James Cahill dies at 87; scholar of Chinese art

16.Tessai And The "No. School/So. School" Problem

16. Tessai and the "No. School/So. School" problem. Excerpts from letters to Tamaki Maeda.

Now, what I really started this to tell you is that, having just begun your dissertation (I won't write about that until I've read more), I realize that there is another issue or element in the Chinese painting connection that I think you should take into consideration. Unhappily, I can't send you anything of my own in which it's discussed in detail, for Tessai. In my small Hyakusen book, pp. 45-53 (and chart on 47) I make what I think is a crucial distinction, but one that modern writers on what Japanese Nanga artists took from Chinese painting fail to make: between the "pure" Southern School approach of Dong Qichang and followers and the Suzhou artists of late Ming whom they looked down on. (for the Chinese situation see my Distant Mts. p. 27 ff., "The Soochow-Sung-chiang Confrontation.") Writers on this subject have tended to refer to "Chinese literati painting" etc. as an entity, but this split is crucial, I think. If you have my Hyakusen handy, look at pp. 48-49 where the typical characteristics of the two directions are listed; and in the pages after I argue that Nankai, Kaiseki & others pursued the "pure Southern School:" approach, insofar as they could, while Buson, Taiga much of the time, and certainly Tessai have the good (artistic) sense not to. Particularly in his later period, Tessai does the kinds of figure and landscape-with-figure pictures that had been their specialty. Landscapes with poetic themes, Red Cliff etc. (cf. second chapter in my Lyric Journey book), P'englai and other paradise scenes, all that. And with bold uses of brush and ink and color. All anathema to Dong and followers.

When the Kyoto National Museum had a big Tessai exhibition in the 1970s? I haven't the reference, the Temple arranged for me to give a lecture at the KNM, which I did (first time) in Japanese. That's why no text survives—I realized I couldn't write it out and read it fast enough, so I just made a word list that I could refer to when I needed a word, setsuwa-teki and the like. It went over well; I used lots of slide comparisons, and my good friend Kohara, sitting in the front row (very comforting), said it was convincing. Anyway, it was on just this: how Tessai chose to follow this direction in his derivations from Chinese painting, and how it greatly enriched his works. I did find recently—copied for me by the archivist of the Freer Gallery's archive in my name (I turned over many boxes of papers to them several years ago)—a paper I wrote later (for translation into Japanese and publication in Tessai, Tokyo, Asahi Press (1973), pp. IV-VIII) that goes into this matter a bit; I'll send you a copy of that. (I don't have it digitized.)

• < Prev
• Next >