Chinese art

“ The Chinese have been idealists, and experimenters in the making of great principles; their history opens a world of lofty aim and achievement, parallel to that of the ancient Mediterranean peoples. We need their best ideals to supplement our own—ideals enshrined in their art, in their literature and in the tragedies of their lives.
We have already seen proof of the vitality and practical value of oriental painting for ourselves and as a key to the eastern soul. It may be worth while to approach their literature, the intensest part of it, their poetry, even in an imperfect manner. ”

“ And yet it is impossible to understand Chinese art without doing so. In China art was confined to experts, while in Japan it acquired an ever-increasing popular character. But the Chinese is by far the higher form of art. The Chinese have always been the teachers and pioneers in all matters of thought and creative genius in the Far East. Architecture, sculpture, painting, with all their various ramifications, date back to the remote ages of Chinese antiquity. ”

“ No one will be surprised to learn that fourteen hundred years ago the Chinese laid down six canons of art. Nothing is more natural than that some great artist, reviewing in old age his life and work, should deduce from the mass of experience and achievement certain propositions, and that these, in time, should become rules, to be preached by pedants, practised by dilettanti, and ignored by every artist worthy of the name. What does surprise us is that the first of these Chinese canons should be nothing less than a definition of that which is essential in all great art. ”

“ Painting.—Painting is the pre-eminent art of China, which can boast of a succession of great painters for at least twelve centuries. Though the Chinese have an instinctive gift for harmonious colour, their painting is above all an art of line. It is intimately connected with writing, itself a fine art demanding the same skill and supple power in the wielding of the brush. The most typical expression of the Chinese genius in painting is the ink sketch, such as the masters of the Sung dynasty most preferred and the Japanese from the 15th century adopted for an abiding model. ”

“ But even their characteristic blue they use rather sparingly in their painting. Chinese drawing impressed me as primitive, but not inexact; but if I were less ignorant about Chinese art, I might regard it very differently.
I have a dozen or more of the dainty “rice pictures” that were being painted in that queer unartistic Cantonese studio. Not one picture has been painted by one man. For instance, I have among them the figure of a mandarin. It is not over six inches high, but it represents the considerable work of three artists, one of them noted throughout China. ”

“ Until with the last two or three centuries, nature itself was always appealed to as the one source of true inspiration; then came the artist of the studio, since which time Chinese art has languished, while Japanese art, learned at the feet of Chinese artists from the fourteenth century onwards, has come into prominent notice, and is now, with extraordinary versatility, attempting to assimilate the ideals of the West. ”

“ All the elements of form which make for beauty in Chinese composition are there in overwhelming force. Terseness is pushed to its extreme limits; each particle that can be safely dispensed with is scrupulously eliminated, and every here and there some new and original combination invests perhaps a single word with a force it could never have possessed except under the hands of a perfect master of his art. ”

“ There is, perhaps, no section of art that has been so completely misapprehended in Europe as the pictorial art of China. For us the Chinese painter, past or present, is but a copyist who imitates with laborious and undiscriminating exactness whatever is laid before him, rejoices in the display of as many and as brilliant colours as his subject and remuneration will permit, and is original only in the creation of monstrosities. ”

“ Chinese design shows naturalistic art arrested and perpetuated on totally different principles. Their representations are all equally allied to their art of picture-painting, whether on china with the brush, or on textiles with the needle. The flatness of the picture is still preserved by their ignorance of perspective. When they attempted to express different distances, they did so by placing them one above another, so that in reading the composition the eye first takes in the distant horizon ”

“ From the point of view of the artist or the organizer it is perfect. It is an exquisite harmony, [182] limited to the tones of gold, the sapphire, and the emerald, with the rich hues of a peacock's feather carried to its climax in decorations, paintings, embroidery, dresses, flowers, and fruit.
Each object in the hall has its purpose in the magnificent scheme. It may be a simple chrysanthemum or a flag on the canopy over the throne itself, but they all emphasize the same grand central idea.
Whatever our opinions of Chinese art may be, we cannot fail to admire its vigour and its refinement. ”

“ The Chinese have ideas of painting peculiar to themselves. They have little regard for perspective, and in ancient times had none whatever. Even so late as the seventeenth century perspective was at direct variance with the rules guiding their art. We can, for example, see vases—particularly those of the Ming Dynasty—in which the personages in a scene appear to be piled directly one above another, or mount stairs, like upright ladders, in order to reach other personages evidently some distance off, but as much in the foreground of the picture as those nearer at hand. ”

“ The opening up of China and the increased opportunities which Europeans enjoy, not only for studying the monuments of ancient Chinese art, but for acquiring examples of the early masterpieces in painting, sculpture, bronze, jade, and ceramic wares, have given the Western student a truer insight into the greatness of the earlier phases of Chinese art, and have awakened a new and widespread enthusiasm for them. ”

“ Although paintings of the Yuan period, generally speaking, are inferior to the Sung, lacking the spiritual qualities that characterize the earlier period, in such work as this the great traditions of Chinese painting are worthily continued. To appreciate Chinese painting one must rid oneself of the mistaken idea, so common to Occidentals, that a work of art depends for success upon its “likeness” to nature. Petty imitation of the appearance of things plays no part in Chinese painting. ”

“ We see it in the old bronze statues, in the delicate porcelain work, the exquisite carvings, and the precious cut stones. These relics in themselves may leave us cold, design and colour may not be to our taste, but the artistic idea, and above all the artistic ideal, underlying all these masterpieces, and the power of execution, cannot fail to impress any one at all interested in art.
We must remember that although the Chinese conception of art is so different from ours, the interest of it to us lies not exclusively in the productions themselves, but rather in the mind which produced them. ”

“ From now on, surviving monuments permit us greater certainty in studying the continuous development of Chinese art. Under the Sung emperors we find a complex civilization marked by luxury of living, refinement and elegance of [pg 16] taste. These characteristics are reflected in the arts. Although religeous painting was largely practiced, Sung artists show a predilection for landscape and for subjects allied to landscape, such as birds and flowers. ”

“ Up to this point art had sounded every depth and attained the highest summits of human achievement. Thenceforward it concerned itself with varying manifestations which were only the different modes of a formula that was still flexible, until the time when—the great inspirations of the past forgotten—there appear signs of a spirit on the quest for realism, emerging from the ancient tradition. This is the distinctive note in the evolution of Chinese painting under the last two dynasties. ”

“ We note also that in the more specialised arts the transcendence of China belongs to the past, and even sometimes a remote past. It is so in the art of philosophy, and the arts of poetry and painting. It is so also in the art of pottery, in which Chinese supremacy over the rest of the world has been longest recognised—has not the word “china” for centuries been our name for the finest pottery?—and is most beyond measure. Our knowledge of the pottery of various cultures excels that of any other human products because of all it is the most perdurable. ”

“ All these efforts were capped by those of another artist, whose picture of the North Wind made people feel cold, while his picture of the South Wind made people feel hot. Such exaggerations are not altogether without their value; they suggest that Chinese art must have reached a high level, and this has recently been shown to be nothing more than the truth, by the splendid exhibition of Chinese pictures recently on view in the British Museum. ”

“ In the domain of painting, we are only just beginning to awake to the fact that in this direction the Chinese have reached heights denied to all save artists of supreme power, and that their art was already on a lofty level many centuries before our own great representatives had begun to put brush to canvas. ”

“ The life of things is contemplated and portrayed for its own sake, not for its uses in the life of men. From this point of view the body of Chinese painting is much more modern in conception than that of Western art. Landscape was a mature and free art in China more than a thousand years ago, and her school of landscape is the loftiest yet known to the world. Nor was man ever dissociated from nature. As early as the 4th century Ku Kʽai-chih says that in painting a certain noble character he must give him a fit background of great peaks and deep ravines. ”

“ The landscape art thus founded, and continued by the Japanese in the fifteenth century, must rank as the greatest school of landscape which the world has seen."405 In art, as in literature and politics, the great days of China lie in the past, but there are probably more artists at work at the present day in China than anywhere else, and the zeal and enthusiasm with which they execute their best work—generally without any expectation of material reward—is a sure indication that the artistic sense of the Chinese is still full of vigorous vitality, and may lead to great results in the future. ”

“ The artistic genius of the Chinese is particularly evinced in those cases where constant application and great manual precision are necessary; difficulty overcome being, in the eyes of the children of the Land of Flowers, the principal merit in a work of art. A poor workman, who gains but a few francs a day, shut up in a garret or in the dark corner of a shop, is absorbed in his work, and early accustoms himself unhesitatingy to improvise subjects, which one of our most skilful artists would hardly dare to attempt. ”

“ In flowers the Chinese were less successful owing to the absence of true chiaroscuro, but they were able to evolve a better picture out of a single spray of blossom than many a Western painter from all the treasures of a conservatory. If we endeavour to compare the pictorial art of China with that of Europe, we must carry ourselves back to the days when the former was in its greatness. Of the art that preceded the Tang dynasty we can say nothing. ”

“ But though the Chinese take such careful pains to avoid fatiguing your eye, with sure taste making the elaborateness of a decoration endurable by contrasting it with a plain surface, in the end weariness overcomes you. Their exuberance bewilders. You cannot refuse your admiration to the ingenuity with which they so diversify the ideas that occupy them as to give you an impression of changing fantasy, but the fact is plain that the ideas are few. The Chinese artist is like a fiddler who with infinite skill should play infinite variations upon a single tune. ”

“ But their colours are vivid and striking, and in delineating flowers, animals, or the human countenance, they are sometimes very successful. The Chinese drawings brought to this country on what is called rice paper, have been much admired for the striking characteristics, and brilliant tints which they display. If instructed in the art of shading, and taught the nature of perspective, the Chinese might become good artists ”

“ The industrial spirit of the great nation killed all romantic and poetic aspirations in art, religion and literature. The music of China is as syncopated and monotonous as her views of life. The only poetry that the Chinese possess is that which was written 4000 years ago. ”

“ Thus we know that most of the painting was done on silk, of which plenty came into the market through the control of silk-producing southern China. Paper had meanwhile been invented in the second century B.C., by perfecting the techniques of making bark-cloth and felt. Unfortunately nothing remains of the actual works that were the first examples of what the Chinese everywhere were beginning to call "art". "People", that is to say the gentry, painted as a social pastime, just as they assembled together for poetry, discussion, or performances of song and dance ”

“ The second section of the book, "Written Pictures," consists of illustrations, or half illustrations, of an art which the Chinese consider the most perfect medium in which a man can express himself. These Tzŭ Hua, "Hanging-on-the-Wall Poems," are less known and understood than any other form of Oriental art. A beautiful thought perpetuated in beautiful handwriting and hung upon the wall to suggest a mental picture—that is what it amounts to.
In China, the arts of poetry and calligraphy are united in the ideographs which form the written language. ”