Orient pearls
FRANCIS WATSON
Chinese Masters of the Seventeenth Century Victoria Contag (Lund Humphries 6 gns) The Clouds and the Rain Edited by Michel Beurdeley (Hammond Hammond/Office du Uwe 16 gns) Indian Painting M. S. Randhawa and J. K. Galbraith (Hamish Hamilton 7 gns) India Roloff Beny and Aubrey Menen (Thames and Hudson 8 gns) Only in an exhibition of Chinese art would one be unsurprised. I suppose, to come upon a passport. The item sticks in my mind (though I have had to look up the date, which was 1406) out of that cornucopia offered by the Royal Academy thirty-three years ago, when Esme Percy and the inex- pensive properties of the imagination were packing the Little Theatre for Nancy Price's production of Lady Precious Stream. That you couldn't get an art exhibition, or a passsport, out of China today is a melan- choly but not exceptional turn in the great rhythm. And Professor Victoria Contag's prodigious researches among the seals of the Imperial collection and the Ming and Ch'ing landscapes in private hands were concluded in 1946.
If the name of her publisher is enough to
guarantee arewarding production, theiitle of her work may confuse expectations. For who are the 'Masters' (to use a western word) of the 'Century' (to use another) in which the Ming Empire at last collapsed under the Manchu invasion and a different kind of social order emerged, an order under which (despite or because of its rulers' deliberate enterprise of sinification) the aesthetic fire of three millennia seems to its awed spectators to have been extinguished?
Part of the answer, of course, derives from the ancestor-worshipping tradition which has proved (in the virtually endless problems of distinguishing between the 'authentic', the individual copy, the mass-product and the forgery) so ready an accomplice of western sale-room culture. Professor Contag's masters must consequently include, on the reverent insistence of their followers, the great Ni Tsan (1301-74), and even the tenth- century Wu Tao-tzu. To find this latter inspiration reappearing from the Tang like a disinterred burial-horse is a matter of personal pleasure, since my only reliable in- formation about Wu had been that he ended his life by disappearing through one of his own pictures. But the resurrection that has to be acclaimed is of the groups and individuals already known to have been active during those seventeenth century death throes. By the time we come to the eighty or ninety plates, all at the end and almost all of landscape, we know the artists not only as imitators or iconoclasts, atavists or revolu- tionaries, but as men solitary or convivial, drunk or sober, wandering among the natural scenes which it was the whole end of man to penetrate by subtle secrets that seemed to be vanishing.
What we can neither know nor guess from Professor Contag's fascinating selections from inscriptions to friends, poems and aesthetic treatises, is that 'Clouds and Rain' (Yung Yii) have since AD 300 symbolised in the Chinese mind a different penetration. So M Beurdeley assures us, on behalf of himself and his collaborators, in conveying us under that title from the Chinese love of art to the Chinese art of love. But by what delicate bamboo-bridge, and with what silken calligraphic passport? The question seems much less easy to answer for the Chinese Yung Yii than for the Japanese Shunga (Images of Spring) since the candidly erotic paintings and prints of Japan's fertile eigh- teenth century have been hitherto separated from the mainstream only by the reticence of collectors and curators. The sinologist (like a West End magistrate adjudicating pictorial impropriety by the laws against vagabonds) has at hand all those demarcations of the `cultured' artist from the artisan, the scholar from the professional, the landscapist from the figure-painter, the philosophic sage from the monastic image-maker: and at deeper roots, the Taoist from the Confucian.
Only this last is touched upon in The Couds and the Rain, which opens with mystical-anatomical charts and their ex- planation, proceeds rather untidily with ex- tracts from the Chin Ping Mei and other novels (quaintly retiring at intervals into Latin while magnificent plates offer copula- tions in colour) and ends with appropriate essays on foot-fetishism and the homosex- uality of actors. A wide selection of often en- chanting poems gives authentic flavour. But could no plates be found, from the Ming period and earlier, combining the love-poem directly with its subject? The bridge remains to be crossed, but this is in many ways a very welcome (if expensive) approach to it. A much more straightforward affair is the elucidation of 'the scene, themes and legends' with which the veteran Indian con- noisseur, Mohinder Singh Randhawa, in close association with the former us Am- bassador in Delhi, John Kenneth Galbraith. find- a pleasantly useful way of introducing Indian painting, from the Mughal Schools to the last lovely flowering in the Himalayan Kangra Valley. The thirty-four colour plates have been so carefully chosen and reproduced that even addicts can be pro- mised discoveries. And for the arm-chair discovery of India itself, the sumptuousl■ selective photography of Roloff Beny, offset by the quite differently discerning wit of Aubrey Menen in a full-length and corn-
• pulsively readable essay, is gift-wrapped to the last detail for the friend who has everything—or nothing.
Previous page
