BOOKS Dragon and Phoenix
By BASIL GRAY
* FOUNDATIONS OF CHINESE ART FROM N E011THIC
,,‘,97city To MODERN ARCHITECTURE. 16 vvilletts. (Thames and Hudson, 6s.) By William In HAT there is still an unsatisfied appetite for I 1 well-illustrated books on Chinese art is natural if one considers for a moment the size and potential power of China, to say nothing of her long artistic tradition. Indeed, what was remarkable and unfortunate was the lack of opportunity for the general public not able to frequent one or other of the few great western Museums to gain an idea of the quality and range of her artistic achievement. When Mr. Willetts Published his two-volume Pelican in 1958, it met With a deserved welcome from a very hungry Public. This was obviously due to the combination of seriousness of aim with freshness of treat- ment which he brought to his task, rather than to the limited and small-scale illustrations to which he was necessarily restricted. It is no more than his dessert that he should now have the opportunity of providing pictorial documentation adequate to his text.*
He has wisely retained the general framework of his book and, in large part, the actual words of this earlier essay, while pruning it of what he
'shimself calls the 'mediaeval disputation' of the first version. It has thereby gained considerably In readability, and now almost always avoids the kind of special' pleading betrayed by the use of such words as 'admittedly.' Many sections of the book could now not be bettered; such as the full account of Tang pottery, which is the best available in English. The history of the Y'tieh kilns, which produced the earliest of the famous family of celaClon glazes, has been entirely re- written with admirable clarity and good judg- ment. If one still feels slightly exasperated at the choice of the T'ang dynasty as the classic age of Chinese ceramics, Mr. Willetts has now entered a powerful plea in, defence of this view; while it is hard to think of any art which repre- sents more fully the adaptation of foreign shapes and decoration to native use and materials, a Process so characteristic of the period. For the method followed is to present each of the ages of China as expressed in a single One of the arts, and thus to cover all of them ism turn. We have jade for the neolithic; lacquer and silk under the Han dynasty; Buddhist sculp- ture from the third to the seventh century; Pottery from 700 to 960; painting and calligraphy under Sung and Yuan and architecture there- after • . . the most unexpected and yet con- vincing choice. Such a system permits of a reasonably full treatment of each topic, thus giving a picture in much greater depth than COuld have been attempted in a complete survey 01 Chinese art. The foundations of all the arts are discussed. Jade may be entitled to priority in d, ate: but the case is hardly argued. Instead, the tr.aditional identification of the uses of the Ifferent shapes given in the late and corrupt text of the Chou-li is rejected in favour of a typological analysis that leaves the animal jade ('Ivifts out of account. although they certainly Ro 15tdck into the Shang period. In this section 1,here,"is too little "eference to recent archaeologi- cal 'discoveries, whereas in the account of the Bronzes, while the traditional nomenclature of the ritual vessels is followed, the findings of the past decade of excavation in China have been used to revise entirely the account of the tech- niques used in the casting of these astonishing products of the second millennium ac. The dating, however, remains schematic and relative, according to the system of 'three phases' con- structed by Professors Karlgren and Yetts. It is illustrated by a well-chosen and sympathetically photographed gallery of these masterpieces of design and casting.
Silk and lacquer were two of the most im- portant of China's early industrial products, and both were luxury exports already near the beginning of our era. Mr. Willetts uses their decoration to give a survey of the principal motifs in the Chinese repertory, mythical beasts such as the dragon, phoenix, ch'i-lin, the mysterious animal mask of the t'ao-t'ieh (which he not very convincingly derives from the gorgon), the tree of life and the Parthian shot, borrowed from the Persian tradition.
The treatment of sculpture, virtually all Buddhist, well brings out the limitations and virtues of the Chinese school, dependent on the Indian tradition of religious carving, conceived to be seen from the front, and at its best in high relief. The school excels in decorative design of interlaced dragons or trees, in the rich linear relief on haloes, the repetition of conventionalised drapery folds and of heavy jewellery, rather than in plastic quality or spiritual expression. The great rock-cut shrines are impressive by their scale and profusion rather than by the quality of their carving. Mr. Willetts professes to find a loss of integrity in sculpture after the year 700, and therefore turns his attention to pottery; yet the best free-standing figures, whether in bronze, stone or wood, might be held to fall after that date.
The reader is,-however, rewarded by a most illuminating account of the kiln processes, lead- ing on to an account of the coloured glazes in use under the T'ang dynasty, when for the first time colour became an important part of Chinese ceramic design. Mr. Willetts compares it to warm sunshine•and enthusiastically reviews the different shapes that it clothed. He rightly traces a number of these shapes to western models from Persia and the Mediterranean; but it would be interest- ing to know how he can be sure that the craft of the silversmith in China was virtually a creation of refugee Sassanian craftsmen. Does this rest simply on the existence at Ch'ang-an, the T'ang capital, of a colony of Manichees? But these were of Turkish central Asian origin rather than immediately Persian, and the Sas- sanian silverware could readily have travelled to China independently of its makers. It evidently appealed to Chinese taste for the exotic, just as did also the Sassanian woven silk designs. Several Roman glasses are included among the excellent line-drawings which are a feature of the book, and their influence on Chinese ceramic form and decoration alleged. It might have been added that there is clear evidence of the impor- tation of such glasses into China under the T'ang, and of the high value attached to them there.
They served, for instance, as Buddhist reliquaries in the same way that Eastern silks and, later, Iledwig' glasses did in Christian churches.
Mr. Willetts can have had little doubt in choosing painting as the representative art of Sung, and no student of the history of this art would be surprised at his joining the Yuan with it, for this has long been the age to which Chinese painters have looked back for emula- tion. Yet what is give us is as near an attack upon the basic ideas behind the 'art of painting at both a social and a philosophical level. This was not so obvious in the earlier version of the book, because it was prefixed by an account of the traditional scheme of the history of painting as it was fixed in the late Ming period by Tung Ch'i-ch'ang. Without this—and one cannot really regret being spared the reading of yet another rehearsal of the division into the 'Northern' and 'Southern' schools of painting—the brutality of the attack is unconcealed. The narrow basis of Chinese society and the escapism of the 'clerks' cannot, of course, be denied, but in an account of the arts it is perhaps relevant to look at the actual products of the painters, rather than to start from the judgment that `painting reflected an exquisite parochialism, one for ever typified by the nice, but little more than decorative, per- sonality of the emperor Hui-tsung.'
The explanation is to be found in the very limited range of reference which the author has allowed himself. His illustrations are nearly all taken from the material available thirty years ago at the time of the great Burlington House exhibition of Chinese art, in which it is notorious that painting was the art far the worst repre- sented. The position has so greatly improved during the interval that the subjects chosen for illustration of this chapter simply will not now do. One has only to compare them with the plates in Mr. Cahill's volume on Chinese painting to realise how inhibiting it has been for Mr. Willetts to be so restricted. Reading his text, one longs for a reference to surviving paintings which can be accepted. But it should be said that the production of the volume is excellent, the size of the illustrations generous, and some of the colour reproduction outstanding; for instance, the plates showing some of the Han. woven silks from Lou-lan in Sinkiang, now preserved in the National Museum of India. The text may still be described as provocative and stimulating.
Very different in almost every respect is Pro- fessor FitzGerald's latest book, to which he has rather fancifully given the title Barbarian Beds.t After pointing out that this term refers only to the folding chair and not to that with a rigid frame, and that it was a camp stool for use in the garden and never in the house, he gives chapter and verse for believing that its intro- duction to China was a revolutionary event in the later second century AD and that it really came, as its name suggests, from the far west —in fact, the Roman empire. With equal wit and assurance, he proves that the wood-frame chair with back was not borrowed from the west, but evolved in China itself for the sake of the extra comfort of leaning hack. Anyone who has sat in a Chinese chair of traditional type will not recommend it for comfort, however! Still, for the westerner it is distinctly preferable to the Japanese Mode of sitting on the floor and without support of any kind. It is a most elegant piece of writing and produced in an elegant style which is rare today, with ample margins, clear type and collotype plates.
t BARBARIAN Bros. THE ORIGIN OF THE CHAIR IN CHINA. By C. P. FitzGerald: (CreSSet Press, 84s.)
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