ARTS Beyond the Grecian urn
FRANCIS WATSON
It is something of an accident that has brought to the Victoria and Albert Museum concurrent exhibitions of Chinese and of Japanese art provided by two lately deceased private collectors. The Mount Trust Collec- tion of Chinese Art is on a generous and extensive loan from the widow of Captain Bulkeley-Johnson (who died in 1968), and is to be made available by the v and A's Circulations Department 'to any suitable institution in the British Isles, the intention being that it should be kept on display for periods of six months or longer at a time.' The other exhibition, of 123 examples of Japanese painting and drawing from the Harare Collection, is an Arts Council enter- prise in which the collector himself, the late Ralph Harari, had taken the closest interest. But for a crowded exhibition-schedule and the closing of the Council's St James's Square gallery, he might have lived to see the fruition.
Each of these distinguished collections reminds us in its own way how recent a growth is a knowledgeable Western apprecia- tion of the arts of the Far East, how much has depended upon the passionate engage- ment of men with the means to support their connoisseurship, and how curious a part the supposedly oriental cult of perfection in the single perishable object has played in the breathtaking story of market-valuations. Even today the 'Ming vase' stands for the idea of a shatterable _ fortune, and the memoirs of James Henry Duveen dwell with a lively nostalgia on spectacular deals in K'ang Hsi and other late dynastic ware with a European history behind it. For many years the Kuomintang government used the personal column of the Times in the attempt to recover specimens surviving from the looting of the Summer Palace. and the late George Eumorfopoulos told me that he had made his celebrated collection, which in so many ways helped to set standards of taste, without ever going—or specially wanting to go— to China.
A six-sided late . Ming flower-pot, its designs of flowering lotus glazed in yellow, white and purple on a turquoise ground, was at one time owned by Eumorfopoulos and is now among the Mount Trust treasures. But the former collection, like the latter, made its mark by the choice eclecticism of its range over the extraordinary continuity of the Chinese achievement which has only been made visible (in cyclical or any other terms) by the archaeological discoveries of the present century. The 'eighteenth century Europeans who begin to be represented in porcelain in the last case of the Mount Trust exhibition may have been infected. one way or another, by chinoiserie. But they can have known little indeed of the contents of the cases preceding them in a chronology which we now take for granted. To quote from the catalogue compiled by Mr John Ayers. Deputy Keeper of the Museum's Ceramics Department, 'an overwhelming proportion of the known material dating doivn to the Sung dynasty—about the thirteenth century —has been excavated within living memory.'
To anyone who has indeed been over- whelmed by the reflection that a Grecian urn might not, after all, tell us all we know on earth or all we need to know, the Mount Trust exhibition offers a renewal of the sensibilities and, at the same time, a clarifica- tion of that daunting Chinese sequence in which a separate and static perfection seems achievable at each turn of technological and cultural change. Admirably arranged and catalogued, it begins by isolating a pre-
historic (described as Neolithic) earthenware bowl, the inside painted in a fluidly abstract manner, and follows—almost with shock- effect—with the technical mastery of bronze in a ritual food-vessel of the earliest identi- fied dynasty, the Shang (eleventh century BD or earlier). Only the inscription translated from a bronze mirror of the second or third century AD hints at long interregna of waste and horror: 'All barbarians have submitted, many pay tribute to our kingdom: our people live at peace: the Hu-lo [Huns] exterminated, the world is recovering ...'
The first unified empire of the Han has come and gone, burying its tomb-pottery and its bronzes. It is a couple of steps and five centuries or so to the confident splendour of the T'ang, as significant in a white bowl of the earliest porcelain as in the famous horses and camels (you can now, by the way, buy a quite presentable pseudo-T'ang horse in a London store, while the Mount Trust Case Four includes an aberrant T'ang ewer of a strongly Cairene pattern).
It is a tribute to the collector, as well as to the tradition, that the formal purity and tonal subtlety of the great Sung age of pottery, offset by the vividly splashed glazing of a late example of Chun ware and a masterly painted vase of the same period, do not spoil the palate for the cases in which the fully decorated and technically advanced blue-and-white or polychromed wares of the succeeding dynasties are seen at the high standards which established the exportable notion of China and of china. And one leaves this comparatively small exhibition with the startled feeling of having traversed thirty centuries of art through the sole medium of plastic materials, moulded and fired and cast for domestic or ritual purposes of an extraordinary refinement. Everything has, besides the visual, an unsatisfied tactile appeal. and there is much that can be called sculptural. But the strictly glyptic is confined to a single small T'ang carving in white micaceous marble. Drawing, painting and engraving have been surveyed only as absorbed by a major craft. Nor have we considered anything in its monumental aspect.
The Japanese paintings and drawings of the Harari Collection, beginning in date from roughly the period where the Mount Trust leaves off. are thus lent, for a decep- tive moment. a complementary sianificance. But the collector's approach, towards the end of his life. to the 'Floating World' of the Ukiyo-e and other seventeenth-nineteenth century schools was not made from Chinese head-waters but by way of a stylistic addic- tion to Islamic metalwork and a supplement- ary acquisition of drawings by Beardsley, Gavarni, Keene. Lautrec. Rouault and John. A group of Hokusai's drawings, twenty of which will be met with delight in this exhibi- tion, was the first step into a field of con- siderable variety, both in schools and in independent practitioners. Apart from the intrinsic discoveries to be made, there is a peculiar interest in, as it were, going behind the wood-block prints which made the first and enduring impact. And it is an expert on the Japanese print and a professional en- graver, Mr J. Hillier, who has annotated the exhibition in the course of preparing for forthcoming publication (by Lund Humphries) the full catalogue raisonne of this important collection.
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