On the Coordinates of Style in Chinese Painting--and Elsewhere

By the coordinates of style I mean those factors that appear regularly to “go along with,” or correlate with, changes in style. We have all been properly told about (and I have described how the ancient Chinese believed in) “correlation, not causation”--not constructing a cause-and-effect world in the Copernican manner, but a correlative one that works by mysterious harmonies between all the things and forces that make it up. Now, within that model, how do we understand the factors that surround the creation of art, so that certain of them correlate with stylistic choice and stylistic change?

Because they do--that much seems to me beyond question. I am no more able to understand it than anyone else--well, maybe advanced thinkers can in ways beyond my capacity. I have related several times an exchange with C. C. Wang at a Shanghai symposium: he saying (I paraphrase), “You talk and write about how artists have to paint in the ‘right way’ for their time and place. But we artists know that we’re not subject to any such constraints, we paint whatever we please, any time, entirely free in our choices.” And I responding, ”It’s your job as an artist, C.C., to paint as though that were true; it’s my job as an art historian to prove, over and over again as often as necessary, that it isn’t true.” And I was just then preparing a lecture that included a section on the styles being used by overseas Chinese artists at that time, of whom C.C. was one.

Now, given all that, what were the coordinates of style for Chinese painting? I’ve spent much of my career arguing and showing that there were such coordinates, against an opposition that preferred to believe in the free-spirited artist, not subject to any determinants in what and how he painted. But I’ve related all that often enough already, and quoted Baxandall on how that kind of artist doesn’t appear until very recent times. Still, let me go back over some of it.

- In dedicating one of my books to Max Loehr, I wrote “He taught us that style has meaning. Everything else that mattered followed from that.” This tribute was called into question by those who pointed out, quite rightly, how Loehr had denied that historical and economic circumstances surrounding the artist should be taken into account in understanding the forms that his paintings take. But Loehr had been a notable practitioner of identifying other coordinates, notably period (as shown by his triumph in identifying pre-Anyang bronze styles before archaeology proved him right), and local or regional style: I’ve related how once in a seminar he pointed to a little bronze animal in the midst of a collection of nomadic-style bronzes (the so-called Ordos bronzes) and said: “This small animal speaks, and says to us:  ‘I am Chinese.’” And he believed in personal style for artists, and tried endlessly to define it for those he wrote about, beginning with his early article on Li Tang.

- I’ve been engaged in arguments about this large matter throughout my career--I needn’t, I hope, recount or summarize all the arguments I’ve had about this matter. My first truly challenging or combative paper was the one about how the “life patterns” of middle Ming artists --the patterns underlying what was written about them in the biographical sources--coordinate with the kind of paintings they do, in an observable, unshakeable correlative pattern. And I got in another big argument over the appearance of features of style in 17^th-century Chinese painting that could only have come from the artists’ exposure to European pictures. And more recently in my lecture and article “Some Thoughts On the History and Post-History of Chinese Painting,” which raised again the controversial matter of period style: is there such a thing? We have gone through an awful period--I hope it’s gone forever--in which only certain associations or coordinates of style in art have been permitted for consideration as significant by mainstream art historians--how well I remember our best students, back in the 1980s-90s during the late part of my teaching career, parroting the formula: “We aren’t interested in anything but race, class, and gender.” Along with that went post-colonial theory, and the awful effects of a good idea--Edward Said’s Orientalism--pushing too many scholars into a passionate belief that it was elitist and trivializing to work with other aspects of style than those three--race, class, and gender--in art and literature. A generation of young people grew up with the belief that Shakespeare’s Tempest was really about the wicked imperialist Prospero’s takeover of the island, brutally suppressing its natives (Caliban and his mother).

I worked with my students on, for instance, the socio-economic coordinates of Anhui-school painting styles: how the merchant culture in the Jiangnan region was persuaded that the dry, linear manner used by certain artists was an emblem of refined taste and lofty status, so that they lavished their patronage on artists who worked in this austere, super-refined style--just as the very rich today, or some of them, pay crazy prices for works by Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst and the others, for reasons far removed from real artistic preference--they are in effect buying prestige and reputation within a particular world of opinion. But all this is well known. What have I to say that is new?

- But continuing for a while to reminisce: Viewed over a long period, which my career has become through the simple factor of my sheer survival: the art-history field has gone through some truly striking ups and downs. Fervent denunciations of old-style art history--I recall an angry scholar who came up from UCLA to give us Berkeley professors a lecture about how what we were doing could no longer be taken seriously--I think it was Donald Presiozi--and my unuttered response: thank you, and now you can fly back down and we’ll go on doing exactly what we were doing before. UCLA professors were usually angry at Berkeley for all kinds of reasons, but Berkeley went on being the best, unperturbed. Anyway, the end of old-style art history proved to be like the end of tonal music, or of figurative painting--we are assured passionately that it will never be done again, and then, if we live long enough, we watch it come back. Prohibitions of this kind, thank god, last only for a while, and then are forgotten--or rather, become part of the history of the field. Marxist art history, at one time a minor anomaly practiced by a few scholars (notably one at UCLA named Otto Karl something), certainly not part of the mainstream--it was given one special session, poorly attended, at each CAA meeting--then took over for a time, in the hands of major scholars such as T.J. (Tim) Clark of our faculty. And this led to the situation I mentioned above, in which good students proclaimed that they were interested in no issues other than race, class, and gender. And there was Theory, especially the francophile form of it--no one matters but Foucault, or Derrida, or Lacan, or Quel-qu’un. (I have called it Big Theory, consciously recalling Big Nurse in Cuckoo’s Nest.) I have been an observer of all this from the sidelines, mostly, although I tried, with my students, to see how one or another of these approaches might be usefully applied to Chinese painting studies.

Now, at last, back to my original subject, the coordinates of style. I used to lay out an elaborate theoretical model for identifying these in Chinese painting, a grand project that would never be carried out but which we could nonetheless envision. I included it, as I remember, in a lecture given at China House in New York on “Regional Schools in Chinese Painting,” in connection with Hongnam Kim’s exhibition of the artists surrounding Zhou Lianggong, the subject of her dissertation--my lecture is listed as CLP 93 on my website, but the text isn’t available there. Anyway, outlined in my lecture was a way we could, if we spent enough time and trouble on it, identify all or most of these coordinates. It goes like this:

We assemble, shall we say, a thousand Chinese paintings--or, better, ten thousand--and for each of them we identify, and enter into our card-files (or, today, our computers) a series of yes-or-no “facts” about it: Is it a landscape? Yes or no. Are there figures in it? Is there color? Are the figures active or conventional? Is the brushwork fine or rough? And so forth, up to a thousand--or, better, ten thousand. (Don’t come back complaining that some of these are subjective--I mean only objectively observable features, which would be agreed on by everybody--or everybody we cared about.) And then, separately, we enter for each of the paintings a set of circumstances surrounding its creation, a great many of them: date, where it was painted, what was around there for the artist to see, what came before it within the artist’s tradition that he/she could have learned from (and yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as artistic tradition--doubters should go back and read George Kubler, The Shape of Time, which lays it out expertly). And so on, through all the various “facts’ about the artist (his or her age when he/she painted it, etc.) and (if known) about the purchaser or recipient, how and how much the artist was paid for it (or what favor or obligation it requited)--all of that. And then, once we have this huge task finished, we push the right buttons and we learn what coordinates with what: which factors or features appear to belong with period, which with locality, which with certain facts and circumstances surrounding the artist--and so forth. And there we would have them: period style, regional or local style, personal style, “old age” styles, economically high-cost styles--all of it.

I hardly need to add that the project is pretty much un-realizable, or at least highly unlikely ever to be realized. I set it forth here only as an ideal model for how I think some of these big questions about the coordinates of style in Chinese painting might be answered--and, just as importantly, shown to be, indeed, operative coordinates. And it would serve also as an affirmation that, given enough time and effort, these big questions could be answered--they have answers, that is. It’s just up to us to find them.

James Cahill, February 20^th, 2012

Blog 2/12/2012: More American Funnies

About the above title: I recently recorded one of my video-lectures--in the second series, to be posted later this year--under the title “Old American Funnies” (about Gelett Burgess, Clarence Day--his Scenes from the Mesazoic--and the main subject, the great George Price). I think I will continue using the word “funnies” for catch-all collections like that one of materials by myself and others that seem to me funny and worth making public. “Funnies,” by the way, used to mean what we now call the comics--when the newspaper came, I might shout “Give me the funnies!” And there I would find the Katzenjammer Kids, Maggie and Jiggs, Mutt and Jeff and the like. (No, not Little Nemo--I’m not quite that old.) (Is anybody else alive who can still sing “Barney Google”?)

This collection I’m doing now could be sub-titled: Jottings While Semi-watching the Superbowl. I spent some hours today doing that, feeling some kind of cultural obligation and a certain curiosity about what I would see after all the hyped buildup. I’ve watched a number of Superbowl games over the years, some of them with my two pairs of children--I could have watched all 56 if we’d had a TV back in 1956 (how symmetrical!) and if I wasn’t too busy traveling and doing other things back then. Anyway, today’s was intermittently absorbing, even exciting--by the end of the first quarter I had figured out who the guys in red and the guys in blue were, and had been introduced to a young man named Brady who came from what used to be, for me, nearby San Mateo and looked like he could have been one of my undergrads--and who has a good throwing arm. One bit I still don’t understand is when one of the players carrying the ball made a mistake? by falling back over the line into the endzone. (No, don’t write and explain.) I wrote my daughter Sarah tonight, among other things:

“Today I watched some of SuperBowl 56, with all the accompanying stuff. Not for long--I’m not a football fan, really. Madonna’s halftime show wasn’t bad--she looks OK for her age, and still sings with a real voice, unlike the three who did “America the Beautiful” & “Star Spangled B.” at the beginning, all using the new mode of singing, through your nose with a kind of country-music twang and rhythm. I’m old enough to remember when it was the fat lady Kate Smith who always sang that at the opening of major occasions. (“It ain’t over until the fat lady sings.”) She really did it right. As for the commercials: ads for current and upcoming TV shows, all done in the super-fast new mode, no image on screen for more than a second--they drive me crazy, make me feel I’ve lived too long. I’ve been so pleased by the responses to my video-lectures from people who appreciate their leisurely pace. I’m sure there are others who find them boringly slow, but they don’t write to me, and it wouldn’t bother me if they did. Before I started my series I wrote, on somebody’s advice, to that commercial company that sells sets of lectures, the Teaching Company, which has all those full-page or half-page ads in the newspapers & magazines advertising their latest series--with phony “special savings” all the time. Their lecturers, good people, all have to do half-hour lectures, never longer--well, those on music get three quarters of an hour so they can play some music. That would have driven me crazy. They never responded. Thank god.”

Anyway, I had lots of time while semi-watching the game to jot down ideas for things to put into another catch-all blog, to join quite a few random memories that I’d already listed for future use in my “Blogs In Progress” (mental echo: “Progs in Blogless”) folder. So, here we go.

- How to Eat Pomegranates With Children

No, I’m not being a learned sinologue--yes, I know about how pomegranates symbolize lots of children (lots of seeds, get it?). I’m offering, from my own distant past, advice on how children can have fun while eating pomegranates. You get some large plastic drinking straws and after biting the pomegranate seeds (of which you hold bunches in your mouth) and drinking the juice you shoot the leftover bits at each other through the straws. Advice: Yes, this really works, I’ve done it. More advice: wear old and easily washable clothes because the seeds leave tiny pink stains.

- Advice for the Mischievous Young, from Old Trickster

I’ve meant for some time to recall and relate some of the tricks that we used to play on each other in Duffey’s Boarding House, where I lived for several years as a high-school student and UCB undergrad--it’s a big old three-storey house on Benvenue Ave. near Dwight Way in Berkeley, which was a boarding house run by Mrs. Duffey. Here are a few, for starters:

- Sitting at a long dining table with a plastic tablecloth hanging over the sides: if those seated on one side conspire to do this, they can lift up the edge of the overhanging part in their laps in such a way as to form a trough, and somebody at one end pours a glass of water into it and all the others raise their parts of it so that the water spills down into the lap of someone unaware seated at the other end. Believe me, this works.

- The steps leading up to the porch at Duffey’s Boarding House were directly under a third-storey window, and anyone mounting them who was unaware of what DBH boarders enjoyed doing was in danger of being water-bagged--a paper bag filled with water, that is, dropped on him as he came up the steps. I could relate some waterbagging stories, but won’t.

- My close friend Stephen Green, who didn’t live there but came often to see me, was waterbagged once by my roommate Eugene Ainger. Stephen’s revenge, typically devious and literary, was to have printed many thousands of little cards, each about ¾” square, with green lettering on one side saying “PRAISE EUGENE” and on the other, “PRAISE HIM.” These we placed everywhere so that Eugene couldn’t get through an hour without finding one--in his bed, his desk, his books, his clothing--I worked in the kitchen, and put one in his mashed potatoes. They are probably still to be found sometimes in that old house (which is still standing.) Another of Stephen’s plans--I don’t remember whether he ever carried it out--was to buy a huge stone lion from a monument sales lot in Oakland and have it delivered and carried up the stairs and put in the middle of Eugene’s study--I think this was only an idea.

- It was Stephen also who found a pharmacy in Oakland where he could buy metal canisters with spray valves of ethyl chloride, which dentists used to use as an anaesthetic--it was called Laughing Gas, and when you sprayed it onto a handkerchief and inhaled it, you would get a sudden high, feel exuberant, and start laughing. We all had fun with this for a while until Eugene inhaled too much and passed out on the floor of his room, where he was found by Mrs. Duffey, who called the police, who hauled us all off to the police station to receive a lecture on how ethyl chloride, harmless as it might seem, sometimes led the unwary young to go on to try marijuana, which in turn would lead to . . .

(Some time I will relate how Gordon Cyr and I spent our graduate night from Berkeley High in the Berkeley jail. Also how Stephen Green and I hung a sixty-foot sign down the front of the Campanile, during our first semester at U.C. Berkeley. You will find some of that, and similar stuff, on this website under CLP 157, "The Pleasures of EAL: An Art Historian's Recollections.")

I think I related here already, so shouldn’t repeat, how Stephen and I were sign-alterers, adding letters and lines to signs to alter their readings. The sign on the BAND HOUSE at the Music Department on campus we altered to read BAWDY HOUSE--only a few strokes of the brush & ink--it remained that way for many years, may still be there.

Others, from my jottings:

- Some early American humorist, I don’t recall who, it could have been Robert Benchley, wrote an essay dividing all of mankind into two great groups according to the way they ate their breakfast cereal--this was back in the days before pre-sweetened cold cereals, when you still had to put sugar on your cornflakes or Rice Crispies or whatever. The Milquetoasts (there was a comic strip character then named Casper Milquetoast) poured the milk on first, and then sprinkled the sugar over it--they were the cautious and ineffectual types. The Wozzlers, by contrast, sprinkled the sugar over the cereal first and then wozzled it all down with the milk--they were the bold ones, the high achievers. I used to watch people at breakfast and amuse them--or offend them--by explaining this distinction.

This is running quite long--I still have some jottings of old jokes and comic memories to be expanded into other Funnies, but will save them for a Part Two.

My good intentions about writing frequent blogs for this site, so that those who drop by (in cyberspace) to see what’s new here will be rewarded, haven’t been fulfilled much lately--I’ve been hard at work on the video-lectures, finishing up the first series (A Pure and Remote View) with a Postlude and two Addenda. Still, we have ambitious plans for big additions to this website coming soon, and I want today to call attention to a few of those, to set up a sense of anticipation in some of you.

First: I promised when we first launched our Pure and Remote View lecture series that notes for it, the ones I prepare and speak from, would be made accessible on my website. The Institute of East Asian Studies at U.C. Berkeley, under the direction of their publications editor Kate Chouta, is preparing cleaned-up versions of these with all the Chinese names properly in pinyin spelling and with characters added, my abbreviations (LS for landscape, etc.) spelled out, and my incomplete sentences finished. I appreciate this effort, and the version of my notes that she is preparing will be the official one, to be used by serious students and others not satisfied with scholarly sloppiness. (I mean by that, of course, looseness in form and language, not sloppy scholarship.)

But I have also given my aide Barry Magrill a set of old printouts of lecture notes, messy as these are, and they will be put into some kind of order-- by lectures, basically, but also, within each, original sets of notes followed by c&c (changes and corrections) “talking heads” (my term for me-on-camera openings etc.) and AddAudios--inserts in which I need to talk to accompany newly-inserted images, usually. These should be posted here before too long. Even though I make no claims for completeness or neatness or total accuracy, they may be of interest to viewers and users of this series.

Second: I have decided to “publish” here, chapter by chapter, the shorter book on Chinese erotic painting that began as a long sixth chapter of my Pictures For Use and Pleasure book on vernacular painting, then was split off (mostly so that the book wouldn’t embarrass owners who would feel awkward about leaving it around the house where their children would find it, etc.)--separated into a shorter book, tentatively titled Scenes from the Spring Palace: Chinese Erotic Painting and Printing. It was taken on for publication by the U.C. Press--it has in fact gone through all the process of outside readers etc. and in principle I should be going ahead with publishing it through them. But most everyone I knew there has retired, no one seems eager to proceed with it, they have reduced drastically the number of color plates I was to have allowed, and I am simply too old to submit to all the editorial minutiae and endless correspondence that a book publication requires--I did my share of those earlier in my life. All and all, I feel it will be better to “publish” it here, where I can use as many color illustrations as I want to, and where it will be accessible to everybody free of charge, like my video-lectures. The first chapter should be posted soon; it will lay out a general introduction to the subject, survey the old Chinese literature on Chinese erotic painting, and do all I can to set right van Gulik’s mis-direction of the whole topic into his beloved areas of esoteric Buddhism and Daoism--a misdirection that has been accepted and followed by too many Western scholars, even though it has no basis that I can find in Chinese writings. I will also find a way to “publish” the image library of high-quality Chinese erotic albums that I have assembled over the decades.

Third: For those of you who have been following the Pure and Remote View lectures as they have been posted on the web (and you are quite a large company by now, with many in China): the final lectures in this series, which follow the 12A-D treatment of Jin and Chan painting, will soon be posted: they are three. A Postlude titled “Arguing the Aftermath” treats the big problem of how we understand Chinese painting after Song, and why the great Song tradition of ink-monochrome landscape as practiced by great masters of the Academy, Xia Gui and others and a few of the Chan masters, was not really continued significantly in China in the post-Song period, but had important followings in Japan and, I believe, probably Korea as well (although I am less clear on this.) How are we to understand this failure of the Chinese to build on that great beginning? Watch the Postlude to see/hear my arguments about that. Then there will be two Addenda: A, which is my Freer Medal acceptance address, and B, which is a lecture on problems of authenticity and dating in Chinese painting, how to tell the best and earliest version of a composition from the later copies, and all that. And each of these Addenda will have a Part 2; and about those I can only say that they will be revelatory, maybe even explosive. I hope writing that will induce more of you to watch them, if only out of idle curiosity: what is he revealing, that he hasn’t already?

And Fourth: Work on our second series of video-lectures, titled Gazing Into the Past: Scenes from Later Chinese Painting, is already very much underway. The opening and closing credits for these will be accompanied by appropriate music, the “Forlane” from Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin--evocative of older music in much the same way our paintings evoke old styles--played divinely by my daughter Sarah. And I plan to incorporate somehow other music from this suite, in Sarah’s performances, into the lectures, when I want to present images without talking. (Yes, there will be such times, even for me.) We have several of this new series already finished in draft, and I have mapped out, collected images for, and even recorded the soundtracks for, another dozen or so already. It will be a while before my collaborator Rand Chatterjee can turn these into a form finished enough for posting; my intention, based on my own perception of my precarious state of health, is to get as many finished in draft as possible, so that they will live on, so to speak, after I can no longer continue working on them, and end up being posted even if it has to be posthumously.

So, those are the things you should expect to find posted on this website in the near future, things that some of you can anticipate, and be confident that your anticipation will be rewarded. And I wish a happy Year of the Water Dragon to you all. (I must do a lecture on dragon paintings, a subject I’ve neglected up to now, in my new series, to celebrate the year!) I will, by the way, be spending about two months in Berkeley from late February through March and most of April. I fly down on that day before the day on which, if children are both then, they will be like Frederick in The Pirates of Penzance. So there is a final puzzle, which G&S fans will know the answer to immediately; others can look it up.