Foreword to James Cahill article

It is not often that a journal decides to accept for publication a twenty-year-old manuscript. Archives of Asian Art is pleased to accept this article for a number of reasons. First is the lasting importance of the topics it engages: the relationship in Chinese painting history between literati and professional artistic styles, their conventions and their audiences’ expectations of them; the encounter between collector choices and random survivals, which artificially shape (expand or limit, focus or diffuse) our opportunity to see and understand the distant history of this medium; the scholarly engagement, unusual in our field, with “second-class paintings” (the author’s own term for those discussed here) in order to reconstuct a history of common practice, rather than the more typical engagement with exclusive “masterpieces,” which creates what we ought properly to recognize as a history of exceptionalism. To amplify a bit, the literati-professional relationship referred to here contributes to a long-standing dialogue concerning the tension between artistic freedom (in this case, the literati artists’ much-esteemed “spontaneity”) and prescribed social roles, conventions, and expectations. That discussion has sometimes taken on its own conventions, dividing participants into “lumpers” and “splitters”—the latter (including the author, Professor Cahill) arguing that an artist’s social background (whether “lofty” scholar or “lowly” artisan) can be discerned in the style of his work, which conformed to the social expectations that bore on him; the “lumpers” claiming this to be unreliable, deterministic, and socially biased.¹ What is intriguing about his article, however, is its concern with a group of works (rare for having been archaeologically excavated) which, in the author’s words, “do not raise the amateur-professional issue by displaying any clear distinctions between ‘amateurish’ and ‘professional-looking’ works, but rather by representing types of painting in which the distinctions are minimized or imperceptible.” This is not a reworking of old arguments but a new and nuanced approach to them, in which the author has abandoned his steadfast “splitter” position and instead blurred the “lumper-splitter” distinction.

More briefly, then, a second reason for bringing forth this article now is that little scholarly literature bearing on the subject has come forth in the past two decades. (A few important exceptions could be noted.²) Publication here will, I hope, keep these important issues alive and inspire a new generation of scholars to consider them. Finally, a third reason for Archives, in particular, to welcome this essay is that it serves to complement an earlier, outstanding article published here by Professor Cahill, “Continuations of Ch’an Ink Painting,” similarly concerned with the complex and subtle modes of transmission and transformation of earlier conventions into the art of later times.³