ART
East and West
THE interactions of eastern and western art have been of many different types. In the eighteenth century the taste for the Chinese was a mere whim of the man of culture, satiated with the perfection of Occidental art, and ready for any form of novelty as a stimulant to a jaded palate. In the later part of the nineteenth century Oriental influence comes in again in a more serious form. The Impressionists found that Japanese prints put them on the track of the new method of designing for which they were searching. • Their interest in passing effects of light and in the snap-shot view of nature was not compatible with the space-construction traditional in European painting. They - needed something less logical and less intellectually calculated ; and this was exactly what they found in Japanese prints.
Degas was one of those most profoundly affected by the Oriental influence, and the results of it on his painting can be well seen in many of the canvases at the two exhibitions now devoted to him, one at the Adams Gallery, the other at Rosenberg's. The whimsical and purely non-spatial com- position of the Chevaux de Course at Rosenberg's or of Le Sanglier, one of the rare landscapes at the Adams Gallery, are unthinkable if we assume a purely European development in the arts. The Portrait of Madame Jeantaud (Rosenberg's) is as free from the weightiness of flesh as any. Chinese figure. Even in his later years when he had in large measure given up his Impressionist principles, Degas retained many Oriental characteristics.
The Impressionists borrowed from the East because the East could supply them with an idiom which fitted what they wanted to say. But it must be remembered that what they wanted to say was something aesthetic. Japanese prints attracted them not because they expressed ideas or a view of life congenial to them, but because they gave them a technical weapon to make a new aesthetic statement. In the last few years there has been apparently a reversal of the whole relation- ship between East and West, in that Chinese artists have begun to borrow the methods of European art. This is one of the most striking features of the exhibition of contemporary Chinese art recently held at 76 Charlotte. S-treet. The works shown consist of drawings and woodcuts made by artists who all support the revolutionary movements in China. Most of them are not produCed as separate works of art, but are illustrations for books cr pamphlets, or posters. They deal with the immediate problems of the day, above all with Japanese aggression, or with smaller incidents of every- day Chinese life. They are moreover a purely popular art, meant for consumption by the same kind of people as the men who produced them. We are told in the preface to the admir- able booklet of reproductions issued by Lawrence and Wishart in connexion with the exhibition that in the earlier years of the revolutionary movement the artists who worked for it tried their hand at the various forms of Expressionism current in Europe. But they have now got beyond that stage, and have evolVed a form of realism which, while it includes certain elements of Oriental art, is largely Western in style. - But there is no sense of effort in the torrowing of European idioms. For these artists have been moved to take elements from Western art not as a joke, not yet because they could use them to make some refinement on a mode of aesthetic otpression, but quite simply because the revolutionary ideas which they are trying to express are the same as those which the Russians have tried to express in their art and it is therefore almost inevitable that they should seek the sort of artistic language used in Soviet art.
This is in fact what has happened. Their woodcuts are close to Russian models, and therefore ultimately based on an adaptation of a French style, but made far firmer and less mannered than it was in the hands of its inventors.
Much grander are the drawings. Some are like stills from the best Russian films (Wu Ko's Refugees); others com-
bine a simple observation of fact with something of the
traditional Chinese skill in calligraphy ; most impressive of all are certain heads by Jack Chen ,who seems to have arrived
by his own route at the position of artists like Rivera and Orozco, and to be capable not only of realisni but of heroic realism, a form of art to which revolutionary movements in
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