Page 13 - Studio International - October1973

shown any awareness of the kind of ideals that growth of both . . . From the Japanese point may be their involvement in it is deeper and
are expressed in the early Chinese writings on of view, it is not Man who draws, but rather more lasting than that of the Western painters,
art from which I have quoted. Critical interest the Existent brings forth its own shape.' many of whom have already moved on, before
in the era of Cubism was focused almost Or, as Klee put it, 'Art does not render the they have even begun to explore the expressive
entirely upon the art of Africa and Oceania. visible, rather it makes visible'. possibilities of calligraphic abstraction. We
Very few of these Chinese texts were translated As Western science has been liberated from should speak not of Western influence on Liu
before the 193os in any case, and even today bondage to visible matter, so has Western art Kuo-sung and Saito but rather of stimulus, or
some of them, particularly those that concern been set free from the necessity of depicting it. even of provocation.
the detachment of the gentleman painter from What the eye sees at one moment in time is
the object, perspective, and the methods of the ephemeral, and so illusory. Their awareness of The American Response to Oriental Art
T'ang 'action painters', are known only to the limiting character of scientific one-point For Europe to accept the Oriental aesthetic was
specialists in Chinese painting. perspective led the Chinese, centuries ago, to to deny her own heritage. Modern America has
The change in Western art in the twentieth reject it. That Chinese painters had a grasp of not found it so difficult, for her culture derives
century, which has brought it, in certain its principles is shown by the way in which the part of its strength from its very rejection of
fundamental respects, into harmony with that T'ang Dynasty fresco-painters of the Paradise Europe. The popularity of Oriental art and
of the Orient, was not due to the influence of compositions in the caves at Tunhuang handled thought in America has been partly due to the
Oriental art, nor was Oriental art held up as an their complex celestial palaces. The tenth- calibre of the men who propagated it — Fenollosa
example; never did Kandinsky or Klee echo century landscapist Li Ch'eng was severely and Okakura, Coomaraswamy and Suzuki, to
Pissarro's remark about an exhibition of taken to task by the Sung critic Shen Kuá for name but a few; but their success was also due
Japanese prints : 'Damn it all, if this show his very skill in this craft. Why look at a building, to the American willingness to look beyond
doesn't justify us'! It was due rather to a said Shen Kuá, from only one point of view ? Europe. The American mind may be a little
profound change in Western thinking about Li Ch'eng's 'angles and corners of buildings', gullible at times but it is open and generous, and
the nature of the physical world, most clearly and his 'eaves seen from below', are all very America suffers not at all from the intellectual
expressed in the physical sciences. No longer do well, but only a continually shifting perspective complacency of Britain and France. America,
we believe in a finite world, or in the permanence enables us to grasp the whole. Chang Tse- moreover, looks westward across the Pacific as
of matter. The physicist may describe it in tuan's remarkable long panorama of life outside well as eastward, and her enthusiasm for things
terms of waves, particles, or energy, according the Northern Sung capital, Going up River at Chinese and Japanese has not been tainted by a
to the aspect of nature which he is investigating, Ch'ing-ming Festival Time, painted in about AD sense of cultural superiority to the East.
and he speaks no longer of objects, but of events. 1120, represents both the climax and the For twenty years, before the New York
'Physical concepts', Einstein said, 'are free swan-song of pictorial realism in the upper Armory Show in 1913 opened American eyes to
creations of the human kind, and are not, levels of Chinese landscape painting. Southern modern art, Arthur Dow, Fenollosa's close
however it may seem, uniquely determined by Sung academicians such as Ma Yüan drifted friend and travelling companion in Japan, had
the external world'. Space and time, we have into a dream world of their own, almost into a been promoting a system of art education that
to feel, are infinite, and our knowledge of them poetic surrealism, while the gentlemen painters stressed not the realism of the salons, but
can be but partial and relative. Solid matter has from the succeeding Yüan Dynasty onwards essentials of pictorial form, rhythm and
dissolved into an accretion of particles in an showed no interest in realism whatsoever. construction. 'I confess,' he wrote with great
eternal state of agitation. Such a view would Today many Western painters have rejected insight, 'to sympathy with all who reject
seem the natural one to any thinker in the perspective, chiaroscuro, the very picture-frame traditional academicism in art . . . Japanese art
Hindu-Buddhist world. For the basic ambiguity itself, because they have come to realize, like had done much towards breaking the hold of
of our concept of matter, and particularly for their Chinese predecessors of the Sung Dynasty, this tyranny, the incoming Chinese art will do
the illusory nature of sense data, the Buddhist that pictorial realism, far from making possible more, but it may remain for modernist art to
philosopher would use the term Maya the representation of the real, actually hinders set us free.' Some critics have seen the Oriental
('illusion'); while, when referring to the idea it. The same liberating process has taken place aesthetic at work in Dow's most distinguished
of continuous change, he would speak of in Western poetry, music, drama and film, and pupil, Georgia O'Keefe, but after early
Sunyata ('the Void'), or Samsara, the chain all these arts are open as never before to experiments in sumi she developed a style that
of existence in which all things are for ever influences from the Orient. owes little or nothing to the Orient. Ever since
coming together, dissolving, and coalescing So it is that today, for the first time, Eastern she abandoned those experiments, her
again into new transient patterns. To the and Western artists, instead of borrowing from inspiration has been Texas — 'my country,' as
Eastern mind, Taoist or Buddhist, the Void is a each other for their own immediate ends, as she said, 'terrible winds and a wonderful
positive force: Chinese court painters in the eighteenth century emptiness'. Nothing could be further from the
'From ancient times' (wrote a Japanese critic) borrowed from the Jesuits, and the Oriental ideal of a paintable landscape than the
'Being or the Existent, in other words that impressionists from the Japanese, have found plains of Texas.
which makes the appearance of Things as common ground in a view of reality that reaches 'I have often thought', wrote Mark Tobey in
They Are, has been thought of as Mu (an beyond the bounds of art itself. Sometimes in 1957, 'that if the West Coast had been as open
approximate term is 'nothingness'). And by the West we hear painters such as Liu Kuo-sung to aesthetic influ,ences from Asia, as the East
Mu we do not at all mean a state of absolute or Yoshihige Saito — to take two names at Coast was to Europe, what a rich nation we
Zero, but the mysterious core of Being random — criticized for 'copying' Pollock, would be.' Though America continued through
filled with a dynamic, creative energy Kline or Soulages. But this is quite wrong. On force of habit to look to Europe, it was in the
of infinite scope. the contrary, the Far Eastern painters, after a Pacific north-west, and notably in the work
If the light of intelligence is directed from brief and on the whole disastrous flirtation with of Tobey himself, that Oriental art first struck
this Mu, everything from the Man to Nature Western realism, are now firmly back on their a responsive chord in an American painter. On
takes on the same transcendental dimension. own ground. That they have to some extent Tobey the influences were cumulative. First,
Not that Man and Nature thereby come to been inspired by the New York School, and all his conversion, in about 1918, to the syncretic
face each other in an impassive confrontation, that led up to it from Kandinsky onwards, to faith Baha-i ; then, in 1923, his encounter with
but that there occurs a persuasive, mutual achieve a rediscovery of the abstract Japanese prints in Seattle, and his meeting with
interchange of energies between the pair and expressionist roots of their own tradition, the Chinese painter and critic Teng K'uei, who
which contributes to the development and cannot be doubted; but for this very reason it gave him his first lessons in handling the
I 1120 7