Page 65 - AI WEIWEI CAHIERS D ART

A CHINESE SCULPTURE ENTERS THE LOUVRE
Mr. David Weill has just donated a masterpiece of Chinese sculpture to the Louvre: a standing sandstone Buddha dating from the end of the fifth century CE and originating from the cliffs of
Yunkang.1
It was left by the Tungusic
nomads who, from the year 250, settled in the north of China,2 the dynasty of Northern Wei made its capital at Ta-t’ong-fou (Chansi), from 386 to 494; then relocated it to Loyang (Honan). Chinese Buddhism, sustained here by the land route of Cen- tral Asia, has moved on from its tentative beginnings around the Christian era,3 following the brief-lived persecutions in the middle of the fifth century, it consolidates under the auspices of the Wei emperors. In the area beyond their first capital, these rulers build the rock temples of Yunkang that they continued to occupy until the end of the sixth century;4 in the Loyang period we see also the rock temples of Longmen and Konghien: these important monuments of Budd- hism, the oldest known to us in northern China, are described and published by Mr. Edouard Chavannes.5
The caves of Yunkang burrow
into the cliff that overlooks the
town of the same name and the
Cheli River, 120 km west of Ta-
t’ong-fou. Mr. Osvald Siren sug-
gests that our statue originates
from cave twenty-six;6 but in any
case, what we do know, is that it
stands in the front rank of the finest works of Yunkang and leaves most of the others in its shadow.
1. Osvald Sirèn, La Sculpture chinoise, du Ve au XIVe siècle (Paris and Brussels, G. Van Oest, 1925), t. I, plate 69.
2. Alfred Salmony, Chinesische Plastik (Berlin, R. C. Schmidt, 1925), 41.
3. Joseph Hackin, Guide catalogue du musée Guimet (Paris and Brussels, G. Van Oest, 1923), 49.
Beneath the plainly modeled ushnisha between the ears with their hanging lobes, the face appears as little Chinese as is possible and of a markedly In-
do-European type; the delicately arched eyebrows, the closed eyes, the straight nose, and the small mouth with the fine corner of the lips creates an expression of tender sweetness, that suggests, ever so slightly, an imperceptible malice; the line of the chin, de- prived of untoward bulges is free and pure; the right hand per- forms the ritual gesture of ‘ab- haya mudrâ’, the left hand ‘vara mudrâ’; the garment is arranged in sober symmetrical folds, quite different from the Greco-Budd- hist folds, still less Hellenistic, but more a relative of the annun- ciatory Greek archaic of our Ro- man style; somewhat stocky legs rest on sturdy feet.
What a marvelous testament to continuity Buddhism intro- duced into Chinese sculpture; we are far now from those ani- mal figures of the time of Han, whose tradition endures long after; far from those more recent religious statues, with the hiera- tic gesture of the angered high priest or swollen by alimentary obesity. Chinese Buddhism in its blossoming, and what a dew, all too soon exhausted! The celes- tials come swiftly to their ex-vo- tos, to their Saint Sulpice. Let us just enjoy such an exquisite incarnation of the divine, this Buddha that readers of Cahiers
d’Art will soon have the chance to encounter in the galleries of the Far East in our first national museum.
G.-H. Rivière
4. Hackin, Guide Catalogue, 51.
5. Édouard Chavannes, Mission archéologique dans la Chine septentrionale, vol. I, 2nd part (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale E. Leroux, 1915; (Paris: Mission..., planches, 2 albums, 1909).
6. Sirèn, La Sculpture chinoise, 26.
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