Strong lines from the Chinese ARTS
MICHAEL SULLIVAN
Now that we are almost completely cut off from China by a wall of mutual misunderstanding, we must seize every chance to enjoy her artistic heritage, and our museums should strive to make it as accessible and comprehensive as pos- sible. Mr and Mrs Walter Sedgwick, a selection of whose treasures acquired before 1950 are now on view in the Oriental Gallery of the British Museum, belonged to that fortunate generation of collectors between the wars who took advantage of the indifference of the Chinese government to the wholesale export of works of art. Now that has stopped, and the days of the great collectors are over. It was a sensible idea to show at the British Museum not only the pieces that will remain there but others that Mrs Sedgwick bequeathed, through the National Art Collections Fund to the Fitz- william, the Victoria and Albert, and the City Art Gallery, Bristol.
What does such a collection mean to the average gallery-goer, who is never quite sure whether T'ang comes before or after Sung, and is bewildered by the unfamiliar names? It needs no special knowledge to sense the vitality and wholeness of the Chinese aesthetic tradition and to feel its pervasive linear rhythm, to which we can respond whether we understand its content or not. In its purest form this rhythm is manifest in painting and calligraphy, but no British collector has had the nerve to venture far into this field, to our great loss. It is felt, too, in the swinging curves of the t'ao-t'ieh mask on a sacrificial bronze; in Tang and Sung ceramics it is transmitted directly from the potter's hands into the clay; in later porcelain it lives—for the shape itself is neutral—In the painted decora- tion. It even survives in that most intractable material, jade, notably here in a garment hook carved with fighting beasts and two exquisite little figures from a third century tomb. Indeed, Ise is everywhere, and gives unity and meaning to a collection that ranges over 3,000 years and many different media.
The selection is judicious. All the main periods of the bronze art except the earliest are represented. There are five late Shang pieces and several of Early and Middle Chou. There is a magnificent covered tripod of the sixth cen- tury tic, and an interesting group of early mir- rors. Sculpture, as an art form in its own right, developed surprisingly late in China, and ex- amples of Shang stone carving in western col- lections are very rare. In the Sedgwick limestone buffalo from Anyang, form is reduced to essen- tials. It lacks the surface tension of Egyptian sculpture, but there are hints, even here, of the powerful line that animates the Shang bronzes.
Fifteen hundred years later this rhythmic line swept over the surface of sculpture in clay and bronze. The élan of the modeller of tomb figurines is expressed directly in the superb grey pottery dragon of the sixth century, indirectly in the Buddhist bronzes of which the standing Kuanyin of the same period is an outstanding example. It was made just after the Northern Wei climax, when the Buddha figure had be- come flatter and even more ethereally linear than the Romanesque sculpture with which it is so often compared. The extent to which this
insubstantiality is the expression of purely spiri- tual feeling, which is often assumed, is debat- able. The same elegant attenuation can be seen in the Admonitions scroll of Ku K'ai-chih, a famous secular painting in the permanent col- lection nearby, which shows that the style had been created by the scroll painters a century and more earlier. The Sedgwick Kuanyin is especially interesting because it shows the first hints of a stylistic revolution that was soon to lead to the full-bodied splendour of the T'ang.
English collectors have, for some mysterious reason, always preferred ceramics to any other branch of Chinese art, and the Sedgwicks were no exception. Apart from the rare kuan and still rarer Ju, all the typical Tang and Sung wares are represented here, although this section begins much earlier with an earthenware bowl of the fourth century decorated with glass paste, a curious illustration of the demand for rich effects created by the emergence of a new leisured class in the Warring States period. The self-confidence of T'ang culture, which ab- sorbed all that came along into its richly cos- mopolitan arts and crafts, is shown in a beauti- ful white porcelain rhyton decorated with foreign musicians and roundels with masks in relief that come straight out of the Sasanian repertoire. By comparison, Sung taste was private and indrawn. It was probably the very understatement of the Sung wares that appealed most to the English collectors, and their famili- arity makes them no less satisfying.
The contrast in taste between the Sung and the Ming is so startling that one cannot display their wares side by side, and most of the blue and white, for which the Sedgwicks were well known, is very properly on the opposite wall of the Gallery. A charming, hardly noticeable little bowl, crudely decorated with chrysanthemums in underglaze blue and labelled fourteenth cen- `The Red Guard will have a tough time taking this away from us!' tury, is probably even earlier. Recent excati- tions in the Philippines have turned up quanti- ties of this type of porcelain, for which Manila millionaires are now paying outrageous prices. It was probably made not at the great factorY in Kiangsi but in small provincial kilns in Fukien in the thirteenth century. At the moment a quite pointless debate is going on as to whether any of it is actually Sung, which amounts to de- ciding whether blue and white was first made in 1279 or 1280.
There are fine examples of the later porce- lain, some of which show how the weight of tradition was piling up on the craft: an exact replica, for example, of a Ch'eng-hua chicken cup, beloved of collectors, made in the Yung- cheng period, and an unusual sixteenth century enamelled bowl with a fifteenth century mark. Quaintest of all is a little brown I-hsing teapot made in the shape of an ancient brick and re- producing in relief an inscription of AD 370, which delightfully illustrates the whimsical anti- quarianism of Chinese scholarly taste.
Although the inscriptions on the pieces are translated, the labels are very brief, and there is no catalogue. This is a pity, Not only do people like to have something to carry away with them, but even the vaguest knowledge of Chinese art simply cannot be assumed in our gallery-going public, and every effort should be made to close the gap.
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