Page 153 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

: C14 Landsupe in the linear style. Copy
of wall painting in the comb of l-tc.
Ch'irn-hsicn. SKcnsi. Tang Dynatty.
rapidly becoming more populous and more prosperous. It was in
the region of Nanking and Hangehow that landscape painters
now made their most daring experiments in "breaking the ink,"
while the breakdown of traditional restraints on artistic, as on so-
cial, behaviour encouraged the eccentrics to indulge in techniques
of ink-flinging and -splashing quite as wild as those of the New
York School of the 1950s. The work of these expressionists, alas,
is lost, but their styles were taken up by some of the Zen painters
of the tenth century and again in the late Southern Sung.
The objects, apart from paintings and sculpture, with which our DECORATIVE ARTS
Western collections illustrate the achievements of T'ang culture
arc, for the most part, grave goods. These, though they have an
appealing vigour and simplicity, bear little relation to the finest of
Tang decorative arts. But masterpieces of T'ang crafts were
placed in the tomb as well, and sometimes buried for other rea-
sons. In 1970, two pottery jars were unearthed at Ho-chia-ts'un,
crammed widi gold and silver vessels and other treasures, believed
to have been buried when their owner fled from the rebel An Lu-
shan in 756. Among the finest pieces was the ccveredjar illustrated
here, decorated with parrots and peonies in gilt repousse.