Some Thoughts on the History and Post-History of Chinese Painting

Author(s): James Cahill

Source: Archives of Asian Art , 2005, Vol. 55 (2005), pp. 17-33
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20111325

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Some Thoughts on the History and Post-History
of Chinese Painting
James Cahill
Emeritus, University of California at Berkeley

Note: This is a shortened form of the Haley Lecture deliv paintings, to mean that Chinese paintin
ered at Princeton University in November 1999. I noted significant change in the later period, and
that it was "by unintended timing a millennial lecture, and ine ... an exhibition that begins with G
by unavoidable timing a late-life lecture, following on a with Gauguin" in which "everything wa
half-century of dedication to the study of Chinese paint beginning, further development of which
ing." My teacher Max Loehr, at the first great international able and superfluous'." And for Danto the
symposium in our field in 1970, had given his late-life peri Ming-Qing exhibition, whose creation s
odization paper,"Phases and Content in Chinese Painting";1 centuries, seem "oddly contemporaneo
it seemed to me, I said, time for another attempt. I expressed of this view of Chinese painting as ess
the hope that the direction of my recent writing would throughout its later periods, Danto cites
dispel any suspicion this lecture might arouse that I want to observations about the "strange atrophy o
consider Chinese painting in isolation, as an autonomous spirit" that afflicted later Chinese art, and
system; it is sometimes useful to treat it as though it were sive reverence for tradition."3 For us in t
an autonomous system, for a particular limited purpose, trast, what has strangely failed to develop is
keeping firmly in mind that it isn't. I hope also that the famil foreign perceptions about it: has not
iarity of the paintings used as illustrations will not deceive between Roger Fry and Arthur Danto?
potential readers into believing that the text is correspond I mentioned several factors that migh
ingly hackneyed.) somehow disturbing phenomenon: the pe
ill-informed belief held by pioneer Wes
In the course of writing a general essay on Chinese paint Chinese painting that its creative period e
ing for the catalogue of the Guggenheim Museum's 1998 end of Song, the late thirteenth century,
"China: 5000 Years" exhibition,2 I raised a troublesome after that being repetition and decline; th
problem: why, despite all the serious study that later Chinese even sensitive people have in recognizing
painting has received from specialist scholars over the past stylistic distinctions, even large and crucia
half-century or so, with major private and museum collec unfamiliar artistic tradition; and the ha
tions assembled, and exhibitions and their catalogues and later Chinese artists of claiming, in inscr
symposia making the fruits of our scholarship available to works, that they are "imitating" some old
a wider public?why, in the face of all this, do certain tice which might seem derivative, if we a
misperceptions about later Chinese painting persist among at face value, but which in actuality is
those outside the field, including eminent art historians and when T.S. Eliot "imitates" Chaucer, or P
critics? I quoted two to represent them, Ernst Gombrich Velasquez, or Stravinsky "imitates" Monte
and Arthur Danto, both deeply knowledgeable in Western familiar enough, and students of Chine
art history, both bold enough to venture sweeping formula wonder why we need go through it all
tions and judgments. Gombrich, reproducing a page from a glimmering of a new idea is this: granted
Chinese seventeenth-century painting manual showing discern a "history" of post-Song Chines
how to paint orchids stroke by stroke, takes this to exemplify a clear, unilinear development, in the sen
China's "complete reliance on acquired vocabularies," and advances in representational techniques or
remarks that "there is nothing in Western art that compares tic shifts like those the old art histori
with this conception of painting," which he characterizes as European painting?from Medieval to early
a "combination of traditionalism and respect for the unique Renaissance, from Baroque to Rococo t
ness of every performance." Later Chinese painting, then, in Neo-Classical to Modern?this need n
this version, is a performance art. Chinese painting stopped being innovative
Danto misreads a statement in an essay by Sherman Lee, natively be argued that the great stylistic
written for the catalogue of an exhibition of Ming-Qing place earlier in China?that the Chinese eq

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Giotto-to-Gauguin phase happened between the Tang and than an uncomfortable anomaly within their tradition. On
Yuan dynasties, roughly between the seventh and four the other hand, many Chinese artists in that same period
teenth centuries?and ended sooner, so that the Chinese embraced other European illusionistic devices, such as
arrived in their painting, long before we did, at "the end of chiaroscuro or the Northern European system of depicting
the history of art." What followed, then, could properly be farther spaces beyond foreground spaces, viewed some
termed a post-historical period, in the sense that the term times through constricted openings, in ways that heavily
is used by Hans Belting and others4?and, like the art of affected their paintings?and their use of those devices has
the post-historical phase in the West, could continue to mostly been ignored by foreign writers for whom linear
flourish on a high innovative level. But I added, somewhat perspective is the touchstone of fidelity to "the visible
evasively, that "this is not the place to make that argument world."7
at length, nor am I the person to make it." Later rethink Seen by eyes attuned to them, Chinese ways of creating
ing persuaded me that the Haley Lecture was the right illusions of space in their pictures are no less optically per
occasion for attempting it, and that I myself, burdened as suasive for not being built around real or imaginary lines
I am with an antiquated theoretical apparatus and thus converging on the horizon as viewed from a fixed vantage
(unlike those who occupy more advanced positions) still point. The development of successive systems for doing
open to this kind of thinking, am the person to make it? this, over the early centuries of Chinese pictorial art from
in fact, I had best do it while there is still time. the pre-Han period to the tenth century or so?beginning
My argument can begin with another quotation from with simple intervallic space between objects and figures,
Gombrich, and another disagreement. (The writings of continuing through what the old art historians called space
the late Sir Ernst are a frequent target for such disagree cells and the joining of these into more complex and
ments exactly because he wrote clearly and directly about expansive settings, culminating on the one hand in some
large matters on which others usually hedge and sidestep, tenth-century works featuring elaborate multi-unit spatial
if they address them at all.) Gombrich writes: "But only structures that invite prolonged visual penetration and
twice on this globe, in ancient Greece and in Renaissance exploration,8 and on the other in the grandly spacious
Europe, have artists striven systematically, through a suc effects of eleventh-century landscape?is not merely a cul
cession of generations, step by step to approximate their turally biased formulation that Western art historians have
images to the visible world and achieve likenesses that imposed on the Chinese works, but was a central concern
might deceive the eye"5 As is often true of such global of the artists who made those works and of their audiences,
statements about world art, this one needs the insertion of manifested in the pictures themselves, as any sympathetic
a single phrase: except for China. The collective mastery and perceptive consideration of them over time must rec
of representational techniques by Chinese artists over the ognize. And these successive advances in spatial rendering
early periods, culminating, I believe, in the tenth to enabled, in turn, more and more complex descriptive,
eleventh century (China suffered no such massive disjunc narrative, and expressive effects.
ture as Europe's Middle Ages, so the development is more As for light and shadow, the Chinese artists had them
continuous), can be said, as convincingly as it can for selves, from pre-Tang times through the tenth-eleventh
Western artists, to be aimed at "approximating their images centuries, developed methods of representing natural forms
to the visible world." As for likenesses that might deceive with illusions of three-dimensionality through light-and
the eye, the early Chinese literature on painting, like the dark shading techniques. The portrayal of the animals in the
Western, offers anecdotes in which pictures by the most "Deer in an Autumn Forest" pictures (which are probably
accomplished painters do exactly that, whether the eye be Liao dynasty works) supremely exemplifies this mastery.9
human or animal: otters who jump at painted fish, falcons And in the astonishing Bamboo, Old Tree, and Stones in
who attack painted pheasants.6 Winter, attributed to the tenth-century master Xu Xi
So, why was China excluded from Gombrich's (Fig. i), the artist has concealed his hand throughout, creat
pronouncement? A clue to the reason is provided by ing the image as if entirely out of light and dark, making
Danto, who, after citing Gombrich on the two European the picture seem more a work of nature than a product of
illusionistic episodes, adds: "I think this is an underestima human artifice. That he appears to be somehow dispensing
tion. There is internal evidence that the Chinese, for exam with conventions and portraying his subject in a way
ple, would have used perspective if they had known about unmediated by style is of course only an effect, but it is a
it, perhaps to their artistic detriment." I am not sure what powerful one. In this it is like some seventeenth-century
"internal evidence" Danto refers to?when the Italian Dutch paintings about which Svetlana Alpers writes: "It is
system of linear perspective did become known to Chinese as if visual phenomena are captured and made present
painters in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, without the intervention of a human maker." And she
nearly all of them rejected it. The few Chinese attempts to writes of the "selflessness or anonymity that is characteris
utilize it that have survived suggest why it was never more tic of Dutch painting"?and equally characteristic, we can

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 (ca. iooi-ca. 1090) Early Spring of 1072II?we realize that
only small shifts in one's habits of visual reception are
required to recognize paintings such as these as trans
mitting at least as much, in some respects more, of the
characterizing aspects of natural scenery than European
landscape pictures generally do, and to recognize also that
if the Chinese pictures fail to transmit other aspects, it is
largely by choice. The elimination of color permits the
painter to evoke, through consummate gradations of ink
values, an optically convincing atmospheric perspective.
Rendering the images of trees and rocks in endlessly var
ied type-forms and otherwise taming the variegation that
scenes of nature offer to the eye opens the way for con
veying a sense of natural order, li. By rejecting all that is
pretty or picture-like in the Western sense (even the
picture-like aspects of nature), the artist could embody the
profound understanding of geological forms and phenom
ena, the sensitivity to conditions of season and weather and
time-of-day, that inspires the loftiest achievements of the
Chinese masters.
It would be difficult, then, to think of ways in which the
European artists succeeded better than the Chinese in
"approximating their images to the visible world." Different
conventions and assumptions, of course, underlie the two
traditions. But granting this is not to say that "truth to
nature" is purely a matter of more or less arbitrary conven
tions; on this issue I am entirely on the side of Danto, who
writes that "the Chinese appreciative response to pictures
that embodied Western perspective, such as Castigliones, is
worth citing in view of the fashionable thesis that perspec
tive is a symbolic form rather than an optical truth.
Castigliones work should have looked hilariously wrong if
perspective is merely a cultural convention."I2
Fig. i. Anonymous, 10th c? (old attribution to Xu Xi). "Bamboo and
Old Trees Growing by a Rocks." Hanging scroll; ink on silk;
The sequence of stylistic moves that preceded the stage
h. 151.1 cm, w. 99.2 cm. Shanghai Museum. seen in those eleventh-century works could be mapped,
and up to a point has been mapped, into a coherent art
historical account.Valuable work in this direction was done
note, of these Chinese works. The intricate overlappings of by pioneer scholars such as Ludwig Bachhofer, Max Loehr,
leaves and twigs is representationally effective but tech Alexander Soper, and others who tried to apply or adapt
nically bewildering: how was it done? We must remember classical art-historical concepts of the morphology of style,
that when one works in ink on silk, nothing can be cor derived as these were from formulations of European art
rected or painted over, as it can in oil painting. To say that history, to the Chinese materials. Needless to say, doing
the artist used some kind of resist technique may be true, this left them open not only to legitimate criticism?their
but does not carry us far in accounting for the picture. The limited access to crucial materials meant that their formu
unassuming technical mastery goes with the effect of visual lations were necessarily tentative and sometimes mistaken,
exactitude; quoting Alpers once more, "To appear lifelike, based on too little evidence (or, especially in Loehr s case,
a picture has to be carefully made."10 No pictures in on insecure evidence)?but also, more recently, to the
China will ever be more carefully made?as pictures, that familiar facile put-downs, as guilty of Eurocentric attempts
is?than these. to impose the patterns of W?lfilin and Winckelmann onto
More or less the same is true in landscape, which about Chinese art, or of orientalizing, essentializing, and all the
this time becomes the central subject of Chinese paint rest. None of this diminishes their achievement in laying
ing, In the presence of the great works of the Northern the foundations for our later studies, which would be
Song period?the handscroll Fishing in a Mountain Stream foolishly adrift without the underpinnings they provided.
ascribed to Xu Daoning (ca. 970-ca. 1052), or Guo Xi's They saw their task to be, as Hans Belting writes about

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nineteenth-century Western art historians, "that of order a rich art-historical literature, which can be seen as begin
ing the works of art. . . into a sequence which appeared to ning with a few relatively brief critical and theoretical
be governed by a lawful development of form."13 writings in the fifth?sixth centuries and reaching an early
Some in my generation have carried on this project, but climax in Zhang Yanyuan's imposing Record of Famous
no one has even tried to put together a comprehensive, step Painters of Successive Periods in the ninth century, a work
by step history of early Chinese painting that considers sty comparable in scope and sophistication to Vasari's in the
listic change along with other criteria and concerns. Our mid-sixteenth century, which is hailed as the beginning of
generation, then, can be charged with having collectively Western art history.15 Zhang Yanyuan's work was followed
failed to build on the achievements of the pioneers suffi by a succession of substantial texts, each aimed at bringing
ciently to construct a history as solid and detailed as has been the history of painting up to date for its period. But these
done (over a much longer period, to be sure) for European continued only to the twelfth?thirteenth centuries, after
painting. Scholars in the generation after ours are on the which no one attempted any such broad account. Texts
whole disinclined to take part in such a project, or even are from the later periods are biographical, theoretical, critical,
methodologically opposed to it. And so the great work of technical?but not historical. Without meaning to offer a
putting together such a history, which should be the basis reductive explanation of the reasons why not, I quote Hans
upon which further studies of early Chinese painting can be Belting on the problem of writing about Western art after
undertaken, has been discredited before it has been accom 1800: "An art which is already produced under the welcome
plished. It is as though we had abandoned the practice of or unwelcome awareness of its own history, which it then
architecture before we had built our city. (Perhaps mine is an seeks either to escape or to reapply is not very well suited
anxiety peculiar to our cultural crux: the historian Paul to an art history interested in demonstrating stable princi
Cohen wrote recently that historians of China have given up ples or evolutionary patterns"16 All this is entirely applicable
studies of large events and important people before some of to Chinese painting after about 1300?nobody attempts a
the major ones had been seriously studied.)14 It might be history of it because it does not exhibit a clear, unilinear
that the history of early Chinese painting can still be written, development; and most of the best post-Song painting is
especially with new archaeological finds augmenting our indeed deeply aware of its own history.
small body of safely datable monuments. Some younger So, if Chinese writers on painting no longer attempt his
scholar or group of scholars willing to take the time to reach tories, how do they deal with painting of the later periods?
a thorough mastery of the visual materials, and willing also The question cannot be answered simply, but we can
to buck the predictable negative responses, may accomplish observe that those who write the essays and books?who
what we have fallen short of doing. (I do not, of course, mean are, by definition, the literati?adopt generally the account
that style-history should again become a central concern of of meaning and expression in painting that had been intro
Chinese painting studies; only that someone should continue duced by their exemplar Su Shi (Su Dongpo; 1037-1101)
doing it, and that it should not be regarded as a hopelessly and his contemporaries in the late Northern Song, which
backward pursuit.) locates the source of expression within the artist. And they
But the main point I am making is that it can be done: do this, not by allowing the artist to construct the meaning
Chinese painting in the early centuries is susceptible to and expression of his picture at will, using established sig
diachronic analysis and ordering of the kind that allows nifies, but rather by assuming that the internal life of the
the construction of an art history. This continues to artist, his nature and feelings and thoughts, are somehow
be true, I believe, through the Song dynasty, although in manifested directly onto the paper or silk through brush
the twelfth and thirteenth century the history appears work, in an inarticulate mode of expression that can
more and more to divide into separate strands, as geo nonetheless be "read" by the sensitive viewer. In this they
graphical, social-economic, and other factors induce were applying to painting a reading much older in writings
artists who are contemporaries to take strikingly differ on poetry and calligraphy; they were also, I believe, reflect
ent stylistic directions. As before, pervasive shifts can be ing the Song literary critics' discomfort with the idea of
recognized in the ways landscapists rendered space and fictionality in poetry, their insistence on reading the poem
atmosphere, how they composed their pictures, how fig as relating things that really happened to the poet. Su Shi's
ures participate in them. The dynastic change from Song friend Li Gonglin (ca. 1049?1106) wrote, famously, that he
to Yuan in the late thirteenth century, however, is more "makes paintings as a poet composes poems, simply to
than a wrenching historical disjuncture brought about recite my feelings and nature."17 Equating painting with
by the Mongol conquest of China: it marks, for Chinese poetry allowed the artists and theorists to extend to paint
painting, the end of its history. ing the claim made for poetry: that its real content is the
It is worth noting here that the developmental or evolu experience and inner life of the maker.
tionary phase of Chinese painting, ending with the late Traditional connoisseurs have accepted Li Gonglin's
Song, is accompanied (like its counterpart in the West) by pronouncement, and similar ones by later artists, at face

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value ever since, as the deep truth about good Chinese tantamount to imposing foreign attitudes onto Chinese art.
painting. To this day they take pleasure in exercising their That argument seems to me completely specious.
finely honed visual skills in discerning the hand of the If we observe, for instance, that much of the most inter
artist, and associating the qualities of the painting with esting Yuan and later painting is deeply engaged with devis
what they know about the artist. They extend this pleasure ing elaborate ways to evoke and manipulate old styles, we
into a theory of value as well as expression, assuring us will look in vain for any correspondingly sophisticated
that brushwork, the artist's "touch," is what the painting is articulation of the practice in Yuan texts, beyond Zhao
really about, equating painting with calligraphy, deriding Mengfu's (1254-1322) brief admonition that the spirit of
as philistine anyone who wants to see the painting as a antiquity (guyt) was the quality most to be valued in paint
picture and read its imagery before turning to its facture. ing, or Huang Gongwang's (1269-13 54) observation that
This contention, probably because it enjoys the sanction of most landscapists of his time follow either Dong Yuan
centuries of Chinese connoisseurship (which is continued (ca. 900-962) or Li Cheng (ca. 919-ca. 967). Tang Hou's
into the present by such distinguished figures as Xu (act. ca. 13 22-13 29) famous six criteria for judging paint
Bangda and Wang Jiqian), has gone more or less unchal ings begin with the mysterious and undefinable "spirit
lenged, at least on the level of theory, as if impregnable in resonance," followed by brushwork, and list formal likeness
the face of our contrary experience?I am sure I speak for last, but make no mention of what must by this time have
most Chinese painting enthusiasts in observing that for the been fundamental to much high-level connoisseurship:
paintings that move us most deeply, the ones to which we a recognition of how painters such as Zhao Mengfu and
constantly return, pleasure in brushwork accounts for only Qian Xuan (ca. 1235-after 1302) were playing on the past.
a part, and often not even the major part, of our response. Dong Qichang (1555?1636) at the end of Ming strikes
One might also suppose that this set of beliefs about artis closer to the heart of the issue with his concept of fang,
tic expression would by now have been driven from the renderable as "creative imitation"; but even Dong, while
arena of serious argument by decades of battering from taking the position of one who is enlightening others, is so
theories of semiotics, intertextuality, deconstruction, and uninformative about how fang imitation was to be accom
the rest?the recognition that the power of art arises as plished that even the best scholars until recently could
much from collective as from individual production.18 But misunderstand his words as referring to a simple practice of
this has not happened. Such a concept of artistic expres imitation.19 We have been able to get beyond this misun
sion also rules out another common and productive derstanding only by paying close attention to the formal
approach, that of relating art to external circumstance, relationships between Dong's paintings and his old models,
since the formula "the artist painted that way because he and reading the significance of his transformations of these
felt that way" constitutes a closed circle, complete in itself. old models in the context of other painting of his time.
There are even those who argue that Chinese cultural The inadequacy of Chinese writings on painting in
expressions should be somehow exempt from the modes dealing with this issue seems especially odd in view of the
of analysis practiced elsewhere. The linked equation: high degree to which Chinese literary culture as a whole is per
level Chinese painting = literati painting = brushwork = meated by a consciousness of its own past, revealed not
individual self-expression still makes up an unexamined only in critical writings but also in the constant allusions
underpinning for a lot of writing in our field, and so con within the works themselves to older texts with which the
tinues to stand in the way of what I believe to be more complete literatus was expected to be conversant. This was
open and productive approaches. of course true of poetry, which in the later periods echoed
If individual self-expression had indeed been the princi continually the classical canon; it was also true of other lit
pal pursuit of later Chinese painters, the situation of stasis erary forms: readers of David Roy's Plum in the Golden Vase
and stagnation imagined by Western observers must surely (his translation of Jin Ping Mei) know that a Chinese
have followed quickly upon the end of the historical phase. author cannot even write a lurid erotic novel, a high-level
Fortunately, the painters were engaged in larger projects one at least, without introducing on every page mini
than baring their souls. To determine what these were, we quotations from earlier texts that must be footnoted for
need to look to the paintings, since writings by critics and the foreign reader.20 Chinese culture in the later centuries
theorists, even when these were the painters themselves, are can be seen as folding back on itself, drawing constantly on
nearly always inadequate to what the artists were up to.You its past, without, in the best work, sacrificing the excite
may wonder why this point needs to be made?it may ment of fresh, first-time creation. It attained the condition
seem self-evident?after all, scholars of Italian painting do that Harold Rosenberg (as cited by Belting) defined in the
not limit their investigations to those issues that concerned 1950s for what was then contemporary art in the West: the
Vasari. I make it to answer another familiar charge: that old concept of tradition is replaced, he writes, by "a new
introducing and pursuing matters that do not figure, or historical consciousness ... an awareness of art history
figure only weakly, in traditional Chinese writings is which not only the beholder but indeed every new work

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shares. It demands constant innovation as much as clear absolutely sharp, we can adopt these terms, and add that
references back to a history of art, a history toward which this article is concerned chiefly with painting.111 It is worth
the work takes its own stance."11 I am not suggesting any noting, however, that in the centuries after Song the other,
neat correspondence; Rosenberg is writing, of course, larger practice of picturing also entered a post-historical
about modernist art, and I am deliberately avoiding the phase, in that it, too, ceased to develop, or even to change
problem of what constituted modernism in Chinese paint significandy?Ming court artists who did works of a prima
ing?and even more the P-word, which I am not uttering rily descriptive or representational character did not notably
at all?a can of worms I do not care to open. I am simply alter the Song academy styles they inherited, and were not
saying that much of the best of later Chinese painting, and encouraged by their clients and patrons to do so. The critics
the most innovative, is infused with just that kind of his who formulated criteria of value did this only for literati
torical consciousness. painting; there were no generally accepted criteria, apart
Much, but by no means all. The painters regarded by the from a generalized "skillfulness," for the "artisan painters," as
Chinese critics, as well as by us, as the major post-Song they were dismissively termed. Even acclaimed masters such
masters?those who make up the canon, if you will?are as Dai Jin (1388-1462) and Wu Wei (1459-1508) win posi
nearly all, in their different ways, engaged in this practice of tive notice from the critics, not for their picturing skills but
playing on earlier styles, and in stylistic explorations other for their breaks with the main picturing tradition.
than the pursuit of resemblance. But these make up only the Through the Northern Song period great masters were
part of Chinese painting that they, and some of us, consider praised for pictures that "made you feel as if you were really
"fine art," and recent scholarship increasingly directs our in the place," or that "rivalled creation in Nature." In the
attention to another, surely more copious production of post-Song period such a judgment would not have consti
paintings that were functional, documentary, celebratory, tuted praise. Emperor Huizong in the early twelfth century
iconic, or simply decorative.21 (A good example is Fig 2) An was perhaps the last important voice to honor artists for
inscription attributed to the seventeenth-century landscapist doing true-to-life pictures, and even he insisted also on
Gong Xian (ca. 1617-1689) usefully draws the distinction as poetic resonances. Chinese critics would protest this state
that between pictures, tu, and paintings, hua; and for the pres ment of the matter, saying: we do not praise post-Song pic
ent purpose, with the usual caution about how the line is not ture makers because there are none who deserve praise, no

Fig. 2. Anonymous academy

master, Ming dynasty (early
16th c). Emperor Wuzong
Returning by Boat from the Imperial
Tombs. Section of a handscroll;
ink and colors on silk;
h. 92.1 cm, w 3003.6 cm.
National Palace Museum, Taipei.

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more great masters of picturing?all right, maybe QiuYing fit together or overlap without allowing real depth. But
(act. ca. 1522-1552), but nobody else. But the situation was these large trends also do not succeed one another in any
surely circular: the lack of critical recognition for whatever pattern of continuity. The appearance of those great creative
innovations and advances in picturing might have been masters who worked from the mid-seventeenth century
made, and the lack of enthusiasm for these among collectors into the early eighteenth "shook up" these mini-traditions
who mostly accepted the admonitions of the critics, must and gave them honorable ends. What followed had even less
have not only discouraged such moves but also ensured that of impetus. The deaths of three major early Qing land
any stylistic change based on them would be short-lived. scapists within a decade?Shitao in 1707, Wang Yuanqi in
A good example is Zhang Hong (1577?ca. 1652) in the late 1715, Wang Hui in 1717?mark, I have argued, a turning
Ming: as I have shown in various writings, he devised point in Chinese painting, of which the sharp decline in the
unprecedented techniques for making his pictures approxi production and importance of landscape is only one symp
mate better what he saw (in a Gombrichian sense). But tomatic aspect.22 The Yangzhou school in the eighteenth
nobody noticed, and he was ranked in the "competent century, the Shanghai school in the nineteenth, the guohua
class"?in effect, as a mediocrity?by those who made the or "traditional" masters in the twentieth, all can be said to
judgments. make up a kind of posi-post-history of Chinese painting
So, one could write a detailed and interesting account of that moves as if inexorably into the kind of "ongoing,
picturing after the Song, but one cannot write a history. potentially endless 'end-game' " condition that James Elkins
The kind of development in portraying the visible world (of whom more below) sees in both late Chinese painting
that exhibits some degree of continuity and a seeming and our own Western art of recent times. If the collective
logic ended with the end of Song, and nothing compara project for artists of the first great phase was exploring
ble to the stylistic sequence we can trace, for instance, from modes and techniques of representation, and for those of the
tenth-century landscape to Fan Kuan (act. ca 990-1030) to second, working through the formal and expressive possi
Li Tang (ca. 1050?ca. 1130) to Ma Yuan (act. ca. 1190?ca. bilities opened by the Yuan masters in their manipulations
1230), Xia Gui (act. ca. 1190?ca. 1230), and Ma Lin (act. ca. of old and new styles, the artists of the third, post-post
1250-1260) was ever to happen again. historical phase appear to have had no collective project at
Now, returning to what is customarily taken as the main all?no agreed-on "great game" to play.
line, literati and quasi-literati painting of the post-Song Such a schematic account gives no clue to why and how
period: the same is true here?it does not have a history, in Chinese painting continued in such strength for more than
the sense of presenting a succession of works susceptible to four centuries after it had stopped "developing."The ques
analysis as revealing intelligible patterns of change over tion is of some importance if we choose, in spite of all the
long stretches of time. (I say this as someone who has pub attendant perils and with no intent of either prognosticat
lished three volumes of what was announced as a "history ing or admonishing, to consider later Chinese painting as
of later Chinese painting"?the word was used loosely.) So an indication of the directions that a strong artistic tradi
what shape can it be said to take? Since a chronological tion might take in the centuries after its developmental
account is obviously not to the point, I will let it take its phase ends?in the words of the original title of an essay
form from its subject, and offer a series of related but by James Elkins, "Chinese Landscape Painting as Object
discontinuous observations. Lesson." And later Chinese painting is the only case of this
The developmental thrust that was the motor for stylistic in the history of art outside the European-American tra
change in the earlier centuries of painting, and that allows dition, I believe, and so offers the only opportunity to
us to speak of a history and a tradition, is lost. If we draw make such a comparative inquiry (at considerable risk, as
a time-line through the later centuries, we cannot arrange Elkins has learned: after his original essay was rejected by
along it a succession of representative and interrelated works several journals, he rewrote it, on advice, with heavy injec
that exhibit a sequential order, but can only add extrusions tions of post-colonial theory and agonizing over whether
sideward, so to speak?relatively short-lived schools and such comparisons can ever escape bias?arguments in
episodes that are not strung together into continuities. The which, he told me, he did not entirely believe. But it was
Wu school, the Zhe school, Dong Qichang and his still turned down, and remains unpublished).23 To put the
Orthodox school following, are prominent examples, but question another way: what were the patterns of relation
there are many others, mini-traditions which quickly lost ships among the works constituting post-Song Chinese
their viability. School styles, often regional, can be defined painting that replaced developmental stylistic sequences in
among these, and period characteristics can sometimes be generating rich internal structures of meaning, and staved
recognized that cut across schools?for instance, composi off, for several centuries at least, the disintegration and
tional method in the Wu school and Zhe school of the decline and repetitiveness that might have ensued?
fifteenth?sixteenth centuries: landscape pictures in both To understand the significance of the radical break with
tend to be composed of large, flat, firmly bounded units that the immediate past in the early Yuan period we should

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 look briefly at what preceded it, the Southern Song. If period that followed, notably Stravinsky, to reject them in
we were to single out the most consequential representa favor of harshness and dissonance or a referential mode
tional advance made in that period, it would be the shift that seems to revert to old, pre-Romantic styles. (The
to a more optical mode, in which a grove of trees, for analogy could equally be made with the sudden distaste
instance, was presented as the eye perceives it, fused into a for classical styles and the embrace of primitivism among
single image, instead of as an assemblage of discrete many early twentieth-century European painters.)
objects?exactly the change that Leonardo is credited Zhao Mengfu occupies a Stravinsky-like position in
with introducing to European painting three centuries relation to late Song painting. Two of his major artistic
later.24 Equally momentous was the development and stratagems have provided models for all later artists. One,
refinement of expressive means for arousing in the viewer represented by his 1296 Autumn Colors on the Qiao and Hua
highly focused poetic sensations through rigorous selec Mountains (Fig. 3), turns archaistic allusions to old styles to
tion and arrangement of pictorial materials.25 Xia Gui is the purpose of a highly sophisticated primitivism that
the great master of the first, both he and Ma Yuan of the forcefully denies all the representational advances in land
second, along with Ma s son Ma Lin, in whose hands this scape painting made during the Song, and confronts us
poetic mode was brought to the edge of preciousness. with a deliberately spaceless, awkwardly scaled, graceless
Similar effects are common to a great deal of painting by scene. The other, represented by his 1302 Village by the
their contemporaries, much of it preserved in Japan: the Water (Fig 4), employs a stratagem that we might term
means of achieving these effects appear to have become stylistic extremism: pushing to an extreme, far beyond
widely known and popular. As one fond of musical analo what could be sustained in a properly pictorial approach,
gies, I have sometimes invoked, in talking about the some feature of style?here, the elimination of color and
post-Song repudiation of this aspect of late Song painting, washes and solid substance and linear drawing (excepting
that moment in late nineteenth?early twentieth-century a few small touches) so as to leave only an expanse of dry,
European music when the harmonic and melodic means crumbly brushwork that only minimally evokes the simple
for arousing nostalgic and otherwise pleasurable feelings scenery. This kind of stylistic extremism, which takes
poignantly in the listener had become so effective and diverse forms, was continued in works by Ni Zan
so accessible as to virtually force some composers of the (1301-1374) and Wang Meng (ca. 1308-1385) in the Yuan

Fig. 3. Zhao Mengfii

(1254.-1322). Autumn
Colors on the Qiao and Hua
Mountains. Dated to 1296. Section
of a handscroll; ink and colors on
paper; h. 28.4 cm, w. 93.2 cm.
National Palace Museum, Taipei.

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 Fig. 4. Zhao Mengfu
(1254-1322). Shuicun tu {Village
by the Water). Dated to 1302.
Section of a handscroll; ink on
paper. Palace Museum, Beijing.

as well as by artists of later centuries. It would be difficult through two of these series will clarify this practice better
to find in world art, at so early a period, any comparably than discussing it in words could do.
radical and complex stylistic moves that are more than Zhao Mengfu's new mode of applying spare, dry-brush
sports, or dead ends?that are followed up, that is, by drawing to the most unexciting of scenery was taken up
whole new lines of pursuit which prove to be themselves by major Yuan masters such as Huang Gongwang and Ni
productive and innovative. Zan.What we observe in Yuan painting is a succession of
I do not say "lines of development," for reasons sug highly creative artists throwing stylistic ideas back and
gested already. Instead of adopting his style initially from forth, so to speak, each grasping quickly what the others
some close predecessor, as in a traditional art, the painter have done and making some new and unexpected move
now had the option of looking back over centuries for outward from that point, in a very complex interaction
what was attractive and useful to him. (There were, of over time that leaves simpler pictorial concerns far behind.
course, factors other than personal taste involved in the Sometimes the back-and-forth appears to happen in rapid
choices: particular old styles often carried heavy associa succession, as here; at other times it extends over cen
tions.) Zhao Mengfu could find sources for his dry-brush turies, with long periods of lull. Huang Gongwang, in his
drawing in some mid-Song literati paintings; later artists 1347?1350 masterwork Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains
who chose to explore this stylistic direction could draw (Fig 5), employed the dry-brush manner of ink mono
both on Zhao Mengfu's innovations and on his sources; chrome in building more complex, volumetric structures,
still later artists drew on these and others, and so on, without sacrificing the improvisatory-looking drawing and
making up what we might call linked series. Following rich brushwork textures that make his landscape forms still

Fig. 5. Huang Gongwang

(1269-13 54). Dwelling in
the Fuchun Mountains. Dated to
135?- Section of a handscroll;
ink on paper; h. 3 3 cm, w.
636.9 cm. National Palace
Museum, Taipei.

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appear earthly and un-schematic. Ni Zan, inspired in some
*?' '
part by these structural innovations of Huang Gongwang,
explored ways in which the dry-line drawing could be used
in defining readable masses that are put together out of
modular units of convex and semicubic forms. (An exam Hit
. *|f
ple is a small painting dated to 1352 [Fig. 6], present where
abouts unknown.)
Shen Zhou (1427-1509) in the late fifteenth-early six HI*.
teenth century was perhaps the next to follow this line of
pursuit seriously, as in his Walking with a Staff, circa 1485.26
But the next truly radical move within this series was made
by Dong Qichang in the early seventeenth century, the late
Ming, as in his River Landscape After Huang Gongwang (Fig. 7).
In his inscription he credits Huang as his model and wishes
that the old master could see his painting. Throughout the
later phases of this series, it is as if the system of forms is being
progressively stripped of its softening and naturalizing over
lays of looser brushwork to reveal the stark underlying struc
ture. And this process obviously implies an ever-increasing
tolerance, or even preference, for unnaturalistic, all-but
abstract form.
Dong Qichang s radical reworking of the Yuan masters'
styles was a principal model for the Anhui school in the
early Qing, along with the works of the Yuan masters them
selves, as we can see in a 1658 work by the greatest of the
Anhui artists, Hongren (1610-1664) (Fig. 8). He rejected
the schematic light-and-dark shading of Dongs style,
depending more direcdy on the Yuan-period models, in
which the sense of substantiality depends only on volume
defining devices of drawing possible within the linear
manner. The sequences are of course not really unilinear; the
strands interweave with others, joining and separating
Fig. 6. Ni Zan (1301-1374). Landscape with Houses. Dated to 1352.
constandy. In the mid-1650s Hongren rediscovered the
Large album leaf; ink on paper. Formerly Manchu Household
Northern Song monumental landscape manner and learned collection; present whereabouts unknown.
from it how to create imposing effects of space and mass and

Fig. 7. Dong Qichang

(i555-1636). Hills on a
Clear Autumn Day, in the Manner
of Huang Gongwang. Section of a
handscroll; ink on paper;
h. 37.9 cm, w. 137 cm. Cleveland
Museum, of Art (59.46).

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 towering height, as he demonstrates on a sublime level in
m great Coming of Autumn in the Honolulu Academy of Arts
The achievements of the later Chinese artists can o
be described as the reconciling of seemingly incompat
choices and, more specifically, as following up some stylist
direction into the range of extremism without sacrifi
the power of the picture as an image. It is as if Hong
were demonstrating the possibility of staying within the d
linear manner and still creating landscapes that have th
qualities of spaciousness and monumentality.
This single sequence?and many others could be p
together?will suggest the complex interrelationships
can be traced within a linked series, and also will answ
the Western art critics' complaints about how post-So
Chinese painting fails to develop. It fails in much the s
way that European painting from the mid-nineteenth
tury on fails to develop, in the old and traditional sen
Chinese painting of the centuries corresponding
Giotto-to-Gauguin in Europe did not somehow miss
chance to make comparable representational advances;
was no longer concerned with making them.
We return to the Yuan period to begin another of
nondevelopmental sequences, while also illustrating on
more the stratagem of stylistic extremism. The landsc
paintings by Ni Zan's friend and contemporary W
Meng stand at an opposite pole from Ni Zan's in a n
ber of ways: they are typically fully packed instea
empty, highly unstable instead of stable, with textures
to the point of oppressiveness, sometimes done in hea
color, often with active figures, and with compositions th
sometimes produce an effect of near-incoherence inst
of clarity. How the subjects and styles of Wang's and N
landscapes appear to correlate with their respective stan
within the political circumstance of their time is a pr
lem beyond this lecture, but one that can be profitab
pursued. In Wang Meng's masterwork of 1366, Dwelling
the Qingbian Mountains (Fig. 9), for instance, the artist
be seen as embodying his perturbation at the turm
accompanying the Yuan-Ming dynastic change. He rep
sents his family retreat at Mt. Qingbian (in a region
then engulfed in warfare), employing a compositional
mula (taken from tenth-eleventh-century models) t
normally expressed a sense of security and the possib
of escape from the outside world, but powerfully subv
ing the normal implications of that landscape type. W
Meng's picture does not permit the viewer to move eas
through it, to find his way into and out of the retreat; it
full of spatial and formal ambiguities, blocked passage
unnatural and disorienting shifts of light and dark. In
upper part (one reads such a landscape upward), the
mated earth masses and warped, constricted sp
between them do strange and potent things to the
Fig. 8. Hongren (1610-1663). Landscape in the Manner of Lu Guang. vis
Dated to 1658. Hanging scroll; ink on paper; h. 86.3 cm, w. of
35.3anyone
cm. who attempts to understand the picture in
Sarah Cahill Collection, Berkeley, California.
old, naturalistic way.28 Recent Western art, of course, off

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 parallels for such sophisticated and radical violation of
established expectations. But it is a stratagem that works
only so long as the expectations hold?when they have
been violated too repeatedly, it loses its power.
Skipping over the early and middle Ming imitations of
Wang Meng's style by Shen Zhou, Wen Zhengming, and
others, we jump to Dong Qichang, whose own huge 1617
painting of the Qingbian Mountains betrays a familiarity
with Wang Meng s work, and probably with one by Zhao
Mengfu of the same subject, now lost (Fig. 10). The points
of correspondence will be obvious, as well as the great dif
ferences; Wang Meng's Qingbian and others like it are the
genesis (along with their own predecessors) for a whole
series of tall, crowded compositions in which the earth
masses are made to generate more turbulence than the
frame seems able to contain. Dong Qichang's inscription
on the work, however, does not mention Wang Meng's or
Zhao Mengfu's pictures (he does that in another, recorded
inscription); instead, he claims as his point of departure the
style of the tenth-century landscapist Dong Yuan. A copy
of the painting that Dong Qichang believed to be (as his
inscription on it states) a genuine work of Dong Yuan, and
of "divine quality," survives in an album of reduced-size
copies of old paintings.29
It is clear that Dong Qichang grasped, and situated him
self in, the linked series from Dong Yuan to Zhao Mengfu
to Wang Meng to himself, with each earlier stage contain
ing in more moderate form the features that the later ones
would manipulate more radically. Each artist recognized
formal possibilities in the earlier painting that he could
exploit to powerful effect in his own, and each artist in
the series must have felt that he was pushing the implica
tions of the style and imagery out to the furthest point
possible?as indeed he was, for his time. What further
move could possibly be made beyond Dong's painting
within this sequence was in 1617 unimaginable. One that
in the event was made we can see in a landscape painted in
1694 by Zhu Da (Bada Shanren; 1625-after 1705) (Fig. 11),
beside which the instabilities and ambiguities of Dong's
picture, so striking in the late Ming context, seem rather
tame and tentative. (It is, of course, only one realization
from what was in effect an infinite range of possibilities?
no kind of determinism is implied. Nor am I suggesting
that this artist necessarily saw that picture?the linked
series requires no such assumption.)
However one understands the process by which Dong
Qichang and Bada Shanren arrived at the point of paint
ing such pictures, a question of the same order of com
plexity and interest as tracing "the roots of Cubism", it can
only have been through brilliant and sometimes violent
manipulation of materials and "stylistic ideas" from earlier
Fig. 9. Wang Meng (ca. 1309-1385). E>welling in the
Qingbian Mountains. Dated to 13 66. Hanging scroll; ink on paper; painting, in which layers of conventionalization, overlaid
h. 141 cm, w. 42.2 cm. Shanghai Museum. onto what had once been imagery from nature?for
instance, patches of fog against a mountainside?were

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 transmuted into forms that are self-consciously b
er * * # * T 1 highly unnatural but expressively powerful.
' ? * odic attempts by some writers to "rescue" Dong
1. A ! stigma of being estranged from nature, on the grou
f.
S ft
4 t? ? ? great painters in China can only learn directly f
experience of real scenery (a cultural stereoty
>1> '?I5 * sents, I continue to believe, a profound misunde
of what he was up to.
2. ? References to old painting and membership
; '1 ^C series are, of course, only two of the many way
later Chinese paintings interlock with issues both
and exterior to the art, achieving in the most s
and satisfying works a multilayered density of
Subjects and styles can be observed to correlate
socio-economic status of the artist and his stanc
ical and other large concerns. Artists who in
dynastic change chose to become yimin, or loya
keep aloof from the new regimes, for instance, w
to paint quite different pictures than those who
were compelled by circumstance, to enter gov
service. In all these cases, we begin by obser
correlations, and go on to investigate and dev
significance both within painting and outside it.
this direction over the past decades have o
important new ways of integrating Ming-Qing
into the broader fabric of Chinese political and
history. Mid-Ming artists, as I have shown in wri
the years, developed styles and chose subjects th
to themselves and their contemporaries to be
suited to their situations in life. Those, for inst
were impelled into the painting profession by f
achieve governmental posts, and who wanted
being classed with the "artisan painter," tended t
their nonconformism both in eccentric behavio
rough-brush or running-brush pictures.30 All thi
familiar; my point is that the rich and multidim
systems of signs and signification underlying M
painting permitted the artists to do works that
were appropriate for a diversity of occasions and
and uses, but could also, in their capacity as c
meaning, participate in negotiating issues of eco
social class, religious and intellectual beliefs, regio
and others that occupied people of the time.
And the artists did this, I want to stress again,
ing skillfully on established systems of signifier
dry, sparse style is customarily read as reflecting or
ing his high-mindedness, reserved temperam
obsession with cleanliness. Without disputing that
which has its measure of validity, one can point
when this same style is taken up by a whole
painters in seventeenth-century Anhui, the self-
Fig. io. Dong Qichang (1555-1636). The Qingbian Mountains. Dated
account breaks down, since it would confront u
to 1617. Hanging scroll; ink on paper; h. 225 cm, w. 66.9 cm.
Cleveland Museum of Art. movement made up exclusively of high-minded,
mentally reserved, obsessively cleanly artists. In

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 understand the paintings in relation to a new clientele
who wanted to claim these qualities for themselves, and
artists who understood their desires and were willing to
accommodate them. Ownership of a painting by Ni Zan
or by Hongren, according to writers of their respective
periods, conferred an elevated status on families in their
regions.31
It should be unnecessary to add that none of these ways
of reading the work exhausts its content, or dissolves the
artist entirely into a nexus of status and circumstance. In
branding as inadequate the traditional Chinese version of
self-expressive theory, I am certainly not rejecting altogether
linkages between the art work and the psychology of the
artist, as they are argued notably by Richard Wohllheim.32
After we have recognized, for instance, that the paintings
of the two late Ming giants Dong Qichang and Chen
Hongshou (1598?1652) (Fig. 12) in part reflect their respec
tive positions as highly successful scholar-official (Dong) and
failed-bureaucrat professional painter (Chen), we must go
on to acknowledge that their bodies of work, both deeply
engaged with old painting but in radically different ways,
reflect also markedly different mentalities. Dong in his the
oretical writings, while never specifically rejecting the self
expressive theory, sends it in a new direction, shifting
emphasis away from the facture of the work, brushwork and
texture and gesture, toward structural concerns that inter
lock with his modes of drawing on old masters. He righdy
recognizes Zhao Mengfu as his true predecessor in this
project, not merely for his advocacy of capturing the "spirit
of antiquity" in paintings, but more, we can surmise, for
making central to his work a deep sense of a plural past
(I take the term from Carl Schorske, who writes of "cultural
definition as modern through the ingestion of a plural
past.")33 Dong institutionalized that practice and urged it on
fellow artists, advising them on which veins in the past
were most worth mining. He also made a massive attempt
to re-historicize Chinese painting with his theory of the
Southern and Northern schools.This, as we all know, is a far
cry from art history in our sense, but it was enormously
influential, pardy because it satisfied the deep Chinese need
to invoke the cultural authority of the past in validating
some doctrine and practice in the present.
If a systematic charting of the internal dynamics of a
post-history can ever be accomplished, it will recognize
that certain moves, certain strategies in engaging with the
past, can be fully successful only once, or only for a brief
time, and thereafter lose their effectiveness. Wang Meng's
way of working against expectations set up by earlier
monumental landscape was essentially unrepeatable; when
a later artist such as Wu Bin (act. 1573-ca. 1625) attempted
something like it in the late Ming, the effect is under
Fig. ii. Bada Shanren (Zhu Da; 1626-1705). Landscape. Hanging
mined by the later artist's slipping into a mode of fantasy,
scroll; ink on satin; h. 180 cm, w. 48 cm. Formerly Untei Akaba, Tokyo.
which shifts the viewer's response from a quasi-real world
reading to one of estrangement. (That was, of course, part

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 if H
mi
Luo Ping and Ren Xiong revisited Chen's figure style
effectively in certain of their works. Irony as a trenchantly
pessimistic stance turns too quickly into one that is no
more than easy parody, as all too much recent painting

m?
both inside and outside China demonstrates.
Our non-historical post-history of Chinese painting will
conclude quickly with a highly abbreviated account of
what happened (I stop short of saying went wrong) in the
last three centuries, which I persist in seeing as a period of

\w
decline, in the face of all the recent efforts (on their own
terms laudable) to present it as different but equal. Dong
Qichang's model of reintroducing complex and innovative
compositional structures to landscape painting and engag
ing productively with artists of the past remained in force
only into the early eighteenth century, when the deaths of
ill-** ^. ' three major landscapists, as noted earlier, brought an end to
this phase. Shitao's perception of fang, drawing on the old
masters, as a practice more oppressive than enriching, and
his late-period attempt to break out of it, powerfully but in
the end poignantly, is symptomatic of the predicament of
painting in his time, and did not point a way out. For much
of the landscape painting that followed, such words as
"exhaustion" and "ennervation" seem applicable. In style,
landscape tended to emulate the Orthodox model without
adding much to it; in subject, apart from some interesting
pictures of real places, it tended to present endlessly, in a
highly dilute form, the pastoral ideal of living in nature, far
from the contaminating world. What had once been a
moving theme had by now become outworn and tiresome.
Painters of the Yangzhou school in the eighteenth
century and Shanghai school in the nineteenth, as well as
guohua, or "traditional," artists in the twentieth, produced
paintings that are fresh, engaging, often loveable: I have
written enthusiastically about them, and own and treasure
examples of them. But artists of real originality appeared
more sparsely, and repetitiveness was more pervasive. Even
such good recent painters as Qi Baishi (i864-1957) and
Huang Binhong (1864-1955) slipped into highly repetitive
modes of production. Or, if not repetitive, the later images
are likely to be thin in content and dilute in expression,
in addition to taking a popularizing direction that robs
them of some of the strengths of earlier painting. Other
subject categories supplanted landscape in the late period,
but these, too, one after another, succumbed to conven
Fig. 12. Chen Hongshou (1599-1652). Tall Pine and Daoist Immortal
tionalization and made up new mini-orthodoxies. A genre
(Self-portrait in a Landscape). Hanging scroll; ink and colors on silk;
h. 202.1 cm, w. 98.7 cm. National Palace Museum,Taipei. of beautiful-women (meiren) pictures that flourished in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a finely
tuned code of signification separating the more demure
ones, some of them done for women, from erotically
of Wu Bin's purpose.)34 Chen Hongshou's very sophisti inviting, even lurid ones aimed at men, was tamed in the
cated misquotings of antique styles and imagery belong to early nineteenth century into a more or less homoge
a Stravinskian phase when irony can be a fresh and pow neous and relatively pallid imagery of incorporeal, willowy
erful artistic device. But this is another move that is essen ladies who smile sweetly and exhibit little strength or
tially unrepeatable, although a few later masters such as individuality.

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 I could go on quoting Belting and Danto and others and manipulating styles in very sophisticated ways. This
about our own post-historical art and noting parallels with period I have called post-historical, and what followed,
later Chinese painting. Someone could then ask: so what? characterized by the weakening of this internal order and
and I would be hard put for a compelling answer. I am cer the onset of disintegration and repetition, I have called post
tainly not the person to venture any conclusions about post-historical. My comparativist observation would be that
what, if anything, the Chinese case might mean for the West within this framework, if it has any validity, the post-history
in the twenty-first century and beyond. I shall conclude, of Western painting, which might correspond to what
then, with a single observation. Chinese painting as I have Belting calls the "classically modern," the phase of
tried to see it in this article continued strong for about four Impressionist/Post-Impressionist, Cezanne-to-Picasso-and
centuries after its history ended, sustained by a meaningful Cubism followed by a quick succession of other isms, was
internal order that is not developmental but depends on comparatively short-lived, and the ^05i-post-history came
strategies, worked out by the artists individually and collec on us depressingly soon. And before I am tempted to
tively, of drawing on a plural past, whether distant or recent, expand on that observation, I had best close.

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Notes 21. My book Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Urban Studio Artists in High
Qing China will be devoted to this category of painting in the 17th and
18th centuries. See also Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early
i. Max Loehr, "Phases and Content in Chinese Painting," in Modern China (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Pr., 1997), p. 15. Clunas goes
Proceedings of the International Symposium on Chinese Painting (Taipei: further than I would like to in dissolving the "discursive formation" (his
National Palace Museum, 1970), pp. 285-97. term) "Chinese painting."
2. "Chinese Painting: Innovation After'Progress' Ends," in China 3000 22. James Cahill, "On the Periodization of Later Chinese Painting:
Years: Innovation and Transformation in the Arts, exh. cat. (New York: The Early to Middle Ch'ing (K'ang-hsi to Ch'ien-lung) Transition," in
Guggenheim Museum, 1998), pp. 174-92. The Transition and Turning Point in Art History, Ninth International
3. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Symposium, The Society for International Exchange of Art-historical
Pictorial Representation, 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Pr., 1969), pp. Studies (Kobe, i99i),pp. 52-67.
146?78: "Formula and Experience." Arthur Danto, "Ming and Qing 23. Elkins has kindly let me have copies of the two versions of his
Paintings," in Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations unpublished essay. The first version, written ca. 1994, is titled "Chinese
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), pp. 34-35; reprinted from Landscape Painting as Object Lesson." The second, sent to me in 1996,
The Nation, 23 October 1959, pp. 469-71. is titled "Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History" This has
4. Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art?, trans. Christopher S. been published in Chinese translation as Xifang meishu shixue zhong de
Wood (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1987). Zhongguo shanshui hua (Beijing: China Academy of Art Press, 1999). In
5. E. H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye (NewYork: Phaidon Press, 1999 Elkins delivered a lecture at several places titled "Why It Is Not
1994), p. 11. Possible to Write Art Histories of Non-Western Cultures." This also is,
6. James Cahill, The Painters Practice: How Artists Lived and Worked in so far as I know, unpublished.
Traditional China (New York: Columbia Univ. Pr., 1994), p. 114. 24. James Ackerman, "Leonardo da Vinci: Art in Science," Daedalus,
7. These developments are outlined in one chapter in my forth Winter 1998, pp. 223-24.
coming book Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Urban Studio Artists in High 25. James Cahill, The Lyric Journey: Poetic Painting in China and Japan
Qing China. (Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard Univ. Pr., 1996), pp. 7-72:
8. See my article "Some Aspects of Tenth Century Painting as Seen "In Southern Sung Hangchou."
in Three Recently Published Works," in Proceedings of the International 26. Shen Zhou, "Walking With a Staff," in Cahill, Parting at the Shore:
Conference on Sinology, Section on History of Art, (Taipei: Academia Chinese Painting of the Early and Middle Ming Dynasty, 1368-1380 (New
Sinica, 1982), pp. 1-36. York and Tokyo : Weatherhill, 1978), pi. 29.
9. For these, see Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace 27. This development in Hongren's painting is traced in my
Museum, Taipei, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Compelling Image, pp. 158?64; the Honolulu Coming of Autumn is repro
1996), fig. 66 and pi. 70, also p. 158 (detail). duced there as pi. 9.
10. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth 28. Richard Vinograd, "Family Properties: Personal Context and
Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1983), pp. 30, 83, 72. Cultural Pattern in Wang Meng's Pien Mountains of 13 66," ^4r5 Orientalis,
11. See Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting, exh. cat. (Cleveland: The vol. XIII (1982), pp. 1-29. James Cahill, Hills Beyond a River: Chinese
Cleveland Museum of Art, 1980), pp. 20?24; and Possessing the Past, p. 129 Painting of the Yuan Dynasty, 127Q-1368 (Tokyo and New York:
(cf. n. viii), pi. 60. Weatherhill, 1976), pp. 122-24.
12. Arthur C. Danto, Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic 29. The leaf, from the album Xiaozhong xianda (Seeing the Great in the
Meditations (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994), p. 37. Small), an album of reduced-size copies of masterworks known to
13. Belting, The End of the History of Art?, p. 15. Dong Qichang, is reproduced in Cahill, The Compelling Image, fig. 2.3.
14. Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical 30. James Cahill, "Tang Yin and Wen Zhengming as Artist Types:
Writings on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia Univ. Pr., A Reconsideration," Artibus Asiae, vol. 43, nos. 1/2 (1993), pp. 228-48.
1984; 2d ed., 1996), Second Preface, 1995, P- xiy 31. This is a bare statement of an argument made by my students and
15. Translated by William Acker in Some T'ang and Pre-T'ang Texts on myself in the catalogue of an exhibition, Shadows ofMt. Huang: Chinese
Chinese Painting (Part I, Leiden: EJ. Brill, 1954; Part II, 1974). Painting and Printing of the Anhui School (Berkeley: University Art
16. Belting, The End of the History ofArP., p. 41. Museum, 1981).
17. Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih, eds., Early Chinese Texts on Painting 32. E.g., Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton
(Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard Univ. Pr., 1985), p. 204. Univ. Pr., 1987), p. 138: "Emotion, aroused by what we see, comes to
18. Cf. Stephen Grenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, pp. 4?5, 12. color our perception of what we see." This is very different from the
19. Joseph R. Levenson, "The Amateur Ideal in Ming and Early Chinese version of self-expression through brushwork.
Ch'ing Society: Evidence from Painting," in Chinese Thought and 33. Carl E. Schorske, Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage
Institutions, ed. John K. Fairbank (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1967), to Modernism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Pr., 1998), p. 117.
pp. 320?41. Also James Cahill, "Style as Idea in Ming-Ch'ing Painting," 34. Cahill, The Distant Mountains, pp. 176-81.
in The Mozartian Historian: Essays on the Works of Joseph R. Levenson, ed. 1. The End of the History of Art?, p. 41.
Maurice Meisner and Rhoads Murphy (Berkeley: Univ of California 11. Belting, p. 50, summarizing Rosenberg in The Anxious Object,
Pr., 1976), pp. 137-56. Dong does, to be sure, write that the fang imita pp. 25 ff.,"Past and Possibility."
tion that does not resemble its model is "the closest resemblance," and in. Cited in my essay "Types of Artist-Patron Transactions in
earlier artists had written that imitations of old paintings should not Chinese Painting," in Artists and Patrons: Some Social and Economic Aspects
simply reproduce them; see my Distant Mountains: Chinese Painting of the of Chinese Painting, ed. Chu-tsing Li (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Pr.,
Late Ming Period (Tokyo and Rutland, Vt.: Weatherhill, 1982), pp. 1989), pp. 7-8.
120-23, "Fang or Creative Imitation: The Theory."
20. David Roy, trans, and annot., The Plum in the Golden Vase, vol. 1,
The Gathering (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Pr. 1993); vol. 2, The Rivals
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton Univ. Pr., 2001).

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