Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting (review)

This collective effort is divided among six specialists on Chinese painting. Four are of Chinese background, three of whom are from Beijing and one from Chicago; the two non-Chinese are both Americans. As part of the series on "The Culture and Civilization of China," the goal in this book is to gather together information for both general readers and specialists and provide a resource for future research. The book is claimed to represent the "fruit of cooperation between Chinese and Western scholars." Since the "Western scholars" here include only two Americans, this reviewer feels that the input of French, German, or other European scholars would have added more of an authentic "Western flavor" to this evaluation of the three-thousand-year-old tradition of Chinese painting.

In seven chapters, covering the origin of Chinese painting through the twentieth century, each Chinese or Western specialist treats an individual chapter in a unified English writing style. Although this style is uniform, the two different cultural approaches are clearly recognizable, and it is this difference that makes the book so valuable.

The first chapter, "Approaches to Chinese Painting," is divided into parts 1 and 2. Part 1 is by Yang Xin, Deputy Director of the Palace Museum, Beijing, and part 2 is by James Cahill, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. Yang points out the gradual changes that have taken place in Chinese painting, from the decorative purpose of prehistoric pottery and floor ornamentation to individual paintings. He emphasizes the importance of the early development of the ink-brush technique, and the later interaction between painting, philosophy, poetry, and calligraphy, more or less throughout the entire tradition of Chinese painting. Archaeological evidence supports the contention that painting appeared before the invention of script, mainly in the form of printed seals or brush paintings. (I would like to call attention to the fact that Chinese cartoon artists, in their large-scale humorous paintings at the end of the twentieth century, have returned to the ancient ink-brush technique. ¹)

The Six Principles of Painting displayed in the work of the painters of the Southern Qi (479-502) certainly had an important influence on the attempt to achieve realism. But, according to Yang, even earlier, in the Qin period (221-206 B.C.), the achievement of realistic likeness in painting was developed in order to "publicize and eulogize loyal ministers and martyrs and to denounce traitors." On the basis of my own research, I believe that although this could be the case, the tradition of portrait painting unquestionably had an influence on the realistic portrayals of the life-size terra cotta soldiers found in the burial complex of Qin Shi Huang and of the miniature soldiers found in the Han tombs near Xi'an. ²

James Cahill, on the same subject (in part 2 of this first chapter), explains to the reader how to look at Chinese paintings. Despite their realistic style, Cahill points out that Chinese paintings seemed technically inept to Western viewers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Paradoxically, because of the "failure" of these paintings to create an illusion, they may seem "all the more modern to us now." I should note here that since the nineteenth century, Western viewers have become well acquainted with the flat, outline-style composition of medieval European stained-glass windows. (The three-dimensional perspective in Western art, which had originally been championed in classical times, was not rediscovered until the European Renaissance.) The images in these stained-glass windows evoked strong religious feelings among Christians and served the purpose of educating their viewers.

Cahill, on the other hand, does well to point out that seeing traditional Chinese paintings as "modern" may trivialize them by obscuring their original meaning. The cultivated audience, according to Cahill, should be aware of the history, literature, and doctrines of Confucianism, Daoism, and...