Paper for Seattle Art Museum symposium, April 17, 2005 "Late Paintings of Women in the U. Mich. Museum of Art: Asking New Questions" James Cahill
S.S. (Wen Zhengming #7 + detail?) Since neither Dick Edwards nor Marshall Wu, who both had a lot to do with bringing the U. Mich. collection together, can be here, I want to reminisce a bit about its formation, during the decades I’ve been somewhat distantly involved in it. Apart from some early acquisitions from the 1930s, the building of the collection was mainly accomplished by three people. The first is the late Max Loehr, who in the 1950s (besides teaching many students, including myself) pursued and acquired a number of paintings for the Museum, including this landscape by Wen Zhengming (about which he published an article). Marshall Wu, in his Orchid Pavilion Gathering catalogue, raises questions about its authenticity and suspects it’s really by Wen Chengming’s follower Chu Chieh. He may well be right. Loehr was mainly interested in style in a broad sense, and wrote about the painting in those terms; he was insufficiently concerned with questions of authenticity. My generation, following traditional Chinese scholarship, became so engaged with authenticity questions for a time that we neglected other, more interesting aspects of the paintings.
S,S. The second is Richard Edwards, who taught Chinese art history there for many years from 1960 and oversaw the acquisition of more fine paintings, including the Sheng Mao-yeh "Orchid Pavilion Gathering" handscroll and Zeng Jing's "Portrait of Pan Qintai," both painted in 1621. The third responsible person is Marshall Wu, who was Curator of Asian Art there for twenty-some years and was mainly responsible for the most recent acquisitions, including (I believe) several of the paintings I’ll speak about later. Marshall Wu also wrote the detailed and highly informative entries, based on exhaustive research, for the Orchid Pavilion Gathering catalog published in 2000, with its separate volume of notes, many of which are mini-essays in themselves.
I myself was the Chinese art curator, and before that a fellowship student, at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. from the early1950s until 1965, the period during which some of the U.M. Museum of Art's collection of Chinese paintings was coming together, and was involved in a few of its acquisitions--pieces which, after I had I recommended them unsuccessfully to the Freer director and vice-director, Archibald Wenley and John Pope, I then recommended with more success to Max Loehr or Dick Edwards. These include
S,S. The paintings by Zhou Chen and Li Shida, both of which I recommended as additions to the Freer collection but both were rejected. (The Chou Ch’en is another one doubted by Marshall Wu; and again, he may be right, I haven’t seen it for a long time.) As many of you know, the relations between the Freer and the University of Michigan are especially close because Freer, a Detroit man, first offered his collection to the U. of Mich. which turned it down, and then gave it, as you know, to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. Freer forgivingly established a fund at U. Mich. for the study of Asian art in connection with the Freer Gallery, and students regularly go back and forth between the two institutions, which also jointly publish the journal Ars Orientalis.
S,S. My subject today, however, is none of those, but a group of later and (most traditional Chinese connoisseurs would say) less important works: the paintings of women by or attributed to the late Qing masters Gai Qi and Fei Danxu, active respectively in the first decades and the second quarter of the 19th century. Both specialized in paintings of women, and a great many surviving works of that kind are by them or attributed to them. The name and seals of Gai Qi, in particular, appear on a great number of figure paintings of the late period. There is, then, a serious problem of authenticity; and the fact that the UM Museum's collection contains three versions of (more or less) the same composition, two with Gai Qi signatures and the third with the signature of his older contemporary Yu Ji, makes this a group very useful for pedagogical purposes, teaching students how to distinguish real from fake, and how to conduct research that backs up, or alters, the judgments one might make on the basis of connoisseurship. Marshall Wu's long and heavily annotated essay on these three paintings is a model for how such research might be conducted; it even extended to borrowing for comparison a set of four paintings, one of them with the same composition, from the Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan. (I won’t go through his argument; would take too much time. Generally convincing, although I would differ on a few points, as we’ll see.).
At left, #43 in catalog., which Marshall Wu accepts as real Gai Qi. “A Lady in Her Study, with Attendants,” dated 1821, acquired by Museum in 1973. At right, catalog #44, also signed Gai Qi, undated, and acquired in 1982 at auction, presumably because the relationship between them would be interesting topic for study and connoisseurship training, as indeed it is. It partly repeats the other one in comp., but has dif subject: "presenting lichee fruit on ice platter." This one Marshall Wu doubts, along with two other versions of composition: the other one in their collection, which I’ll show in a moment, and a version in the Fukuoka Art Museum, where it is part of a set of four. None of these others qualifies, in his view, as a Gai Qi original.
I’m not going to challenge his argument, because I haven’t had a chance to study the two pictures in originals (saw them long ago, before I thought of treating them in a paper); the one at left seems quite consistent with other Gai Qi pictures, of which I’ll show a few later; the one at right I wouldn’t reject immediately, on the basis of the reproduction—there’s nothing obviously wrong with it, to my eye--but I’ll simply reserve judgement. I want to say only that the fact that it repeats in large part the other composition isn’t a strike against it, because, as I’ll show later, artists who did such pictures frequently repeated their own compositions.
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