The Painter's Practice: How Artists Livedand Worked in Traditional China (review)

270 China Review International: Vol. ?, No. ?, Spring 1994 to insert expressive landscape settings. Somehow the stated fact that he was addicted to opium can influence one's perception ofhis faces: intense and yet detached, they project over emblematic rocks or trees, or squirming animals like an angry cat or a shrieking dog about to be butchered. With this last image in the book (fig. 85), we realize the distance traveled from the ordered world of traditional Chinese culture. As might be expected, this substantial book is well equiped with scholarly endnotes, glossary of characters, bibliography, and index. What needs to be said in conclusion? Possibly something along the lines ofadvice for the author's future writings. A sentence from the section on Yuan Mei's portrait raises certain issues. It reads: "The portrait set in motion a process that became, eventually, literally self-destructive in the intensity of its analysis, but the image itself seems unexceptional, and almost everything of interest presented up to this point has been extraneous to the pictorial image as such" (p. 90). The analysis is, of course, the author's own, and perhaps for the reader's sake, ifnot for himself, he should keep in mind that it is not an uncontrollable process. Also he might note that interpretations can easily be projected onto paintings (now called texts), and this is true even in the case oflater Chinese paintings often so encumbered with written texts. Furthermore, there is a danger in subtlety if the material dealt with is included for the sake ofcomplete coverage, as mayhave been the case with some of the less well-known Ming and Qing works that do not warrant in-depth analysis. Occasionally psychological "intro-spection" (to coin a term) may seem to give way to overt speculation in the treatment ofless-famous subjects (for example, fig. 25), where a detailed biographical context is not given. Finally, in matters of style, some simplicity in sentence structure is not necessarilybad (and notice that alliteration). Susan Bush Fairbank Center, Harvard University James Cahill. The Painter's Practice: HowArtists Lived and Worked in Traditional China. NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1994. 180 pp. 119 illustrations. copyright\994 by University of Hawai'i Press To review the work of James Cahill after considering that ofhis student, Richard Vinograd, is rather like turning to the expansive Sung poet Su Shih after reading his more meticulous follower, Huang T'ing-chien. As the author of innumerable books on Chinese painting, Cahill has something of Su Shih's swiftness of mind and facility of expression, which enables him to cover and condense a great deal ofmaterial (see, for example, the last page and a half ofhis i960 Chinese Painting, Reviews 271 on the Ch'ing eccentric Lo P'ing [Luo Ping in pinyin in Vinograd's book] ). Again, since Cahill's new book focuses on the socioeconomic dynamics of Chinese painting, it should, like Vinograd's, be of interest to China specialists in fields other than art history. As ofnow, Cahill has not continued to work on the sequel to his three-volume set on Yuan and Ming painting, but, since most of the information given here dates from the late Ming on and essentially fleshes out the record up to modern times, this book will be a useful reference for students oflater Chinese painting. It is published in the prestigious Bampton lecture series initiated by Arnold Toynbee's The Prospects ofWestern Civilization in 1940, and the text is based on lectures delivered at Columbia University in October of 1991. As noted in the Preface, most of the content was assembled by specialists and students in a graduate seminar given in 1989 at the University of California, Berkeley; it was then entered as discussed, by topic, into a computer database, which Cahill used in preparing the lectures. Thus the general organization is topical, and chapters on the Chinese painter's livelihood, studio, and hand follow an introductory first chapter on the myth of the artist's practice. Titled "Adjusting Our Image ofthe Chinese Artist," it opens with a feisty attack on myths engendered by the literati-elite of China that have been accepted as truths by modern scholars...