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Early
Figure Painting
The Han, Six Dynasties and T'ang Periods
"To
paint is to draw boundaries," writes the author of
the Shuo wen, the first Chinese dictionary, around the year
A.D. I00. He explains the character for hua, "to paint,"
as representing a hand grasping a marker and drawing the
four boundaries of a field, that is to say, delineating
a field. Sixteen centuries later, the great individualist
painter Tao-chi was to open his theoretical treatise by
speaking of the Single Brushstroke as "the origin of
all existence, the root of the myriad phenomena"-one
might almost, without violating the sense, translate: "In
the beginning was the Brushstroke."
In the beginning and also in the end; the line drawn by
a brush remains the central fact of Chinese painting throughout
its history. Painting began in Europe also as an art of
line, but lost its linear character as painters turned their
attention from the outlines to what they enclosed, concentrating
on the rendition of light and shadow, mass and texture,
softening or obscuring contours and so lessening the importance
of line. The course of Chinese painting led in a different
direction; its artists, never so concerned with reproducing
faithfully the color and texture of surfaces or the corporeality
of mass, gave ever greater emphasis to the brushline itself,
taking it as their primary descriptive and expressive means.
Stylistic movements that tended to destroy the integrity
of the individual brushstroke, or to subordinate linear
drawing to surface treatment, were generally regarded as
unorthodox departures from the main tradition.
The earliest surviving examples of true painting in China
are on two fragments of silk, dating from around the third
century B.C., which were excavated from tombs at Ch'ang-sha
in present-day Hunan Province. The pictures, drawn in fine,
black ink brushline, with flat washes of color filling the
areas thus bounded, exemplify already the technique, and
even something of the style, that was to remain basic and
orthodox for many centuries. They are symbolic representations
of humans, demons, animals and plants, set off as separate
images by their outlines from the neutral silk ground. This
ancient mode of representation corresponds to an even more
ancient mode of thought, in which "images" (hsiang)
played an important role as abstractions of natural phenomena,
objects and aspects of the world isolated from context and
conceptualized. The characters of the written language in
their earliest form as "pictograms" were images
of one kind; another was exemplified by the hexagrams of
the ancient divination text known as the Book of Changes,
thought to be derived from the visual patterns of the physical
universe. The forms created by the painter were still another.
When composed into a scene, they were juxtaposed without
being integrated. Between and around them was void; space
had no existence except as that which separated one image
from another.
The figures painted on a clay slab from a tomb of the latter
part of the Han dynasty (206 B.C. -22I A.D.), now in the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, still stand isolated against
an amorphous ground. But already the artist has discovered
two means of unifying his picture: through suggested movement,
the figures seeming to be swayed by a common cadence, and
through the mutual awareness revealed in the exchange of
glances that binds them. Even a minor drawing such as this-it
certainly does not represent the highest achievements of
Han painting- already begins to transcend the limitations
of a truly conceptual art. It shows the results of observation,
although the artist almost certainly did not paint from
life (Chinese painters very seldom did). The men in it are
self-sufficient, conscious individuals, not merely symbols
or stereotypes. They are not, moreover, minor players in
a cosmic drama, for whatever the subject of the painting
may be (it has not been clearly identified) it it apparently
not in any way religious. The greatest Han painting, as
reported in the literature of that period, was secular.
Confucianism, representing the rationalistic and human-centered
side of Chinese thought, had become dominant in state and
society, and its influence extended to painting: pictures
of edifying subjects, the Confucianists maintained, performed
a moral function in society, refining the spirit and elevating
the minds of men. Portraits of eminent personages of the
past, illustrations to historical anecdotes or classical
texts, were most esteemed.
The lineament in which the figures on the Boston tile are
drawn, while it has not yet realized the full potentialities
of the Chinese brush-perhaps the most versatile and responsive
drawing implement devised by man-suggests that painters
may have been experimenting already with idiomatic brushwork.
Fluctuations in breadth of line serve to enliven the drawing
with an air of spontaneity, to accent contours, to intensify
that sense of movement which seems to have been the objective
of much of Han art. One of the chief criteria of excellence
in Chinese painting throughout its history is quality of
brushline. The same brush was used for writing, and the
brilliant rise of the art of calligraphy in the Han and
later dynasties was eventually to affect profoundly the
technique of painting. But not until much later; the relaxed
brushwork of the Boston tile persists only in similarly
informal sketches, while the thin, even line of the most
ancient style, with little of calligraphic character, remains
standard for centuries in more finished works.
The disintegration of the Han empire in the early third
century A.D. was followed by a long period of division into
smaller states, none of which succeeded in conquering the
others and ruling the whole territory of China until the
end of the sixth century. We know the names of many artists
who were active during the intervening Six Dynasties period,
and a little about what their contemporaries thought of
them, for this is the age that produced the first critical
literature on painting. The only artist of the period whose
name is attached to any surviving pictures of real antiquity,
however, is Ku K'ai-chih, born around the year 345. He was
famous not only for his painting, but also for his eccentric
speech and behavior. His contemporaries credited him with
"pre-eminence in three fields: wit, painting and foolishness."
Nothing so very eccentric can be detected in the paintings,
attributed to him; only a touch of playfulness, at most.
The earliest and finest among them, the handscroll in the
British Museum titled Admonitions to the Court Ladies, belongs
to that didactic kind of painting favored by the early Confucianists,
illustrating a fourth century moralizing text which is made
up of advice on matters of deportment delivered to ladies
of the imperial harem by the Court Preceptress. The passage
of text that precedes the ninth picture in the scroll contains
the words: "No one can endlessly please; affection
cannot be for one alone; if it be so, it will one day end
in disgust." A graceful court lady appears to be learning
this bitter truth as the emperor repulses her with a gesture.
The long bands of cloth fluttering from her clothing, as
if blown by the wind or agitated by rapid movement, are
later echoes of the swift linear plays used in Han dynasty
drawing to impart a sense of vitality to the picture. As
painters grew more proficient in the descriptive rendering
of action, the need for such artifices disappeared; an entire
mass might be convincingly portrayed in motion.
The painting is in the form of a handscroll, or horizontal
scroll, which is designed to be unrolled section by section,
in such a way that no more than two feet or so is seen at
a time. The materials and technique are the usual ones for
the early period: fine drawing in ink line, and washed of
water color, on silk. In orthodox Chinese styles the color
washes are flat and ungraduated; color is almost never used
as it is in the West, to model form or to describe the fall
of light on a surface. The use of shading in some portions
of the Admonitions scroll is one feature of several that
point to a later date for the painting, some centuries after
the time of Ku K'ai-chih. But in its composition and drawing,
it is probably based closely on a work by Ku or some other
Six Dynasties master.
The technique of illusionistic shading, to give plasticity
to the forms of painting, was introduced to China from the
West, along with the doctrine and iconography of Buddhism.
One of the first masters to put it to effective use was
Chang Seng-yu, an early sixth century artist whose major
output consisted of wall paintings for Buddhist exemples.
The Chinese were quite unfamiliar with this device, which
was remotely derived from the late classical art of the
Mediterranean region and transmitted to China by way of
northern India and the oasis cities of Central Asia. Chang's
paintings must have been startling and a bit disturbing
in their time; old conventions were being violated. But
the Chinese tended to be tolerant of innovations and experiments,
not nearly so artistically reactionary as the Occidental
myths have them. The practice of shading, although it seems
never to have progressed much beyond a simple stage, was
carried on into the T'ang dynasty, and appears occasionally
even later.
Another innovation of Chang Seng-yu, probably also of western
derivation, was a more fleshy figure type. A ninth century
writer characterizes the great early figure painters by
saying that Ku K'ai-chih captured the souls of his subjects,
Lu T'an-wei (a fifth century master) their bones, and Chang
Seng-yu their flesh. A well-known handscroll attributed
to Chang, the Five Planets and Twenty-eight Constellations,
exhibits both the technique of shading and an increased
corporeality in the figures. It it quite possibly based
on designs of Chang Seng-yu, although the copy may be as
late as the eleventh or twelfth century. It is made up,
like the Admonitions scroll attributed to Ku K'ai-chih,
of a series of pictures, separated by passages of text-in
this case, descriptions of the deities and instructions
on how they should be worshipped. The figures are set against
blank areas of silk, again as in the Admonitions. But the
two pictures, even as copies, reveal a change in attitude;
in the Planets scroll, a new sobriety has supplanted the
playfulness of Ku K'ai-chih. The lineament is tamer; the
naivete of the earliest styles has already been lost.
The Chen-hsing, the planet Saturn, is portrayed as an emaciated
old man seated cross-legged on the back of an ox. The dark
tone of the man's skin, along with his large nose, bulbous
forehead and general hirsuteness, are common Chinese conventions
for representing holy men of India and other western lands,
and are often encountered in the Arhat pictures of later
centuries. One suspects the ethnocentric Chinese of feeling
that people of such outlandish appearance had no choice
but to turn to a life of the spirit, being so obviously
unfitted for urbane socity. The accentuation of muscle and
bone structure beneath the skin seems primitive if compared
to the products of a Renaissance European artist's semi-scientific
occupation with anatomy, but was no doubt a triumph of realism
in its day.
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