Page 70 - Studio International - October 1967

the temperament of the artist he deals with and see
The art him out in the humble restaurant. it as the unique endowment, transcending parti-
This bond established, Prof. Ecke took me
through the collections of Oriental art as though cular time or place.
of the brush I were not an ignorant Westerner and as though He knows something that many artists believe
he had not been seeing his treasures every day for but few scholars concede : that, as his first quota-
years. With spontaneous expressions of enthusiasm tion in the book, from George Braque, states, 'the
and aesthetic delight, Prof. Ecke drew me into his only valid thing in art is that which cannot be
charmed circle, making each work an intelligible explained'.
and simple experience. Prof. Ecke is not explaining but rather sharing his
This quality of cosmopolitan connoisseurship, of informed passion with the reader. He has a
knowing delight, I now find in Prof. Ecke's book, distinct point of view, of course, and one which
Chinese Painting in Hawaii, published by the may well bring the wrath of colleagues upon him.
Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts. * Technically But artists will sympathize with him.
Review article by speaking, I suppose I would have to call the three- His point of view is shaped by his general culture,
Dore Ashton volume, boxed opus a kind of catalogue raisonné of and not only by his knowledge as a specialist. It is
Academy holdings and a few privately-owned fed by his reading in modern art and literature of
works, but this is like no catalogue I have ever the Western world, as well as by his readings of old
read. Prof. Ecke has written a book in his own Chinese texts. He can, within the first fifty pages of
The people who educated me took scant notice of spontaneous voice, a book crammed with literary the more than 400 of the first volume, quote
the Orient. I have suffered a vague sense of in- allusions, anecdotes, casually conveyed historical Anton Webern, Coleridge, Mathieu, Kierkegaard,
adequacy all my adult life when confronted with information, insights and courageous pronounce- Proust, Julien Alvard, Rimbaud and Baudelaire,
Oriental art. Since last year, however, when I had ments. It is a thoroughly unconventional per- and make his allusions seem natural.
the good fortune to lecture in Hawaii, I have been formance. 3ecause of his general approach, it is possible for
feeling better about it. There, in the pavilions of His purpose, as he says in his subtitle, is to offer Prof. Ecke to summarize complicated arguments
the Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts (a pleasing 'Mid-twentieth century Observations on the and make his position clear without ever losing
and unlikely mixture of Spanish-Pacific and Chinese Art of the Brush'. He does not tax his his conversational simplicity. Before the reader
Oriental styles), I encountered Prof. Gustav Ecke reader with tedious recitals of dynasties—although even enters his text he is confronted with a series
who undertook to purge me of my diffidence. the information is there—nor does he insist on of plates with brief commentary in a section forth-
As a matter of fact, I really encountered Prof. chronological apprehension. On the contrary, he rightly called Imponderabilia'. There, to convey
Ecke while searching for lunch in anything but the approaches Chinese painting as though sensibility the articulation of functional space, he will find
numerous American drugstores. I walked into a alone can go a long way in illuminating its mean- Webern's saying, 'Die Pausen klingen gut'. Or, a
tropical blue restaurant and saw a wiry, tanned ing. Unlike many scholars, Prof. Ecke can imagine few pages later, to illuminate the transformation of
Westerner reading the airmail edition of an a bamboo maze in terms of rhythmic disorder, he
English weekly and eating tempura. We stared will read Coleridge's allusion to 'the perfect form
briefly at each other and later, when I was intro- *Chinese painting in Hawaii, by Professor Gustav of harmonized chaos'. And still further, a com-
duced to Prof. Ecke at the museum, we smiled in Ecke, 3 vols, published by the Honolulu Academy parison between the white of the page that
secret complicity. He was pleased that I had found of Fine Arts, Hawaii. inspired Mallarmé and the weathered face of a

Tile-impressed bovine motif, Han dynasty, 2nd century A.D., slightly larger than actual size