Page 151 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

mcntary problems of space and depth. But during the Tang Dy-
nasty these difficulties were mastered.
According to later Chinese critics and historians, two schools
of landscape painting came into being in the T'ang Dynasty. One.
practised by the court painter Li Ssu-hsiin and his son Li Chao-tao,
painted in the precise line technique, derived from earlier artists
such as Ku K'ai-chih and Chan Tzu-ch'ien, adding decorative
mineral colours; the other, founded by the poet-painter Wang
Wei, developed monochrome landscape painting in the p'o-mo
("broken ink") manner. The first, later called the Northern
School, becomes in course of time the special province of court
painters and professionals, while the second, the so-called South-
ern School, was the natural mode of expression for scholars and
amateurs. As we shall see when we come to a discussion of Ming
painting, this doctrine of the Northern and Southern schools, and
of the founding role of Wang Wei, was invented by a group of late
Ming scholar-critics to bolster up their belief in the superiority of
their own kind of painting over that of the professionals and court
painters of the day. But I mention it here because it has dominated
Chinese <hinking about landscape painting for nearly four
hundred years. In fact, the line between the two kinds of painting
was not so sharply drawn in the T'ang Dynasty. Wang Wei's ele-
vation to this pinnacle in the history of Chinese painting was an
1 6a Attributed to Han Kan (active 740-
expression of the belief, shared by all scholar-painters from the 760). Sight Htiitt. a favourite horse of
Sung Dynasty onward, that a man's painting, like his handwrit- T'ang Ming Huang. Handscroll. Ink on
paper. T'ang Dynasty (?).
ing, should be the witness, not to his skill with the brush, but to
0. |
*
*
<f > i i& ; %
*****
1
v. ft
%
TT1

131
Copyrighted material