Lecture 1 - Introduction and Pre-Han Pictorial Art

I'm James Cahill long retired professor of Chinese art history at the University of California at Berkeley living now in Vancouver and embarking on this ambitious series of recorded lectures under the title a pure and remote view visualizing early Chinese landscape painting as some of you know I've been going around for some years now complaining that Chinese painting specialists of my generation had failed to produce the kind of detailed comprehensive history of Chinese painting early Chinese painting that through the Sung dynasty that is the late 13th century that we need that we should have produced and now our younger colleagues has turned against that kind of narrative art history and they're unlikely to do it so it's in a analogy that was much cooler I said it's as though we had abandoned the practice of architecture before we have built our city and so here we are we went around for some time in the 1960s 70s doing large-scale photographing projects and cataloging projects and putting ourselves into a situation where we could have written such a history but nobody did it I myself did wrote books on later Chinese painting instead and various others that's all you know about and others wrote did good beginnings and semi complete history but at any rate nobody produced the kind of big general history that I thought I think we needed well how great is the need really in a 1999 lecture that was later published I quoted the art historian Ernst Gombrich sir-sir Ernst Gombrich about whom I'll have more to say later writing this he wrote this but only twice on this globe in ancient Greece and in Renaissance Europe have artists striven systematically through a succession of generations step-by-step to approximate their images to visible world and achieve like likenesses that might deceive the eye that's in his book called the image and the eye okay well I quoted that and then I went on to say a to add as is often true of such global statements this one needs the insertion of a single phrase except for China later I was able to meet GaN brick and talk with them and persuaded and in fact that China the other great example of this phenomenon is talking about leaving the side ancient Greece from which there isn't really enough to do much of history there are really two traditions of painting in the whole of world art that to which gum bricks pattern properly applies one of them China one of them European painting that is about us tradition in which large numbers of individual artists worked over the centuries one after another as if collectively to make their images approximate better what they see in nature I know that's a very old-fashioned formulation that is practically outmoded and almost almost a prohibited these days but I'm going to do it anyway and I'm old enough to do what I want and not worry too much about the criticism so okay histories of European painting would fill a library on the other hand for the Chinese tradition which is as great and has as many artists on we don't have one not one and that is exactly the the problem the situation that makes me feel such I feel so so much real guilt for not having written the history okay and I have here I am in my late years one of the few people on earth and maybe the only one in some ways with all the special access to materials and the training which I'll talk about through has studied with great teachers and so on feeling the sense of guilt that I didn't write the book okay well instead I'm embarking on this series of recorded lectures which as ideas I them is turning out to have bene great advantages over the book much better visuals now that's what I want to talk a bit about that is the idea of the visuals I taught a course for many times in Berkeley and sometimes elsewhere on early Chinese paintings that approximates the autumn trying to cover in this series Chinese painting through the Sung dynasty with an emphasis on the landscape and these lectures will be somewhat based on that course at the same time I have to say that they will be very heavily emphasizing and almost limited to the visuals that is to the pictures the paintings and I'm going to be presenting these paintings discussing them showing you the images showing that details from them and leaving out almost entirely the background in Chinese history and philosophy and Buddhism and all of that which I also suggest readings and you can do that you can get them that way they will bound my website and elsewhere there will be readings you can do but for the most part I have to leave that out so I have to have to emphasize that this series is not going to be the equivalent of a proper academic course and I don't I don't want to be thought of that way and a proper academic course needs lots of things that I'm not going to be able to provide I mean the interaction with the students and background lectures and all kinds of things anyway it can be a supplement to a course and if some academic professor wants to use it to have the students hot watch it and then the next day have correcting cable sections or all the mistakes I make which I'm sure are going to be a lot that's okay but it cannot be a curse in itself anyway I want to make that point very strongly I feel I will plead guilty immediately to being terribly out of date and lots of things I haven't kept up with what's happening in my field and I'm sure that I'm going to make lots of mistakes and oh people will feel miss dating things they're not using new methods not using criteria that have been developed since my time well there's no help for that I can only plead old age and decades of having turned my attention rather to the later periods of Chinese art instead of this so anyway uh and I want to make one very strong recommendation which I would make into a requirement if I could and that is don't try to take notes as I'm talking that would be that's a waste of time all the information the names dates will be on in handouts or my website or somewhere else and it you're going to be missing the point and failing to look at the paintings which is what I really want people to be doing and that the whole point of this and to keep you sort of speak the riveted of the screen watching watching the paintings I'm showing okay this combination of me talking and and you watching the picture is exactly what it's all about well first of all I want to spend a bit of time talking about my own background my teachers my predecessors how I got where I am why I feel competent at all to deliver these lectures in fact I feel as I say an obligation to do it while I still can and ask her to be patient with this as with a lot to other and me on screen talking systems in these lectures I'll try to keep them to a minimum because they're not what they're mainly supposed to be about but I want to lay out some general principles and talk about the background of the field I think that's important too I have a background there I knew a lot of the people who are the big people I'll be talking about I knew them well and I took part in the assignments and I think part of my heritage that I can pass on there's going to be that I'll begin by speaking with three people I studied with who represented at the very highest level what I take to be three great traditions of studying of Chinese painting and together they shaped my way of seeing and working and without any one of them these lectures would be very different okay I ask you to be patient with this we'll get to the paintings and works of art before a very long you can fast-forward if you want to I'm not there to watch and she see that you don't I'm going to be talking first about several of my teachers my most important teachers and this is as part of the background for the whole series background for me background for Chinese painting studies as a whole there were three of them one seen here max Laura Meckler are represented at the highest level the great German tradition of art history and European or Western art history as you know probably starts more in Germany than anywhere else I could name the great pioneers but you know them or some of you do anyway max began in Munich studying with some of the great people there he spent nine years in China as the director of a German sign illogical Institute in China during the war actually during the Second World War and was interned there - and published quite a bit at that time he he had learned the Chinese language and was able to do research in Chinese sources and that was very important max was one of the two people I think the other was Alexander Soper who must speak about in a bit one of the two people who combined first in his generation these two great disciplines artistry on the one hand and psychology or Chinese Studies on the other up to that time there was pretty much a kind of battle between them with angry charges and bad reviews and so for each of them saying the other couldn't really do the job properly because they weren't equipped the center logs because they would say the Chinese the art historians couldn't do because they couldn't read the language and the art historians would say the sign of log mr. sanella just couldn't do it because they could didn't know how to use their eyes max Laura made that charge against for instance Bernard Carl brron whom he had a great feud with at any rate lower combined the two of them and very effectively in wrote articles while he was in China on Chinese bronzes early Chinese art Chinese archeology all that using Chinese material Chinese sources in 1950-51 probably 50 51 he was repatriated went back to Munich where he had a job at the ethnological Museum there and but almost immediately left there to move to the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor to begin his teaching there and there I was in the first row on his first lecture as one of his disciples right away anyway so I studied through offer of years and years with Max Laura well he later moved to after teaching quite a few years at Michigan he moved to Harvard and taught there but until he retired here we see him outside the fog museum at Harvard that's of course she's looking very typically well dressed neat well fitting suit pressed between us is Lina Kim a Korean art historian who took her PhD at Harvard and is still active in Korea that's her son down below all right so much for now for max lure we will come back to him of course we ended up writing a book on Chinese paintings I'll talk about the next of them representing the great Japanese tradition of Chinese painting studies was Xu Jarrow Shimada senior to dinner with myself late in his life Shimada was not only for Japan but more especially for Kyoto part of a great tradition of sine illogical studies or Chinese studies he spoke Chinese badly but enthusiastically shall we say he read Chinese marvelously and he didn't publish a lot but what he did publish was extremely important the sub studies of texts as well as studies of paintings and traditions of paintings or kinds of painting and so on Shimada when I first met him I was in Kyoto was a Fulbright student in 1954 or 55 he was then working at the Kyoto National Museum as a curator but also teaching a course at Kyoto University which of course I sat in on later Shimada was forced to move came to the US he ended up teaching at Princeton this was through some misfortune in Japan and over there today that's another story and he became a much admired and much-loved teacher at Princeton and had a number of important students Shimada as you see him here he was lean and intense I always thought of him as like the great Serge Minh in Kurosawa's film Seven Samurai the one who by terrible irony is killed with a bullet from her and he had gun know nobody could best him and Serge Minh ship but he's killed by a bullet anyway Shimada had that kind of inner intensity he always seemed not quite well but he still kept kept going and kept and accomplished went along anyway that you couldn't even get something of character from the from looking at the person with who I probably put on these photographs they're all so revealing in other ways here is she mother with ha ha with his wine glass is still full and here's me with a whole row of do you want classes in front of me yeah very revealing the third person I worked with who was very important to me into the field and generally was CC 1 1 G Chen CC one born and raised in a fairly small town near Sutro near the city of Suzhou near the Great Lake the Thai who in southeast China or southern China anyway he moved to Shanghai and spent some years there and was one of the leading disciples of a major figure in Chinese collecting and connoisseurship and study of Chinese painting generally that is Wu who found Lulu Phan has recently been the subject of a very good book by Clarissa Vaughan once pay anyway important character and CC and another very important kind of surname shoe bomb da where the doer is two leading disciples you might say shoe bomb da still living in Beijing not really functioning anymore but still still alive and he remained in the Chinese mainland where CC Wong moved in 1947 to New York and Stan lived there for the rest of his life he travelled a lot he traveled to the east to Japan and eventually back to China and so on anyway he lived in New York and a large lovely apartment with his daughter and wife and eventually son he was not only a collector but also a major painter and a dealer that is he sold paintings from time to time but important groups of paintings for instance the Metropolitan Museum one Fong bought opera range sales to department about museum MCZ one so a lot of the best paintings in American collections came through him what else to say about him well ok anyway this is uh this is Cece in his late years I he was never actually a teacher in the sense of an academic teacher but I and others learned a lot from him anyway he didn't publish very much but he talked and actually one learned by looking at paintings with him that's really true of the others too I'm certainly not claiming to have combined the best of these three great traditions of scholarship that would be presumptuous and untrue but I did absorb enough from them to have some sense of these people looked at paintings thought about paintings talked about paintings by the Companions with on by studying at least of the other two or more academic scholars how paintings were understood and appreciated in each of these three great traditions I got the feeling eventually that I could look at a painting and have some sense usually of how the others how each of the others might respond to it and they would respond very differently and there are of course questions of right and wrong in a sense cc1 was a better connoisseur than either of the other two much more wide widely experienced in his connoisseurship although general I will say that the Japanese schemata were are very strong on the kinds of paintings that were preserved in Japan what we call so gamgok some grand painting as preserved in Japan that's the Japanese term that was shimada's great specialty and the great weakness of the Chinese who didn't preserve it and don't really appreciate it all that much and so on Sisi and other Chinese connoisseurs are at their strongest in Chinese painting post song really although actually early painting too sometimes and Mexico I'll talk about his strengths and weaknesses in Chinese painting here is ceasing wang at an exhibition wearing his Chinese scholars jacket at a formal event and next place here he is with my wife Shing around at the same event which is some kind of exhibition opening and I'm leaving out to other art historians of some importance Alexander show / not never a teacher of mine really though I spent time with him doing very well he taught at Bryn Mawr College and also at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York for many years edited a magazine or a journal called octopus Ozzie I published a lot did translation and are very strong our history training and Princeton actually and I'll speak about that as we especially when we come to our third lecture on Six Dynasties mating I'll talk about sober more and the other important figure is a bald sir Dan another certainly prominent figure in Chinese painting studies with whom I spent some time a lot of time basically here is Oswald Saran in his garden in China in an old old picture here he is at a private viewing in Japan with Shimada and others this shows how we often used to use scroll paintings in Japan rolling them out on the floor and kneeling on the floor to look at them rather awkward but it worked Suren born in finland but lived in Stockholm in Sweden most of his life so we think of him as a Swedish scholar he was the he you might say you could say now he did not combine Chinese choose me did not combine art history training with psychology never learned Chinese and that was a great weakness with serum he used other people he hired people to do translating for him to do research for him I was his research assistant for three months in Stockholm in the winter of 1956 working with him on what was a seven-volume last last major publication Chinese painting leading masters and principal Sweeting seven-volume art history anyway so Sharon had in some sense been a disciple of Bernard Berenson and he started out writing about Italian painting moved into Chinese and Berenson hoped I think it was who persuaded him to go into Chinese painting studies with the thought of becoming the Bernard Berenson of Chinese painting that is straightening it all out and figuring out who the great masters were and and finding where their works were listing them and deciding which of them were genuine all of that that's what sir answered have done and in fact didn't do Saran well at the end of his career after he published a seven-volume book Alexandre Soper wrote a review in our Naboo socio and which he came out and said openly sir in still alive the Saran had never really developed an eye for Chinese painting which alas is all too true the watch the limitations at suren's book view finds review try reading them okay on to the next slide and the next set of issues okay here is a lovely old photograph of a bunch of people in Taichung rather outside tide room it was a time when the Great Palace Museum collection the former Manchu Imperial collection which had been packed up and moved around during wartime great story had been moved to Taiwan orb the bulk of the book of it some things that were left behind in China I'll talk about that another time anyway moved to Taiwan was being stored outside the city of taichung in central Taiwan not yet a museum that was later they built the Palace Museum in Taipei and move the collection there but here it was in Taichung and you one had to well live anti-german and sometimes I say though both you see here go around a tropical garb actually I wrote a bicycle back and forth three tides on than this place outside where the store the the paintings were stored where the collection was stored there were caves or tunnels dug into the hillside and the things were kept there some of the time sometimes when most of time and storage rooms storage buildings outside okay myself at one end identifiable I think large ears and glasses and holding the Hat at the other end cc1 again okay I had been given the extraordinary privilege of not not of going through a lot of the collection which was mostly still stored in crates back to the also stored in crates from the time it had been moved from mainland China and I was allowed not only go through it but to publish some paintings from it many of them some of them for the first time or certainly the first in color in my scarab book the book I wrote for these series by Albert Sakura I'll talk about that later simply called Chinese painting popular famous book made my reputation I guess anyway Cici and I traveled to two Taichung together and spent some several months I guess it was the third person who was with us I mean looking at paties with us seeing just next to Cici Wong here on the left not the person looking over their shoulder the shorter man who was a mr. Jang working cirrage but the next person smiling holding his hands together at Leela and son good friend great guy he later became the vice director of the Palace Museum and the three of us Cici Wong Lee and son and myself as I say spent days looking through the collection and me with their advice in some part making selections for reproduction in the Scarab book but it was much more than that these things hadn't been gone through seriously by any you know major connoisseur like Cece Wong or a westerner like myself for you know a long long time and see us Leyland some referred to us as the three painting worms it's a term he invented by analogy with bookworm because we were so immersed so wound up it really of the painting and oh these are great days I can still remember them the excitement of seeing you know great paintings appearing for us things that were little known in the center Oh at the next standing next to me with glasses is Henry bevel Henry bevel I'll speak of him again later he is an photographer for the National Gallery at that time and he was Albert's Kyra's favorite photographer in fact he used him for most of his books Andrew bevel would travel whoever he had to go to make photographs for Albert's Kara's books photographing everything in great 8 by 10 transparencies are or whatever anyway okay that's Henry bevel in the center is Duong Yin dong xiang yang Chun yen he another great person he was then the this thin person with glasses looking out at it he was the director of the Palace Museum at that time fine man good connoisseur very helpful and fine calligrapher he wrote cooler for him the manner of the emperor weeds own slender gold calligraphy as his right as we look at the picture and I'm always going to use right and left as the picture not the writing life of the people in it to his right as Tong Tong Zhong was the director of the central MS central museum at that time and on his left of mr. Wu who was the it was a ceramics specialist I never knew him so well but he was important for ceramics and piled in front of this is all of Henry bevels equipment and here we are anyway getting ready to do our great photographing and having done a lot of her great viewing of Chinese painting this is extremely important not only for me but for Chinese painting studies generally because the collection this great collection was being opened up here's a view of the storage area of the Palace Museum collection at that time inside one of the storage buildings out located outside type John with the paintings and other objects still in the crates in which they had been packed and shipped all the way from Beijing many years before another curator is seated in the foreground I can't recall his name then later in 1961 there there was an exhibition of from the Palace Museum ah called Chinese art treasures many of you are familiar with that you see these four people will speak up in a minute are all holding the catalogue which are probably many of you know about and the exhibition opened at the National Gallery in Washington DC I was at the freer gallery than as a curator of Chinese art the freer gallery never had any outside exhibitions exhibited only its own things and so the exhibition is the National Gallery then it went on to other cities and was seen by huge numbers of people and it was the second great foreign exhibition of Chinese art I guess you would say after the 1935-36 exhibition in London which was badly marred by a very bad selection of paintings from China wrong not genuine paintings instead of the crayons this by the contrast included many of the greatest early paintings of China which were in the Palace Museum collection and are this selection that Cici Wong and Leland Sun and I had made going through them it was important to that extra Lippe I'll speak of him in a woman standing next to me the man of the mustache extra lippy and I were the people in charge of writing of doing though choosing the paintings and writing about the Mazon for the catalogue Astrid Ashwin was responsible for painting but he depended a lot on me and my writings we hadn't seen spent as much time of the collection he was a fine scholar but at any rate okay let me talk about the people over here with the glasses again is Henry bevel smiling he's the National Gallery photographers I said and over on the right bald tall looking like Daddy Warbucks sort of very impressive man fine man was his scuse me John Pope director of the freer gallery then and specialist in Chinese ceramics okay back to Ashwin lippy extra nephews was a prince actually his real proper name was Ernst rushman prinster lippe-biesterfeld ah lippe-biesterfeld was a defunct principality air Kingdom located between Holland and Germany and he was the prince of that his brother was Prince Bernhard the consort of the queen of whatever of Holland anyway extra nippy however in spite of his many actually publishes first publication was a translation of a dissertation on excuse me of a treatise on bamboo paint pushy published in Germany and he used the name Aaron Susteren printer lippe-biesterfeld by the time he gained from New York and was security at the Metropolitan Museum he was simply extra lippy I do him very well because I spent a year at the Met as a Fulbright student 1953 to 54 in the art in the Asiatic departments offices Sam was right next to him and we spend a lot of time together okay anyway here we are having having pulled together this really great extubate exhibition which opens as I say in 1961 now we made by the way a set of slides at this exhibition Henry bevel did that is the help of the freer photographer sets as a sets of slides all original slides large sets and made them available at cost as the freer gallery always did to educational institutions and museums and so on all over the country and actually abroad too and that made these great paintings available accessible for the first time in great in marvelous slides we had had to study up to that time using slides made from old black-and-white reproductions you couldn't really see the details so it was important in that way now going on I had the good fortune also to be a member of a the first delegation of art people to go to China from the US after the opening up of China and I mean the Nixon Kissin kitchen or Kissinger opening in the early 1960s this was in 1970s this was a delegation the first delegation was in 1973 and it was called an archeology delegation not me but the reason for that is because art history was not a recognized discipline in China at that time they were they had no respect for art historians but archeology was archeology revealed the past and they were much engaged into themselves and using it as propaganda for their the rest of the world and so on okay so we were an archeology delegation and we were led as I say by Sherman Lee a powerful remarkable very fine man seen here in the very center looking out at us the man with a sort of reddish face and bowtie holding his hat um he was well he was director for many years the Cleveland Art Museum he wrote the book many people use as a text on Asian art he had a remarkable range of knowledge including Indian and Japanese art and quite a lot of Western art too for that matter quite remarkable in many ways in dynamic energy great organizer everything here is Sherman Lee playing ping pong with our Chinese delegation leader on one of our stops he lost but only because as we decided any American can be beaten ping pong by any Chinese Sherman had been a champion actually as he'd been in other sports next to him also wearing glasses older man looking out at us is Larry sickman Lawrence sickman a major Pioneer scholar in Chinese art studies here is Lawrence sickman as a young art scholar seen outside a dealer shop in Roe young and next please here he is in his later years I ended up as the director of the nelson gallery leader Nelson at Kim's art museum in Kansas City and put together there a great collection of Chinese painting some of which we'll see so I'll talk more about Sigmund he Cuba's along on the on the delegation and as I say 1973 we are seen here near at one of the great sixth century stone lions outside the city of nan Jiang nan King and anyway posing for our photograph behind Sherman Lee and sickman is sure a red face dark haired is Arthur right he was not an art historian but a Chinese the story history historian of China that is teaching at Yale in his lit years behind him myself wearing a necktie glasses blue shirt and so on okay then other people at see over here to the to to the right cherub with his head turned to looking normally bald not not ball but a tall her head is Tom Lawton who became the director of the freer gallery later let's see then and over to the left wearing dark glasses and a cap and older man is Richard Rudolph who was the one real archeologist among us he had dug he had done digs in China in the old days he was older I can talk about others as we go those are those the made Ranger people now we spent a month in China going around making a tour of Chinese museums and collections other important sites on which we saw and photographed a large number of early important paintings among other things and so it was another another opening up project and led to the availability of a lot of slides or paintings they've not been available before here is the delegation visiting the Palace Museum in Beijing Sherman Lee at the left wearing a hat Arthur right Virginia cane turned away from us and next please and here are sick man Sherman Lee Tom Lawton and others entering for the first time the way wagwan or the Hall paintings at the Palace Museum where we would see major master works of painting this is a very exciting woman a the next one now mmm that looks very different indeed AHA much less organized rather disheveled look in fact obviously with a much less capable leader and organizer namely myself over here on the front right wearing the brown jacket became a little bit too small smiling anyway that's myself this is the Chinese painting old Chinese painting delegations a follow-up delegation that went to China in 1977 and by that time one could call himself an art historian or a painting specialist and we went as that I was the chair as I say next to me looking at what everybody's looking out really holding her camera is an clap who taught for many years of Wellesley College and now retired published quite a lot anyway and next to her wearing the yellow cap is Ellen lang Ellen Johnston Lang very important artist or an important specialist in Chinese painting prolific published on a lot of subjects important work she she was my vice chair for this delegation I was confronted suddenly unexpectedly at a meeting in DC washington DC and the committee that was sending us with choosing a vice chair I hadn't realized I'd needed one and looking around the table I'm seeing all the people in front of me I saw three big guns male big guns in the Chinese painting field I should speak about who were here and realized if I chose any one of them it would be somewhat disconcerting to the other two perhaps so and I said - hello I'm be my vice chair one of the few smart moves I made in that anyway okay the three I was looking at where it was tallest of all in the center back light jacket glasses tall man is month long I don't need to tell anybody who one phone is one of the really important art historians Chinese artists torian's in our field for shall we say my generation slightly younger than myself still very much alive and active next to him smiling wearing a necktie next to him to the left is Nelson woo host friend good guy underestimated early figure in the study of Chinese painting on the West he gave lectures anew while I was a student in DC and I attended and was very much impressed by and he was teaching at Yale them later he went on to Washington University and seedless and retired there he didn't publish a lot but what did wonder what he did was quite important he was someone I like like very much admire very much he did publish other things a novel and so on he's a literary person to my other things and then the third big gun to to the left of him wearing a light blue jacket tall forehead again looking out smiled open shirt is why GaN ho ho I Jenn Hui Jim Wykeham who worked were meant for many years with Sherman under Sherman Lee who have not exactly under with terminally at the Cleveland Museum of Art and then went on to but to work for some years at the Nelson gallery of Kansas City Wykeham was probably the best of us in our textual studies Chinese Chinese art studies of the time you did from books he was it was great at that and absolutely I mean be the best trained and the best scholar of that that kind among us he was more than that but that's who he was that particularly published quite a lot and anyway he's very important died tragically not not too many years ago other people in the picture I should point out okay upper right now upper right to his hair sort of slung off to one side open shirt dark jacket as Mark Wilson who was a protege of sickman and became the director of the nelson gallery and has held that poster many years and it's just just now retiring he married a student of my former student of mine anyway that's another story Mark Wilson next to him to the left of him dark hair smiling looking out rather modest tree hidden behind everybody is Susan Bush someone I like and admire enormously very important to the field co-author and major author of the book will use on trends on early Chinese text on painting I'll talk about that book as we go on susan's I say sir typically modest here anyway who else down at front center not modest at all not definitely from fronted center by choice as fashon younger scholar title from Taiwan anyway well enough of of that let's go on to see what happened the rest of the rest of the pictures here now this shows me on one of the demo it's on the county's painting delegation of course with the then director of the Palace Museum on the white air German drama left looking at a scroll painting this is not one of our proper viewings which would be very different to be held in storage rooms of very different anyway this is a formal viewing of some kind and he's showing now it's actually a painting attributed to an artist named Jones of Shem here's another view with Ellen laying in the foreground I must correct what I just said we were not being shown the great early scroll in the original of course but we're being presented formally with a facsimile of it by the palace museum's director we were allowed to make slides from everything we saw and that was extremely important we the second time they tried this tartar by saying we couldn't but I argued as the chair that we absolutely needed to because this delegation was not just for us to see things it was for our colleagues back back in the US and all around the world and that we needed sides for our tea for party Qing and study and anyway we're allowed to take sides and we shot thousands of them the details and sections of hem scrolls and leaves of albums bang bang all of us are most of adèle delegation were fnatic side makers desire myself was this is a photo of rash warts the second from the left the freer gallery photographer who carried out the great photographic project in Taichung in nineteen sixty three sixty two two three the winter myself at far right and two others out of the many who came to watch father Harry Thunder stoppin at the far left Andrew Qing Li second from the right these two month-long delegations natural 73 and 1977 along with the photographing of the Palace Museum collection in Taiwan and also the various photographing projects and photographing of collections in Japan and the US and Europe that had been accessible to us earlier gave us a new degree of visual coverage of Chinese paintings all over the world and we were in principle ready to settle back and write our histories somebody should have written as I said started out this I talk saying somebody should have written a detailed comprehensive history of Chinese painting through the end of the some dynasty from the earliest period up to the end of song the late 13th century the kind of history of these lectures will attempt to outline at least to make up for the missing books of the speech but nobody did max ler tried in his general book about which I'll speak later but went badly wrong on problems of dating an attribution of paintings I'll speak about that in many ways it's a good book but in that way it's not a good book suren's oswald suren's book books simply don't serve the purpose as you know if you've tried reading them as I say he didn't really have an eye for painting and his writing is not very interesting or very perceptive he didn't arrive at the deep understanding that should underlies such a history Michael Sullivan somebody I haven't mentioned up to now but important in our field Michael Sullivan got off to a good start with two important books on early Chinese landscape but then he didn't follow it up didn't continue into the great period in the 10th 10 to 13th centuries I myself could have made a good try etc book I mean instead I devoted my publishing efforts mainly to the later periods after the Sun and that's why as I see it we're in the predict or now in and it's a big reason why I'm doing these lectures to go some small way toward ameliorating remedying this gap in our collective knowledge and maybe to encourage some younger scholar eventually to buck the trend and write the book that we need it still can be done I mean the materials are all there the information is much better than I had in fact there's been a lot more individual studies but nobody has done the big book there are a number of very good books on Chinese art history and Chinese painting history available although not that quite corresponds to the book I think we need this general history of painting through the Sun and I'll be making references to several of these in my lectures and my handouts and I because I think they're books that many of you will have available or be able to find in the library or whatever there are many three books that I'll be talking about and referring to okay here we go first is max ler the great payers of China published in fight on press in 1980 ler as I said was my teacher and great man in this way and it's a fine book in some ways at the same time Lehrer unfortunately accepts a lot of paintings as early and as by the artists whom they're attributed to that others of us appearantly myself do not accept anymore so this book is badly marred I'm afraid by all these unfortunate choices of what should be early paintings and aren't okay I'll talk about that later and then meanwhile just refer to it as more or Laura's book secondly there's a very good book that's intended as a general text to be used in classes in Chinese art replacing older books and this is by two people Robert Thorpe and Richard vinaigrette Thorpe is especially strong in archaeology vinaigrette in later Chinese painting history theory and so on both very good scholars and I will be referring to this for its plates and sometimes for the text it is I say intended as a textbook and relatively inexpensive paperback and certainly you can use that a good account by two excellent scholar writers third and more complicated here's a collaborative work six that people actually involved in writing it titled 3000 years of Chinese painting Yale University Press 1997 it's sometimes listed with my colleague Richard Barnhart as the author but that's a matter of alphabetizing actually it was I myself who was involved in the original meeting we planned the book and I laid out what I thought was a good plan for it and suggested collaborators and we went ahead with that we'll use it for the early periods through the Song Dynasty the parts of the Tong dynasty is by mu hong who teaches at the university of chicago excellent scholar of course famous scholar the second part of the Song Dynasty by Richard Barnhart close colleagues good friends sometimes argue of arguments between us but anyway he's now retired from teaching at Yale University for many years - excellent scholars they were as I say my own recommendations for writing these sections so that if in talking about them I differ on some points or say the three thousand years book says something but I think something this is an X period of good scholarly disagreement and scholarly respect I'm not in any way putting them down that is okay I'll also speak later about a introduction to this book which I think you should read by myself that's important for us is my own old Skara book Chinese painting here it is the original edition published in 1960 written actually while I was still doing my doctoral dissertation very early work written in the late 1950s it's a quite excellent color plate especially for the time so this is a kind of a breakthrough and the publication of early Chinese painting in really good plates tipped on on the pages as you use if you know it does also come out in a cheaper well I don't have it here a paperback edition which many of you can buy it's generally available at any rate it's a it's an old book but still useful for some for those pictures mainly I will have references on some of my handouts to and the website maybe to the book by Oswald Saran a scholar I'll be talking about as I as we go on or have already talked about excuse me titled Chinese painting leading masters in principle seven volumes I will use it only for the plates actually the volume three is the volume for the early play so if I use the terms to rim I mean volume three plate something are there the plates are very good and reproduce a lot of things that are not otherwise easily accessible and finally the cut a kind of semi catalog book by my major colleague one long very very famous I don't need to speak much about him major scholar taught at Princeton for many years now retired now in China title of beyond representation this is in some sense a catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum in New York of their collection of early Chinese paintings well actually put together by him it's more than a catalog really however it goes some way toward being the history of Chinese painting from the age of the 14th centuries the kind of history I think we need but and although it has lots of valuable information and observation translations of texts and so on and as strong as I am NOT on calligraphy I never was and cannot pretend to be strong in calligraphy one thumb definitely is Richard Bernhardt others but the book nonetheless doesn't quite fulfill the function of the general history of really Chinese painting that I think we need and I differ from one phone on some matters as everybody knows so I recommend it generally without using it as a background background text also to be recommended here are books by Michael Sullivan I don't have copies to show you Michael Sullivan now retired living in Cambridge Oxford in England England and taught for some years at Stanford and so on books when titled the birth of when scape painting in China 1962 and a follow up book called Chinese landscape painting vol 2 the sway and tonk dynasties 1980 he also wrote a more general book titled symbols of eternity the art of when scape painting in China in 1979 these are important books but they don't quite make up what I take to be the missing comprehensive history of Chinese painting they stopped at the Tong dynasty and otherwise they're rather different from what I'm going to do okay some general general reading anybody who wants to follow these lectures and gain some understanding of the development of painting especially landscape painting through some should have some background information on on Chinese pay the materials that uses the forms that are used and so on things like that more than I'm going to be able to convey in my lectures so I recommend strongly that you do a toward the beginning separately readings to fill this these matters in I can't do them my lectures I'll be putting recommended readings my website to accompany the lectures that we go on but to begin with I want to recommend rather highly that you read the introductory lecture in there are 3,000 years book by myself at the beginning of the book this is on pages 5 to 12 called approaches to Chinese painting that talks a lot about forms and materials and all the matters and ways in which it differs from European paintings that we used to also where is it now demo oh yes underneath here and three also on the matters of how Chinese painting differs from Western painting and on other ways or this is very good book by Jerome silver gal Jerome silver-gilt younger colleague very respected good friend still teaching at Princeton University but early on he wrote this book called Chinese painting style and 1982 University of Washington press now both pieces of writing as I say outline the forms and which Chinese paintings are made and the tools and the material and the convince that uses something about how it differs from the European and American painting that we're familiar with on that matter how Chinese painting differs in big ways from Western painting I want to say a few words before we go on and that is I believe strongly that we need to steer clear of certain Chinese popular formulations that started out as poetic truths and have become have come to be taken as though they were somehow historical truths are absolute truths and have been delivered endlessly over and over again as great truths about the subject and I have throughout my career tended to hot downplay these a bit writing and painting have a single origin no they don't they're very separate and different arts that's one of them writing and painting them single origin no there's separate profoundly different arts I'll talk about that as we go on Chinese painting doesn't depict the outer forms that depicts the inner essence of the things well okay when I was a teacher I used to tell the students that if any one of them put any form of that at any one of their papers they're going to get some very rude remarks in the margin it's not that it's totally without truth but it's one of those big cliches that stifle thinking I think the old myth about the spiritual East and the materialist West forget it none of those really all of them are simplistic none of them really help very much in my opinion they're misleading now we go on about this series and we begin to look now here's a painting for the first time very important painting - okay here we see the whole painting and a detail from it this is it's actually attributed to a early song artist named Xiu Shi but that's some fairly meaningless attribution in fact it's an anonymous painting in the Shanghai Museum which I would date to the 10th 11th century and a detail that it represents you see bamboo and old tree by by a rock and it's painted in ink on silk and I've used it in various contexts often to represent what seems to be the apogee or high point of realism or life whiteness or truth to nature whatever we want to call it in Chinese painting along with some landscapes the same period which we'll see him talk about a great length it dedicated to portraying the natural world with deep understanding as well as a remarkable degree of visual faithfulness they say whatever we want to call this again this is an unfashionable idea good graduate students back when I was still teaching at Berkeley especially in the late period tried very hard to convince me that it was meaningless to talk about different degrees of life likeness since all representation is convention they would argue I can't reproduce their arguments because I never could believe it since all representation is convention anyway one picture is as lifelike as any other still doesn't make sense to me but even really high-class very good people made the argument I remember Joseph Turner who went on to teach at Harvard also my future daughter-in-law a wonderful young scholar anyway making making this argument but I shall I shall can't reproduce and I don't can't quite believe it ok now this is the there is this great I think anonymous painting in the detail it's very hard to hard to see how it was done you can say it was done by some technique and resist that is as if you painted on the silk with wax or something else that resisted the ink and then you painted an inkwell but ok maybe so wood that doesn't go very far to explaining this to accounting because how this picture we've done it as I say kind of high point of whole what do we call it visual truthfulness something something and now next to it I put na what is this this is a hand scroll I'll talk later about a hand scroll is a horizontal scroll painting an income paper supposed to be by maybe really by the great 11th century statesman poet su-sure or pseudonym paw well known to all Chinese and it's in the Shanghai Museum and it represents again bamboo tree and rock the bamboos rather low hairs growing under the ground the old tree twisting around and rock down below this is a subject that su su Dongpo seems to obtain it often he also painted bamboo by itself he had very limited range of subjects but anyway the point wasn't to represent the thing one the one picture the one attributed to xuxa he has an almost photographic realism I would call it the other one by Sutra or buyer maybe by su Dongpo not realistic at all anything but rather anti realistic but he his paintings are not supposed to be representational II truthful it was the last thing he wanted he was a bit of an early figure prickly the beginning figure and what came to be a great tradition school whatever you want to call it a scholar amateur painting painting by educated cultivated men who were not trained as professionals professional artists that is okay we'll talk about that later in the course and talk about it a great length but it eventually becomes the mainstream of Chinese painter what is perceived as the mainstream from the ground dynasty on after the after the end of this lecture series actually okay without talking about that at Legg which comes later I simply want to say that that this is two profoundly different kinds of painting and once once this type that represented by pseudonym post painting was accepted as potentially great painting everything everything changes now any Chinese connoisseur any traditional Chinese connoisseur confronted with these two paintings saying which one do you want would immediately choose the suitable the su sure it's a it's a very old painting has been much much damaged and retouch but still or maybe a su dongpo painting under it this painting was intended not to be descriptive but to be expressive his friend me Fuu famous calligrapher painter anyway theorist on and all that be Fuu said those should impose paintings that the rocks and trees in them were all coiled up like the sorrows in his breast that's something like that I quote it from memory so it's expressive as I say this one has author seals I'll talk about seals from we talk about other paintings red marks at the beginning and end and lots of inscriptions attached to it whereas the other one is completely bare it has a tiny little inscription I'll talk about later and we come to it but completely bare of any appreciated appreciation of any signs of appreciations come down through the centuries unnoticed practically suddenly published for the first time in the 1950s I remember at any rate these two rays very powerfully I think the issue of well life likeness realism naturalism fidelity to nature whatever we want to call it I'm not going to worry about terms at a symposium a few years ago and Princeton of farewell symposium for one fall on his retirement dick Bernhardt my colleague gave a paper on he called it mimesis in some painting mimetic with another word for resemblance whatever may have one thing look like another thing imitation and it was jumped on by the use by the usual people the usual reasons because we aren't we're who we aren't supposed to be using that technique that what that it's concept I mean it in popular the famous art historian Ernst Gombrich known to many of you German art historian lived in England most of his life much of his life in his book art and illusion 1960 and in his other writings sets forth a pattern of development within an artistic creation in which each significant artist tries to adjust the scheme motto or other representational conventions that he inherits from the past to bring them up closer to natural appearances as he observes them by looking out at nature and through this process he and others gradually move toward greater realism as a kind of progress I hasten to say that I don't mean and Gombrich certainly didn't mean we didn't attach we don't attach positive value to judgments of more or less realistic more or less true to nature moral more realistic art isn't necessarily better art for him or for me I yield to nobody in my admiration for Japanese painting including some of the farthest from realism like grandpa or some schools of non gosh some types of manga I respect Indian and Persian and Islamic painting a lot without really understanding that as much as I do East Asian painting I'm excited by cubism and Picasso and all the rest of motifs and so forth okay so it isn't just a matter of I'm not he isn't saying I'm not saying more realistic is better but anyway this pattern of movement toward more and more true to true to life painting is set up by gum brick in this matter of this pattern of what he called schema and correction that is the inherited schema or conventions and they are the corrections the artists you make to make them more realistic okay this is very unpopular gum brick is very unpopular gum brick ended up you know from practically practically ostracized from the artistry hard history profession by the more progressive people just because the kind of art history he was doing and theorizing about wasn't popular anymore I used to joke with my students that that Gombrich bashing had been become part of the undergraduate major that is you had to and in the undergraduate curriculum you had to learn how to criticize gum break to be a respected art historian I said that with some irony some bitterness I don't believe we deserved it I believe it's still a lot to be said for that kind of approach in what I'm leading up to saying this is the kind of approach that I myself am going to be using in this in this series like it or not I mean I get jumped on for it or not and I probably will be alright okay here is a pair of landscape paintings one of them colorful the one on the left colorful linear in a tongue style that is eighth century style probably a copy but early copy after a work of that period I'll show this at length and talk about it later very famous meeting and the one on the right from the 11th century this one by a known artist in an individual artist who in fact signs that adds the date and even a title so we know it's by gouache II and that it's Payton 1072 and it was titled early spring I'll talk a lot about this matings one of our grand masterpieces ok gum brick was coming to realize late in his life that the only other artistic tradition of painting in world art other than the European tradition that is the only other one that follows this pattern stretching over centuries and engaging a large number of artists and movements and produces a great amount of great painting to arrive finally at a very high degree realism the only other one is Chinese painting columbic realized this I realized it as part of the reason I'm attempting this series really because where as I've said where European painting has histories and histories and histories and it's all laid out and we know exactly how you get from Giotto to Michelangelo's a Chinese painting doesn't have this that isn't all laid out there is an agreement and so on okay anyway so even though this pattern is unfashionable and for some people even objectionable I'm going to be following it in my in my lectures because both because I believe it still has a great value and embodies a certain degree of truth and also because it isn't being done very much today and I think it needs to be so for better or worse I'm going to be taking a very Gombrich IAM view of chinese painting history of chinese mating even even to say history my colleagues spent on Albers published an article called is artists knows our history something like that raising the whole question of whether you can have a history of art and everybody a lot of people since then it or don't even raise the question to say no narrative art history put make stories about the paintings there from one painting to the next is is out out out okay for me it isn't what I'm saying now then next slide here this is the painting an ink on paper whereas the others were on silk a ink on paper from the late 12th early 13th century by a great master named shog way this is a section of a hand scroll representing a Buddhist temple among the trees among the little groves by the by the by the riverside with visitors in the foreground to right now how I'll talk about this hands go at great length this one my favorite works to art anywhere is called titled a pure and remote view of streams and mountains my I took the I took the saddle this whole series from that simply because it's one of my favorite works of all a pure and remote view change Keyshawn Tring around to anyway and d'études sa to the a12 early 13th century early 13th more likely okay in comp paper and this is as different from gouache Ria's gouache she was different from the colorful style of the first of the other painting that we saw and then actually this is is not not far past this point where we will end the course and in fact Chinese landscape painting the 13th century deals very heavily and mists and obscure distances and things seen only things glimpsed only fitfully through miss atmospheric perspective atmospheric dimming all of that anyway and at the one scape almost seems to trail off into the distance the way the painting does so I hope you'll be very sorry to see it see it M if if you are not all being I will have failed anyway you see here how they have mastered the technique of using ink monochrome at a very high level to take you back distance along with a receding shoreline of sharply drawn darkly drawn fishing boats in the foreground going back along the sharp fisherman with nets a fishing village in the middle distance among the trees still further back on the left now upper left a walled village with a gate which can barely see in buildings and then if we were to continue it would dissolve missed altogether okay it's I am kind of suggested already a kind of developmental pattern within the history of Chinese painting through the some dynasty which is not only I think clearly discernible recognizable in the paintings themselves properly understood it's also a reinforced trial try to bring out as we go on in the writings of Chinese critics and theorists who recognize that some period when scape could capture depths and nuances and subtleties of natural scenery that made earlier landscape like the colorful picture we saw landscape of the Tong dynasty look childish and artificial that they had made we can call in quotation marks progress they've moved to a greater naturalness a greater greater capacity for expressing profound ideas among the artists well talk a lot about that the practice of the artist that is is recognized and backed up by writings by the art critics and theorists of the time and we have a series of what are in effect art historical accounts it preserved from the ninth century onward the great literature of early painting Chinese ideas of truth to nature are not the same as Western ideas of course there's a different aesthetic the idea of naturalness is more central to their thinking the idea of avoiding the look of man-made things and so on all this will be in my discussions as we go along and in fact I'll talk a lot about it but the the point is my point is that the theorists and historians are to story and so to speak recognize that the painters collectively had achieved this kind of quasi progress toward realism so the art historical narrative sequence that I'll be trying to bring out clearly in considering the paintings with some references to contemporary writings is not by any means a pattern imposed on the materials by foreign artists Aryans as some ideological motivated writers used to charge claiming that Western artists torrents of trying to overlay the Chinese tradition of painting with developmental patterns that they had adopted from Wolff alone and other historians we are P&R that was charged it is not I think true in if um after watching and listening through this series still believing something like that well you haven't looked and listened carefully enough right have failed one of the other again I have to emphasize that I'm not attaching value judgments to this historical process I don't mean the Chinese meeting up better and better as the centuries passed figure painting a certainly finer in the Tong period than later lots of people think that gouache II is a greater artist and shog way just as many people prefer Botticelli to Raphael let's say I'm talking about a kind of continuous quasi logical movement toward greater and greater truth to nature now I'll speak briefly about the principle to love Chinese painting the brush the picture on the right is - the drawing is from Jerome silver Goats book figure - and title brush structures and dynamics the picture on the left actual brushes as the way they were exhibited at the freer gallery way back anyway the Chinese brush a wonderful instrument the brush tip is conical that is round in section throughout not flat like some western brushes used for oil painting and so on and touched lightly on the paper or silk moves it moves smoothly around it produces a fine line that way put on more pressure and the stroke thickens it has a perfect fluidity of movement it can go equally in any direction without without any difficulty it holds a lot of ink because it's made with a kind of cavity in the center the holds anchor color so Chinese painting begins as I began my old Sakura Chinese painting book it's an art of line so I said and there's some truth in that although as we'll see quickly there's is also a limited truth that is they outline forms in line to depict them to make pictures of them but brushstrokes in Chinese painting very early begin to depart in various ways from strict line as we'll see anyways now we'll go back to looking at the earliest examples of painting in China next slides here to painted pots from the neolithic period from maybe 6,000 years ago bon pau a neolithic site up near the city of Xian and there's a good long discussion of Chinese new I think made it pops in the Thorpe and vinaigrette book which you can read this bowl on the left has painted on it a mask as you see probably representing an extra mask worn by some kind of shaman or a magician or whatever and also a square with cross hatching and triangles at the corners that is sometimes replaced in some of these pops by a fish which has the same shape essentially but the the triangles are turned into fins and tail and head this kind of morphology from pure design to image spec to pure design is very important in early Chinese art including bronze proms decor and used to play a big part in my lectures here is another Bond paw Bowl in which a clear image of a fish appears in place of the rectangle so the interchange and next here's a pair of bowls showing the interchange of recognizable fish and abstract design put that way by the Chinese curators that is to make this point well the the chain should go either way image to design or design to image that is the morphology of form images and design forms in early Chinese art went both ways this pot isn't from bon paw but from a different site and a summit leader although still Neolithic I used to use this and put this slide on the screen to talk about their big question which for me as a real question of what is art how do you recognize a work of art i it not a popular question it's not even allowable question now and yet I think it's still important and I would still attempt answers they wouldn't be the same as everybody his answers but you know the I would do it and I believe it's a real question now for me this I would put this on and say no in what way is this a work of art the painter whoever he or she may have been I say you know it's he because throughout this course pretty much I'm going to go to simply say he because of the likelihood of female painters is small but anyway the artist in a rhyming artist in this case who painted this spot had something like an artistic sensibility I mean he is too early to talk about that really but and this works spray interestingly compellingly even visually first of all the whole design works against and with the shape of the vessel very effectively certain tension between them it looks at first like it's bilaterally symmetrical that is weed side mirroring the other but it isn't really then it looks as if they're kind of mirror image what is dark on one side is light on the other but it isn't that either it looks as though it has a eyes like it's a mask but not quite and everything about it there's subtleties and tensions and ambiguities that hold our interest and make us look at it and so for me this is this is the kind of thing that constitutes art the work of art is that which creates the experience of art which is that are etc then he traded to find it okay enough for that I should add here that some of the bum paw pots have scratched marks on them that some people have taken to be an early form of writing and that may well be long ago at a symposium on calligraphy at Yale University somebody had given a paper on the bum paw pots on these scratches and so forth and I suggested that we should recognize that here is the eye match book up after the paper and said that here we see what seems to be the earliest form of writing in China and the earliest form of painting in China that was true at that time and they were totally different not technically stylistically everything and this meant that this old thing about how painting and calligraphy have us have a single origin has to be regarded as a poetic truth but not as something we really believe oh boy I caught a big furor surprising that these old saws is old some statements have such a passionate following Fred Wong Wong Fong you who was a major scholar calligrapher and some of you know him he spoke up and said Jim you simply have to go back further and then they do start together they are they do have a single origin and so well okay leaving that aside that's not our subject but I generally tend to to what to reject or argue against these old cliches as things that kind of block our understanding more than they advanced it now going on here is the next here you recognize these people this is the part of the famous terracotta army of qin qiong d the first emperor of the Qin located near Xian found in pits around his tomb which around 210 BC as you find these reproduced everywhere there were some 5000 of these figures full size originally painted in in realistic colors looking as though they were all different at first it turns out that they're not all different that parts of them were made in molds but they're combined in different ways and there's so many of them they have the effect of looking like a bunch of individuals or reproductions of individual soldiers remarkable technically all they were made is still something of a mystery ceramicists can't figure out how they were done the they may have had to employ some hundreds of thousands of work maybe 10 or 20 years to Bruce all these as still as I say baffles ceramics specialists well so why do I put these people on the screen to make a very simple but important point and that is that realism and sculpture is relatively easy and it's achieved in China relatively early this is way back at the end of the Dro dynasty or in the beginning of the qin long before anything comparable as possible in painting and why is it possible because I say a realism in sculpture is relatively easy if you want to make a realistic sculpture of a man all you have to do really is take a man or a corpse of a man push it down into the mud or into the clay make a mob mold and then cast a sculpture from it the French sculptor Rodin was accused of doing that in the late 19th century I think it's his famous portrait of the nude Balzac at any rate Rodin is supposed to have done that he didn't really but he had to make a real casting of a human being to prove to them that it didn't look like this at all at any rate it can be done you simply imitate the real thing and you keep working at it until you have a clay image that is the same shape basically as the real thing with armor these people are all carrying bronze weapons and so on well I used to make an imaginary story for my students in which the first emperor of the Qin calls together all his artisans big gang of them and he says to them ok you guys are going to make me a terracotta reproduction of my army to bury around my tomb and I'm going to come back here in 10 years and I'm going to put your figures over here and I want to put my army over there and if I can tell the difference off go your heads centuries of progress toward realism in sculpture would be sandwiched into a mirror decade well it was a joke but there's some truth in it a painting you cannot simply look at something and paint a picture of it you can sort of draw the outline that's about as far as you can go but all the problems of representing representing three dimensions or volumetric three-dimensional objects on a flat surface or representing space or of relating things in space although the problems and the texturing and shadows rubbish so shading and all that these are all things the artists have to work out slowly and and you know over a period a long time so then that is what we'll be following up as we go so I put the figures on simply to make this as a simple but important point and here is a bronze vessel also from the Late Show or the Qin period in the shape of a rhinoceros very realistic as you see I put this on is another example of how sculpture can develop realistic styles far earlier than painting can now next slides please two objects here the one is a inlaid silver inlay design and a bronze of vessel the type called bien who flat who the famous piece in the freer gallery 5th 4th century BC or so and a design on a lacquer dish from a place called Cheung sha maybe a bit later but still like Jo probably with a design on it that is originally from animal or figures that have been dissolved into pure design now I put these on to call your attention to an article that maxilla are published in 1968 in the archives of the Chinese artists ayat II of America titled the fate of the ornament in Chinese art one of the many really profound and valuable publications that Max lor made he his observation is profound and true and that is that the early P in the early periods of Chinese art the great bronzes and Jade's and things and other materials from early China it's a an ornamental art that prevails and the artist is primarily ornamental not pictorial if the bronze elements look like pictures that's almost good say deceptive Laura got into a lot of trouble for suggesting that but and that's another issue at any rate that you have primarily an ornamental art coming down through the early centuries of of Chinese civilization Chinese culture and that is only gradually and late from the late Joe on shall we say that it gradually comes to be replaced by a pictorial art in which pictures predominate these these ornamental designs that we see that we are very highly evolved sophisticated way beyond anything in pictorial art of the time so see in a moment so then how did pictorial art and trying to begin really the earliest stirrings of it may have come from outside from the nomadic culture to the north and the east of China the designs of the so called hunting style bronzes I won't stop to make the argument without a length is just something I believe and I won't stop there it's not crucial to our subject so I'm not going to argue about it at length now anyway here is a bronze who vessel who type and with it a detail of the of the design this is a very simple one some of them are more complicated than this but so these may have had some kind of in way at an early point now they're just beyond design to us or some and ground and slightly raised figures okay some of them show hunting scenes a figure confronting a an animal the spear or here a figure with a bird's head firing an arrow at a monster figure at the other side and so on in images of this kind and they are probably they they repeat on the vessel and from one vessel to the next and are probably made with a some kind of stencil or stamp and so on and they come presumably from the northern from the north and east of of China and belong originally with these nomadic cultures and come down into China that's a big subject which I'm not going to talk about but it's interesting that the beginnings of Chinese pictorial artists we can see them here really may not be properly Chinese at all okay now on to the next one here is a another vessel of the type who with a much more elaborate design probably a bit later maxilla are always called with the Y awnings who yawn and jnn ing s because it was owned part of the collection of a collector in Beijing and when he was there called burner yawning z-- he was the brother of the great actor a mill a awnings Amalie awnings as the old professor who is captivated by Marlene Dietrich in blue angel also plays and the last laugh Faust other things anyway vendor e awnings had this important bronze collection had to leave it behind when he was repatriated elect ler back to Germany and is now in the Palace Museum in Beijing and it's a famous vessel and the the vessel and the picture of the drawings of the design on it are published in most old books as part of the beginnings of Chinese pictorial art it takes us a little past the hunting style bronze there's quite a long ways past actually in that now the images although similar are organized into pictures into more elaborate designs by ground lines or the lines that represent the decks of boats or a wall or whatever and the figures are arranged on them it's all very much flat and two-dimensional still of course and this one on the lower register we see a battle going on between two boats and the people up on top are wielding Spears and hooks people down below rowing a man in the water between them and anyway about old boats on the other side on the left side it's a battle going on people trying to scale a wall the defenders up on the top with daggers and Spears and so on defending the wall others down below climbing up scaling ladders and so on a battle and up above here on the upper left for instance you see very interesting scene and we'll see it a bit better in a detail in a minute of a building a two-story building seen in pure elevation simple profile as if open and down below people are beating are striking on suspended bells and and sounding stones and up above people who are performing some kind of ceremony and elsewhere you have archers firing up into the air shooting down birds with weighted arrows and so on in other words see the figures are still flat and simple and repeated but they are being organized into early forms of pictures okay here is a detail this is this from a similar vessel on which the end way is still there I think that there's gold inlay over the sahibs up there may be some metal copper inlay on this case there's one vessel with gold inlay similar at any rate inlay and bronze from the elite delay control period and this is the this shows the battle on the on the wall the figures on top will Bron brandishing their weapons fighting off the people who are climbing up these scaling ladders and so on down below flat two-dimensional and here another detail and this shows that building two-story building in the lower storey to the left people striking on bells of different-sized which were hung in series and struck to make a scale note our von Falcon house and at the University of California in Los Angeles a certain a book on these very Verne dude and telling what you want to know about them and here is an actual set of bells and the stands archaeological recovered and a great tomb fine from the weight Joe period and others on the right striking sounding stones here is a set of sounding stone suspended on a reconstructed stand over Ferrara right you see a drum suspended and people on both sides of the striking the drum and here we see a real drum stand from the late Joe tomb and a I think it must be a reconstructed drum the drum would be put on the standard looked like something like what we see in the painting and then up on the second story some kind of ritual going on hard to say ceremony sacrifice anyway all right full of movement now and as I say being organized data pictures ok onward from that now we begin to get into real painting we have quite a lot of painting from the late Joe period actually earlier too but especially Joe in lacquer lacquer which is the made from the SAP of the lacquer bush colored with mineral pigments red and brown and black principally lacquer is a very inert substance once it is hardened and so lacquer lasts very well on been pictures made of lacquer have been preserved where pictures on soap and paper largely heaven we have a couple of survivals that's quite remarkable okay these are some fragments of painted lacquer from a late Joe period maybe fourth century BC or so I forget exactly or something like that any of these were from the north I think actually very well preserved as I say up here in the upper left a figure some kind of shaman or magician may be standing on a platform red and seemingly conjuring up or raising a dragon which appears in front of them holding some kind of scepter to the right of that is somebody shooting an arrow at a monster or an animal down below to the left two people carrying an animal they've slain over their shoulder on a pole and then various monster very much collective three-dimensional monsters which were found in late Joe tooms sometimes okay these are still flat and interesting lively pictures but then more remarkable now we can finally get into real into real paintings the first of them there are two of them and they were both found at a place called Cheung sha or near Cheung sha down in southeast China you can find it on the map I'm not going to show a map down in Hunan Province and marshy ground there and some extraordinary system of burial which allowed tombs from the late Jo and Han periods that is the centuries BC and immediately ad to be remarkably preserved so that ordinarily perishable materials in the Mike wood and silk fabric and soap paintings and so on have been seemingly miraculously preserved it's been any of the next lecture we're going to see actually the marvelously preserved body of one of the occupants of the tomb that that will come that will come next lecture which is on the Han Dynasty art of the Han Dynasty but from the late Jo dynasty we have two remarkable paintings quite amazingly preserved which allow us to see actual painting of the Late Show period some of my third century BC into the Jo dynasty their material is silk in both cases a line drawing and ink more than line drawing the other one we'll see in a bit but essentially line drawing and some pigment the pigment is still preserved it's hard to see here but it really gives us sense so what Late Show painting looked like now one of them the one we're now looking at is painted on silk USA with ink and some pigment represents a man holding a sword perhaps the occupant of the tomb may be being carried into the afterlife hard to say I'm not going to be trying interpretation as we go on I won't be talking about the subject I'm talking style the whole courses I've said many times happens it enough it's going to be visual visual visual it's going to be looking and I'm going to be talking about looking and helping you look and pointing out things you can see if you look hard and so on okay anyway he's writing in this dragon which is rather like a boat behind him perched on the Dragons tail is what appears to be a crane and an umbrella up above covers over them all long in the 3,000 years book pay 21 quotes mentions of painting an artist from hung period weddings and these are these are interesting mostly they speak of collaborative projects artisan work not individual artists but there's also and he quotes it a remarkable anecdote found in a text ascribed to the Taoist philosopher janja the Taoist philosopher many of you know the book of Jenga a late Joe period our Whaley translated some of drones anyway and in this anecdote the ruler of a one of the states of that time the son state needs to have a painting done so he calls his artists together they all come following a scraping and showing off their skills and so on but one of them arrives late he takes off his outer clothes and he sprawls comfortably outside in no hurry to present himself aha says the ruler that is the true artist and he hires him to do the job well that's a remarkable story for so early a period the idea of the artist as an exceptional being will continue turn up turn up and writings or the later period as we'll see okay and that raises the question how can this nonconformist artist painting have been different from the painting of the common artisans not a question we can answer we don't have enough except by looking at the paintings of this time and using this using them to suggest possibilities unfortunately as I say we now have a very few actual paintings from light show notably these to this picture and another here is a detail by the way of the of the one of the man with a sword writing on the dragon it's done as you see an outline fine line even line generally and with addition of some color there the other one here seeing the whole thing putting the two together the other one represents a woman perhaps a shamaness standing with her arm raised and conjuring up maybe a dragon and Phoenix making them appear before her it's a little like one of the things we saw in the painted lacquer where somebody seems to be conjuring up a dragon this is this is slightly smaller than the other one the other one the move the man is about 37 centimeters high this one's about 31 centimeters high okay it's important to note here by the way that the images I use are going to be made mostly from sides some of them from reproductions will vary very widely and wildly and color lighting and fidelity to the original and every possible respect there's no help with that there's I'm not making any claims for accuracy of color or general look sides that transmitted the real look of the painting might be invisible or hard to see on the cinema screen so to speak all sir is serious students of Chinese painting have to spend a lot of time looking at originals in museums or wherever they can see them and I certainly advise you to do that don't take the sides or they're reproductions of visually truthful they will tell you things about the painting that I can be showing you and particularly slides made close up from the original now the slides I'm going to be showing of this painting of the woman are the first ones made from the from an original painting we'll see lots of them throughout the course which I myself or somebody else made from the original painting going enclosed with a flash gun with a backlight for details and these can reveal features of the painting that are hard to see if you have the original in front of you anyway here is the woman and I put her beside the man the two of them the writer of the three thousand years text reproduces both of these and then writes quote the two paintings share drawing techniques in a compositional formula images are outlined in a blank blank blank etc continuing the main difference between these works lies in the degree of artistry the female figure appears as a silhouette the outlines are rather coarse and uneven apparently by an unassured hand end quote well I can see how one might make that judgment from a reproduction but I would differ from it and judge the painting different and I'll take you closer into the painting using detail slides that I was able to make from the original long ago and show you why I feel that way it's true that it's less than the repeating of the woman is less firmly defined and the less substantial image than that of the man writing the dragon it's not drawn in the same kind of controlled fine line but this can also be seen as a deliberate difference in style okay here we go on now to another slide from the shramana picture of the shamaness letting a little closer she stands with her arm raised wearing a robe and in front of her this great bird I'll call Phoenix for convenience and the dragon predator off writhing as though as I say she is somehow conjuring them up okay here is a close-up of the woman with and her robe now we begin to see the drawing how the artist is used a brush and partly is to fill in black in the outlines partly it's just to outline that is to define the forms by drawing lines around them I started my scarab book by saying that to paint is quoting an old text saying to painters to draw outline something like that oh that's true is now as I say I come to realize that it isn't only that after the Chinese artists from very early times you're doing more than that come on now the next slide now we're getting enclosed we see closer the woman's head and hand and so on now we see that the line differs and you remember the slide showing how the brush was used you push a little harder on the brush and it becomes a thicker line you put rays that are you touch lightly into the thin line where the artist draws the woman's hand with the five fingers it has to be fine line you couldn't draw it otherwise the face of the woman and the eyebrow and I are drawn and very fine continue fairly fine continuous line the robe is drawn in somewhat heavier line and down here at the bottom of the sleeve the line thickens as it goes around the sleeve and the design on her robe on her sleeve the design actually have too much dissolved animals either with heads and eyes but anyway the the brushstrokes used for those thicken and thin rhythmically and quite beautifully to represent the decorative designs on her robe now we go in another slide here and we look at the Phoenix and dragon they are really very interesting indeed they have as I originally had pigment on them the pigment is largely come off and hard to see but as we look at them we see that even more the Phoenix in particular is drawn in brushwork it is not simply continuous light at all the Phoenix is not defined that is or depicted simply by drawing a even line around it and presenting it as a silhouette image well as I say I began by quoting my old Sakura trainees painting book from a old Chinese dictionary saying to paint is to draw boundaries I miss Corder before that is to say to draw on linear outlines who defined the and then to do some some interior groin but in fact next please let's see coming in closer here is the dragon now when you look at them closely you find that it is not outlining simply at all look at the Dragons arm or leg rather reaching out here from the body and it's two lines but they don't really join one of them curls around the other bends and goes up upward it isn't outlined it's two quite distinct lines the next piece and here this quite wonderful side representative the upper part of the Phoenix okay the the well it's other various things the the crest on the head of the bird a single stroke curling thickening and thinning quite beautifully the line defining its neck which goes down into the wing doesn't continue doesn't outline the form at all it ends in a kind of spiral open wide open the wing here doesn't end isn't continuous there's a gap the tail is not attached to the body and these two long plumes beautiful which are turned into a kind of animals themselves by having heads with eyes these two long plumes are not attached to the body in other words it's a very awesome really important is that we don't have something that is simply outlined and inclined at all the images produced that is as a structure or a configuration of brushstrokes now it's important very important to note this it's already a break with the basic means of simply drawing a line around the thing as is done basically in the other painting one of the man a really very important break now reading these brush strokes we are made conscious of the movement of the brush on the one hand but also the pressure applied to the brush by the artist we are feeling the brush movement so to speak the varying pressure on the brush the movement of the brush this gives a certain energy to the lines the strokes that make up the form long ago I use the somewhat ponderous academic term empathic Kinesis for this quality that is empathy because you're feeling somebody else with somebody else did kanessa sister feeling of movement feeling your own movement kinesthetic empathic kanessa this means feeling somebody else is moving in effect and that's what that's what we're doing I don't use the term anymore but the concept is still there and when we look at brushwork in Chinese painting as new who endlessly and over and over again and as much of what you look at in Chinese painting you are responding in that way and to a very sensitive controlled kind of movement that kind of responds to the execution of paintings in addition to or even instead of the imagery of paintings partly underlies the great value the Chinese put in brushwork in judging paintings see see Wang always said brushwork is what really matters Ypres compared it to the the voice of a operatic singer you don't go to the Opera to to learn the story you know that already you go to hear the voice of the singer and the brushwork you don't look at a picture to see the scenery as he called it rather disparagingly yes the brushwork that matters well he exaggerated that a bit too much or overemphasize in a bit I'm M now more inclined to go back and spend more time looking in the picture but that's another issue maxillary points out on the first page of his book that what was sought or sought after in Chinese painting from the very beginning was not some accuracy of representation not really truth to life but a certain aliveness centuries later a Chinese theorist is going to use the term Cheon chandram my Chinese is no good its terms are bad but anyway a term that before character terms of means something like engender movement through spirit resonance as the supreme quality that the artist should strive for and that Muir should look for in paintings do we see it already here something about I don't know maybe this is a simple picture if we look at it sympathetically and close up we see a lot that we don't see it first and we see that is not simply an image made by drawing a line around the Phoenix okay so much for our first lesson we've learned I think some important things about early Chinese painting including a few that you won't find in the books and that's the purpose of these lectures really to look hard to learn things that you can't find by reading - there's going to be a lot more of this kind of thing in the lectures to come and then the next one I'll start off by telling how I was able to make slides like this from these to them that's very early painting before this first lecture closes I want to deliver some heartfelt thanks which will serve for the whole series most of all to my collaborator Rann Chatterjee of chatterbox films who is listed in the titles as producer but in fact as producer director a technical adviser pretty much everything except me talking for these films he's done most of it and he took my original conception which was much something much much simpler a simple filming of my old slide lectures and through his remarkable technical knowledge and experience turned them into a new form making them immeasurably better than anything that I can see both the president of the Tong Foundation who very modestly doesn't want to be named I urged me at lunch here in Vancouver about two years ago to embark on this series which I was sort of hesitating about and he more or less promised to provide me with the original funding for the series out of his personal foundation as he has done so he too deserves a lot of the credit for whatever success we have jan Eckland long ago my student at Berkeley who was headed the visual resources section of the mice history of art department at Berkeley my old apartment used to be called the side room she responded with all her knowledge and abilities to the challenge of producing hundreds of digitized images from the side library big big job and has helped to make this possible and even more Samantha Jew who was the person who does Asian sides there or Asian materials she has spent a great deal of her time and expertise on this project um much of it in unpaid work done outside hours just out of sheer belief in the value of what we're doing she too deserves a lot of credit for whatever success this year is in order to have I want to and I want to thank my many teachers and colleagues and the many museums and universities and other institutions that have supported me over the decades of my career and for this project in particular I owe a big debt of gratitude to our sponsoring organization and that is the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of California especially to the two people who are in charge of respectively program coordination as Coverley carry and publications Kate or Katherine Chawla along with the present director of the Institute who is my old friend and colleague ea1 shin they took on this large time-consuming project as one of the to which they were personally committed and they've again the black others devoted a great deal of time to it and worked tirelessly to bring it to the point where now we can release it free of charge to the world at large and as this is part of their educational aim of promoting and disseminating Asian scholarship scholarship in East Asia now it's only with the constant and untiring support of all these people that I can present to you now the fruits of this my major late life a pure and remote view thank you all of you okay that's all for this lecture see you next Monday have a good weekend bye

Channel: UC Berkeley Events

Views: 58,818

Rating: 4.90378 out of 5

Keywords: Cahill, Chinese, Art, History, Landscape, Lecture, IEAS, Berkeley, Tang, Han, Pre-Han, Gombrich, Loehr, Shimada, Soper, Siren, Lee, Sherman, Vanderstappen, Schwartz, Sullivan, Taichung

Id: KJ4S-jCh4iE

Length: 118min 51sec (7131 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 30 2011