Watching the waterfall
John Spurling
Fu Baoshi and his contemporaries Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, until 31
October rihinese calligraphy is an art form as well as a written language. Just as Chinese landscape painting is a language as well as an art form, Practised since the 12th century, mainly by poets, scholars and retired or exiled civil servants, it is primarily concerned neither with representation nor with manual skill, but, like poetry, with the communication of emotions, thoughts, philosophy or religious feelings. One might, of course, say almost the same of the best landscape painters in the European tradition, except that in their case the 'language' is less direct, partly concealed by the greater emphasis on representation and the deployment of many painterly skills in its service: perspective, chiaroscuro, colour, glazes, impasto, etc.
Chinese landscape artists paint in ink on paper or silk, using colour very sparingly, if at all, and their motifs are almost exclusively mountains and rivers, partly or wholly invented in the studio. These symbolise their world — their Han Chinese world and its continuous history from ancient times — in a way that no European landscape motif can. When the Jurchens conquered the northern half of China in the 12th century, the slogan of nationalist rebels was 'Give us back our rivers and mountains!', and the same slogan surfaced again when the Chinese rose up against their Mongol rulers in the 14th century.
Like a language, too, Chinese landscape painting is constantly referring to the masters of the past, deliberately adopting a quirk of style or a manner of approach so as both to pay homage and to deepen the meaning. Thus Fu Baoshi changed his name — Baoshi means 'embracing Shi' — to mark his admiration for and indebtedness to the great 17th-century painter Shi Tao, who ironically enough had made a particular point of breaking with the methods and mannerisms of past masters. 'This method is no method; herein lies my method,' he wrote on one of his paintings. Shi Tao lived through the conquest of China by the Manchurians and Fu Baoshi through the Japanese invasion of 1937, though he himself had only recently returned from studying at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Tokyo.
Born in 1904 — hence this centenary exhibition at the Ashmolean — Fu died in 1965, just before Chairman Mao's infamous Cultural Revolution, which would surely have crushed Fu, a traditionalist and a professor at Nanjing's Central University, as it did so many other scholars. As it was, his grave was vandalised by Red Guards. Between 1961 and 1963, shortly before his death, Fu painted many versions of 'watching the waterfall', which, although a traditional subject, must have had a special and ominous meaning for him at that time. Four of these wonderful paintings are in the exhibition. The influence of Shi Tao is still evident in Fu's discreet use of colour washes — pale brown and blue — hut his whorls and blobs of thick black ink, depicting rocks and the foliage of pine trees, are scratchier and wilder, and his mountains and waterfalls altogether more hair-raising. The trali tionat gentlemen-watchers, placed at vantage-points in the foreground, are in one painting lifted on to a high bluff between two mighty waterfalls (Fu's seal on this painting reads 'often after intoxication'), and in another the watchers are either or, in keeping with the times, gentlemen dressed as peasants.
Sonic earlier paintings, done in the 1940s. when Fu was a refugee from the Japanese in Chongqing in the far west of China, are equally wild and gloomy but less dangerous-looking to the watchers. He was equally capable, however, of painting, against the soft green of the Southern Song school (12th-13th century), a quiet summer scene of figures strolling beside a lake, three gentlemen playing 'qi chess' under a group of pine trees — this in 1943 during the Sino-Japanese war — or, in 1948, after the war was over and just before the communists took power, a humorous portrait of The Scholar Artist in his Studio', not at all amused by the yokel and his boy staring rudely at him through his window. The only hint of modern technology is the small splodge of black smoke from a river steamer far below in the beautiful high-viewpoint 'River Landscape' of 1964, the year before his death. A huge rock-face rises up on the left in a rhyming funnel of spreading black ink.
The exhibition also contains work by Fu's near contemporaries, both older and younger, hut none quite in his class. Fu Baoshi was surely the greatest master of his ancient tradition in modern times and we must hope he was not also the last.
Previous page
