Page 417 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

dynasty (1392-1910), bamboo symbolized Confu- ered garden rock, together with new bamboo 267
cian virtues of resilience and fortitude, thus shoots. Compositionally, this leaf is the most unu-
enhancing the significance of bamboo painting. sual for its time: bamboo paintings of this period Yi Sumun
Yi Sumun's album comprises ten leaves, each rarely depicted the new bamboo shoots or cut off active first half of 15th century
showing bamboo growing in a natural setting. the top part of the bamboo.
These settings vary from a private garden to a At the upper left of this leaf is an inscription LANDSCAPES OF THE FOUR SEASONS
wild grove. The most dramatic leaves show accompanied by the artist's signature, Sumun, and Korean
bamboo blown by wind or pelted by rain, the most a rectangular relief seal also reading Sumun. pair of six-fold screens; ink on paper
1
lyrical leaf represents bamboo against the full K.P.K. each 92.7 x 348.7 (^/2 x i}? /^
moon. Unlike most bamboo paintings executed references: Matsushita 1961, no. 21; Nara 1973, no.
after the sixteenth century, which were explicitly 24; Matsushita 1974, 64-65, figs. 53, 54; Princeton
conceived as vehicles to express the painter's 1976, 217, n. 11; Cleveland 1977, 4-5, no. 2; Tanaka
nature or emotions, Sumun's bamboo, with their 1977, 81-82, pis. 6, 7
thin stalks and narrow leaves, look like the plants The Cleveland Museum of Art,
they represent. The windblown or rain-drenched John L. Severance Fund
bamboo, for instance, seem to convey the artist's
direct experience of nature. Tonal gradations in The four seasons are depicted as was customary,
the paintings imply air and light, also enhancing from right to left and beginning with spring. A
the illusion of a real world. On the last leaf are gentleman-scholar attended by two servants opens
several tall bamboo beside a fantastically weath- the scene; standing before a pavilion built on a

416 CIRCA 1492