than figuratively, we can recognize that people’s experience of them benefits. If we consider quality an aspect of experience of work of art, that is, we can affect how people experience it, thus affect its quality. And since I don’t think we can get beyond that situation anyway, in judgements of quality in works of art, we might as well accept it, even see it as justifying whole project of connoisseurship and criticism. I hope I’ve convinced some of you, at least, of that today.

Thank you.