Page 177 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts
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have instilled it firmly in the consciousness of both One might see these simply as misreadings: there is
academics and the larger community of art-lovers
a large gap between the woodblock-printed
as ranking among the supreme artistic achievements painting manual cited by Gombrich and the
of any culture. And yet a curious belief about practice of serious later Chinese artists that he
wrongly took it to represent; and there is an even
—Chinese painting persists that in its later phases it larger gap between Sherman Lee's unobjectionable
statement that further subtlety was unimaginable in
is essentially a performance art, within which the the later centuries in China (one could persuasively
artist is reduced to making individual argue that Gauguin does not represent any advance
interpretations of long-established formulae. in subtlety over Giotto) and Danto's construing this
to mean that no further development took place. But
Two examples can represent quite a few more. it is less a misreading, I think, than a proclivity
among Western scholars (even good ones)
E. H. Gombrich, in his influential Art and Illusion, unfamiliar with Chinese painting: to believe a
reproduces from a seventeenth-century Chinese version of its history in which innovation ended
manual for beginning painters a page of about the fourteenth century and to take what they
instructions for painting orchids in ink, stroke by see and read as evidence for that version.
stroke. This he takes to exemplify China's "complete
reliance on acquired vocabularies," commenting What lies behind this inclination to see the later
that "there is nothing in Western art which
compares with this conception of painting," which centuries of Chinese painting as essentially
he characterizes as a "combination of traditionalism
and respect for the uniqueness of every repeating the earlier ones? In part, it is a carry-over
performance"' More recently, Arthur Danto, in
"Ming and Qing Paintings," misunderstands from the ill-informed belief of pioneer Western
Sherman Lee's opening statement in a catalogue
essay that by the beginning of the Ming dynasty writers on Chinese painting that its great creative
"the materials, formats, and techniques of painting
had developed in flexibility and complexity to a period ended with the Song dynasty in the late
point where further subtlety was both
unimaginable and superfluous." 2 Danto takes Lee's thirteenth century, and that all beyond was
statement to mean that, in Danto's words, "all the
truths of Chinese painting were in place before that Norepetition and decline. one seriously engaged
protracted [Ming-Qing] period began." And Danto, with Chinese painting believes that now, but this
too, contrasts this reading of the Chinese situation attitude no doubt continues to resonate in the
with what happened during the same period in
Western art: "Imagine, then, an exhibition which minds of people who have read the old books or
begins witli Giotto and ends with Gauguin." One taken courses with the old teachers. Another
scarcely could say ofWestern painting during that important reason is the inability of even sensitive
time, as Danto believes we can say of Ming and observers to recognize stylistic distinctions,
Qmg painting, that "everything was already in place including large and crucial ones, within an
at the beginning, further development of which unfamiliar art, whether it be painting or music or
[sic| was 'unimaginable and superfluous.'"' In
support of his view, Danto cites observations by poetry. I noted this often-encountered
Roger Fry about the "strange atrophy of the
creative spirit" that afflicted later Chinese art and phenomenon at the beginning ot my book The
about its "excessive reverence for the tradition." 1
Compelling Image, recalling the experience ot taking
a distinguished and recently arrived Chinese
connoisseur around the National Gallery in
Washington (yes, from Giotto to Gauguin and
beyond) and being told: "Very nice, but they all
look 4 Danto's admission that the works in
alike."
the Ming-Qing exhibition, spanning some six
centuries, seemed to him "oddly contemporaneous"
CHINESE PAINTING: INNOVATION AFTER "PROGRESS" ENDS 175
