Page 12 - Studio International - October1973

contact with the painting that the result is a For the synthesis of space and time which early abstractions of Kandinsky, who was at
mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy Naum Gabo proclaimed in his Manifesto of least partly Asiatic and who, thanks to his
give and take, and the painting comes out well.' 192o, and which the exponents of kinetic art Russian temperament, felt, as Herbert Read
This might be any Chinese or Japanese later realized in practice, there is in the Chinese happily put it, 'at ease in an atmosphere of
calligrapher or Zen painter speaking. Here again landscape hand-scroll a precedent already chaos and intimations of immortality.'
is Wen T'ung, by no means a special devotee of two thousand years old. The hand-scroll, Kandinsky may have been stimulated by
Zen, discussing his own bamboo painting : 'At which is unrolled a little at a time, presents, Madame Blavatsky's theosophy, but mysticism
the beginning, I saw the bamboo and delighted by means of a continually shifting does not lead inevitably towards abstraction in
in it; now I delight in it and lose consciousness of perspective, a journey in space which, like art. On the contrary, it usually inspires a feeble
myself. Suddenly I forget that the brush is in music, can only be experienced in time. And and-insipid symbolic art. Kandinsky's discovery
my hand, the paper in front of me; all at once just as the panoramic scroll is a world in of abstraction, apart from the famous encounter
I am exhilarated, and the tall bamboo appears, miniature, so may the time taken to view it with the painting turned on its side in his studio,
thick and luxuriant.' represent, in miniature, the time which such a owes far more to Wilhelm Worringer's very
Perhaps even closer to Pollock is the journey would take in a real landscape. influential thesis of 1908, Abstraktion und
seventeenth-century individualist Shih-t'ao, Chinese painting has never lost the sense of Einfuhlung (`Abstraction and Empathy'), in
who in his essay on painting, Hua yü lu, space, which is as old as pictorial art itself, and which for the first time the `will to abstraction'
enunciated the concept of the i hua (literally, has no need of a receding ground line, solid is defined as a recurrent impulse in the history of
`one line'), whereby the artist's exhilaration objects, or a landscape to suggest it. In art, than it does to the influence of Oriental art.
carries him through the painting on an unbroken Neolithic art, in Han wall painting, sometimes Yet it is difficult to convince ourselves that
surge of creative power. Shih-t'ao devotes a in European mediaeval art, space is just 'there', Oriental influences were not at work, here and
short chapter to the free movement of the hand whether there are objects in it or not. We are there, in the first decades of the present century.
holding the brush, fundamental to both painting often told by Western writers that the Oriental In one or two cases they certainly were. Mark
and calligraphy, and ends, `If the painter's painter 'invites us to fill up the blank spaces in Tobey's moment of truth came one autumn
wrist is animated by the spirit, it produces our imagination.' But there are no blank spaces evening in 1935 at Dartington Hall, in the year
miracles, and mountains and rivers reveal their in a Chinese painting. 'Emptiness' is a purely following his fruitful visit to the Far East, and
soul.' His section on yin-yün, a phrase that in metaphysical concept. though his first exercise in 'white writing' looked
the Book of Changes refers to the fundamental A Chinese painting is first and foremost a to him like Broadway, it was unconsciously
unity of Heaven and Earth, concerns precisely picture of space; it defines space, as Gabo put it, inspired by this experience of studying
that ecstatic losing of oneself in the creative act by space, not by objects. A miraculous example calligraphy in Japan. Henri Michaux is another
that Jackson Pollock so vividly described. of this is a sketch of a little fish alone in the example of direct influence in the 193os, Morris
We may carry the parallel still further. As long middle of an album leaf, by the seventeenth- Graves in the 194os and 195os, Sam Francis in
ago as the T'ang Dynasty (AD 618-906) there century eccentric Pa-ta Shan-jen. Only the fish the 196os; but these instances are not of critical
were artists in South China (in the Nanking- is painted; only the fish tells us that the 'blank' importance for the development of modern art,
Hangchow region) who practised techniques as part of the paper is water and not air. The for, as Herbert Read wrote in 1959, 'Klee and
advanced as those of any modern action unpainted water fills the picture space, indeed Kandinsky, in the course of their
painter. 'Ink Wang', according to contemporary goes far beyond it. It will still be there when, experimentation, had anticipated all the
accounts - none of his work, alas, survives - with a flick of its tail, the little fish has darted possibilities that lay ahead: every type of
would get drunk, then spatter and splash ink out of sight. Abstract Expressionism that was to be
on to silk (presumably laid out on the floor), We could go on matching the theories and developed between 1914 and the present day has
then, laughing and singing, stamp on it and methods of revolutionary twentieth-century somewhere its prototype in the immense oeuvre
smear it with his hands as well as with the Western artists against those of the traditional of these two masters'.
brush. He also dipped his hair into the ink and Orient, but there is no need to labour the point An important exhibition of Far Eastern art
slopped it on to the silk. A certain Mr Ku from that what has happened in modern Western art was held in Munich in 1909. Kandinsky wrote
Kiangsu would cover the floor with silk, then has brought it suddenly, in certain fundamental an appreciative account of it, which appeared in
run round and round, emptying ink all over the aspects, into total accord with that of the Far the same year, for the Moscow art magazine
floor and sprinkling colours over it. Not content East. It is as though the inhabitants of one Apollon. Yet there is nothing in his own
with that, he would then have someone sit on a country, with immense imaginative effort, had theoretical writings to suggest that he was ever
sheet and drag it round, creating swirls of ink succeeded in creating what they thought was a influenced by the Japanese paintings in that
and colour. This must have been a public new language, only to discover that it was the exhibition, which included works by the
performance, like Georges Mathieu's spectacular native tongue of another land on the other side sixteenth-century landscapist Sesson and several
antics before an audience. The work of these of the world. Zen masters. If he was affected at all he seems
men has all disappeared, but something of its There are differences, of course. Some not to have been aware of it himself.
extraordinary quality survives in a scroll movements in modern Western art, such as Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy refers
attributed to an obscure thirteenth-century Zen Surrealism, Dada and Pop Art, have no but once to Japanese art. His comment is a
master named (Ying ?) Yü-chien. The recognizable counterparts outside the West, perceptive one. 'Japonisme in Europe', he writes,
essential difference between the late T'ang only imitations of them. Few Western avant- `constitutes one of the most important steps in
eccentrics and the modern action painters is garde painters have shared Matisse's cosy and the history of the gradual rehabilitation of art
that, while the latter left their gestures and very Chinese ideal of 'an art of balance, of as pure forms . . . and on the other hand it has
splashes as complete statements, their Chinese purity and serenity devoid of troubling or saved us from the immediate danger of seeing
predecessors of a thousand years ago, by a few depressing subject-matter, an art which might the possibilities of pure form only within the
deft touches of the brush here and there, be for every mental worker, be he businessman classical canon'. This is excellent as far as it
proceeded to turn theirs into landscapes. But or writer, like an appeasing influence, like a goes, but it represents rather a verdict upon the
action painting and Zen art belong to no mental soother'. Western Expressionism, rooted completed Japanese phase than the beginning
period. They are moments in time and space in the restless, anti-classical psyche of northern of a new understanding of Oriental art. Indeed
that are not linked in any kind of historical Europe, is too full of conflict and anxiety to it would be very surprising if Worringer or any
continuity; they simply occur, and occur again, achieve, except rarely, the inner serenity of even of the pioneers of the modern movement -
in an eternal present. the wildest Zen art. Notable exceptions are the Kandinsky, Matisse, Klee and Gabo - had
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