Page 418 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

spit of level land, he gazes out over an expanse of repoussoirs are views set in the middle distance. When the Cleveland screens were discovered
calm water. Not far away (in the second panel) are The result is stable and balanced. Some of the rock (before 1950), the Ink Bamboo album (cat. 266),
two more gentlemen, similarly attended. They are forms recall the 45° angle projections in Yi which documents Yi Sumun's arrival in Japan
crossing a footbridge that will take them toward Sumun's Ink Bamboo album (cat. 266). The solid, from Korea, was unknown; and until its publica-
the pavilion, and have stopped to admire a tree dark ink washes for farmland and wet ground in tion in 1961 the painting of Lin Heqing was virtu-
in flower. Beyond them, in the middle distance, the right-hand screen resemble nothing like such ally unknown. Since at the time the Cleveland
fresh, tall bamboo are shown below towering areas in Chinese and Japanese paintings, but they screens came to light Yi Sumun (the "Korean
vertical peaks. At the center of the next three do resemble ink washes in a Korean painting of Shubun") was scarcely known to exist, the
panels a copse of willows in full foliage marks the The Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang (exhibited in seals on these screens are highly unlikely to
summer. Autumn opens the left-hand screen. Nara, 1973), though the nervous brush manner be spurious.
Past distant tree-clad hills sloping down to fenced- there bespeaks a different artist. Any study or discussion of early Choson ink
in houses and moored boats, gentlemen-scholars At the lower outer edge of each screen is the painting and the place of Yi Sumun within that
are being ferried to a viewing pavilion built out seal of the artist, Sumun, in fine-line "maze" tradition must take account of these Landscapes of
over the water from a peninsula stretching into characters within a vertical oblong. The same the Four Seasons. S.E.L.
the distance. The last two panels give us distant, characters on a differently cut seal appear on
rugged country, snowbound by winter. Catalogue 266, accompanied by the artist's signa-
The composition is simple but ingenious. Each ture. Still another Sumun seal marks a hanging
screen is centered on a foreground repoussoir — scroll depicting the Chinese poet Lin Heqing
one a rising mountain mass, the other a sharply (Lin Bu, 967-1028) in a landscape; this has been
receding series of plateaus. Framing these central accepted as genuine by Matsushita (1961, no. 21).

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