Painting in the Far East : an introduction to the history of pictorial art in Asia, especially China and Japan

Front matter

FRONTISPIECE PORTRAIT OF SUGAWARA MICHIZANE Traditionally attributed to Kanaoka Arthur Morrison Collection Perhaps a very early copy by Takuma Tameuji

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HIS- TORY OF PICTORIAL ART IN ASIA ESPECIALLY CHINA AND JAPAN

BY LAURENCE BINYON

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. The Art of the East and the Art of the West i

II. Early Art Traditions in Asia 26

Chapter I. The Art Of The East And The Art Of The West

IN the great mystical poem of Persia, the " Masnavi," it is told how the Greeks and the Chinese disputed as to which were the better artists. Their dispute was brought before the Sultan ; a contest was arranged, and a house allotted to each party for them to embellish in their own way. The poet tells how the Chinese covered the walls of their house with paintings, while the Greeks contented themselves with cleaning theirs till the walls shone bright and clear as the heavens. The work of the Chinese was greatly admired, but it was the Greeks who were adjudged the prize.

This story is told merely by way of illustration, and is put to symbolic use by the poet. It would be rash to treat it as historic relation. Yet doubtless it reflects some truth of tradition. At any rate it embodies a traditional antithesis between the art of the East and the West.

In what precisely does this antithesis exist? Does the Persian poet's allusion emphasise, as we might perhaps infer, a reliance of the East on colour, a reliance of the West on form ? Such an interpretation would commend itself probably to general acceptance in this country. This thesis

A I has, in fact, been recently promulgated by a thoughtful writer in an interesting and ingenious essay.* In seeking to form a conclusion on such a subject, we cannot do better than follow Aristotle's method, and start by examining some theory already in the field. And as this theory accords with popularly received impressions, we shall do well to see what support it really has from facts.

" The two main ideas " (writes the critic in question) "with which all art is concerned seem to have been separately contributed, one by the West, the other by the East. Form is chiefly a matter of the intellect. The arts which deal with form convey ideas. Their appeal is to the mind. Colour, on the other hand, conveys no ideas. It is emotional, and appeals to the senses rather than the intellect. And this being so, it seems natural that the Western temperament, intellectual rather than sensuous, should excel in form rather than colour ; while the Eastern, sensuous rather than intellectual, should excel in colour rather than form."

There is more than one point in these too absolute statements which challenge discussion and criticism. But let us first follow our author in the development of his theory.

After characterising Oriental colour as something different from Western colour, as distinguished by a note of " swarthy and deep half-melancholy rich- * " Byzantine Architecture." Edinburgh Review, October 1904.

Tiess," he goes on to say that in the Eastern conception of colour there is " that union of strength and simplicity which reveals itself only when a nation is dealing with the things which it understands and which correspond to its own genius. To match the Eastern sense for colour we must have recourse to the Western sense for form." And the West is weak, trivial, and uncertain in colour, as the East is unstable, eccentric, and capricious in form.

But more : " Though the idea of colour is indigenous to the East, yet of an adequate expression of that idea, of its embodiment in any great work or school of art, the East has never been capable.. . . . Diffused throughout the life of the East as this sense for colour is, we look in vain for any great artistic manifestation, any school of painting" or architectural style of Eastern origin and growth,, which shall centralise and collect that sense for colour for us. The impotence that saps the emotional temperament has waited on the East." According to this writer, it was the Byzantine Greeks who were called upon to effect a manifestation of the Oriental ideal of colour, an ideal which the Oriental races had been too feeble-willed to do more than trivially illustrate in minor arts and crafts.

All this is as plausible at first sight as it is interesting. But now we must ask, On what evidence is this theory based? The writer has many and definite illustrations to draw from in the field of Western art, but his illustrations from the East are fragmentary and vague. Have the Oriental races really been so impotent and uncreative? Do the vague associations of luxury and sensuous magnificence which the " gorgeous East " brings into our minds really represent all that is to be known of it ? Is there nothing besides carpets and embroideries, lustrous wares and richly ornamented metal-work, familiar to our eyes in our shops, as Aladdin's trays of rubies and the glowing furniture and background of the Arabian Nights," together with a hundred phrases from the poets, are familiarly impressed on our imagination, with the same vague and sumptuous effect ? If so, then we must indeed say that art in the East has never emerged from the barbaric stage, the stage in which decoration precedes design, and in which the sense for beauty remains childish, fascinated by colour and movement, unable to grasp organic relations, incapable of coherent and articulate production.

We say " the East," with how huge a generalisation! Most Englishmen, if they ask themselves what materials their minds have collected to furnish and fill out this broad idea, will think above all of India. And if they pursue the question into a special field of art, reminiscences of travel or of reading will recall images of architecture that are, at least to our eyes, inexpressive and fantastic, together with, it may be, some scattered specimens of Persian miniature painting or Japanese colour prints, and for the rest mere craftsman's work, textiles, and bric-a-brac.

Whatever be the merits of Oriental architecture, one may say at once that it is not in this art that the genius of Asia has found its supreme expression. There is a reason for this, which we shall revert to later.

Let us take pictorial art : Persian paintings, Japanese prints and drawings, what have these in common ? Are they sporadic outbursts, one on the western the other on the eastern verge of the vast continent? Or are they both related to an older and more central art ?

The latter answer is the right one. It is in China that the central tradition of Asian painting must be sought for. Of all the nations of the East, the Chinese is that which through all its history has shown the strongest aesthetic instinct, the fullest and richest imagination. And painting is the art in which that instinct and that imagination have found their highest and most complete expression. If we are to compare the art of the East and the art of the West, in their essential character and differences, we must take as our type of the former the pictorial art of China.

But why not of Japan? many will ask. For it is

S generally believed that in art the Japanese have enormously improved on what they have derived from China. Certainly they have added new elements, and in some particular respects have surpassed the older nation, though in other respects they have never attained the same level. So vast an amount of Chinese painting has been lost or destroyed that we have no means for any detailed comparison. Yet even what little remains vindicates its great claim. The Japanese look to China as we look to Italy and Greece : for them it is the classic land, the source from which their art has drawn not only methods, materials, and principles of design, but an endless variety of theme and motive. As in the late nineteenth century Japan has taken over the material civilisation of Europe, so, more than a thousand years earlier, she took over and absorbed the civilisation of China, its art, its religion, its thought. But it was not foundation and starting-point alone that Chinese art supplied, but a pattern and ideal. Again and again the painters of Japan have renewed their art with fresh life and inspiration from the vigorous schools of the continent. The first great school of painting in Japan derived entirely from the grand and forcible style of the masters of the T'ang dynasty. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a school arose which developed a native character in its design, and enrolled in its ranks a number of splendid draughtsmen and 6 gorgeous colourists. When this school decayed, it was again from China that the renaissance came, the great renaissance of the fifteenth century which established the three classic schools of painting in Japan, and gloried in infinite variations on themes already handled with consummate feeling and expression by the galaxy of artists who flourished under the Emperors of the House of Sung. The next phase in Japanese painting was inaugurated by emulation of the rich and decorative colouring of the earlier Ming epoch ; and once more, in the eighteenth century, a last wave from the now declining art of China left its traces on impressible Japan.

The painting of the two countries, therefore, represents one great and continuous tradition, a tradition maintained and made illustrious by countless artists for two thousand years. From China that tradition, with its principles and ideals, originates ; not only Japan in the East, but Persia in the West, has derived the sources of its art from the fertilising overflow of that wonderful nation whose history has been the continued absorption from without of barbarous neighbours and invaders, and the imposition on its conquerors of its own civilisation.

The general conception of Chinese art which prevails in Europe is entirely founded on the productions of its decadence. Even in the case of the porcelain, it is the later kinds that are collected and prized : the simpler and grander forms of the earlier periods are scarcely known. In the case of painting, the real nature of the art is absolutely unguessed at by any save a very few students. The bastard and comparatively worthless productions made now for two centuries for the European market in Canton represent for most of the general public who have formed any idea at all on the subject the pictorial art of the Empire ; and they associate that art with bright, if harmonious, colours, a tame and flaccid sense of form, and the monotonous repetition of effete conventions.

But if we take the central tradition of Asian painting in its great periods and most typical form of expression, what do we find ? We find a type of painting in which colour, so far from being predominant, is an always subordinate element, and is often entirely absent.

The painting of Asia is throughout its main tradition an art of line. The Chinese of the twelfth century, the Japanese of the fifteenth, evolved an art of tone, but in both cases eliminated colour.

A Chinese critic of the sixth century, who was also an artist, published a theory of aesthetic principles which became a classic and received universal acceptance, expressing, as it did, the deeply rooted instincts of the race. In this theory it is Rhythm that holds the paramount 8 place ; not, be it observed, imitation of Nature, or fidelity to Nature, which the general instinct of the Western races makes the root-concern of art.

In this theory every work of art is thought of as an incarnation of the genius of rhythm, manifesting the living spirit of things with a clearer beauty and intenser power than the gross impediments of complex matter allow to be transmitted to our senses in the visible world around us. A picture is conceived as a sort of apparition from a more real world of essential life.

Every one knows the story of the grapes of Zeuxis which appeared so like real grapes that birds came to peck at their tempting clusters. The Chinese have parallel fables about famous masterpieces, but how different an order of ideas they attest ! A great artist painted a dragon upon a temple wall, and as he put the final touch to it, the dragon, too instinct with life, soared crashing through the roof and left an empty space. The inner and informing spirit, not the outward semblance, is for all painters of the Asian tradition the object of art, the aim with which they wrestle.

Let us take an example, a Chinese painting of the thirteenth century. The subject is "The Moon over Raging Waves." Doubtless to the Chinese mind the theme had its symbolic side ; the peace of the radiant soul above the fluctuating tumult of the passions is perhaps the parallel suggested ;

but we need no more for enjoyment than the inherent poetry of the contrast. The picture presents us with a vision of the sea, a waste of waves curling over into foam, pale under the brightness of the full moon. And the waves are represented by lines which, if they neglect the accidental edges and broken forms of rough water as we see it, emphasise the continuous curve and rhythm by which waves are actually created. Another treatment of this subject — traditional, like so many of the subjects of Asian art — shows the golden moon appearing over the shoulder of a shadowy promontory, and at its base a single wave flung up out of darkness into the moonlight. The same treatment of water persists throughout this art, from the earliest examples we know down to Okio and Hokusai in Japan. It is always the essential character and genius of the element that is sought for and insisted on : the weight and mass of water falling, the sinuous, swift curves of a stream evading obstacles in its way, the burst of foam against a rock, the toppling crest of a slowly arching billow ; and all in 'a rhythm of pure lines. But the same principles, the same treatment, are applied to all subjects. If it be a hermit sage in his mountain retreat, the artist's efforts will be concentrated on the expression, not only in the sage's features, but in his whole form, of the rapt intensity of contemplation ; towards this effect

ID every line of drapery and of surrounding rock or tree will conspire, by force of repetition or of contrast. If it be a warrior in action, the artist will ensure that we shall feel the tension of nerve, the heat of blood in the muscles, the watchfulness of the eye, the fury of determination. That birds shall be seen to be, above all things, winged creatures rejoicing in their flight ; that flowers shall be, above all things, sensitive blossoms unfolding on pliant, up-growing stems ; that the tiger shall be an embodied force, boundless in capacity for spring and fury — this is the ceaseless aim of these artists, from which no splendour of colour, no richness of texture, no accident of shape diverts them. The more to concentrate on this seizure of the inherent life in what they draw, they will obliterate or ignore at will half or all of the surrounding objects with which the Western painter feels bound to fill his background. By isolation and the mere use of empty space they will give to a clump of narcissus by a rock, or a solitary quail, or a mallow plant quivering in the wind, a sense of grandeur and a hint of the infinity of life.

Who shall say of such an art that it is not mature, still less that it is impotent to express ideas ? In its coherence and its concentration, in its resolute hold on the idea of organic beauty, this tradition, so old in the East, manifests the character of an art that has reached complete development.

II

This painting, we have said, is an art of line rather than an art of colour. Yet it is not difficult to see how an art of line can come to have for one of its chief characteristics, and for its most obvious attraction, the charm of colour. The Japanese prints of the eighteenth century, for instance, proved a revelation of exquisite colour to Europeans ; and yet they too are in their essence linear designs. The reason is that these linear designs aim at no illusion of relief, and ignore cast shadows. The spaces to be coloured are fiat spaces, and the instinct of the artist is to invent a harmony of colours which intensifies and gives added charm to the harmony of line. Such an art never loses sight of the primary condition of a picture as a decoration on a flat wall ; and with this decorative aim the free and undistracted development of colourharmonies is naturally associated. It is when a new and absorbing interest is added to pictorial art, when the artist attempts to produce the likeness of figures and objects as they appear in relief, and begins to use light and shade as a means to this end, that his mind is distracted from the pursuit of harmony in line and colour ; these become secondary aims, and as a natural consequence the sense for colour becomes weak and uncertain. Why is it that in Italian painting before the Renaissance, even where no decided genius for colour is shown, the colour of quite minor, insignificant, and provincial masters pleases us ? It is because the painting of those early periods was as yet unconfused and undistracted by the problems of chiaroscuro. European painting, however, was soon committed to the portrayal of relief and the ideal of complete realisation. In the North this was inevitable because of the powerful instinct towards realism innate in the races of the Netherlands, the early flowering of whose genius directed the aims of painting. In Italy it was equally inevitable, because of the intellectual passion for science which was inseparable from the genius of Florence ; and it is from the great Florentine school that Europe inherits its main tradition of design for all ideal subjects. Scientific curiosity has, ever since the Renaissance, played a potent part in the history of European art. In painters like Paolo Uccello we find the struggle to master perspective overshadowing the purely artistic quest for beauty, just as in our own time an intense interest in scientific discoveries about the nature of light has led a whole school of landscape painters to sacrifice fundamental qualities of design in a passionate endeavour to realise on canvas the vibration of sunlight.

Science must of course play a part in the production of all mature painting. The artist in his desire to discover beauty is confronted with difficult problems which he must acquire the science to solve ; but it is as a means to an end, and only as a means. It is the besetting vice of our Western life as a whole, so complex and entangled in materials, that we do not see things clearly ; we are always mixing issues and confounding ends with means. We are so immersed in getting the means for enjoying life that we quite forget how to enjoy it, and what is called success is, oftener than not, defeat. So, too, in current criticism of painting, we find it commonly assumed that an advance in science is of itself an advance in art ; as if correct anatomy, a thorough knowledge of perspective, or a stringent application of optical laws were of the slightest value to art except as aids to the effective realisation of an imaginative idea.

The scientific aim which has warped and weakened certain phases of modern painting in Europe is a symptom of Western tendencies in extreme. The East has also sometimes carried its tendencies to extreme ; we find the expression of them in what is known as the Literary Man's Painting of China and Japan, a kind of art which has as little reference as possible to external fact and relies entirely on vague suggestions of poetic mood.

But, ignoring these extreme expressions, let us regard rather the sum of classic painting in Asia and in Europe.

The main arresting difference is, as we have seen, that the painting of Europe does not limit itself; it is not content till it has mastered every possible means of communicating ideas through the representation of the visible world : it emulates the effects of sculpture, in order to communicate the emotions which alone can be produced by figures seen in roundness and relief ; it emulates the effects of architecture, in order to communicate the emotions that only ordered spaces and perspective can evoke. And it wants to produce all these effects at once, as well as the effects of harmonious line and colour.

The painting of Asia, on the other hand, limits itself severely. It leaves to sculpture and to architecture the effects proper to those arts. But it has not remained merely decorative, as so many people assume ; it is in its own way fully as mature as our own.

The great painters of either continent have pursued the same end. They have sought to communicate life-giving ideas of beauty in a sensuous embodiment. The means employed have been different, yet not so different as would appear at first sight. Limited to line, the painters of Asia have concentrated centuries of study on the effort to make that line intimately expressive of form ; and with mere contour they succeed in producing the illusion of perfect modelling. The very ease with which relief can be represented by shadows, as with us, has taken away from our painters the necessity for this concentration and weakened their sense for expressive line. The painters of the East have succeeded in giving life to their figures ; and that the figures in a picture should impress us as real, breathing, laughing, sorrowing humanity, this is the essential thing we demand. Absolute anatomical correctness, which pedants demand, detracts from this impression, and is no more present in the great painting of Europe than in the great painting of Asia. The fact is, we are so used to our own set of conventions that we forget how large a part they play even in the most realistic pictures, and when confronted, in the art of Asia, with a different set of conventions, we are apt to fix our attention entirely on them, instead of allowing ourselves to receive the suggestions of reality which these are intended to produce. So it is often said that there is no perspective in Chinese and Japanese painting. M. Raphael Petrucci, in a most illuminating, comprehensive, and masterly essay,* has entirely exploded this fallacy. He has conclusively shown that the mastery of perspective in Eastern painting is quite comparable to that of European painting, only it is different in the conventions it allows ; it has been naturally evolved

Petrucci. Revue de I'Universite de Bruxelles, Janvier-Fevrier, 1907. 16 out of the past history of art in Asia, whereas in Europe its problems were approached in the fifteenth century from an abstract point of view, as geometry, in a conscious effort to recover effects known to have been achieved by the Greek painters. As we shall see, Chinese painters of the eighth century and the twelfth century, among many others, have left treatises on the means of representing in a picture the appearances of the relative distances of objects in space. But M. Petrucci has also shown that in European painting, even in masterpieces of artists like Leonardo and Ingres, the laws of perspective are boldly violated in obedience to aesthetic necessities, although we are entirely persuaded of the reality of the effect produced, and the violation is only perceived when we resolutely discard the artistic impression and make a patient scrutiny from the point of view of science alone. He reminds us, too, how easily Hokusai was able to assimilate European perspective, learnt from the Dutch at Nagasaki, to the perspective of the Japanese.

Readers of Goethe's " Conversations " will remember his striking comment on a landscape by Rubens. He showed an engraving after this picture to the ingenuous Eckermann, and asked him to say what he noticed in it. After minutely describing every detail, Eckermann at last saw what he was intended to see, that the figures in the picture cast their shadows one way and the trees another. Light, in fact, was introduced from two different sides, in a manner "quite contrary to Nature." "That is the point," said Goethe. "It is by this that Rubens proves himself great, and shows to the world that he with a free spirit stands above Nature and treats her conformably with his high purposes." Admitting that the expedient was somewhat violent, still Goethe praises " the bold stroke of the master, by which in a genial manner he proclaims to the world that art is not entirely subject to natural necessities, but has laws of its own." " The artist," he continues, " has a two-fold relation to Nature ; he is at once her master and her slave. He is her slave, inasmuch as he must work with earthly things in order to be understood ; but he is her master, inasmuch as he subjects these earthly means to his high intentions."

Goethe's mind, so magnificently free from prejudice, at once sheds the light of truth upon the subject. The laws of science are not the laws of art. Yet so permeated are our ways of thought (how much more so since Goethe's day !) by scientific conceptions, that to many this criticism of his will seem a startling paradox and a dangerous heresy. On the contrary, the danger and the heresy are with those who import scientific views into judgments on art. Few of us probably realise how strong i8 this influence is ; to what a degree, in the public, it prevents a free judgment of painting, and how tyrannical a claim it makes upon the painter of to-day.

Here is one thing we can learn from the study of Oriental painting. We can learn to distrust this tendency, absorbed from an age of triumphant science, to set up an external objective standard, asking of a picture whether it correctly represents the objects it portrays, instead of asking to what service the materials have been used, and whether it is a real experience to our souls. Our art, like our civilisation, too often defeats its own end ; in the thirst for reality it falls into indiscriminate acceptance, and loses or obscures essentials. The art and the life of the East stand, with far more constancy, for a finely valuing choice.

We may now turn back for a moment to re-examine the theory with which we started. The notion that the idea of form is the great contribution of the West to art, and the idea of colour the great contribution of the East, is, we can now see, founded on entirely inadequate evidence, and even if true would not touch the essential question. There is indeed an unreality in the antithesis. What is meant by the idea of colour and the idea of form ? The phrases have no meaning except in so far as the idea of harmony or rhythm underlies both. Nor can the intellectual appeal in art be divorced from the sensuous or emotional appeal. Great art only begins when all these are absorbed and unified in one complete yet single satisfaction. It is a proof of the profound ignorance prevailing in the West of Asiatic art that so earnest and thoughtful a student as the critic I have quoted should totally ignore the painting of China and Japan. In that painting the Oriental sense for colour is assuredly " collected and centralised " to magnificent effect. Yet I do not believe that the sense of colour is peculiar to the East, and that the West has only a "taste" for colour, without instinctive sense. Remember how easily even the Oriental sense for colour, strengthened by ages of tradition, can be corrupted by the introduction of cheap pigments invented by the chemists of Europe. Nowhere is there lovelier colour than in the Japanese prints of the fine period in the eighteenth century ; nowhere is there viler or more hideous colour than in those same prints when invaded by the aniline pigments of the West. In Europe also the multiplication of pigments by chemistry has further weakened a colour sense already enfeebled or obscured among painters by scientific aims imported into art ; just as our sense for form has been vitiated and degraded by the commercial manufactures of machinery. I incline to believe that in the life of mediaeval Europe the sense for colour played as strong 20 a part as it is still claimed to play in Oriental life.

Both in this and in other respects, if we take a comprehensive view of the pictorial art of both continents, the differences which arrest at first sight tend to lessen or disappear on closer scrutiny. The critic I have quoted was misled, I think, by concentrating his attention on architecture rather than on painting. With Oriental architecture this book is not directly concerned. Yet all art is one, and I do not wish to ignore conclusions that such a study might provoke. We find that painting in the East has carefully eschewed all emphasis on the solidity of materials ; it ever tends to absorb object in idea : it is natural, therefore, that we should not expect the Asian spirit to find congenial expression in such an architecture as our own. I write with diffidence on the subject, but so far as I understand the architecture of Japan, for instance, I would say that it was conceived in a different spirit from our own ; that a building was regarded less in itself than as a fusion of man's handiwork into Nature, the whole surroundings of the scene making part, and perhaps the chief part, of the architect's conception. And here we touch what is certainly a very real and animating principle in the pictorial art of the East, and come at last on a more essential difference between the art of the East and the West.