Page 75 - AI WEIWEI CAHIERS D ART

Cahiers d’Art was created in the very particular context of the Roaring Twenties. Colonization, then at its high noon, had also spawned a new and sincere interest in the cultures it encountered. At the same time, archaeology was developing and prehistory emerging as a distinct subject of study, arousing the interest of researchers, collectors and artists. Set in motion by Japonism, an aesthetic that took root in the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the creation of the Musée Guimet, focusing on the study of Far Eastern religions, Asia too was embraced by this burgeoning interest in distant cultures. Cahiers d’Art contributed to this movement even in its first issues, which made a considerable effort to bring its readers objects and artworks from historical and geographically remote places.
In its tenth issue in 1926, the year of its foundation by Christian Zervos, the journal published a short text by a student at the École du Louvre, one Georges-Henri Rivière (1897–1985), or “GHR” as he would later come to be called with a mixture of familiarity and respect. Rivière became famous for a number of reasons, not least for having conceived and created the Musée des Art et Traditions Populaires, the first museum dedicated to exploring and researching French rural life from the nineteenth century to 1960. He directed this institution from its opening in 1937 up to 1967 (the museum eventually closed in 2005). Rivière also played an important role in the foundation of ICOM, the International Council of Museums, in 1948, and served as its director until 1965. But back in 1926, when he published his article in Ca- hiers d’Art, “Une sculpture chinoise entre au Louvre,” he was still a student, and one with a keen interest in the non-academic novelties of the day who was manifestly moved by this Chinese sculpture that had entered the Louvre. Carved in the soft, gray-pink stone characteristic of the famous Yungang Caves in Shanxi Province, where it was found, the 129 centimeter-high figure was a superb illustration of the Buddhist art fostered in the second half of their reign by the Northern Wei, a non-Chinese dynasty that ruled over the northern provinces of the empire from 386 to 534. It is hard to ascertain exactly how this statue of Buddha reached Paris—the political anarchy following the proclamation of the Chinese Repu- blic in 1912 makes commercial circuits hard to retrace—but we do know that it was acquired by the antiques dealer Weill on Rue de Rivoli, and that he gifted it to the Louvre, whence it was later allocated to the Musée Guimet (with the catalogue entry “EO2730, don Weill”).
Rivière studied this sculpture as rigorously as he could, referring to the best practicing specialists of Chinese history and, especially, art, whose work still has authority today: Edouard Chavannes (1865– 1918), Joseph Hackin (1886–1941), Oswald Siren (1879–1966), and Alfred Salmony (1890–1958: he would write for Cahiers d’Art two years later). The first part of his article, in which he locates the piece in space and time with reference to texts by these authors, remains valid today. The second, in which he analyses it aesthetically with reference to “Archaic Greek” art, makes more surprising reading, not least for its rather peremptory judgments. That being said, twenty years later, André Malraux was still using the same kinds of comparisons in his Musée imaginaire (1947) and Les Voix du silence (1951), giving his reasons for doing so quite clearly in the earlier of these two texts: “What had been seen, up until 1900, by those whose reflections on art are still revelatory and meaningful for us today, and whom we suppose are talking about the same works as ourselves [...]?” That is very much the issue for the art historian, the critic and the anthropologist: how do we understand and, more importantly, promote understanding of a foreign civilization when we have only stories and all too infrequent images, usually presented out of context, to help us grasp representations about whose underlying and explanatory ideas, symbols, and experiences the beholder knows nothing? What path must we take to make apparent the emotions and associations of ideas that these images carry when we know nothing about the society from which they sprang? Given this situation, do we have any choice but to relate these representations to what we have experienced ourselves, while remaining aware that “comparison is not proof”? The question remains. With the torrent of images and explanations offered by today’s media, our eyes wide-opened can get their fill of information, but do we correctly interpret what we see?
In its sixth issue of 1927, Cahiers d’Art published another article of a similar kind. Its author was Georges Salles (1889–1966), then deputy director of the Louvre, who went on to direct the Musée Gui- met from 1941 to 1944, and after that, the national museums authority, Musées de France, from 1945 to 1957. Salles offered a few lines of commentary on four Chinese paintings reproduced in black and white in the review. This short, purely descriptive text, judiciously noting that, ultimately, these paintings “introduce a whole world of thought,” is remarkable not only for its modesty but also for its sensitivity. Salles understood perfectly that reception of a work of art—particularly one of these fragile works from the Far East—also depends on the context in which it is presented and the gestures surrounding it. He therefore took great care over describing the atmosphere of the building housing the paintings and the way they were used (unrolled and hung up). In this presentation, the layout places particular emphasis on a “Buffalo Nibbling a Leaf.” Long attributed to the Chinese painter Zhang Fangru (thirteenth century), this
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