Page 357 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

ness to serve as their subjects. Wen ren painters exercises (later codified in woodblock-printed the early development of Shen Zhou (1427-
looked to the history of art; their subject was to handbooks on bamboo, orchids and the elements 1509), the most famous wen ren of early and
a great extent their own aesthetic lineage and of landscape). Wen ren painters shunned non- middle Ming. Founder of the Wu school and
traditions. In other words, the new style was a landscape—figure compositions (notoriously epitome of wen ren ideals and practice, Shen
kind of "art historical" painting, informed by difficult); "fur and feathers"; the whole genre stands alone as an ideal model of his age.
references to the great ancestors of wen ren of "still life" so popular with the professional He was alone as well in artistic style until
art —the Tang poet-painter Wang Wei, the and academic painters of the past; and the large- Wen Zhengming (1470-1559), also of Suzhou,
tenth-century master from the south Dong scale decorative works favored by the court, past became his pupil and follower (cat. 316, 317).
Yuan, the Northern Song eccentric critic and and present. This is not to say there were no other contem-
painter Mi Fu, and above all the true inventors The location of the court was crucially impor- porary painters of merit in the area, nor that
of the new tradition, Zhao Mengfu, Qian Xuan, tant to the development of wen ren painting, Shen Zhou was without friends among painters,
Gao Kegong, Huang Gongwang, Wu Zhen, both in particular and in general. Particularly, scholars, and officials. It does mean that there
Wang Meng, and Ni Zan of the Yuan dynasty. the immediate successors of the Four Great was no circle of like-minded painters influenc-
This lineage, largely formalized and made Masters of Yuan, asserting the independence of ing each other's work; only the landscape
dogma about 1600, was the source for most of patronage and authority that they considered masters of the past, especially the Four Great
the styles so faithfully and so inventively appropriate to gentlemen-amateurs, received Masters of the Yuan dynasty (Huang Gong-
exploited by the self-designated inheritors of short shrift at the court of the first Ming wang, Ni Zan, Wang Meng, Wu Zhen) contrib-
the wen ren tradition. To be a wen ren artist, emperor. This pockmarked peasant-soldier, Zhu uted to the style Shen Zhou created almost
one must have studied the precursors' paintings, Yuanzhang (often known by his reign-name in isolation.
and know the nuances of their brush techniques, Hongwu) restored the prominence of the south Born into a wealthy land-owning family
compositions, and flavors. It was commonplace, by locating the capital at Nanjing, and reinsti- living at Xiangcheng, ten miles north of
beginning with Shen Zhou in the second half of tuted many of the imperial institutions and Suzhou, Shen could easily afford the expensive
the fifteenth century, to paint works in homage practices of the last native dynasty, the Song. and creative self-indulgence of collecting fine
to an earlier master and in his style. Later, But the tenor of his reign was determined by paintings and bronzes. One painting alone in
whole albums were made, with eight or twelve his suspicious, brutal, and violently anti-intel- his collection provided lessons enough for a
pictures in sequence, each alluding to the lectual character, nowhere clearer than in his lifetime — the most famous of all works of the
manner of a different earlier master. Even treatment of the second wave of wen ren mas- fourteenth century, Huang Gongwang's (1269-
handscrolls were often painted in such stylistic ters : of six major artists who lived from late 1354) Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, a
segments; at the hands of a skillful artist one Yuan into early Ming, only Wang Fu survived handscroll painted between 1347 and 1350 that
section blended into the next with hardly a the reign of the Hongwu emperor; two of the was the most significant fountainhead of wen
whisper of tension or incongruity. This is not to others died in prison and three were executed ren style and aesthetic. But Shen also collected
say that later artists did not have their own for treason. When the Yongle emperor moved works by near-contemporary professional paint-
styles; they did, and highly individual at that, the capital north to Beijing in 1421, he also rati- ers such as Dai Jin (cat. 288) and Dai's rival Xie
but even their most idiosyncratic passages fied a division in the artistic community. At the Huan, a professional and conservative master
might include an inscription or poem that new capital on the dry northern plains a revived attached to the court.
evoked the spirit of one of the great ancients of imperial patronage benefitted and stimulated As Shen Zhou's painting tutor, his father
the true tradition. painters of professional-academic orientation; Shen Heng (c. 1376-after 1470) selected Chen
Just as Ming wen ren painters selected a lin- far to the south, in the fertile and affluent "eye Kuan, grandson of the late Yuan-early Ming
eage of approved precursors, so they also area" of Suzhou, Nanjing, Yangzhou, and envi- painter Chen Ruyan. This choice may well have
selected an approved subject for representation: rons, the gentry pursued their own wen ren contributed to Shen Zhou's famous reluctance
landscape. To the representation of this chosen ideas, without benefit of the patronage they in later life to travel beyond Wu, especially to
subject the wen ren brought concepts derived would in any case have scorned and at a rela- the capital, Beijing. Shen's great-great-grandfa-
from Confucian, Daoist, and Chan Buddhist tively safe distance from the lethal intrigues of ther Shen Liangchen had been a collector and
thought: // (the essential reality of things), tian the Ming court. From the 1420$ through the friend of Wang Meng (1309-1385), one of the
ji (artistic instinct or inspiration), and shen hui end of the century, the attraction of imperial Four Great Masters of Yuan, and Wang had died
(insight into the subject to the point of fusion patronage assured the dominance of the "con- in prison, a victim of the purges set in motion
between artist and subject). Such an approach servatives" over the wen ren of the south. by the anti-intellectual paranoia of the first
was particularly productive of those visual qual- Ming emperor. Shen Zhou's great-grandfather
ities most prized by the wen ren: spontaneity Shen Cheng had set a family precedent by
(zi ran), "blandness" (ping dan), expressiveness Shen Zhou declining a government appointment; and the
(untrammeled feeling, yi), and the spirit of This dominance delayed the development of tutor Chen Kuan's painter-ancestor Chen Ruyan
antiquity (gu yi). wen ren painting. The new wen ren movement, had been executed by the Hongwu emperor
With landscape, as any aspiring or practicing centered around Suzhou, was called the Wu before 1371. It is no wonder that the Ming His-
painter knows, the successful representation is school, as Suzhou itself was called Wu after an tory (Ming Shi Lu) lists Shen Zhou in the "re-
both easily accessible and terribly remote. The ancient kingdom lying largely in southern cluse-scholar" category, meaning simply that he
semblance of reality, however much it may be Jiangsu Province. But the Wu school sputtered refused to enter the government bureaucracy.
declared unwanted, is easily attained; essential almost to a halt in the first half of the fifteenth By no means a recluse in Western terms,
reality, transcending formal resemblance, is century. Several painters are known, but two of Shen was a close friend of Wu Kuan (see cat.
remote to all but a few. Nevertheless landscape them, Liu Jue (1410-1472) and Du Qiong 312, 315) and Wang Ao (cat. 284), Du Mu, and
became the only subject, aside from calligraphic (1396-1474), only because they played a part in Wen Lin (father of Wen Zhengming) — all in

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