Art: An Age of Innovation and Withdrawal

In 1279, his empire overrun by the invading Mongols, China’s last Sung emperor was cast into the sea. Kublai Khan became lord of an empire that stretched from Korea to Mesopotamia. In the next 90 years under the Yuan dynasty, which he founded, China experienced what seems to have been a wideranging artistic reorientation. Yet until recently, Chinese scholars could never bring themselves to study in depth this hated era of foreign domination.

Seeking to re-evaluate the little-known period, Cleveland’s Museum of Art this week unveils a 316-piece exhibit, “Chinese Art Under the Mongols.” Says Sherman Lee, the museum’s director and an outstanding Orientalist: “There will be lots of mistakes in it.

But a major exhibition is the best way to sort things out.” To prepare the show, Lee and his curator, Wai-Kam Ho, who was born and educated in China, have traveled from Berlin to Tokyo, assembled objects from ten different countries. Yet the impact of the exhibit lies less in the individual pieces than in the way they unite to convey the spirit of a century.

Coterie in the Country. As seen in Cleveland, the Yuan period emerges as one of sleek sophistication, technical innovation and fertile alienation. Though the Mongols established peace and reopened trade routes to the West, their court at Peking remained essentially barbaric. They were frank admirers of China’s traditional culture and encouraged conservative sculptors to turn out temple and palace art, some of which has been preserved. The Cleveland show includes 15 bronze and wood statues, twelve silver vessels, jade and ivory carvings. Yet for all the emphasis on tradition the period was not stationary. Tremendous strides were made in developing porcelain. The earliest statues in this material date from the Yuan period; many bodhisattvas show the influence of Tantric Buddhism, the Mongol religion. Their faces have half-closed Nepalese eyes and small, sensual lips.

Before the Mongols, porcelain was glazed in one color. Under the Yuan rulers, blue-and-white vessels were developed, and became widely popular. One of the 32 pieces in the Cleveland show belonged to the 17th century Mogul Emperor Shah Jahan, builder of India’s Taj Mahal. Among other exports on exhibit are Chinese silks found in Arab tombs in Africa and early carved cinnebar lacquerware, lent by a Japanese temple. But it was in defiance of Mongol tastes that one of the greatest of China’s arts—scroll painting—made the largest advance of all. The most inventive Chinese painters, the wen-jen, or literary men, withdrew from the court, preferring to paint and write poetry for a small coterie in the country.

Personal Record. In their voluntary exile, the reclusive wen-jen introduced a style that was to last for centuries. Abandoning the sweetly colored realism of the late Sung court painters, they developed a powerful expressionism that glorified a painter’s unique “handwriting.” Landscapes and bamboo stalks were popular because such subjects put a premium on brushwork. Colors and perspective were largely abandoned, human figures casually sketched in.

Wang Meng (ca. 1309-1385), one of the four great wen-jen masters, reduced his Scholar in a Pavilion Under Pine Trees to a ropily textured, rolling composition peppered with the dots that were his particular brushwork “signature.” While the finished composition may seem to Western eyes much like other Chinese paintings, to scholars it is as different from the Sung realists as a Jackson Pollock from an Andrew Wyeth. It is also peculiarly modern. Says Cleveland’s Lee: “At the heart of the whole modern concept of painting is the premise that technical skill is something almost anyone can acquire with effort, but great painting is a personal record of the artist for his own private ingroup, and he doesn’t care about what the mass of people think.”