by Will Durant
IV. PAINTING
1. Masters of Chinese Painting
Ku K’ai-chhi, the “greatest painter, wit and fool”—Han Yü’s miniature—The classic and the romantic schools—Wang Wei—Wu Tao-tze—Hui Tsung, the artist-emperor—Masters of the Sung age
The Occident has been forgivably slow in acquainting itself with Chinese painting, for almost every aspect and method of the art in the East differed from its practice in the West. First, the paintings of the Far East were never on canvas; occasionally they were wall frescoes, as in the period of Buddhist influence; sometimes, as in later days, they were on paper; but for the most part they were on silk, and the frailty of this material shortened the life of every masterpiece, and left the history of the art with mere memories and records of accomplishment. Further, the paintings had an air of thinness and slightness; most of them were in water-color, and lacked the full-bodied and sensuous tints of European pictures in oil. The Chinese tried oil-painting, but seem to have abandoned it as too coarse and heavy a method for their subtle purposes. To them painting, at least in its earliest forms, was a branch of calligraphy, or beautiful penmanship; the brush which they used for writing served them also for painting; and many of their chef-d’œuvres were drawn simply with brush and ink.* Finally, their greatest achievements were unconsciously hidden from Western travelers. For the Chinese do not flaunt their pictures on public or private walls; they roll them up and store them carefully away, and unfold them for occasional enjoyment as we take down and read a book. Such scroll paintings were arranged in sequence on a roll of paper or silk, and were “read” like a manuscript; smaller pictures were hung on a wall, but were seldom framed; sometimes a series of pictures was painted on a screen. By the time of the later Sung Dynasty the art of painting had already developed thirteen “branches,”63 and innumerable forms.
Painting is mentioned in Chinese literature as an established art several centuries before Christ; and despite the interruptions of war it has continued in China to our own time. Tradition makes the first Chinese painter a woman, Lei, sister of the pious Emperor Shun; “alas,” cried a disgusted critic, “that this divine art should have been invented by a woman!”64 Nothing survives of Chou painting; but that the art was then already old appears from Confucius’ report of how deeply he was affected by the frescoes in the Grand Temple at Lo-yang.65 During the early years of the Han Dynasty a writer complained that a hero whom he admired had not been sufficiently painted: “Good artists are many; why does not one of them draw him?”66 The story is told of an artist virtuoso of the time, Lieh-I, who could draw a perfectly straight line one thousand feet long, could etch a detailed map of China on a square inch of surface, and could fill his mouth with colored water and spit it out in the form of paintings; the phoenixes which he painted were so lifelike that people wondered why they did not fly away.67 There are signs that Chinese painting reached one of its zeniths at the beginning of our era,68 but war and time have destroyed the evidence. From the days when the Ch’in warriors sacked Lo-yang (ca. 249 B.C.), burning whatever they could not use, down to the Boxer Uprising (1900 A.D.), when the soldiers of Tung Cho employed the silk pictures of the Imperial Collection for wrapping purposes, the victories of art and war have alternated in their ancient conflict—destruction always certain, but creation never still.
As Christianity transformed Mediterranean culture and art in the third and fourth centuries after Christ, so Buddhism, in the same centuries, effected a theological and esthetic revolution in the life of China. While Confucianism retained its political power, Buddhism, mingling with Taoism, became the dominating force in art, and brought to the Chinese a stimulating contact with Hindu motives, symbols, methods and forms. The greatest genius of the Chinese Buddhist school of painting was Ku K’ai-chih, a man of such unique and positive personality that a web of anecdote or legend has meshed him in. He loved the girl next door, and offered her his hand; but she, not knowing how famous he was to be, refused him. He painted her form upon a wall, and stuck a thorn into the heart, whereupon the girl began to die. He approached her again, and she yielded; he removed the thorn from his picture, and forthwith the girl grew well. When the Buddhists tried to raise money to build a temple at Nanking he promised the fund one million “cash”; all China laughed at the offer, for Ku was as poor as an artist. “Give me the use of a wall,” he asked. Having found a wall and secured privacy, he painted there the Buddhist saint Uimala-Kirti. When it was finished he sent for the priests, and explained to them how they might raise the million “cash.” “On the first day you must charge 100,000 ‘cash’ for admission” to see the picture; “on the second day, 50,000; on the third day let visitors subscribe what they please.” They did as he told them, and took in a million “cash.”69 Ku painted a long series of Buddhist pictures, and many others, but nothing certainly his has come down to our day.* He wrote three treatises on painting, of which some fragments survive. Men, he said, were the most difficult things to paint; next came landscapes, then horses and gods.72 He insisted on being a philosopher, too; under his portrait of the emperor he wrote: “In Nature there is nothing high which is not soon brought low. . . . When the sun has reached its noon, it begins to sink; when the moon is full it begins to wane. To rise to glory is as hard as to build a mountain out of grains of dust; to fall into calamity is as easy as the rebound of a tense spring.”73 His contemporaries ranked him as the outstanding man of his time in three lines: in painting, in wit, and in foolishness.74
Painting flourished at the T’ang court. “There are as many painters as morning stars,” said Tu Fu, “but artists are few.”75 In the ninth century Chang Yen-yüan wrote a book called Eminent Painters of All Ages, in which he described the work of three hundred and seventy artists. A picture by a master, he tells us, brought in those days as much as twenty thousand ounces of silver. But he warns us against rating art in monetary terms; “good pictures,” he writes, “are more priceless than gold or jade; bad ones are not worth a potsherd.”76 Of T’ang painters we still know the names of two hundred and twenty; of their work hardly anything remains, for the Tatar revolutionists who sacked Chang-an in 756 A.D. did not care for painting. We catch something of the art atmosphere that mingled with the poetry of the time, in the story of Han Yü, the famous “Prince of Literature.” One day he won, from a fellow lodger at an inn, a precious miniature portraying, in the smallest compass, one hundred and twenty-three human figures, eighty-three horses, thirty other animals, three chariots, and two hundred and fifty-one articles. “I thought a great deal of it, for I could not believe that it was the work of a single man, uniting as it did in itself such a variety of excellences; and no sum would have tempted me to part from it. Next year I left the city, and went to Ho-yang; and there, one day, while discussing art with strangers, I produced the picture for them to see. Among them was a Mr. Chao, a Censor,* a highly cultivated man, who, when he saw it, seemed rather overcome, and at length said: ‘That picture is a copy, made by me in my youth, of a work from the Imperial Gallery. I lost it twenty years ago while traveling in the province of Fukien.’” Han Yü at once presented the miniature to Mr. Chao.
Just as in Chinese religion two schools had taken shape, Confucian and Taoist-Buddhist—and just as two schools, led by Chu Hsi and Wang Yang-ming, were soon to develop in philosophy, representing respectively what we in the West would call the classic and the romantic types of mind; so in Chinese painting the northern artists accepted a stern tradition of classical sobriety and restraint, while the south gave color and form to feeling and imagination. The northern school set itself severely to secure correct modeling of figure and full clarity of line; the southern rebelled like Montmartre against such limitations, disdained a simple realism, and tried to use objects merely as elements in a spiritual experience, tones in a musical mood.77. Li Ssu-hsün, painting at the court of Ming Huang, found time, amid the fluctuations of political power and lonely exile, to establish the northern school. He painted some of the first
Chinese landscapes, and achieved a degree of realism carried down in many a tale; the Emperor said he could hear, at night, the splash of the water that Li had painted upon an imperial screen; and a fish leaped to life out of another of his pictures and was later found in a pool—every nation tells such stories of its painters. The southern school sprouted out of the natural innovations of art, and the genius of Wang Wei; in his impressionist style a landscape became merely the symbol of a mood. A poet as well as a painter, Wang sought to bind the two arts by making the picture express a poem; it was of him that men first used the now trite phrase so applicable to nearly all Chinese poetry and painting: “Every poem is a picture, and every picture is a poem.” (In many cases the poem is inscribed upon the picture, and is itself a calligraphic work of art.) Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, we are told, spent his whole life searching for a genuine Wang Wei.78*
The greatest painter of the T’ang epoch, and, by common consent, of all the Far East, rose above distinctions of school, and belonged rather to the Buddhist tradition of Chinese art. Wu Tao-tze deserved his name—Wu, Master of the Tao or Way, for all those impressions and formless thoughts which Lao-tze and Chuang-tze had found too subtle for words seemed to flow naturally into line and color under his brush. “A poverty stricken orphan,” a Chinese historian describes him, “but endowed with a divine nature, he had not assumed the cap of puberty ere he was already a master artist, and had flooded Lo-yang with his works.” Chinese tradition has it that he was fond of wine and feats of strength, and thought like Poe that the spirit could work best under a little intoxication.81 He excelled in every subject: men, gods, devils, Buddhas, birds, beasts, buildings, landscapes—all seemed to come naturally to his exuberant art. He painted with equal skill on silk, paper, and freshly-plastered walls; he made three hundred frescoes for Buddhist edifices, and one of these, containing more than a thousand figures, became as famous in China as “The Last Judgment” or “The Last Supper” in Europe. Ninety-three of his paintings were in the Imperial Gallery in the twelfth century, four hundred years after his death; but none remains anywhere today. His Buddhas, we are told, “fathomed the mysteries of life and death”; his picture of purgatory frightened some of the butchers and fishmongers of China into abandoning their scandalously un-Buddhistic trades; his representation of Ming Huang’s dream convinced the Emperor that Wu had had an identical vision.82 When the monarch sent Wu to sketch the scenery along the Chia-ling River in Szechuan he was piqued to see the artist return without having sketched a line. “I have it all in my heart,” said Wu; and isolating himself in a room of the palace, he threw off, we are assured, a hundred miles of landscape.83† When General Pei wished his portrait painted, Wu asked him not to pose, but to do a sword dance; after which the artist painted a picture that contemporaries felt constrained to ascribe to divine inspiration. So great was his reputation that when he was finishing some Buddhist figures at the Hsing-shan Temple, “the whole of Chang-an” came to see him add the finishing touches. Surrounded by this assemblage, says a Chinese historian of the ninth century, “he executed the haloes with so violent a rush and swirl that it seemed as though a whirlwind possessed his hand, and all who saw it cried that some god was helping him”:85 the lazy will always attribute genius to some “inspiration” that comes for mere waiting. When Wu had lived long enough, says a pretty tale, he painted a vast landscape, stepped into the mouth of a cave pictured in it, and was never seen again.86 Never had art known such mastery and delicacy of line.
Under the Sung emperors painting became a passion with the Chinese. Emancipating itself from subserviency to Buddhist themes, it poured forth an unprecedented number and variety of pictures. The Sung Emperor Hui Tsung was himself not the least of the eight hundred known painters of the day. In a roll which is one of the treasures of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston he portrayed with astonishing simplicity and clarity the stages through which women carried the preparation of silk;87 he founded an art museum richer in masterpieces than any collection that China has ever again known;88 he elevated the Painting Academy from a mere department of the Literary College into an independent institution of the highest rank, substituted art tests for some of the literary exercises! traditionally used in the examinations for political office, and raised men to the ministry for their excellence in art as often as for their skill in statesmanship.89 The Tatars, hearing of all this, invaded China, deposed the Emperor, sacked the capital and destroyed nearly all of the paintings in the Imperial Museum, whose catalogue had filled twenty volumes.90 The artist-emperor was carried away by the invaders, and died in captivity and disgrace.
Greater than this royal painter were Kuo Hsi and Li Lung-mien. “For tall pines, huge trees, swirling streams, beetling crags, steep precipices, mountain peaks, now lovely in the rising mist, now lost in an obscuring pall, with all their thousand ten thousand shapes—critics allow that Kuo Hsi strode across his generation.”*91 Li Lung-mien was an artist, a scholar, a successful official and a gentleman, honored by the Chinese as the perfect type of Chinese culture at its richest. He passed from the profession of calligraphy to sketching and painting, and rarely used anything but ink; he gloried in the strict traditions of the Northern School, and spent himself upon accuracy and delicacy of line. He painted horses so Well that when six that he had painted died, it was charged that his picture had stolen their vital principle from them. A Buddhist priest warned him that he would become a horse if he painted horses so often and so intently; he accepted the counsel of the monk, and painted five hundred Lohans. We may judge of his repute by the fact that Hui Tsung’s imperial gallery, when it was sacked, contained one hundred and seven works by Li Lung-mien.
Other masters crowded the Sung scene: Mi Fei, an eccentric genius who was forever washing his hands or changing his clothes when he was not collecting old masters or transforming landscape painting with his “method of blobs”—daubs of ink laid on without the guidance of any contour line;* Hsia Kuei, whose long roll of scenes from the Yang-tze—its modest sources, its passage through loess and gorges, its gaping mouth filled with merchant ships and sampans—has led many students93 to rank him at the head of all landscape painters of Orient and Occident; Ma Yuan, whose delicate landscapes and distant vistas adorn the Boston Museum of Fine Arts;† Liang K’ai, with his stately portrait of Li Po; Mu-ch’i, with his terrible tiger, his careless starling, and his morose but gentle Kuan-yin; and others whose names strike no familiar chords in Occidental memories, but are the tokens of a mind rich in the heritage of the East. “The Sung culture,” says Fenollosa, “was the ripest expression of Chinese genius.”95
When we try to estimate the quality of Chinese painting in the heyday of T’ang and Sung we are in the position of future historians who may try to write of the Italian Renaissance when all the works of Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo have been lost. After the ravages of barbaric hosts had destroyed the masterpieces of Chinese painting, and interrupted for centuries the continuity of Chinese development, painting seems to have lost heart; and though the later dynasties, native and alien, produced many artists of delicacy or power, none could rank with the men who had known paradise for a time at the courts of Ming Huang and Hui Tsung. When we think of the Chinese we must see them not merely as a people now stricken with poverty, weakened with corruption, torn with factions and disgraced with defeat, but as a nation that has had, in the long vista of its history, ages that could compare with those of Pericles, Augustus and the Medici, and may have such ages again.
2. Qualities of Chinese Painting
The rejection of perspective—Of realism—Line as nobler than color—Form as rhythm—Representation by suggestion—Conventions and restrictions—Sincerity of Chinese art
What is it that distinguishes Chinese painting, and makes it so completely different from every other school of painting in history except its own pupils in Japan? First, of course, its scroll or screen form. But this is an external matter; far more intrinsic and fundamental is the Chinese scorn of pe
rspective and shadow. When two European painters accepted the invitation of the Emperor K’ang-hsi to come and paint decorations for his palaces, their work was rejected because they had made the farther columns in their pictures shorter than the nearer ones; nothing could be more false and artificial, argued the Chinese, than to represent distances where obviously there were none.96 Neither party could understand the prejudice of the other, for the Europeans had been taught to look at a scene from a level with it, while the Chinese artists were accustomed to visualize it as seen from above.97 Shadows, too, seemed to the Chinese to be out of place in a form of art which, as they understod it, aimed not to imitate reality, but to give pleasure, convey moods, and suggest ideas through the medium of perfect form.