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ОглавлениеCHAPTER I THE POSITION OF CHINESE PAINTING
I PAINTING AND MAGIC
THE STUDY OF THE TECHNIQUES of Chinese painting has been rather neglected in the West, perhaps because technique has been regarded more or less as a handmaiden in the service of the idea, which could therefore be ignored as of secondary importance. Painting, it has been assumed, must be the same kind of art everywhere, and consequently the same ways of looking at and judging Western painting must be equally applicable to Eastern and Chinese painting. This supposition has led to misunderstandings and misinterpretations, because Chinese painting, in contrast to its Western counterpart, cannot be fully appreciated without some knowledge of its techniques and methods.
I shall try to demonstrate here just why technique plays such a decisive part in Chinese painting. This involves not only an explication why, fundamentally, Chinese painting reaches its culmination in absolute identity of idea and technique, but also requires an introduction to various of the essential techniques and principles by which a Chinese picture—its style and form already inherent in it from the very first brush stroke—comes to completion.
To illustrate this unity of technique and idea, a unity which seems essentially to be an identification of opposites, it is necessary to start a long way back. To begin with, it will prove helpful to recount four of the most famous out of countless legends attributed to Chinese artists.
Wu Tao-tzu, the great master painter of the T'ang period, was once journeying and decided to spend the night in a temple. The monks received him without enthusiasm and grudgingly supplied a small bare room. Wu Tao-tzu retired. The following morning he was up early, intending to leave his unfriendly hosts in a hurry. From the doorstep he cast a glance back at his somber lodging. And then with one sweeping motion of his brush the master painted a donkey on the wall of the cell. He had hardly left when the donkey stepped out of the wall, kicking right and left until the cell was a shambles. When the monks came running, the donkey quickly jumped back into the picture. But the monks understood how this was Wu's revenge for their unkindness.
The following story has been ascribed to several early masters, and we pick the version linked with the name of the great Ku K'ai-chih. Ku one day decided to paint a dragon on the wall of his house. He guided his brush with full confidence, and after a while the dragon was finished except for its eyes. Suddenly the master's courage failed him. He simply did not dare to paint those eyes. When, many months later, he at last felt brave enough, he groped for his brush and with swift strokes dashed in eye and pupil. Within an instant the dragon broke into loud roaring and flew away, leaving a trace of fire and smoke.
Another legend attributed to the same painter tells of a girl he loved but who did not return this emotion. Ku K'ai-chih painted a picture of the disobliging young woman, hung it in his room, and stuck a thorn into it. From that moment the girl became sick and faded away. She did not recover until she had responded to the painter's feelings and he eventually pulled the thorn out of her portrait.
The most revealing of these legends about Chinese painters is the one which deals with the end of Wu Tao-tzu. The emperor had asked Master Wu to paint a landscape on the palace wall. Wu set to work and was soon able to lead the emperor to a magnificent painting in whose center he had drawn a gaping cave. The emperor was still expressing his admiration when Wu Tao-tzu directed firm steps toward the cave and vanished inside it. After the shape of his body had melted into the shadow of the cave, the entire painting disappeared into the palace wall.
Diverse as these stories may be, they all have one common trait: the assumption of an extraordinarily close relationship between painting and magic, and of the resulting conclusion that a great painter is also a great magician—the greater the painter the more powerful his magical capacities. It seems that a demonstration of magic was proof of a painter's genius.
The fact that such legends were still taken seriously as late as the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries suggests the persistence of the Chinese belief in the supernatural. In a world dominated by the supernatural, people could not possibly conceive of the brush stroke and the idea as being two distinct things, nor as existing on different levels, nor as representing the opposite poles of material and spiritual. In fact, this dichotomy has rarely existed in Asia. It is an expression of the Western mind and is most probably linked with the death of the world of magic. This is not the place to investigate the reasons for the overthrow of the belief in magic throughout the West. But surely we can surmise that is was partly due to the influence of Christianity, which turned its face against magic. There was never any similar development in the East, because the Eastern religions did not divorce themselves from magic and philosophy.
Of course, in early times magic visions were known in the West too. Most scholars today believe the great neolithic cave paintings of Altamira in Spain or Lascaux in France to be magic paintings done in those dark, cold caves during the interglacial period by tribal witch doctors to appease the dangerous world and the wild animals that surrounded them and to charm the game they hoped to feed on. A distinction between technique and painting was then probably nonexistent. In an age of magic, technique is completely identified with the power to make magic. The greatest technician is also the greatest magician. The strength of the spell grows with the ability to paint. The equation may be put in another way: the magician of those bygone times was indeed the painter, but his artistic skill was only regarded as the measure of his power to make magic. The more authentically he could reproduce the appearances of the world around him—and his power was directed at these appearances—the stronger was the spell. He felt no artistic urge as such, for he was only a magician, and his painting craft proved itself by its effect.
Though we have no knowledge of Chinese counterparts of Altamira and Lascaux, it seems most likely that the Chinese also went through this most primitive stage of art and magic. And the earliest Chinese paintings which have come down to us lend additional weight to the belief that the magic tradition in China followed much the same pattern as did that of the West. At the time of these earliest paintings, however, magic as such was already but a general background from which the artist had emerged as the dominant personality, though possessing magical powers—a complete reversal of the situation that we must presume to have existed in the prehistoric period. The Chinese painter was by now first and foremost an artist. If he was a great artist, he acquired magical power, and he was able to cast spells even though this was not any more the primary purpose of his art. Note that in China supernatural legends concerning artists are linked only with the names of great masters. As explained, magic was a proof of great genius. But genius was the essential factor, and magic no more than a manifestation of it, whereas in prehistoric times the opposite had been true: magic was then the essence, and artistic excellence merely a means of proving it.
It may be argued that at the time when legends about the great masters began to be told, the belief in magic was already dead, and those legends were nothing more than an attempt to interpret the present in terms of the past. As a matter of fact, however, in the Asiatic world, belief in the supernatural power of the artist remained alive over greatly prolonged periods. In evidence of this, more recent examples can be supplied from Japan, a country which may be called the immediate artistic extension of China.
There is, for instance, the story translated into English by Lafcadio Hearn under the title "The Boy Who Drew Cats" and charmingly illustrated in Japanese Fairy Tales, published at Tokyo by T. Hasegawa and Son in the late nineteenth century. Although it seems likely that the story goes back to more ancient Chinese sources, it still has a well-established tradition in Japan, and one is justified in believing that the Japanese accepted it as a matter of historical fact. The boy of the tale, from an early age, showed unusual talent in drawing cats. He drew cats on every slip of paper within his reach and also on the walls and sliding panels of his parents' house. At long last he was apprenticed to a very severe master in the hope that he would be dissuaded from ruining walls. Alas, the urge to paint triumphed over discipline, and the disgusted master dismissed his apprentice as a hopeless case. On his subsequent wanderings the boy one night entered an abandoned temple. Before lying down to sleep in one of the lonely rooms, he swiftly sketched a few cats on an old discarded screen (Fig. 1). During the night he was harassed by the sound of terrible yowling and screeching, and when he finally awoke in the morning, he found a huge ghost rat dead on the floor (Fig. 2). The cats on the screen had blood smeared all over their claws and fangs—and very pleased looks on their faces.
Another legend concerning a Japanese master painter dates from the sixteenth century, extracting its essence from within our own historical period. It is the story of young Sesshū, who was made a Zen acolyte in boyhood but displeased his abbot by a constant unruly preference for drawing over prescribed religious duties. As punishment the abbot one day bound the boy to a tree. Sesshū at first cried and wailed, but then after a while, with his toe, he began drawing pictures in the tear-wet sand. It was mice that he drew, and so lifelike were they that when he had completed a good number of them they sprang to life and gnawed through the ropes that bound him (Fig. 3).
Dated even later than Sesshū's magic is that of Maruyama Ōkyo (1733-95), who is credited with originating the ghost-picture genre in a painting commissioned by a leading daimyo. Incidentally, one delightfully ironical feature of the story consists in the detail that he used his aunt as model for the ghost. This much only by the way. The important part of the tale lies in its relation of what happened after the master had completed his last brush stroke. The master, it is said, had hardly stepped back from his picture with a satisfied grunt when the painted ghost detached itself with a gliding motion and disappeared from the room.
Today the usual interpretation of such legends places primary emphasis upon the extraordinary realism of the paintings and explains the events in reference to this realism, deducing it to be the very cause that made the paintings come to life. Such conclusions entirely miss the point of the legends, which should no more be thus interpreted than should the story of Myron's cow or of the cherries of Apelles. The afore-cited stories are all tales of magic, pure and simple.
In the East, until as recently as the turn of the nineteenth century, art and a belief in the magical powers of the artist were intertwined concepts. Even in our own age, therefore, the painter in Japan, just as in China, has not doubted that great art and magic are one and the same. Whether this has been explicitly admitted or not is of no importance. An implicit acceptance of the basic idea has been rooted so deeply in the Oriental mind that there has been no need for conscious expression. Mention may here be made of the magazine Tien Shih, a forerunner of the modern illustrated, which was published in Shanghai during the early years of the present century, just before the founding of the Republic. It reported contemporary events in a traditional style, with lithographs, and featured many "authenticated" instances of magic and the supernatural.
In a comparison between Chinese and Western painting, the unity of technique and idea in the former becomes more obvious. Western art lost its magical elements at an early date because of the influence of Christianity. It is true that certain aspects of the supernatural continued to be expressed, but only insofar as they had been transfused into the body of Christian thought. Technical skill, though, no longer had anything magical about it: it evolved from no formula of magic but rather from the search for ways of overcoming the problems presented by the various materials of artistic expression—a search that has always produced a different answer in each epoch. And once the unity of technique and idea had ceased to exist, doubts and perplexities concerning technique began to arise. It is precisely such doubts and perplexities that have destroyed more works of art, by preventing their creation, than have all the fires and floods and wars of history. The East has suffered from an equally destructive mechanism in that the almost ritualized technique which necessarily developed out of magic resulted in the mass production of skillfully executed but mediocre paintings.
From this short and incomplete survey we can see that until our own times no distinction was made between technique and idea in Chinese painting. The two concepts were one and the same. Hence those who seek to know the art of the East must study the technical significance of forms with just as much determination as they study the finished compositions. Most essentially, they must persevere until they reach the point of perceiving the real identity of those apparent opposites: material appearance and spiritual essence. Only from that point on will the world of Eastern art truly open itself to the Western observer.
2 PAINTING AND TAO
BESIDES MAGIC, THERE IS YET A SECOND approach to an understanding of Chinese art: one which leads through Chinese philosophy. And this we may now try. We have already stated that in the East, and especially in China, there was no absolute division between magic, religion, and philosophy. Doubtless they were never, as in the West, fundamentally opposed to each other, even if in certain points differences or distinctions were recognized.
Some scholars assert that Taoism is the typically Chinese philosophy, having been the primitive philosophy of the Han race. They also suggest that Chinese Buddhism has taken over some essentially Taoist features. And one can agree that the Book of Changes, in the version which we know (until recently attributed to Confucius), in fact expresses a thoroughly Taoist attitude within the framework of its Confucian ethos, at least in the sense of presenting a typically Chinese state of mind.
In the works of the Taoist philosopher Chuang-tzu there occur two passages that are worth noting for our purposes. The first is the often-quoted parable concerning Prince Hui's cook; in the translation of H. A. Giles it goes as follows:
Prince Hui's cook was cutting up a bullock. Every blow of his hand, every heave of his shoulders, every tread of his foot, every thrust of his knee, every whshh of rent flesh, every chhk of the chopper, was in perfect harmony—rhythmical like the dance of the Mulberry Grove, simultaneous like the chord of the Ching Shou.
"Well done!" cried the Prince."Yours is skill indeed."
"Sire, " replied the cook, "I have always devoted myself to Tao. It is better than skill. When I first began to cut up bullocks, I saw before me simply whole bullocks. After three years' practice, I saw no more whole animals (but saw them, so to speak, in sections).
"And now I work with my mind and not with my eye. When my senses bid me stop, but my mind urges me on, I fall back upon eternal principles. I follow such openings or cavities as there may be, according to the natural constitution of the animal. I do not attempt to cut through joints; still less through large bones.
"A good cook changes his chopper once a year—because he cuts. An ordinary cook, once a month—because he hacks. But I have had this chopper nineteen years, and although I have cut up many thousand bullocks, its edge is as if fresh from the whetstone. For at the joints there are always interstices, and the edge of a chopper being without thickness, it remains only to insert that which is without thickness into such an interstice. By these means the interstice will be enlarged, and the blade will find plenty of room. It is thus that I have kept my chopper for nineteen years as though fresh from the whetstone.
"Nevertheless, when I come upon a hard part where the blade meets with a difficulty, I am all caution. I fix my eye on it. I stay my hand, and gently apply my blade, until with a hwah the part yields like earth crumbling to the ground. Then I take out my chopper, and stand up, and look around, and pause, until with an air of triumph I wipe my chopper and put it carefully away."
"Bravo!" cried the Prince."From the words of this cook I have learned how to take care of my life."
The second parable from Chuang-tzu concerns a certain "man from Ying" who had a scab on his nose no thicker than the wing of a housefly. He sent for a stonemason to have it cut away. The stonemason wielded his adze with such skill that afterwards the man's nose was quite unharmed, and he had not even changed color.
These and many other passages from Chuang-tzu have often been taken for Taoist parables. But, adequately interpreted, they have a much wider significance. They suggest that, although technical skill alone is not enough, a mastery of technique leads the artist beyond the material limitations of this world to a higher knowledge, a perception of Tao. So skill is not simply a necessary step toward Tao but rather a part of it. The command of technique leads, through assiduous practice, through the reconciling of the inward and outward, through the conquest of material difficulties, toward a final liberation. A mastery of technique that has become so instinctive that it is absolutely unconscious makes possible a transcending of technique, a liberation into the world of the mind and—from our point of view—into the world of art.
Just as brushwork and magic were earlier shown to be integrated, so now idea and execution, which on one level look like opposites, become identical on a higher level. And here we touch on a principle enunciated by Chuang-tzu and many other Chinese: the principle of the identity of opposites. This basic principle seems to be very typical of Chinese thought. It permeates Chinese philosophy, Taoist religion, Confucian ethics, and everyday life and language as well.
Within the philosophic sphere, the two contraries are known as Yang and Yin, the two primary elements, which are united on a higher level in the great creative principle of T'ai-chi, the father of all things. The contraries of Yang and Yin are found in a vast number of parallel contraries, of which we shall name only a few here: masculine and feminine, sun and moon, day and night, hard and soft, rise and fall, unyielding and yielding, solid and liquid. One cannot think of these separately. The one always posits the other, and the relationship of each to the other defines the limits of their influence, the resultant of the forces they exert on each other. This is Tao, two opposite forces in equilibrium, and hence reconciled.
That this philosophy remained influential in China right down to recent times is proved by countless word formations in colloquial Chinese which are fairly new. The word tung-hsi, a combination of the characters for east and west, means " the object "; that is, presumably, whatever lies between east and west, between the borders of the Chinese world. Ta-hsiao, a combination of big and small, means "size" or "format"; that is, the big-small. Yüan-chin, a combination of far and near, means "distance," particularly "perspective." There are numerous other examples.
The philosophy of the identity of opposites, this matter of equating contraries, penetrated to the furthest reaches and the minutest details of Chinese art. Indeed one might almost say that Chinese painting, particularly landscape painting, is a projection in visual terms of Chinese philosophy, or of the Chinese mind. It is a demonstration of the endless process of harmonizing opposites which goes on, producing ever new combinations.
This concept is found in the Chinese art vocabulary even on the purely material level. The brush stands for the masculine principle, the ink for the feminine. The brush is masculine, too, in relation to the feminine paper. The straight line is masculine; the hooked line is feminine. Then we have the brush held perpendicularly and the brush held at an angle, the linear and the nonlinear. These are only a few of the pairs of opposites which stem from the same principle.
The principle is also found at work in the way the Chinese critics classify paintings by their subject matter. The Chinese mind loves to catalogue and systematize, but always on the basis of recognized maxims. Some of the more important subject-matter categories of Chinese art will make this point clear.
Jen-wu is portrait painting; literally the term means " people and things," the contraries of animate and inanimate, what lives and what only exists. Ling-mao is animal painting; literally, "feather and fur," the contraries of the flying and the earth-bound. Ts'ao-ch'ung is the painting of insects and small plants; literally, "grass and insects." Like ling-mao, this last term refers to the contraries of things growing on the earth, bound to one place, and those creatures which fly freely.
The most interesting category, and for us the most important—because we are concerned here mainly with landscape painting—is the word shan-sh.ui. Translated literally, the two syllables mean "mountain and water," opposing what is hard, solid, and resistant in mountain and rock to the feminine element of water, which is yielding, pliant, and changing. Water obeys the laws of gravity and yet—this is a typically Chinese attitude—its ceaseless flux forms mountains and rocks and occasionally conquers them. Out of these fundamental opposites, Chinese landscape painting was born. It is an attempt to show in visual terms the identity of Yang and Yin, their interplay and their unity at a higher level. As will be seen later, this idea pervades the whole of Chinese landscape painting at all stages from the lowest to the peak. The world of art is held together by it, bound tightly by the invisible threads which run all through it.
3 PAINTING AND TECHNIQUE
WE HAVE EMPHASIZED THE UNITY OF IDEA and technique in Chinese painting, pointing out, in contrast, how preoccupied Western art is with the separate problem of technique. But this is in no way meant to belittle the importance of technique in Chinese painting. Quite to the contrary: when technique becomes so integrated with idea as to be practically an instinctive process, its role thereby evolves all the more decisively.
If what follows concentrates upon the technical aspect of Chinese painting, it is partly in recognition of this decisive importance and also partly because other aspects have already been thoroughly investigated by Western authors whose works are easily accessible. Chinese painting has been examined from the historical point of view, the aesthetic, and the philological, as well as from the viewpoint of its origins. But there has been no work which has had as its primary object an explanation of the techniques of Chinese painting. Most books have contented themselves with short comments on the special characteristics of Chinese technique, and these have, moreover, been vitiated by misunderstandings. This is natural enough. For the Chinese literature dealing with the problems of technique in painting is extremely vague in its terms and cannot be understood unless the reader already has not only a profound knowledge of the old masters and their techniques but also a wide practical experience in the use of the brush.
For the educated Chinese reader, the technique of brush handling presents no problem at all, because he has learned from his childhood to write with brush and India ink, and perhaps even to paint with them. By the time he develops a critical appreciation of the art of his own people, or has the confidence to set his creative ideas down on paper or silk, he has already had fifteen or twenty years of experience with the brush. Thus for every Chinese artist or writer on art, the use of brush and ink has been, from the beginning of his career, a part of his very being, an instinct of his wrist, a spontaneous, intuitive ability to express his innermost thoughts and feelings.
A Westerner who tries to translate Chinese documents on art therefore finds himself in a labyrinth and manages to worm his way out only by desperate measures. These include both mistranslation, which, though not necessarily deliberate, may be due to a failure to understand, and misinterpretation, which may result from the application of Western categories of thought to Chinese painting. One need only think of attempts to approach Chinese painting through the categories of pointillism, cubism, or chiaroscuro.
One of the most important Chinese works on the technique of painting is the Chieh-tzu Yuan Hüa-chuan, the painters' manual called The Mustard-seed Garden. This was published between the years 1679 and 1701 and has become famous in the West mainly because of its beautiful colored woodcuts. It has been translated into French by Professor R. Petrucci, and those portions he omitted as possibly being additions of a later date are included in the German translation by Victoria Contag. There is also an English translation by Mai-mai Sze titled The Tao of Painting.
The Mustard-seed Garden has often been taken to be a code of laws for Chinese painting, a set of hard and fast rules which could not be broken. This is certainly wrong. Admittedly The Mustard-seed Garden is a compilation of all the elements and techniques of Chinese painting known at the time, a sort of collective expression of the traditions of Chinese painting. But it would be an almost fatal misunderstanding to treat it as a rigid code of laws which had to be obeyed. In fact it is exactly the opposite. The Mustard-seed Garden in a way makes suggestions as to methods: methods which had developed and proved themselves over a period of a thousand years. But the stating of such methods surely limits no one who feels the urge to be creative, and numerous Chinese painters who worked after the compiling of The Mustard-seed Garden have demonstrated that the creative spirit can transcend rules or—and this is far the more common case in China—that the creative artist, while seeming to abide by the rules, really produces something quite new.
It is precisely here, in this delicate balance between abiding by rules and remaining free, that one encounters an important problem of Chinese art. For reasons to be explained later, the stylistic differences between periods, and also between individuals, are much subtler than in the West; and it is almost impossible for a Western expert, unless extremely experienced, to distinguish the individual style in the style of the period.
This, then, provides yet another reason why it is essential to study the techniques of Chinese painting in the minutest detail. It is only when one has an intimate knowledge of how a certain painter in a certain period applied his brush stroke or his wash, his outlines or dots, letting them flow from the brush onto the painting surface with a unique fluency, only when one's eye is trained to the point of distinguishing the "big-axe cut" shaping lines of a Ma Yüan, Ma Lin, or Li T'ang, or the dots of a Mi Fei or Mi Yu-jen—only then can he hope to undertake with meticulous care the enormous task of judging the genuineness of a painting and of pinning it down to this or that period, to this or that painter.
If in addition one remembers that one of the six principles of Chinese painting laid down by Hsieh Ho (of which more later) is: "Copy the old masters"; that almost all the great painters have carefully copied the great masterpieces of the past or of their own times; and that, generally, Chinese painters did not feel impelled to produce original work but rather to emulate the great ones of the past; it then becomes clear how difficult it must be to recognize stylistic differences. For the copying was not confined to an approximate imitation of composition. The attempt was often made to follow in the most exact detail the brush technique of the originals. One can safely state that Chinese painting hardly ever tried to create a new style, usually basing itself instead on the past. If a painter left the main stream of tradition, he was looked upon as an oddity, a fate which overtook the great Pa-ta Shan-jen. But since he was a monk and loved solitude, Pa-ta Shan-jen could defy his critics with roars of laughter.
Whenever in the history of Chinese art a new style emerged, it was usually without any conscious idea of breaking away from tradition. Innovations in style were sometimes made so gradually—deriving as they did from the conditions of the period and education—that neither the age nor the individual painters were aware of them. It was not until later that these developments could be recognized in their proper perspective.
For example, today we can look back over many centuries of Chinese art and realize what an enormous influence the revolutionary work of the painter Mi Fei had on his and subsequent ages. As will be explained later, he gave a kind of sanctity to the dot, using it rather than the traditional shaping line for his magnificent mountain ranges. But dots had been used earlier, though in a much more limited way, and thus, in those days before the technical rules of Chinese painting had been so elaborately codified, it was possible for Mi Fei and his contemporaries to regard his radical innovation as a technique already sanctioned by tradition.
The Mi Fei technique must indeed have answered a real need of the time, because it was adopted immediately, and from then on, almost every great painter would employ the Mi Fei dots at some period of his artistic career. The "shaping lines like the dots of Mi Fei," if one may for once cite this paradoxical and therefore typically Chinese expression, thus became a generally accepted technique, even a style, in Chinese landscape painting.
This example shows how the inevitable individuality of a single person can—if at the same time it foretells the latent ideas, aspirations, and possibilities of an age—unintentionally produce a lasting impression and bring with it changes in style, even when the age and the artist are both convinced that they have only been guided by the past.
To Western eyes, there has seemed to be an extraordinary sameness about Chinese painting, both in style and in subject matter, and this has been considered a weakness. But it can only be classified so if judged according to Western standards of what art and painting ought to be. Originality, whether in technique or composition, in outlines or in colors, in the extent to which it is realistic or abstract—originality of this kind is not absolutely unknown in the East, but it is not felt as an urgent need by the painter, nor is it taken as a mark of worth. On the contrary, the Chinese painter usually tried to suppress the originality of which he was undoubtedly capable. Otherwise he would have been departing too much from the master on whom he modeled himself. A further deterrent to radical originality lay in the fact that the painters of those days were always scholars and often poets at the same time, occupying an honored position in society, and no one wanted to be shunned by his colleagues as a man lacking in taste. Because the Chinese painter repeated the same motifs and themes time and time again with only minor variations, the Westerner may come to the conclusion that he had no creative imagination. But the most important issue for the Chinese painter was to express, within the strict limits imposed by tradition, his motif or theme in an immediate, personal yet universally recognized way. The "Pavilion on the Riverbank," which made the fourteenth-century painter Ni Tsan immortal, has been repeated thousands of times in Chinese landscape painting. And some of these repetitions, like that by Wen Cheng-ming, are perhaps as good as the original. The untrained Western observer will find it very difficult to tell these two, and other similar ones, apart, or even to suggest the name of a likely painter. An Eastern expert will at once be able to distinguish them, although the differences between them may seem very slight. He looks at the two paintings, so identical to Western eyes, and finds them as diverse as a Caravaggio and a Rembrandt.
Inevitably one is reminded of the analogy of music. A Chinese painting is like a piece of music brought to life again by a brilliant pianist or violinist—coaxed out of an orchestra by the conductor's baton, as splendid and beautiful as ever, but in clumsy hands painfully bad. Chinese painting is often nothing more than a new rendering of a well-known piece, a variation on a theme, or even simply an etude. The important thing is the quality of the performance.
And at this point there is a second analogy between Chinese art and music: only when the technical problems have been mastered will the artist be able to express himself lucidly, for only then will the material differences which hinder pure expression have vanished. Of course, original compositions have also been produced in Chinese art at all times, but, once created, they became part of the repertoire of all painters, to be reproduced again and again with new variations.
It is certainly possible for a Westerner to get something from a Chinese painting by applying, consciously or not, criteria which are familiar to him. But if he does this, he will absorb only a fraction of the total idea of the painting and will be unable to claim that he has gained anything even resembling a complete understanding of it. One might almost say that the expressiveness, the wealth of associations, the subtle undertones which go into a Chinese painting are all wasted on the Westerner who will not take the trouble to delve into the secrets of technique. It may even happen that the similarities he thinks he sees—behind which actually lie fundamental differences—-produce misunderstandings which will prevent his ever approaching the heart of Chinese painting.
Something must be added here to the remarks already made on the concept of originality in East and West. The Western student of Chinese painting may notice what he thinks is a lack of development, and for no good reason he assumes that all art, in every country, must show development. This leaves out of reckoning the fact that until quite recently China had an essentially static culture. And this culture emphasized not progress but preservation, not change but tradition. There was certainly no recognized principle of change. If Chinese culture has undergone some development in spite of this, then it is because the human spirit is naturally given to change, no matter what restrictions are placed in the way. But the Chinese system has discouraged such a predisposition much more strongly than other cultures, and the resulting antipathy to change is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the extraordinary continuity of the Chinese civilization.
Until the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty and the end of the empire, the cultural history of China had rolled on without a break. The wonderful endurance of this civilization, with all the richness of its inner mutations and movements, was the soil in which Chinese painting took root and flowered for nearly two thousand years. In effect, the end of the traditional civilization of China was also the end of its traditional art. Much of what has been produced in art since the year 1911 will probably be thrown away as a late flower of a dying civilization. This need not mean in practice that the values of Chinese painting—if the new regime does not destroy them for ideological reasons—are bound to disappear completely. It may much rather mean that the obstacles which formerly stood in the way of radical changes in the practice of art will now vanish, and that—from a sociological point of view—the painter may find a new freedom to combine his traditions with the spirit of his own age.
So far as Chinese art is concerned, we are living in a final phase from which no strong new developments have yet come forth. There are certain fundamental reasons why such new developments are unlikely to appear. To start with, the great age of the brush has yielded to the banal age of the fountain pen. This means that young students no longer study the use of the brush during the period when their hands have the full flexibility of youth. In sociological terms, the structure of Chinese society has changed so much that the painter is no longer necessarily a scholar. Most people consider that it takes too long to educate a person in the use of the brush and that it is not possible by traditional methods to express modern ideas on politics, industrialization, and national reconstruction. Finally, the old-style painter, with some exceptions, finds it impossible to exist, because people no longer buy traditional paintings. They are too expensive, and besides, they have a reactionary flavor about them. So the painter is dependent on official commissions. Chinese painting has therefore reached its end, and we have all the more reason to study it in its various forms because we are in a position to survey a movement which is now over.
The Mustard-seed Garden, then, from which all this body of ideas has been drawn, is not a book of rules but a sort of list of suggestions. The academic painter who follows each of these suggestions will paint in a dry, tedious, and uninspired way. But the creative artist who has thoroughly absorbed their meaning thereby wins his freedom. So again we have come back to the same point: technical skill is prerequisite to any advance beyond technique. This does not mean that technique is to be neglected but, on the contrary, that without any apparent effort the technique is inextricably involved in the work of art as a whole.
In order to achieve this degree of facility, Chinese painting has produced an extraordinary variety of basic rules, aids, and methods which the young artist more or less learns by heart, so that he can apply them whenever he wishes, spontaneously and without self-consciousness. As a result, the Chinese painter suffers from none of those Western complexes which arise from asking: "How shall I paint it?" In China the answer to this question is taken so much for granted that it never arises at the moment of artistic creation. Technical inhibitions have seldom stopped a Chinese artist once he has got going. But at the same time—and this has already been noted—the fact that painting technique is something that can be learned has resulted in some rather ordinary works remaining alive, even if anemically so. And the fact that many commonplace or downright bad Chinese paintings are to be found in Western museums and collections is due to the inability of the Western eye to mark the difference between mediocre and good, between second-rate copy and work of art. For these differences are too minute to be recognized at first, or even at second, look.
During the course of centuries Chinese painting has developed innumerable type forms which can be put together by the painter to form a painting. These forms are something like algebraic ciphers which only become significant when the formula is applied. They are etudes, but not yet sonatas. One could find many similar analogies. If one remembers that Chinese painting—and this will be more fully explained later—expresses certain fundamental principles of life, then one cannot help comparing it with the Ars Magna of Raimundus Lullus, or the Mathesis Universalis of Leibniz, or finally with the Glasperlenspiel of Hermann Hesse. These are only three of the countless attempts of mankind to create an art of combination which is capable of presenting all the thoughts and feelings of the human spirit and which makes imaginative use of all the symbols of the human spirit in ever new arrangements and ever new relationships.
In such syntheses we are confronted with something quite different from a mere imitation of the outward forms of nature. It is true that this sort of imitation of the world around us is up to a point inevitable, for only in nature can we find the symbols and signs we need in order to play the great Glasperlenspiel. But the reproduction of the visible world was never the only, nor even the main, aim of Chinese painting. The inventing of simplified symbols to stand for the phenomena of the visible world proves that for the Chinese it is more important to interpret things symbolically than to set them down realistically. Nevertheless, Chinese painting has naturally developed forms in which one can certainly recognize definite objects in nature: the bamboo grove or the pine tree, a late homecomer or a bird in flight.
A certain degree of abstractness is reached without, however, completely abandoning objective appearance. Even the painters of the Ch'an (Zen) school, who turned the techniques of brush and ink into a play of self-expression, hoping to gain insight from the movements of the brush inspired by the subconscious mind; even those painters who—to use a modern word—-distorted; even these stopped short of pure abstraction in their calligraphy and made their bird, fish, or tree still recognizable. And yet the habit of projecting philosophic ideas into visible terms, of demonstrating Yang and Yin with the brush, was very highly developed.
The possibility of mastering technique, as mentioned already, depends on learning to handle the brush in all its peculiarities. Brush technique, as the Chinese understand it, became an acquired discipline through arduous practice and reached a point where it became instinctive and spontaneous through absolute control. The brush stroke was itself a disciplined spontaneity, as it were. We are here in the presence of Taoist doctrine, the sort of thing we learn from the story of Prince Hui's cook and of the man from Ying.
Here again analogies suggest themselves, though at first sight they appear quite incompatible with this art. A brush stroke resembles nothing so much as a sword stroke, the release of an arrow, the judo grip, the sumo throw, the karate chop. They all have one thing in common: they require an extraordinary discipline and concentration of mind on the stroke, the throw, the blow, the grip, with exact co-ordination of mind and body achieved through controlled breathing. They achieve such incomparable perfection of expression that they go beyond the merely physical purpose into the realm of the spirit, and this the Chinese call Tao. In the West we have at least one activity which approaches this Eastern form of expression, and that is golf. This may seem rather a far-fetched comparison. But in fact a golf stroke involves all the same elements of precision and concentration. If golf does not lead to a spiritual experience in the West, as it may do in the East, the reason lies only in the different attitudes of the players. However, it is worth noticing that the Chinese and, far more, the Japanese have a very special talent for this sport in which long spells of relaxed walking and controlled breathing make possible a perfect performance.
We have reached the stage at which technique takes the foremost place in our minds. It has been shown how important a role technique plays in Chinese painting. The complete fusion of technique and expression is something which can no longer be disregarded. Now we have only to trace the path from the elementary form to the general principle, the path along which the simple brush stroke advances to the finished work.
