Read and Answer and question

Foreword: Whose Hobbyhorse?

by Jennifer Purtle

I read the manuscript for this book expecting to hate it. Rumors about the manuscript bemoaned a non-specialist author who presumed to tell specialists in the field of Chinese painting history working to recover traditional Chinese ideas about painting that and how they practiced Western art history. Moreover, the author allegedly did so in terms not interesting to many specialists in the field of Chinese painting history, nor fully intelligible to some. To propose the Westernness of the practice of art history in the field of Chinese painting history—which has, since the middle of the twentieth century, sought means (including rigorous sinology) to recover traditional Chinese ideas about painting—might be construed by some as proposing the failure of that enterprise. For some, the manuscript thus proposed the fundamental impossibility of thinking about Chinese landscape painting history in its own terms. What does it mean to consider the history of the art of non-Western cultures in their own terms, especially when those cultures, despite the presence of sophisticated, indigenous strategies for thinking and writing about images and things—and/or art—lack an enterprise approximate to the Western discipline of art history? Can such a project be undertaken within the discipline of art history? Is such a project better suited to anthropological approaches to art, even though the question of what constitutes “art” outside the Western tradition remains difficult to define? Or, does such a project, even as it closes the distance between non- Western art and the Western scholar or viewer, necessarily transpose the object of inquiry into Western epistemological frameworks and strategies of academic inquiry, thus leaving an uncrossable, irreducible gap between the non-Western object and the Western practice of art history? Universal art histories and world art, both firmly grounded in Western practices of art history (and often in the nomenclature of the nation-state), impose the epistemological limitations of their creators and practitioners on the objects of their study. Objects, moving within and beyond the conceptual borders of art history, problematize both the entry of

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objects into art historical discourse and the reception of these objects in that discourse. As a result, the movement of things from one culture into the discursive fields of another is as an object lesson in cross-cultural hermeneutics. When the things are Chinese landscape paintings and the discursive field is Western art history, this object lesson reveals that the study of the history of Chinese landscape painting is defined by epistemological structures and hermeneutic practices entirely alien to it. It is precisely this point that Elkins makes in this controversial text.

Loading the Deck

That the history of Chinese landscape painting might be defined by epistemological structures and hermeneutic practices entirely alien to it is not limited to the historiography of Chinese landscape painting studies. In a series of paintings called Repaint Chinese Shan Shui Painting—some of which were shown in Shuffling the Deck (an exhibition in the Princeton University Art Museum in 2003 that “explored the dialogue between contemporary thought and artistic practice”)1 —the Beijing-born, New York–based artist Zhang Hongtu (b. 1943) made Chinese landscape painting Western art history. Zhang Hongtu did this by repainting the compositions of famous masterpieces of Chinese painting in the style of Western

Fig. A: Zhang Hongtu, Shitao–Van Gogh. 1998. Fig. B: Shitao, Landscape from An Album for Daoist Yu. Album leaf, ink and color on paper. C.C. Wang Collection, New York.

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nineteenth-century masters. In a work from this series, Shitao–Van Gogh of 1998 (fig. A), Zhang takes a famous composition, Landscape from An Album for Daoist Yu (fig. B) by one of the most famous Chinese landscape painters, Shitao (1642–1707), and repaints it in the style of Vincent Van Gogh’s (1853–1890) The Starry Night of 1889 (fig. C). To the viewer who knows both traditions, Zhang’s Shitao–Van Gogh, like the remainder of paintings in this series, is wry and funny, the improbable meeting of two great masterpieces. In reprising a famous composition by Shitao, an egoistic painter who rejected prescriptions for painting in the style of Chinese Old Masters, Zhang Hongtu’s hybrid playfully makes Shitao the proleptic progenitor of Van Gogh.2 But Shitao–Van Gogh, like the other paintings in Zhang’s series, is a pointed meeting of Chinese landscape painting with Western art history, one with disturbing implications for historians of Chinese art: viewers unfamiliar with Chinese landscape painting see Shitao–Van Gogh as Van Gogh. When viewers who do not know Chinese landscape painting fail to recognize the Shitao composition, they render it invisible, eliding the status and influence of a masterpiece of Chinese landscape painting. Such viewers thus blithely assimilate one of the single most iconic compositions of Chinese

Fig. C: Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night. 1889.

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landscape painting into Western art history, shuffling the deck—or rather loading it—in favor of Western art historical outcomes.3

Just as Zhang Hongtu’s Repaint Chinese Shan Shui Painting shows how easily Chinese landscape painting can become Western art history, in Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History, James Elkins proposes six hypotheses that, based on Elkins’s sustained engagement with both Chinese and Western traditions, push his audience to consider how Chinese landscape painting is Western art history. The six hypotheses are a bracing call for art historians in all subfields, including but not limited to specialists in Chinese painting, to meditate on the conceptual framework and historical evolution of their discipline, and to consider these with respect to the practice of art history. Briefly summarized, these hypotheses: 1) propose the inherently Western nature of art history, and the place of Chinese landscape painting history as example or examples within Western art history, rather than as a co-equal of Western art history; 2) problematize comparison (entrenched in the discipline of art history), especially cross-cultural comparison; 3) advise that art history is so inherently a Western discipline that any history of Chinese landscape painting is a Western endeavor, even if written by a Chinese person in Chinese for a Chinese audience; 4) state that comparison of historical perspective (that is, a sense of relative position with respect to one’s own tradition) reveals assumptions about the nature of art history and its sequences, and shows affinities between Chinese and Western periods; 5) note that Chinese painting has an odd structure, exemplified by decline in the late Ming and derogatory, if not absent narratives of the Qing (a counter-hypothesis contends that late Ming and Qing artists appear to art history as a form of postmodernism); and 6) plead for sustained inquiry in considering art history as Western, aware that when inquiry into art objects transcends Western assumptions, it will no longer be recognizable as art history. Though rarely voiced, some scholars of Chinese art history know, from their own working practices and institutional situations, the substance of Elkins’s hypotheses—even as their colleagues in Western art history may never have considered the odd synthesis of Western discipline and its Chinese objects that preoccupy their colleagues. For some historians of Chinese art history, Elkins’s text is an affront because he, a non-specialist, presumes to tell specialists in the field what they already know; for others, the text is an affront because he tells them something they do not know.4 For still others, the affront comes from telling specialists that the history they have constructed for the tradition that they study fails to meet basic standards of plausibility for European language art historical scholarship, thus making that history an exceptional and unusual artifact of cross-cultural encounter that privileges Western art history even as it purports to understand Chinese landscape painting in its own terms. Still other specialists find the book irrelevant because it falls beyond the questions they ask, and constructs its narrative outside the range of texts that they use to consider the history of Chinese landscape painting.

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Finally, some specialists take offense at the absence of Chinese scholarship in Elkins’s text. Here, the Westernness of Chinese painting history manifests itself twice over. First, Elkins does not read modern Chinese, so cannot read this literature; he is, in this way, the archetypal Western scholar of Chinese painting history. But second, were Elkins to read Chinese, and thus to more fully engage Chinese language scholarship of Chinese painting history, this encounter would only reinforce Elkins’s position: for, unlike its Western counterparts, Sinophone scholarship of Chinese painting, from all parts of the Sinophone world, has, until the 1990s, tended to focus more on describing connoisseurial and documentary detail than on crafting grand narratives informed by Western presuppositions about historical and art historical writing. This stems partly from the fact that it is only from the late 1990s that it has been possible to earn a PhD in Chinese art history in the PRC or Taiwan (and to write that thesis in Chinese), and also partly from the fact that Sinophone scholars trained in the West often write in Western languages, and from the vantage of the Western art historical tradition in which they were trained. Thus while Sinophone scholarship serves as a foundation of the field—few among us in the field of Chinese painting history could imagine working without the great connoisseurial contributions of Xu Bangda (b. 1911),5 for example, and without the ground-breaking documentary contributions of Chen Gaohua,6 Mu Yiqin,7 and many others—it is only recently, perhaps through a process that some might call the globalization of art history,8 that Sinophone scholarship has become imbricated, institutionally and intellectually, in the messy web of Western art history and its idiosyncratic expectations for Chinese landscape painting. In the past, Sinophone scholarship did not leave itself open to Elkins’s critique, thus reinforcing Elkins’s point about the Westernness of Chinese painting history. Specialists in the field may not be the sole or primary audience for this book. Indeed, the number of rejections the manuscript has received suggests that whoever has reviewed it does not see its worth, or a point in its publication. But if Chinese landscape painting, and Chinese art history more generally, are Western art history (not all will agree!), then perhaps it is interesting, and even beneficial, that Elkins’s hypotheses usefully explain, in the language of a theoretically- and historiographically-informed Western art history, the cross-cultural position of the field to larger art historical audiences. In an ideal world, I would hope that colleagues in Western art history would read the scholarship of colleagues in Chinese art history; but in a more instrumentalist world, I would hope that colleagues in Western art history would engage the idea of Chinese art history, even if it is this book—and not a work written by a specialist—that serves as their portal. The deck is already loaded in favor of Western art history; why not make that condition more transparent to those seeking to study Chinese landscape painting?

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Speaking Art History

Some of the funniest things I have read about Chinese art history I have read in the context of the unpublished manuscript on which this book is based. Among them is a rejection letter in which a reviewer of the manuscript writes that they are sure that Jim Elkins cannot understand Chinese painting history because he does not know Chinese. What makes the letter so funny is that its writer goes on to say that because of their own very vague (but presumed superior) familiarity with Chinese culture, including having once studied Chinese (but lacking any real, current facility in it), they know what Elkins can or cannot know about Chinese landscape painting. In a move reminiscent of Zhuangzi’s (fl. fourth century BC) “The Pleasure of Fish,”9 this reviewer, who admits that someone who does not know Dutch might write about Dutch painting, vehemently defends the position that someone who wants to write about Chinese landscape painting must know Chinese. The point that is missed is that Elkins does not want to write about “Chinese landscape painting,” but rather about the “history of Chinese landscape painting.” The language of Elkins’s primary sources is art history. The idea that a generalist or non-specialist—fluent in predominantly Anglophone, but also Europhone, art history—could shape perceptions of a non-Western field of art history, let alone that of Chinese landscape painting, troubles some, if not the majority, of scholars in the field of Chinese art history. But one must ask: what about the generalist or non-specialist is or should be offensive to specialist study? Of course a generalist or non-specialist might not be well equipped to study a non-Western tradition in which they have little to no language training. But using knowledge of the discipline to analyze the historiography of the subfield, might such a scholar add value to the larger debates within a non-Western subfield of art history? Formalist inquiry and Western-language secondary scholarship are two avenues through which a generalist or non-specialist can approach Chinese landscape painting. Formalist approaches to the history of art serve as a putatively universal approach to works of art, and thus putatively give equal access to works of art to any art historian trained to use them. The specialist presumably acquires greater facility in the formal analysis of the type of work they study. But the non-specialist might also, over time, acquire similar facility—or perhaps even greater facility than some specialists whose arguments rest largely on textual sources rather than on the study of the object. This book is brilliant, except for the places where it is dead wrong in the ways that an outsider is wrong because they do not know Chinese and thus cannot read beyond the secondary scholarship. Lacking language skills in modern and classical Chinese, a non- specialist is forced to read the secondary literature of the field. Given their linguistic limitations, non-specialists—and I think this is true of Elkins—read the European-language

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secondary literature more carefully than specialists, who see such literature as bringing concepts and ideas that they know from primary sources into focus in European languages. In other words, specialists read the secondary literature of the field in dialogue with, and as indexical of, primary sources. In contrast, non-specialists readers read the secondary literature in its own terms—as art history—and hold that literature to a standard that might be accepted in any subfield of art history. Just as Elkins posits that Chinese landscape painting is Western art history, Elkins reads the secondary scholarship of Chinese landscape painting as Western art history. Based on twentieth-century secondary literature of the field, Elkins argues, in his third chapter, that it is during the Yuan Dynasty that “a sense of the shape of the past” takes form, that the period functions as a renascence and as Renaissance. This analogy of painting of the Yuan Dynasty to that of the Renaissance, coupled with narratives of painting of the late Ming and later periods that suggest the end of art and its history, to borrow a concept from Hans Belting (b. 1935), suggest a profoundly different sense of history than that constructed in narratives of Western art; while Belting sees the history of art end with contemporary art, Elkins aptly notes that the history of Chinese landscape painting once ended after the late Ming, circa 1644.10 What interests Elkins here might be called, to borrow a phrase from George Kubler (1912–1996), the shape of time.11 Yet Elkins’s interest lies not in temporaneity and artifacts in the abstract, as was the case for Kubler, but lies instead in the way in which art historical narrative is constructed for Chinese landscape painting, a narrative that sketches swaths of time simultaneous to those described in art historical narratives of Western art, but a narrative that does not conform to a Western sense of an archetypal shape of the past. Elkins not only analyzes the ways that other scholars have written Chinese landscape painting as Western art history, but he intentionally writes Chinese landscape painting as Western art history. Citing Georg Hegel’s (1770–1831) philosophy of history, specifically Hegel’s sense of the awareness of the subject and his perception of history, for example, Elkins positions Yuan Dynasty landscape painting as a parallel to the Italian Renaissance. The move is one that some historians of Chinese art have made. In Beyond Representation, Wen Fong makes exactly this point, as do others in a variety of texts Elkins cites.12 When scholars of Chinese landscape painting have made this point, they have looked to the Chinese tradition, not to Western philosophy, to justify their point. Yet, is it not possible that a single phenomenon might be analyzed both with conceptual paradigms current within a cultural system,13 and by those outside it? Might it not be productive—and provocative—to understand how any number of interpretive frameworks illuminate an interesting problem? By positing, reading, and writing Chinese landscape painting as Western art history, Elkins identifies peculiarities of the secondary scholarship of Chinese landscape painting. In the third and fourth chapters of his text, Elkins questions the way in which Chinese landscape history has posited the Yuan Dynasty as a renascence, examining the narratives of artistic decline and absence of artistic production that were told, in the twentieth century, about the landscape painting of the late Ming and Qing Dynasties, and the void of scholarship

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about Chinese art of the twentieth century. Whereas specialist scholars of Chinese landscape painting constructed and largely accepted this narrative in the twentieth century, they rarely probed its strangeness. While these narratives no longer have the same force that they did in 1991, when Why Chinese Landscape Painting Is Western Art History was written, it seems that it took an outsider reading secondary scholarship of Chinese landscape painting as art history to see—or at least to comment eloquently upon—the strangeness of the narrative that the field constructed for itself. While the field has changed in the nearly twenty years since Elkins first completed his text, the lesson that might be learned from the disjunction of his text with established narratives of Chinese landscape painting is that specialists, beguiled by the exceptionalism of a non-Western tradition putatively understood “in its own terms,” fail to recognize the implausibility of such narratives, or the historiographic factors that create them. In such moments, the perspective of the outsider, the non-specialist, can serve as an intervention into a literature that, despite the quality of its scholarship, fails to make adequate sense with respect to larger worlds of historical inquiry. In this book, Jim Elkins, who does not speak Chinese, speaks art history. This is perhaps why he does not make much sense to some historians of Chinese painting, who, as a group, are variably fluent in Western art history. By writing in the critical and theoretical language that circulates in the academy these days, Elkins provocatively recalibrates questions and problems in the writing of the history of Chinese landscape painting with larger questions across disciplines about humanistic inquiry and historical writing. By speaking art history, Elkins offers a historiography of Chinese landscape painting that may encourage wider and more fruitful engagement with Chinese landscape painting by specialists and non- specialists alike.

Points of Departure

In speaking art history, Elkins’s text departs from the established reference points for writing the history of Chinese landscape painting. Rather than ground all arguments in the primary and secondary literature of the field, Elkins at times uses literature written by other non- specialists who engage the history of Chinese painting as a starting point for his inquiry. Elkins also uses works of Western art history as a point of departure for his discussion of Chinese landscape painting and its history. More often than not, specialists in the history of Chinese landscape painting ignore non-specialists’ writings; at times they even deride specialists writing in more general ways. Thus when Elkins addresses Hubert Damisch’s (b. 1928) use, in his Traité du trait of 1995, of only Chinese examples in his first chapter “Pinceau” (brush)—following Pierre Ryckmans (b. 1935) commentary on Shitao’s Huayu

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lu and revisiting Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology (which he does elsewhere in the text)—he unpacks the intellectual context of the Traité, and shows how ideas about Chinese painting history, whether or not acceptable to specialist scholars, function in a wider intellectual context. The point that those who impugn Elkins’s text miss is that whether or not Damisch, Ryckmans, and Derrida corporately make a statement that specialist scholars might accept as being “true” of Chinese landscape painting, they nonetheless contribute an idea—and an influential one in art history—of what is at stake in Chinese paintings. What this manuscript does, then, is inscribe other non-specialist texts as potential points of departure for inquiry into Chinese landscape painting. To facilitate conversation, Elkins’s text also opens up the history of Chinese landscape painting to texts and ideas of Western art history that specialists in the field may not read or otherwise engage. Using works of Western art history to talk about Chinese landscape painting has been a staple of the writing of Chinese landscape painting history in the twentieth century. But Elkins positions those writings differently than would a specialist in Chinese painting, using them to leverage big ideas in ways different from the specialist. Elkins, for example, thinks through the case of the Bulgarian modernist Detchko Uzunov (1899–1986), makes references to classics of art history such as E.H. Gombrich’s (1909–2001) The Story of Art first published in 1950, uses Hegel to think about the abrasive nature of comparison and the self-awareness of the historian. In considering Western art historians who study only Western art, Elkins leads his reader to Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), E.H. Gombrich, Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996), and Hans Belting, effectively forcing the reader interested in Chinese landscape painting to confront authors of foundational texts of art history that might be useful in terms of thinking through larger issues of the discipline. Similarly, Elkins leads his reader to confront more recent authors such as John Onians (b. 1942), Norman Bryson (b. 1949), and David Summers (b. 1941)—all Western art historians with sustained interests in non-Western topics. Many specialists in Chinese landscape painting know these texts. But rarely are we asked to think about them with respect to our own work, let alone in rapid-fire succession. Elkins’s book is thus a stimulating and provocative read for the specialist scholar, asking them to rethink their basic assumptions about art history and the relevance of its important texts to the history of Chinese landscape painting. Curiously, nearly a decade before the publication of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s influential book Provincializing Europe (2000), Elkins’s text provides a detailed, though some might say idiosyncratic, account of the ways in which Western art history serves as the framework for the study of Chinese landscape painting. Elkins’s hypotheses are hardly radical in light of recent work in postcolonial and critical area studies. Such studies make clear the implicit colonial and imperialist assumptions present in Western academic disciplines and area studies, namely, the formatting of knowledge in Western terms.14 Even though Elkins’s text might now seem dated or derivative, this is merely an artifact of not being able to get this manuscript published circa 1991. Strangely, in 1991 Chinese landscape painting could not serve as a point of departure for thinking about the implicitly colonial practices of art history

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… and only now, when such practices have been revealed in their broadest senses in other disciplines, will the subfield acknowledge them.

Whose Hobbyhorse?

Who speaks for Chinese landscape painting? For whom might Chinese landscape painting serve as a hobbyhorse—perhaps not the narrowly iconological hobbyhorse of Gombrich that barely applies to Chinese landscape painting, but a larger, shape-shifting hobbyhorse, even a Chinese one, a zhuma—useful for considering any number of art historical questions? And why? The time has come for specialists to consider how the material that we study might be of interest to non-specialist or generalist art historians. Some historians of China have already made this leap: the Harvard China Historical GIS project seeks to make as much data as possible available in English so that social and economic historians not trained in Chinese might begin to analyze the wealth of Chinese data compiled in the project, and thus cast comparative light on the social and economic development of China.15 The approach of the Harvard CHGIS suggests that the intelligent non-specialist, knowledgeable of another subfield of the discipline, has something to offer the specialist in the subfield as well as the larger world of ideas. If historians of Chinese landscape painting and other forms of Chinese art embrace the position that the Harvard HCGIS promotes, this raises the stakes for those of us in the field about training non-specialists who, like Elkins, take our classes. Do we subsequently expect the non-specialist with some training and interest in our subfield to do nothing further with the knowledge they acquire? Is it simply the case that such courses were either a convenient way to fill a blank in a course schedule, or a means of fulfilling a distribution requirement? Or do we instead hope that the non-specialist/generalist will use their knowledge and considerable intelligence to forge useful ideas that illuminate the subfields on the basis of different knowledge bases? When a non-specialist takes Chinese landscape painting as their hobbyhorse, they might alternatively serve as an interlocutor between specialists, or between specialists in the subfield and specialists in other fields and/or generalists in the discipline. As an interlocutor, Elkins functions effectively. His text is illuminating, especially when it is right, but even when it is wrong. Moreover, specialists are likely not to agree on what is “right” and what is “wrong”; and, they would do well to remember that errors are not the sole province of the non-specialist, for even specialist authors get things wrong at times, things that peer review does not always catch. As an interlocutor, Elkins questions the narratives of the

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field established in the twentieth century, narratives that have lost their force with newer scholarship, but that have also not been revisited. While the field has moved on in terms of the shape of the past that it presents, no specialist has stepped in (or perhaps will step in, given the small size of the field and its need to keep moving forward rather than to look back) to write the history of these narratives, to expose their oddness. Elkins does work that no specialist will do any time soon; the interlocutor takes up a project that would otherwise remain undone. Specialists may not agree with the way Elkins connects the dots of secondary scholarship in his historiographic narrative. For, by speaking art history, Elkins’s text loads the deck in favor of new ideas about Chinese landscape painting. But rather than provide the final word on the subject, Elkins’s work becomes a point of departure, a text from which to open debate to any number of art historians for whom Chinese landscape painting might serve as a hobbyhorse.

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24 Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History

conditions the meaning of art, history, and art history, both as a discipline and a conceptual possibility. This is not to say that the historical project is not an indispensable feature of Chinese scholarship; it is to say that what appears as history, in academic scholarship, is articulated in Western terms.38

Let me put this down as an initial hypothesis, the first of six that will help guide my argument:

First hypothesis. The history of Western art is deeply related to the enterprise of art history itself, so much so that the history of Chinese landscape painting tends to appear as an example, or as a set of possible examples, and not a co- equal in the production or understanding of art history itself.

19

After, Binyon comparisons proliferate, though they hold more tightly to the ground of historical fact and pictorial organization. Sherman Lee’s introductory text Chinese Landscape Painting (1954) makes several comparisons between individual Chinese and Western painters, and he offers reproductions of painters such as Van Gogh, Cézanne, Rembrandt, Breughel the Elder, one of the Bamboccianti, Pavel Tchelitchew, John Marin, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and Claude Lorrain.39 They are meant as pedagogical tools, to help Western students see features of Chinese painting, and Lee chooses pairs that have what he takes to be obvious gestural and compositional similarities. The atmospheric, late Song or early Yuan Landscape with Flight of Geese in the Art Institute of Chicago has foreground trees, a misted expanse of water, and lightly washed background, as does a landscape study by Claude Lorrain in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Lee notes an “evident effort” in both to “achieve a larger, more total effect”: but other than that, a reader might well say the two paintings look dissimilar.40 Van Gogh’s View of Arles in Providence, Lee says, shares “sudden and abrupt” ink marks with Shen Zhou’s Oak and Hummocks with Three Figures at a Wall from his album Scenes at Tiger Hill (plate 1).41 Such comparisons define and emphasize formal similarities, of a kind that contemporary historians have learned to regard as especially slippery and ideologically overdetermined. Formal and stylistic criteria like the ones Lee adduces tend to look natural to the person who finds them, and less so to readers who may see the same features quite differently. Reading Lee’s text, I find myself learning as much about his way of looking as about Chinese painting. I can remember discovering his book as an undergraduate and noticing the uncomfortable fact that he seemed often wrong about Van Gogh or Lorrain, but always

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A Brace of Comparisons 45

25

I hope that the more infelicitous or old-fashioned of the comparisons I have just surveyed do not make it seem as if comparisons can be easily set aside. It understates the case to say that comparisons are ubiquitous, or even—as I will be claiming—inevitable. Philosophically speaking, comparisons, parallels, and analogies are forms of difference, and difference is what allows understanding in the first place. Hegel, Kant, and Derrida each have accounts of what difference is, and how it provides the contrast that sets thought in motion; without it, there is no possibility of finding an object, or of finding thought itself. That observation may seem remote from the exigencies of Chinese markmaking, and it certainly cannot explain the individual comparisons. I take it as a reminder that comparisons cannot be eradicated. The question is not how to avoid comparisons, though we might well want to stay away from certain comparisons; the question is how it is feasible, within a given disciplinary practice, to manage the comparisons that continue to give us our art and our history. There is a moral to be drawn, I think, about not running from comparisons:

Second hypothesis. Because all understanding works by comparison, no account can be free of it. Comparisons to Western art continue to mold what is said about Chinese landscape painting. Being self-critical, provisional, sensitive, linguistically accomplished, circumspect, abstract, or informal about comparisons does not vitiate their power, and there is no evidence that we have escaped from even the largest mismatches.

26

Before I conclude this opening section, it needs to be acknowledged that, from the 1920s onward, Chinese and Japanese literati writers made extensive comparisons between Chinese, Japanese, and European painters. The contemporary Japanese scholar Shigemi Inaga read this book in an earlier form, and remarked that many East Asian writers took Japanese and Chinese painters as their “known” terms and compared them with Western painters. “I suspect,” Inaga writes, “that for many Orientals, modern Western masters were evaluated in reference to the Chinese Masters, and not vice versa. If Cézanne is a Chinese Wang Shigu, Renoir may be a French Yun Nan-tian. Gauguin might correspond to Bada Shanren [八大山 人], van Gogh may be Chen Lao-lian [陳老蓮].”96 Those comparisons would themselves be interesting material for a study; I wonder what they might reveal about the early- and mid- century commerce in received ideas about artists.

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Tying Some Laces 57

Essentially the argument implied by this book’s title springs from my conviction as a generalist and as an observer of the discipline that even the most “distant” cultures continue to be described in Western terms, using Western conceptual apparatus, and it is therefore incumbent on art historians to continue trying to understand the assumptions and biases with which we (that is “we” art historians, not necessarily “we” Westerners) continue to picture non-Western cultures.

Third hypothesis. The project of writing art history is Western, and so any history of Chinese landscape painting is partly but fundamentally a Western endeavor, even if it is written by a Chinese historian, in Chinese, for Chinese readers.

That means no account of Chinese art that is recognizable as art history is also non-Western in any non-trivial, constitutive, or systematic sense. A sensitive art historical description of a Chinese painter’s vocabulary, using Chinese terms whenever possible, and avoiding all references to Western theorists or Western examples, would still be an example of Western art history. Art history, in other words, is Western no matter what it studies. Several things might seem wrong about this. Three objections in particular have been raised by readers of previous versions of this text. They are substantial objections, and they have caused some readers to reject the remainder of the book. The first objection is that art historical accounts of Chinese painting are themselves mixtures of Western and Chinese methodologies, terms, values, and institutional concerns, so that it does not make sense to claim that art history is Western tout court. The collection of comparisons, from Rowland onward, that I surveyed in Chapter I shows the kind of response I would make to this first objection. Basically I would not disagree that what gets practiced under the name of art history, when the subject is Chinese painting, is a mixture of Chinese and Western elements. But I think that the plurality of what is understood as art history has demonstrably Western origins. What is invariably Chinese about the art historical scholarship on Chinese painting is the material, the stuff of history: the names, dates, places, social contexts, and critical terms. What remains Western, so I will be arguing, is the impetus for writing something that wants to be known as art history; the institutional contexts such as university departments of art history, conferences, and refereed publications; the historiographic frames including the Hegelian inheritance that governs what is perceived as sufficient or persuasive explanations; the methodological strategies including such things as psychoanalytic criticism, semiotics, social art history, and feminism; and above all, the comparisons that are implicit or explicit throughout the texts, linking the project of understanding Chinese painting to the project of understanding Western painting. A second major objection to the claim that art history is Western is that Chinese art, as opposed to Chinese art history, is itself already a thorough mixture of Western and Chinese influences. This position is associated most directly, I think, with Martin Powers. It has a great deal to recommend it: ever since the first extant Chinese paintings there have been traces

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62 Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History

comparison of historical perspectives. What matters in such a comparison is the perceived shape of one’s own history at any given moment. For some Chinese literati looking back at the Yuan, for example, it seemed that from the Yuan Dynasty’s point of view history was divided into a distant period when painting flourished (the Northern Song, 960–1127) and a more recent past when painting took a wrong turn (the Southern Song, 1127–1279). A very different sense of history informed painters several generations later, because they inherited a continuous tradition that appeared to be divided into several schools or styles. Phrases like “structure of history” or “shape of history” describe such awareness because history has often seemed to change form, articulate itself, divide and reconnect with itself. Occasionally history seems more like a dynamic tension of opposed forces, and I will also be using economic and kinesthetic metaphors. The exact tropes are of less consequence than the structure that history appears to have, as it is experienced by any given generation. In the contemporary West, for instance, history seems to be articulated around a moment usually identified as the inception of modernism: if we juxtapose an event before modernism with one after it, they will seem less similar than two events that are both either premodern or postmodern.27 Art historians sometimes argue, as Panofsky once did, about where the largest breaks in our sense of history occur: whether the Renaissance is ultimately the hinge that articulates premodern and modern art, or whether the seminal years around 1905 are better candidates.28 These are utterly fundamental kinds of arguments, and I will be considering some of them; but it helps to talk about them informally, even though they have tremendous consequences, simply because we have little understanding of the sense of art history that informs such choices. The “conditions for the possibility” of the present comparison, to borrow Kant’s phrase, are the existence in eastern China and western Europe of a mutable sense of the historical tradition. The Yuan painters saw their past differently than the early Ming painters, just as Brunelleschi looked back on a radically different Rome than Piranesi knew only two centuries later. The changing landscape of the past is something we do not normally bear in mind, although the study of earlier historians easily shows that our views about history’s shapes are modern ones. To understand a progression of history, as opposed to a progression in history, it is necessary to attend to these conceptual shifts.

Fourth hypothesis. A comparison of historical perspectives addresses some of the deepest-lying assumptions about the nature of art history and its possible sequences. It does so because it seems to be among the most inoffensive and abstract of all comparative principles. In Chinese landscape painting, it reveals affinities between Chinese and Western periods that continue to inform the history of Chinese art.

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110 Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History

landscape paintings, is a sympathetic iconographic study of the painter’s responses to the division of Shanghai.19 But even though she cites Cahill’s opinion of Chen Hongshou’s 陳洪綬 A Tall Pine and Taoist Immortal (1635, Taipei)—namely that it evokes “the absurd world” of Ming society—she does not make use of the larger context of Cahill’s argument or what it implies about Qing Dynasty painting; her citation seems mainly intended to get her own argument going.20 There is also interesting work by Aida-Yuen Wong, chronicling how twentieth-century literati painting became associated with Western modernism—but her concern is mainly Japanese art.21

How are we to understand this passive, often invisible laying-down of narrative? I would not be as surprised if most reactions were like Cahill’s, because then the last two and a half centuries of Chinese painting would simply be poor work—though I would still want to know how such a thing could happen. But it is doubly intriguing when the painting seems to be merely uninteresting, as if artwork could somehow just be affectively neutral, neither good nor bad. Either way the phenomenon has no parallel in the West. The West has the problem of provinces and backwaters (Uzunov’s, for example), and there are many examples of belated work. But western European modernism does not simply sink out of sight: it is strong and central, and its contours are narrowly contested.

Fifth hypothesis. The history of Chinese painting has an odd structure. In particular the Ming decline and Qing eclipse have no parallels in the West, and so they may be fundamentally inassimilable.

I am going to oppose that hypothesis to another one, which is its mirror opposite, because the very invisibility of the period makes it the focus of attention. I cannot imagine a reflective reader of Sherman Lee’s books, or of Wen Fong’s, who is not immediately fascinated with the possibility that a major tradition could somehow take such a wrong turn that it calls down the combined wrath and indifference of its major historians.

Counter-hypothesis. Late Ming and Qing artists appear to art history as a form of postmodernism.22

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Some of the most common explanations would have it that later Chinese painting suffered a natural decline. (Sherman Lee’s description implies as much.) Thus William Willetts thinks that “pictorial schemas” in the Qing “degenerate into the most threadbare of clichés,” precipitating the end of the tradition,23 and Michael Sullivan suggests that the tradition unraveled because Qing painters after the first generation had nothing to rebel against.24

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Postscripts 145

conditions of production? Have we made comparisons irrelevant by moving on to Chinese television, fashion, or folk art? Are parallels no longer necessary now that literati landscape painting has itself faded into the historical past? Is it safe to assume that the texts produced between Fenollosa and the recent past are irrelevant? No, it is not safe, and I have yet to find a text that avoids the problems I have been exploring. Comparisons are built into the discipline in ways too deep to be excavated. The virtue of looking for the best available comparison, on the largest possible scale, and following it to see where it leads (instead of censoring its operative terms, and shutting it down prematurely), is that such an inquiry can help show us part of the apparently inevitable shape of art historical understanding. The really interesting questions for current writing concern the structures we cannot see how to avoid, and the optimal ways of thinking about them. We turn against comparisons, and yet we are also drawn to them; if it were not illogical I would say we are especially drawn to comparisons we do not recognize. Why are contemporary scholars so wary of comparisons, especially when they begin to sound serious or systematic? Why avoid them so studiously, or deconstruct them so assiduously? Perhaps we sense that comparisons are symptoms of a condition that is endemic to the discipline. Like a tic, they seem to signal a deeper problem. Even though at any given moment the comparison itself is what seems faulty, the deeper issue is the shape of our imaginations, which has generated the problem to begin with. This brings me to the final hypothesis, which is a caution against the overenthusiastic hunt for ideological bias:

Sixth hypothesis. There are reasons to keep trying to understand how art history is Western. But any such attempt will remain within Western art history, and if an account succeeds in throwing off Western assumptions it will no longer be recognizable as art history.

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In other words: the repertoire of comparisons, from the most informal, innocuous allusion to a Western painter all the way to the most pervasive, abstract sense of modernism or artistic agency, effectively is art history. Comparisons can be criticized, amended, prefaced, suppressed, analyzed, dissected, “atomized,” and silenced, but they cannot be expunged without dissolving the sense that Chinese art has a history. The cardinal overconfidence of some recent writing, both in Chinese studies and in art history as a whole, is that self- reflexivity, critical analysis, and the turn to new subjects will yield an effectively new narrative, shorn of Western perspectives. I doubt it.

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