46. What I Learned From Alpers, II
Yesterday (8/31/07) I received from Jason Kuo a copy of a two-page close-typed memo I wrote to Svetlana Alpers, along with a note requesting that I supply a date for it. Trying to do this has taken me back to what was an important transitional period in my career, and it seems worthwhile to try to reconstruct it, from memory and context. What follows supplements the first part of no. 27 above, "What I Learned from Alpers and Baxandall." I have retyped the memo to make it digitally accessible; it will be on my website as CLP 180. Interested people should read that in conjunction with this account.
The paper by Svetlana to which I was responding was her "Is Art History?", published in 1977 in Daedalus. In my memo I refer to having sent her my "Levenson paper," i.e. "Style as Idea in Ming Ch'ing Painting," written for the Joseph Levenson memorial volume published in 1976 (see my Biblio. for 1976). Since we sent our papers to each other long before they appeared in print, the memo most likely dates from 1976. In my paper I had made arguments of a kind i would not make later, especially the contention that because subject matter had become so conventionalized in Ming-Qing painting (I was writing about literati painting), it accounted for little of the meaning of the work—style was the main carrier of meaning. That kind of thinking lies behind my memo to Svetlana; I said there that those who wrote about art in relation to social, political, and economic factors were telling me things about the art work that were not the ones I wanted to know, meanwhile trying to make me feel guilty for not wanting to know them. I had been put off by a paper given by Otto Karl Werkmeister, the UCLA professor who was an avowed practitioner of Marxist art history, and by the ill-attended sessions on Marxist art history that were held at College Art Assn. annual meetings.
But that way of thinking soon changed. My 1976 paper for the Wen Zhengming symposium in Ann Arbor (CLP 64 and 96, not digital; summarized in Parting, 163-66; for follow-up see *CLP 14) already argued for close correlations between the artist's place in society and the kinds of paintings he did. The introductory essay in the 1981 "Shadows of Mt. Huang" catalog tried to interrelate style both with social factors, linking the spare, linear manner with the merchants' aspirations toward higher cultural status, and with economic factors—the spread of those styles through the market network of the Huizhou (Anhui) merchants. And a diversity of forces and circumstances, the political among them, are seen as affecting stylistic choices and other aspects of painting in The Compelling Image lectures of 1979 (published in 1982). My 1985 seminar on "Political Themes in Chinese Painting," enlisting the participation of Jerome Silbergeld (who had earlier given a groundbreaking paper on political readings of Gong Xian's paintings at a symposium in Hong Kong), launched the careers of several good students, notably Scarlett Jang and Ginger Hsû. Also in 1985, I gave the keynote talk at a session on "New Directions in Chinese Art Studies," organized by Martie Powers and myself for the CAA meeting in Los Angeles, in which I tried to pull together some of these promising approaches and suggest how we might profitably make use of them. And so forth. In this context, the memo to Svetlana represents a moment of still holding back, unwilling to make the jump, unable to go much beyond the authenticity and dating studies that I still felt (and, in a sense, still feel) need to be done as underpinning for everything else.
The Writings of James Cahill 
Conclusion
VI Conclusion It is time to draw back and look, if not at the whole Hyakusen, at as much of him as we have managed to illuminate in this study. Dark areas remain, and doubtless many distortions, but...Read More...