style="font-size:15px;"> The Western art lover looks at a Western work of art and asks certain questions: What style is it? What is its historical date? Who is it by? What does it mean? How good is it? But when he looks at a work of Oriental art, he does not dare to ask such questions. Confronted with a Chinese painting, he has the depressing feeling that he can neither judge whether the painting is good or bad, old or new, an original or a copy, nor tell whether it is Chinese or Japanese. There is hardly a book on the subject which will help him. To this day even our university seminars cannot solve these problems without a great deal of fumbling and innumerable qualifications. Admittedly, a circumspect solution is often impossible, and usually difficult. In fact, one ought to be rather suspicious of any Western expert who, when examining an early Chinese painting, will pass unhesitating judgment on its origin or even on its genuineness.
In spite of this situation there are many ways of helping the educated Westerner to achieve closer understanding of Oriental art. We Westerners are not necessarily confined to taking Japanese or Chinese painting at its face value, muttering vaguely how beautiful it is, quite unable to express adequately what we like about it, and without the least comparative notion of how a Japanese or a Chinese would react toward it. We are not compelled to remain so ignorant that we have to content ourselves with the mere impression a painting makes, without ever understanding its symbolic value or the charm of its technical perfection.
It is interesting to note that a Chinese work of art is more often mistaken for a Japanese one than the other way round. This can probably be explained by the fact that most judgments on Chinese art accessible to us in recent years have been Japanese. Hence, even for Chinese art, Japanese terms are used. Chinese scrolls are often referred to as kakemono, and people still occasionally call a Chinese landscape painting a sansui, which is nothing but a Japanese version of the Chinese word shan-shui. This is true also of many other technical terms. As a result, changes in the evaluation of Chinese art have occurred either merely through the use of Japanese versions of Chinese terms or through their normal change of meaning in a new environment.
In our consideration of Oriental art, especially painting, we find ourselves faced with two alternatives. We can abandon all attempts to gain deeper understanding as a seemingly unattainable goal or, starting from the very simplest level, we can try to work our way toward better knowledge in the hope that we shall finally uncover at least part of that art's secret. It is the second alternative that has been chosen for this book.
There is no reason why Chinese painting should not, for once, be approached in this modest way: from the very beginning. The course of its development and the pageant of its great names have often been set out and will be repeated here only to the extent necessary for dealing with the specific questions that shall concern us: What technical means does the Chinese painter use to produce his paintings? What does he mean by style? What are the basic conventions he follows in his painting? What meaning does he wish his paintings to have? And, finally, what purely technical or symbolic methods does he use to express that meaning?
All of these questions, of course, as well as their answers, are equally germane for Japan, or at least for that large part of Japanese painting that found its first and greatest inspiration in China. Even though the Japanese thereafter assimilated and subtly transmuted this borrowing, enlarging and transforming its techniques until the art became a true expression of native Japanese genius, even to this day the painting of the two countries, and their calligraphy as well, retains such fundamental affinities as to justify our considering them as similar aspects of a single artistic tradition, a single river of art only occasionally separated into two main streams by numerous small islands and a few large ones. Hence the reader should keep in mind that, with the exception of certain differences to be discussed hereafter, when we speak of Chinese painting we are likewise including its Japanese manifestations. Needless to say, however, our main emphasis shall be upon the Chinese origins of this river, since it was there that the tradition had its birth.
My attempts to approach Oriental painting from the new angle suggested by these questions were met by the invaluable co-operation of the Peking landscape painter P'u Ch'üan or, to use the studio name by which he is commonly known, P'u Sung-chuang. Starting in 1944, we spent countless hours in discussion. With unending patience and the subtlest insight he then translated the verbal results of our sessions into pictorial terms. Thus we assembled well over a hundred sketches illustrating in a modern and easily understandable manner the elements, techniques, and principles of traditional Chinese painting. The sketches were intended to assist those art lovers who had never had any contact with Chinese life and culture, who had never handled for any length of time the Chinese brush. It must be admitted that these sketches, although done with the purpose of illustrating traditional elements, also contained much of the painter's own unique personal style, the unmistakable trait which even the finest copyist can never entirely suppress, however hard he may try. For us, who intend to use P'u Sung-chuang's sketches as a means of explanation, this proves to be a fortunate accident, since it provides graphic illustration of one of the chief objectives of the present inquiry: the ability to recognize with utmost precision that very difference between the traditional and the contemporary styles, between convention and personal expression—a difference that often escapes even the critical Chinese eye.
More than half of these sketches by P'u Ch'üan are reproduced in the following pages. (They are indicated in the captions by the name P'u, whereas the artist's full name is used for his finished pictures.) These sketches supply a sort of backbone to the entire book, and their influence is traceable even in those chapters which seem to be linked to them only by the finest nerves. In this way the present work—which is intended more for the layman than for the expert—will perhaps convey some of the inner relationships between the backbone and the nerve-ends of a Chinese painting, thereby bringing the imaginative reader closer to the painting of the East.
PART
CHAPTER
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
