Page 194 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

the quirkiness appears in the attenuated, twisting painting, at that future moment when three 7. Maggie Bickford, Ink Plum:
shapes of the rock and trees, and the odd, quasi- Tlie Making of a Chinese
centuries will have elapsed since it passed through Scholar-Painting Genre (New
postural way they answer each other, like partners the corresponding turning point, can look back York and Cambridge:
in an ungainly dance. In some of his smaller works, over those centuries and claim comparable Cambridge University Press,
notably album leaves, Li Shan used opaque successes, it will be cause for rejoicing.
pigments and run-together brush strokes in ways 1996).
that opened new stylistic options for nineteenth- SOURCES FOR FIGURES
and twentieth-century painters. Fig. 2. After James F CahiU, The 8. Richard Vinograd," Family
Properties: Personal Context
The real amateur of the group was Jin Nong Compelling Image (Cambridge,
Mass. : Harvard University Press, and Cultural Pattern in Wang
(1687-1764). Although his claim that he did not 1982), pi 2.15.
begin painting until he was fifty is exaggerated, it is Meng's Pien Mountains of
true that most of his dated works are from his late FFig. 3. After James CahiU, 1366," Ars Orientalis 8 (1982),
years. Earlier he made his living as an itinerant pp. 1-29.
antique dealer and calligrapher. It was, of course, Parting at the Shore (New York
and Tokyo: Weathcriiill, 197S), 9. A translation of Chen
not new for an amateur to paint and sell his works; Hongshou is in James Cahill,
what was audacious and attractive about Jin Nong pis. 78-80.
was how he made no effort to conceal his Tlie Distant Mountains: Chinese
amateurism, even flaunting it. Not limiting his NOTES Panning of the Late Ming
paintings to the technically undemanding types
1. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Dynasty (Tokyo and New York:
favored by the scholar-amateurs (unpeopled river
AIllusion: Study in the Weatherhill. 19S2), pp. 264-65.
landscapes, ink monochrome bamboo and other
plants), he took on subjects that usually required Psychology of Pictorial 10. Jonathan Hay, "Shitao s Late

—professional skills figures, including religious Representation, The A. W. Mellon Work (1697-1707): A Thematic
Map" (Ph.D. diss., Yale
images and portraits; horses; illustrations to old Lectures in the Fine Arts 1956,
poems; figure-in-landscape compositions. All these University), vol. 1, p. 45: and
and others he did with an ingenuous air, relying on 2d ed. (New York: Pantheon, vol. 2, pp. 60—61, n. 55.
his cultivated taste, familiarity with old painting,
and a sure and sensitive hand developed through IQ 65), pp. 148-50 (italics
practicing antiquarian calligraphy. His inscriptions added).
to paintings often claim illustrious models; on the
2. Sherman Lee, cited in Arthur
leaf representing two men strolling and conversing C. Danto, "Ming and Qing
Paintings," in Embodied
in a forest from his 1759 Album of Landscapes and
Figures (cat. 218), for instance, he wrote that it was &Meanings: Critical Essays
based on a work by the twelfth-century Academy
Aesthetic Meditations (Farrar,
master Ma Hezhi. In an age and setting in which Straus and Giroux, 1994), p. 35.
For the catalog essay, see
fine technique had become a bit boring, the
demand for Jin Nong's paintings was more than he Sherman E. Lee, "Ming and
could keep up with, and he used "ghost-painters" Qing Painting," in Howard
to do works in his style for him to sign. Rogers and Sherman E. Lee,
Mastem'orks of Ming and Qing
Most of these complex stratagems tor instilling
Painting from the Forbidden City
freshness into a very late stage in a very old (Lansdale, Pa.: International
Arts Council, 1988), pp. 17-31:
Wetradition will seem familiar to us. can conclude this quotation is on p. 17.

by recognizing also that Chinese painting from the 3. Danto, "Ming and Qing

fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries (the Paintings," pp. 34-35.

Yuan to early Qing periods) presents the single 4. Roger Fry, cited in Danto,
"Ming and Qing Paintings,"
other case in world art of what can follow the
P- 35-
—deliberate relinquishing even, on the theoretical
—level, the discrediting of representation as the 5. James CahiU, The Compelling
Image: Nature and Style in
underlying project for a highly evolved tradition of Seventceth- Century Painting, The
Charles Eliot Norton Lectures
painting. Later Chinese painting also demonstrates (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1982), p. 5.
—that after artistic "progress" in the sense of a
6. Richard Barnhart, "Wang
coherent series of pictorial modes that seems to Shen and Late Northern Sung

exhibit a cumulative mastery of representational Painting," in International
Symposium on Art Historical
—techniques had come to an end, stagnation could
mStudies, no. 2,"Ajiya okeru
still be staved off by successive manipulations of the
past, some of them brilliantly conceived, all (at least sanzui no hyogen" ("Landscape
Expression in Asia") (Kyoto:
Taniguchi Foundation. 1983),
pp. 62-70.

until the late Shitao) preserving basic strengths from

the tradition while transforming it. IfWestern

CHINESE PAINTING: INNOVATION AFTER "PROGRESS" ENDS 192