Art: MASTERPIECES OF CHINESE ART

ONE day in January 1949, an LST flying the red-and-blue ensign of Nationalist China pulled away from the dock at Nanking and headed down the muddy Yangtze, its tank deck crammed with a priceless cargo. Another heavily laden LST had already made its way safely across the East China Sea to Formosa. Later, a freighter was to complete the epic task of saving from Communist hands the art treasures assembled over the centuries, and collected in the Peking Palace Museum and Nanking’s Central Museum.

Today the best of the old imperial collections reposes safely at Peikou, a rural hideaway in the central foothills of Formosa. There, stacked in three concrete warehouses and a large tunnel, are nearly 400,000 art objects—paintings, ancient bronzes, porcelains, gold plate, lacquer and jade. Many of the objects have been in packing cases since they were first hurriedly put away in 1934, when the Japanese armies approached Peking. Most have never been seen outside China. Now, with the opening of a small museum in Peikou, Chinese art lovers have their first chance in a generation to see the few treasures chosen for display. But the vast majority, including many here reproduced in color for the first time, remains locked away, the unseen legacy of one of the world’s richest cultures.

Pleasure in Water. Had the ancient Chinese developed their writing with quill instead of brush, it is unlikely that the immense treasure of Chinese painting would have evolved as it did. But for well over 3,000 years, painting and calligraphy developed hand in hand, raising virtuoso brushwork to such disciplined levels that generations of Chinese artists created their masterpieces “on fine silk that permitted no erasures.

Such treasured paintings have been handed down from generation to generation, each collector adding his own red seal of ownership and often adding a poem of comment in his own hand. For the Chinese art lover, the pleasure of viewing a painting includes enjoying the calligraphy of the written words as an art in itself, deciphering the seals, analyzing the brushwork and drawing. But, essentially, each work reflects one great central theme. For well over a thousand years Chinese painters have been primarily concerned not with the works of man but with nature; their most triumphant subject has been landscape.

The worship of nature is as old as Chinese history. Confucius, the great precept-giver on manners and morals, said as early as 500 B.C.: “The wise find pleasure in water; the virtuous find pleasure in hills.” Lao-tzu, an elder contemporary of Confucius, added another dimension, proclaiming that underlying nature was an all-pervading spiritual force, which he called Tao, and likened to water.

The effort to go beyond mere recording of nature to achieve an actual identification with it is the supreme ambition of

Chinese painters. For the great 5th century painter Hsieh Ho, this ability to capture ch’i, the quality of “spirit-resonance and life-movement,” was the first principle of painting. The degree to which a painter succeeds in this aim is for Chinese the final criterion of his achievement.

Blood-Sweating Steeds. The paintings admired by Confucius in his day have long since disappeared. But lessons passed on by the old masters can still be seen in the paintings and sculpture of the vigorous, expansive T’ang Dynasty, which ruled from 618 through 906, conquered an empire that stretched east to Korea and westward to the borders of Persia.

The secret weapons of the fierce T’ang cavalry were their powerful Bactrian steeds, by legend so mettlesome that they literally sweated blood. The artist who most magnificently portrayed them was the painter Han Kan. Summoned to court by T’ang Emperor Ming Huang, Han was ordered to study the paintings of one of the court painters, took the “Illustrious Sovereign” aback by replying: “My masters are all in Your Majesty’s stables.” The results of Han’s study of the Emperor’s 40,000 horses can be seen in his Cowherd (opposite), a painting that for countless generations has epitomized for the Chinese the essential nature of the horse.

Emperor Ming Huang was also a great lover of nature. Homesick for mountains, he one day ordered two of his painters to reproduce the scenery of the Kialing Valley. Artist Wu Tao-tzu went out to lie under the trees, listen to the murmuring streams. Then, having identified himself with the scene, he took his brush, dashed off One Hundred Miles of the Kialing River Valley in a single day. Artist Li Ssu-hsun, who was also a general in the Emperor’s army, labored for long months to depict the same scene. Presented to the Emperor, both paintings were judged “excellent in the extreme.”

Neither painting in the competition has survived, but both the followers of Wu and General Li can be traced throughout Chinese painting history. And some idea of what Li’s painstaking rendition looked like can be got from a work of the general’s son, Li Chao-tao (known as the “Little General”). Travelers in a Mountain Pass (opposite], a rare, 1,000-year-old painting on silk, is believed to be his. Done in metallic blues and greens, it creates a panorama of cloud-shrouded peaks and gorges against which is shown a group of horsemen and camels, led by a red-coated figure that may be Emperor Ming Huang himself. In the foreground, pack asses roll in the grass, while the column winds slowly ahead in a procession that ushers into Chinese art the great theme of the all-engulfing landscape.

The Truth of Heaven. Vast and towering landscapes, of such magnitude that they dwarfed all signs of man within them, became the aspiration and great achievement of the painters who followed under the Sung emperors (960-1279 A.D.). The greatest of them, Tung Yuan, shows in his Dragon Among the Country People the mighty forward leap taken by the Sung artists over their earlier T’ang models. Tung Yuan’s eagle’s-eye view depicts the mountains, lakes and plains that he saw in Kiangnan, laid out in one majestic sweep that reaches to the horizon. In its vastness, human figures are reduced to mere dots of color. To his contemporaries, and to generations after, such scenes appeared as “the very truth of Heaven.”

Longing for serenity and harmony, Sung emperors liked to turn for contrast to closeups of nature, developed a keen liking for small and intimate scenes. I Yuan-chi’s Monkey and Cats, almost playful in both subject matter and execution, is an outstanding example. Such paintings so won the admiration of the Emperor that he awarded I Yuan-chi the commission of decorating a courtyard at his palace on the Yellow River plain.

“My Brother, the Rock.”A painter who was to have an equally great influence on succeeding generations was Mi Fei, the ideal exponent of the wen-jen hua, or Literary Man’s Painting. He was a great art collector, caustic critic, expert on ink-stones and a lover of fantastically eroded rocks (his favorite, placed in his garden, he addressed as “my elder brother”). His calligraphy (see cut) is one of the most famous in Chinese art history, marked by bold, strong characters that broke with the florid, decorative manner of his predecessors. Despite his eccentric habit of dressing in old-fashioned clothes from the T’ang period. Mi Fei was also a successful courtier, rose to become Secretary of the Board of Rites, and served as a military governor.

As a painter, Mi Fei kept his best work for his friends’ appreciation alone, and even then never allowed them to touch the silk for fear it would become soiled. His painting pointed to a new direction. Originating a pointillist style of ink-splash dots (still known as “Mi-dots”), he produced in paintings like Auspicious Pines in the Spring Mountains China’s first impressionist landscape. Its curious sugarloaf mountains are drawn in loosely applied brush strokes and washes, trees are carefully controlled blobs of ink. The human scale is merely suggested with the bare-bones outline of a lone pavilion.

Whirlwind Hand. When the fierce Chin Tartars (“The Golden Tribes”) swept down over the Great Wall, captured the capital Kaifeng and took Sung Emperor Huitsung, along with 3,000 of his court, into captivity in Mongolia, about 6,500 paintings in the imperial collection dating back over 1,000 years were destroyed or dispersed. But the Sung Dynasty held out in the south for another 150 years—long enough to make their new capital. Hangchow, with its willows and delicately arched bridges, one of the most beautiful cities of antiquity.

To depict the bloody events of history was an affront to Confucian principles of restraint and propriety. When Painter Li

Ti, who had himself barely-escaped from the massacre in the northern capital, hinted at storms and trouble, it was in such bucolic scenes as Cowherds Fleeing Storm. An even more extreme reaction to the mounting threat of further Chin and Mongolian attacks was the withdrawal of the Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist painters to secluded mountain retreats.

Believing with Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism, that inspiration comes in a flash and cannot be long sustained, the Ch’an painter worked in monochrome “as if a whirlwind possessed his hand.” Greatest of them all was Liang K’ai, who had won the Emperor’s highest painting award, the Golden Girdle, before he retired to a Buddhist monastery. He dashed off such inspired sketches as his Ink Brushing of an Immortal, showing a monk tearing off his shirt to prove the indifference of the enlightened man to outward appearances.

Crushed by a Mountain. Such indifference was of no avail when the mighty Mongol hordes, headed by Kubla Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, arrived at the gates of fragrant Hangchou. Before his fierce tribesmen the southern capital fell—crushed, one Chinese historian wrote, as “the Sacred Mountain T’ai would crush an egg.” What followed was a galling 100-year reign by the Mongol foreigners.

Kubla Khan ruled his far-flung empire from Korea to Hungary, using a pony express of 200,000 horses to maintain rapid communication, from his palace in Peking (which Marco Polo described with its “walls covered with gold and silver”) or his pleasure-domed summer palace, with its 16-square-mile enclosed park at Shangtu (the Xanadu of Coleridge’s famed verses). But because the Mongol Khans decreed that the elite Confucian scholars —who, under the Sung Dynasty, had ranked just below royalty—should be reduced to a category one degree above beggars, few Chinese scholars showed up in Peking to answer Kubla Khan’s invitation to join his court.

This boycott opened the way for a rise to fame of a naturalized Chinese named Kao K’o-kung, whose ancestors came Lorn Central Asia. He joined the Khan’s court, and rose to become his Minister of Justice. Endowed with extraordinary ability as a painter, he first patterned his style on the impressionist manner of Mi, later emulated the landscapes of loth century Painter Tung Yuan, finally retired to savor the intellectual climate of Hangchow. His Mist in Wooded Mountains shows that he could combine these earlier influences into a work that became uniquely his own. The drama is in the landscape itself, in the mountains and solid trees seen emerging through the fog. But 500 years later it was the small, indistinct figures that caught the eye of Ch’ing (Manchu) Emperor Ch’ien-lung, caused him to write his appreciation at the top of the scroll: “Mountain and villages, dimly seen through rain and clouds; the fisherman on his way home feels the weight [of rain] on his clothes.”

Ground Rubies & Nutmegs. The national uprising that finally drove the Mongol troops north of the Great Wall and installed a young peasant on the throne as the first Ming Emperor in 1368 rapidly produced an epicurean age of elegance, not unlike that which marked the courts of Europe in the 18th century. The great pottery works of the Sung emperors were revived and expanded. For Emperor Hsuan-te’s Dragon Soup Bowl, craftsmen ground rubies to powder to achieve richness of color; court ladies dipped their fingers into exquisite candy dishes for the cardamoms and nutmegs that served as breath sweeteners. Jade was in such demand that by the time of the Manchus there were thousands of workmen carving and polishing objects, many so precious that they were used only for display.

With ten centuries of accumulated art to look back over, Ming masters became eclectics, painting in several different styles. The mark of the age was its delight in intimate, everyday scenes, anecdotal and often merely decorative. But with the custom of copying from old masters, along with an absorption in technique for its own sake, art came perilously close to feeding upon itself. The famed three-volume painting primer called The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, compiled between 1679 and 1701 in a small Nanking house (called the Mustard Seed Garden), broke down brush strokes into 16 different categories. Beginning painters were expected to be proficient in each of them, ranging from “hemp fibers” and “ax cuts” to “horses’ teeth” and “sesame seeds.” But such variety, when carried out by artists with genius at their brush tips, produced some of the most sophisticated and delightful art objects ever created. Among the Ming masters who succeeded:

¶ T’ang Yin, a contemporary of Raphael’s, had a Renaissance man’s gusto and love of high living. His checkered career, which began with a scandal over his civil-service exam (he came out first, then was disgraced when it was discovered that a friend had bribed the examiner), was spent between wild roistering and intense painting periods. His Gentleman and Attendants borrows T’ang Dynasty props, slims down the earlier plump models to suit Ming tastes, and comes off as a triumph in space and contrasts. But T’ang Yin could not resist slyly mocking the mood of scholarly repose. On the painting he wrote: “Miss Li Tuan-tuan of the House of Shan Ho is indeed a walking flower. In spite of all the rich men in Yangchow, she has given her love to a poor scholar.” The House of Shan Ho housed the prostitutes of the day. ¶ Ch’iu Ying worked mainly in the painstaking style that dates back to the T’ang Dynasty’s General Li. He was scorned for his meticulous style by a Literary Man, who said: “When he painted a snake he could not refrain from adding feet.” Perhaps in reply Ch’iu Ying painted his Intellectual Conversation in the Shade of T’ung Trees, which measures nine feet tall. Done in a freer, bolder style, it is a resounding answer to his critics and a masterpiece of brush technique. ¶ Shen Chou, who inherited the Literary Man’s Painting tradition, played the role of rustic philosopher, ignoring the ceremonial elegance of court life. Near the center of the new wen-jen hua movement which he founded, Painter Shen Chou retired to his garden pavilion. He depicted his ideal life in such paintings as Sitting Up at Night, wrote that he had achieved the ideal state with “one flower and one bamboo, one lamp and one small table, books of poems and volumes of classics—with them I pass the rest of my years. My friends are elderly farmers, my conversations are with the mountains, my life is devoted to gardening. News of worldly affairs does not enter my gate. Should it intrude, the breeze in the pines would waft it away.”

¶ Court Painter Lu Chi was not only the favorite bird and flower painter of his day, but honorary commander of the Peking secret police as well. Lu Chi’s aim was to please the luxurious and conservative official taste of his time, and he succeeded superbly. Grass, Flowers and Wild Birds is a typical example of his work, that for delicacy and refined technique has never been surpassed.

Such masterpieces go far to explain the response made by the great nth century Painter Kuo Hsi, who asked: “Why does a virtuous man take delight in landscape?” His own reply: “Having no access to the landscape, the lover of forest and stream, the friend of mist and haze, enjoys them only in his dreams. How delightful then to have a landscape painted by a skilled hand! Without leaving the room, at once he finds himself among the streams and ravines; the cries of the birds and monkeys are faintly audible to his senses; light on the hills and reflections on the water, glittering, dazzle his eyes. Does not such a scene satisfy his mind and captivate his heart?”