Art: From a Peking Palace

In the 5th century there lived in China a great painter named Chang Seng-yu, who one day finished a mural of four white dragons without eyes. When observers protested the omission, Chang pointed out that to give such fierce dragons sight might be dangerous. His critics persisted; Chang gave in and painted eyes on two of the dragons. “At once,” the story goes, “the air became filled with thunder and lightning, the wall broke down, and the dragons ascended on clouds to heaven. But the two other dragons who had no eyes remained in their places.”

The legend, one of a legion of its kind, contains a truth about the art of China more telling than any archaeological find: for centuries, the Chinese attributed almost magical powers to their artists. This week gallerygoers who care to risk the dragons will be able to rediscover the magic at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Works ranging from bronze urns and jade dishes to scroll paintings more than 1,000 years old will be shown in one of the most spectacular exhibitions of Chinese art ever seen. The treasures were selected by a jury of Chinese and American experts from an estimated 35,000 items that were saved from the Palace Museum in Peking when first the Japanese invasion and then the Red conquest sent them on travels that ended in great caves in Formosa. The show opened in Washington in May, and before returning home will stop off at Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.

Animals & Ogres. Like the art of many ancient peoples, the earliest treasures of China were recovered from tombs. As far back as the 11th century B.C., bronze vessels were deposited in the tombs of great men to serve the needs of the body that remained bound to the earth; there was no higher function for the artist than to turn out these ritual vessels. The intricate decoration not only warded off evil but provided a gateway for the artist’s imagination. Fantastic animals, ogres’ heads, symbols of the yang and yin, and finally the human figure, all made their appearance, and the bronzes themselves were never surpassed in the workmanship of later artisans.

By the year 220 B.C., the teachings of Lao-tse had taken root, Confucius had propounded his doctrine of the “superior man.” and the artists of China had become masters of pottery, of glassware, of porcelain and jade, and of sculpture. By that year the head of the powerful state of Chin, which ruled in the west, had risen up against his neighbors and conquered the land that has borne the name of his state ever since. The conqueror styled himself Shih Huang-ti, the First Emperor —an appellation that required him to destroy the palaces, monuments and records of all previous emperors. The wholesale destruction had an ironically tonic effect. The Chinese had, as they were always prone to do, fallen victim of their own achievements, and art had become mere imitation of the past. Now, suddenly, much of the past was gone, and the artists could begin anew.

The First Emperor started the Great Wall of China, placing the work under the command of General Mêng T’ien. But history holds the general dear for quite another reason: he is said to have invented the small, delicate brush that enabled the Chinese to abandon their styluses and to turn calligraphy into an art prized on equal terms with painting and poetry. Painting and calligraphy were siblings, for both were ways, often interchangeable, for expressing ideas. In Western art. the painter until modern times sought above all to capture what his eye beheld. The Chinese painters sought to portray, mostly by the manipulation of line, what was in the mind.

Logic & Unity. There exist descriptions of paintings done long before Christ, but it was not until the Eastern Han Dynasty, which lasted from A.D. 25 to 220, that artists gained a sense of perspective or were able to portray the figure as anything but a flat silhouette seen in profile. In the 4th century, Ku K’ai-chih began to paint mountains, rivers and trees as a background for his scenes, so logically related in composition and feeling that each painting seemed to describe the oneness of the universe. Ku’s contemporary, Lu T’an-wei, could produce a painting that was really one continuous line. Two centuries later. Hsieh Ho wrote his Six Canons of Painting that were to be followed for more than a thousand years. The first canon is “rhythmic vitality,” meaning the spirit and pulse of life itself. Into its art, China poured its soul on its eternal quest for harmony.

The golden age of painting came in the T’ang Dynasty (618-907), when the figure at last became a full-fledged individual with emotions of its own. In such scroll paintings as Palace Concert (see color pages), the figures are so placed that the viewer finds himself looking down at them, and all sense of perspective is given not by a wall or ceiling but by what is on the ground. This Chinese device still dominates in Breaking the Balustrade, which was painted in the 12th century. In neither painting do the figures cast a shadow. Indoors or out, the light is the same, its source always a secret.

Mystery & Infinity. The landscape also came into its own in the T’ang period, centuries before it flourished in the West.

As the Chinese painters developed this art form, space unrolled before the eyes; the foreground dissolved, and distance itself became as much a preoccupation as the objects that filled it. The artist who painted the Deer in Autumn Forest filled every inch of his scroll. But later painters were to leave open spaces, or to cloak their landscapes in soft mists that gave the landscape a sense of both mystery and infinity. In Birds, on the other hand, each branch and each leaf has its assigned place in such perfect balance that the result is an overwhelming feeling of serenity. The painting was done during the Sung Dynasty (960-1279), which was a time of painful retreat before the invading Mongols. As the empire shrank, the artists seemed to turn away from harsh reality and to find in nature itself the one great consoler.

As they always have, the Chinese in time absorbed their conquerors, but something vital had gone out of their art. After the Sung Dynasty, the most highly civilized time of all, the artists of China began again to repeat what previous masters had done before. Nevertheless, the artists’ pre-eminence had been a long one, perhaps richer than that enjoyed by the artists of any other nation.