Art: The Most Sensitive Brush

Since the days when the Yankee clippers sailed to the ports of the Orient, Americans have had a nodding acquaintance with the civilization of China. Yet the study of Chinese art is still in its infancy. A year ago, the citizens of five U.S. cities, visiting a show sent by the government of Nationalist China, discovered the magnificence of the old Peking Palace Museum treasures. Last week another dazzling and instructive exhibition—though inevitably smaller—went on display at Manhattan’s Pierpont Morgan Library.

The collector responsible for it is a Manhattanite named John M. Crawford Jr., who has been using his ample inheritance from a West Virginia manufacturer of oil-drilling equipment to build the finest collection of Chinese paintings and calligraphy in private Western hands since that of the famed Charles Freer.

A Dot Is a Rock. Probably no artists ever followed so severe a technique as the Chinese, and no instrument of art has ever been devised as sensitive as the Chinese brush. In calligraphy, no matter how many kinds of strokes convention demanded, each had to be perfect. According to one convention, “a dot should resemble a rock falling from a high cliff. A horizontal stroke should resemble a formation of cloud stretching 1,000 miles. A vertical stroke should resemble a dried vine stem a myriad years old.” It is one of the virtues of the collection that there is such an emphasis on calligraphy, for the calligrapher’s art was especially admired; as each stroke went into the building of a character and each character flowed onto the next, a man’s inner being was revealed.

The paintings had a similar rhythm, almost musical in their surges of line and empty spaces of pure silence. They required the mastery of the same calligraphic stroke, from the tight lines of the academic seal characters to the freer lines of “grass script.” Color, when used, was often so fragile that it looked as if it could be blown away.

Some artists in the Crawford collection could suggest the universe with a few lines; others explored the world in microscopic detail. While China had its share of artistic individualists, most painters repeated the themes and composition of the great masters even centuries after the masters were dead. If Western art has tended to progress in bursts of genius, Chinese art has tended to flow. Each time of greatness has passed onto the next its heritage intact.

From Emperor to Monk. The Crawford collection ranges from pages out of ancient albums to calligraphic couplets, from spectacular wall scrolls to hand scrolls that were meant to be seen only a few inches at a time. There are scenes of jolly drunkenness and of men contemplating a waterfall, paintings ranging from lofty landscapes to spare sprays of bamboo, the nearest thing in nature to calligraphy. One 22-ft. hand scroll showing a series of great palaces is a work of art so intricate that it seems like a series of fantasies by some Oriental Piranesi. Yet recent excavations in Red China have shown that the fountain and palaces really did exist at Sian (old Ch’ang-an).

The artists themselves knew no class.

One of them was the Sung Emperor Huitsung, who lost his empire to the Tatars but also produced the collection’s exquisite Finches and Bamboo. Another artist in the collection is Yeh-lu Ch’u-Ts’ai, who was captured by Genghis Khan, became his adviser, and introduced him to the mysteries of writing, taxes, and weights and measures. Still another artist was the monk Wu-chun, a disciple of the great Yao, who preached a form of Zen. The monk painted a fellow monk riding on a mule—possibly to extol the virtues of poverty and meditation. The inscription on the painting is as cryptic as Zen itself: The rain comes, it is dark in the mountains ;

He sees the mule and mistakes it for a horse.