班宗华：《天边：王己千藏宋元绘画》

Along the Riverbank: Chinese Paintings from the C. C. Wang Family Collection by Maxwell K. Hearn; Wen C. Fong Review by: Peter Sturman Artibus Asiae, Vol. 60, No. 1 (2000), pp. 189-191 Published by: Artibus Asiae Publishers Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3249945 . Accessed: 01/08/2012 04:25 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Artibus Asiae Publishers is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Artibus Asiae. http://www.jstor.org Maxwell K. Hearn and Wen C. Fong, Along the Riverbank: Chinese Paintingsfrom the C. C. Wang Family Collection, New York, The Metropolitan Museum ofArt, 1ppp, 74 + ixpp., z7o illustrations (55 color plates), catalogue (with Yiguo Zhang), appendix, bibliography. "Important early work? Or modern fabrication?") James Cahill's hedging assessment twenty years ago of the "Xi'an tu," otherwise known as Riverbank, was the genesis ofa con- troversy that eventually turned potboiler. While the Met- ropolitan Museum of Art was working hard to acquire the painting, which it considered to be a tenth-century scroll possibly by the famed artist Dong Yuan (active circa 930s- 6os), Cahill gradually became convinced that Riverbank was a forgery by Zhang Daqian (1898-1983). The matter came to a head in last December's one-day symposium at the Met on issues of authenticity in Chinese painting. Anticipating grand spectacle, New Yorkers turned the symposium into a standing-room-only event, causing some to wonder aloud if such controversy was perhaps not a bad thing for the field of Chinese art history. Others found the event depressing - an embarrassing display of difference among experts too vast to excuse as legitimate scholarly dispute. Along the Riverbank: Chinese Paintings from the C. C. Wang Family Collection, was in some ways the Met's pre- emptive salvo for authenticity, released a couple of months before the symposium. The book skirts the controversy, which is touched upon as only one of a number of issues in Wen Fong's opening essay "Riverbank" (supplemented by Maxwell Hearn's appendix at the end detailing the paint- ing's physical and documentary evidence). Instead, in an obviously well-considered move, the Museum generously produced a separate publication consisting of the sympo- sium papers to make public record of the debate. For those whose interest in the painting begins with the question of its genuineness, Issues of Authenticity in Chinese Painting (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999) is an essential companion volume toAlong the Riverbank. Not to be overlooked in the uproar over Riverbank is the fact that an additional eleven paintings from C. C. Wang's collec- tion round off the promised gift from the Oscar Tang fam- ily to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As the Acknowl- edgments report, C. C. Wang considers these paintings to be cherished daughters, for whom it was his responsibility to find the right match. It is Along the Riverbank's respon- sibility to celebrate the marriage by clearly presenting each painting's value. I should state from the outset that I would not be writ- ing this review ifI thought that Riverbank was the illegit- imate child of Zhang Daqian. The various conspiracy the- ories of the painting's doubters make fascinating reading, but the buzzing all turns to silence every time I stand in front of what seems obvious to me to be a very, very old and impressive painting.' It is an unusual work of art, defining a singular niche in the corpus of early Chinese landscape painting, and this is what makes the scroll both so chal- lenging and rare. If for nothing else, the controversy sur- rounding Riverbank has forced a number of experts to look closely at this painting in an attempt to settle its place in history.3 The strength ofAlong the Riverbank lies in the fresh research presented by Wen Fong and Maxwell Hearn (the latter addressing the other eleven paintings as well). The weakness is the book's eagerness to explain things too neatly. In his essay, Wen Fong addresses Riverbank from various perspectives, displaying the kind of breadth and historical overview that come from decades of study and experience. A brief introduction sets the table with a short review of the painting's physical dimensions and docu- mentation, including the obliterated signature that has been read "Painted by the Assistant Administrator of the Rear Park, Servitor Dong [Yuan]" (admittedly, this is a bit of a mystery to me - I can barely make out two or three of the supposedly eight characters). Wen Fong also describes the scene, which he reads as a scholar, accompanied by fam- ily and servant, sitting in a riverside pavilion to watch a gathering storm as middle-ground figures scurry through the rain. Now, perhaps the darkened painting describes a gathering storm and rain, but I would not go beyond posit- ing this as a possible interpretation. It soon becomes evi- dent, however, that much is invested in this specific read- ing.The scholar is assumed to reside in reclusion, and the somber, threatening environment is presumed to reflect the social and political turmoil of the tenth century. Later, on the basis of collectors' seals and a recorded poem by Zhao Mengfu (Iz54-13zz22) assumed to have been written for this scroll, Riverbank is resituated in the fourteenth century, where it is presumed to have influenced the major land- scape painters of the Yuan, especially Wang Meng (circa I308-85). In this manner it is strongly implied that the single most important landscape theme of Yuan painting - reclusion - was at least partly induced by the presence of Riverbank, and the painting's importance becomes greatly enhanced. Unfortunately, the spotty documentary record of the painting does not realistically allow such claims.4 The remainder of Wen Fong's article is a well-crafted dis- cussion of Dong Qichang's (IS55-I636) interpretation of the Dong Yuan style and the consequent image of the ear- 189 lier Dong passed down to later artists such as Zhang Daqian. Zhang purchased Riverbank from Xu Beihong (I895-1953) but was curiously silent about it; Wen Fong suggests that the painting's lack of a developed brush tex- ture system (cun) may have hampered the later artist's appreciation. Wen Fong's impressive effort to sketch the thousand- year history of Riverbank will be welcomed by the general reader of Along the Riverbank, but the necessary amount of speculation involved here may dampen the interest of the specialist. I much prefer the first part of his essay, in which Fong builds various contexts - formal, stylistic, and the- matic - to set Riverbank into the tenth century. Progress in reestablishing a painting such as this should be meas- ured, and savored, in small increments. Tang landscape images, such as the Shosbin biwa plectrum guard paintings, are combined with the handful of extant tenth-century landscape paintings, such as Wei Xian's The Lofty Scholar Liang Boluan (Palace Museum, Beijing), to help bring Riverbank's compositional structure into focus.5 With good use of comparative material, Wen Fong carries forward the idea that Riverbank is but one panel of what was once a larger horizontal screen composition.6 And he effectively uses early texts on landscape painting, most notably Jing Hao's "Notes on Brush Methods," to explore stylistic and semantic elements in the painting. The gains are modest, but Riverbank begins to establish roots, and as this happens the scroll conversely begins to enrich our understanding of the paintings to which it is compared. Looking, reading, observing... This is nothing more than nuts-and-bolts art historical methodology, and it is entirely satisfying. There is a tendency throughout Along the Riverbank to attempt to answer questions that simply should not be asked. Speculating about where Riverbank might fit into Dong Yuan's oeuvre, for example, seems to me a pointless and unwelcome exercise, especially considering the state of the painting's signature. Dong Yuan is such an amorphous character anyway that the painting gains little more than a considerable load of historical baggage through its asso- ciation with this Southern School patriarch. But the lure of the big name has always proved hard to resist in China, and certainly it is in a museum's best interest to possess works by the "great masters." Later in the book one of the most beautiful scrolls of the entire group, Travelling through Snow-covered Mountains, unsigned and without seals, is definitively assigned to Yao Yanqing (circa I3oo-after I36o); not even "attributed to." The identification, which is based on stylistic similarities to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts' Winter Landscape, is certainly within reason, but I find such insistence strange. Based on other Yao compo- sitions, signed and attributed, Travelling through Snow- covered Mountains then becomes an early work of(probably) the I330s. It becomes Yao Yanqing's "most ambitious sur- viving composition." And it becomes a style-oriented essay in "pursuit of calligraphic effects" (the recipients of Yao Yanqing's paintings were of scholarly status). The paint- ing, which strikes me as far more richly evocative of a frozen landscape than of abstract brush modes, has been pigeon- holed to fit an existing narrative. By wedding ourselves to the name that comes with a painting we are tempted to explain it by what we already know of the artist. I was par- ticularly struck by the extended and effusive treatment of Wu Zhen's Lofty Virtue Reaching the Sky, which is presented as a classic example of the scholar's integration of poetry, painting, and calligraphy. If this painting lacked Wu Zhen's signature would it still be "charged with expressive power"? Would it still compare favorably with the more form-oriented Bamboo after Wen Tong by Ke Jiusi (I29o0- I343)? Suffice to say that my opinion concerning these two paintings is very different from that expressed by the authors. Maxwell Hearn's article, "Along the Riverbank," is as artfully composed as it is titled, weaving together the twelve paintings in an extended stream-like narrative that covers the 8oo years between the earliest and latest paint- ings in the group. Such recurring themes as reclusion, self-expression, and political protest bring an element of cohesion to what on the surface would appear to be a very disparate group of paintings, and again, the general reader is particularly well served. Sometimes the narrative is a lit- tle too familiar, as the author falls back upon well traveled routes of interpretation for such artists as Wu Zhen, Wang Meng (Simple Retreat), and Bada Shanren (I626-1705, Two Eagles), but overall the treatment is excellent. Those paint- ings that fall outside the borders of familiar masters and schools often earn the most interesting presentations. Among these is the spectacular Palace Banquet, an anony- mous and highly unusual tenth-century hanging scroll that is solidly identified as an illustration of the Seventh Evening Festival (Qixijie) and very nicely interpreted as an allusion to the romance-tragedy of Yang Guifei. I am also grateful for Hearn's treatment of Zhao Cangyun's Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao in the Tiantai Mountains, which moves this beautifully delicate narrative illustration of two Han dynasty scholars wandering in a Daoist mountain paradise back a generation from Richard Barnhart's tentative date of the early to middle fourteenth century.7 I very much like Hearn's reading of the painting in the context of the Song 190 loyalist movement, which then places the scroll at the start of the Yuan dynasty and the company of such artists as Qian Xuan (circa Iz35-before I307) and Gong Kai (1222Izzz-13o7). Indeed, with this new addition, the Met now possesses quite an extraordinary group of paintings from this trou- bled and fascinating period of Chinese history. One last painting that deserves special mention is the somber and mysterious Rocky Landscape with Pines by the little-known Zhang Xun (circa Iz95-after I349). One colophon writer alludes to the style of the tenth-century Buddhist painter Juran; a closer stylistic source may have been the early Southern Song painterJiang Shen (circa 1090-1138). In any case, this modest and beguilingly simple image expands greatly our perception of the mid-fourteenth century "mindscape." Interestingly, Ni Zan (1301-74), the most famous practitioner of this kind ofpainting, may have been the original owner of the scroll (he added one of the inscrip- tions). Rounding out the group of twelve scrolls are Lii Ji's (circa I430o-circa 104) Mandarin Ducks and Hollyhocks, Liu Jun's (active circa I475-circa 1505) Remonstrating with the Emperor, and Chen Zihe's (active late Isth-early 16th cen- tury) Drunken Immortal Beneath an Old Tree. These are all excellent, representative paintings of their particular types. Indeed, by any reckoning, in total this is a fabulous set of paintings that will greatly enhance the Museum's already superb collection of classical Chinese paintings. A great expression of gratitude is due to the Oscar Tang family for making it possible for these paintings to enter into a museum as open and generous about presenting its collec- tion as the Metropolitan, and of course to C. C. Wang for first having the foresight to collect these scrolls. Along the Riverbank is first and foremost a museum publication, and its purpose is partly celebratory. There are places where scholarly prudence is compromised by the authors' desire to present clear-cut answers and interpreta- tions, but this is excusable in light of the fact that the intended audience includes the general public. One thing the book cannot be faulted on: the color plates of the twelve paintings, including numerous details, are gorgeous, the accompanying black-and-white illustrations are gener- ously and clearly presented, and the typeset is elegant. This is an extremely handsome production. Peter Sturman University of California, Santa Barbara I James Cahill, An Index of Early Chinese Painters and Paintings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 48. 2 This is an observation based on the physical condition of the silk, including its patching and abrasion, the absorption of the ink, and the fact that none of the Zhang Daqian fakes with which I am familiar possesses this convincing patina. Maxwell Hearn's article, "A Comparative Physical Analysis ofRiverbank and Two Zhang Daqian Forgeries," in Issues of Authenticity in Chinese Painting, 95-113, addresses these issues. 3 Not to be overlooked is Richard Barnhart's original research on the painting published in his Along the Border of Heaven (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983), 29-38. 4 Though unmentioned, the connection to Wang Meng appears to be based on Barnhart's suggestion that Riverbank may have been divided into two scrolls during the fourteenth century, the left half of which bears a remarkably similar compositional structure to Wang Meng's Dwelling in the Qingbian Mountains of 1366. See Along the Border of Heaven, figs. 71-72, and discus- sion on p. 154. This is a very interesting observation, and one well worth mentioning, but it does not constitute proof and con- sequently does not allow Wen Fong's statement that "Wang [Meng] clearly knew Riverbank" (p. 34). 5 Two recently discovered landscape paintings, one from a tenth- century tomb in Quyang, Hebei, and the other from an eighth(?)-century tomb in Fuping, Shaanxi, are important sup- plementary materials. They are not reproduced in Along the Riverbank but appear in both Wen Fong's and Shih Shou- ch'ien's papers published in Issues of Authenticity, pp. I19 (fig. 5) and 270 (fig. 9). 6 This idea was first broached by Richard Barnhart in Along the Border of Heaven, p. 30. 7 Barnhart, Along the Border of Heaven, 1o3-o5. 191 Article Contents p. 189 p. 190 p. 191 Issue Table of Contents Artibus Asiae, Vol. 60, No. 1 (2000), pp. 1-192 Front Matter [pp. 1-4] Rethinking the Non-Chinese Southwest [pp. 5-58] Some Han Dynasty Paintings in the British Museum [pp. 59-78] Āyāgapaṭas: Characteristics, Symbolism, and Chronology [pp. 79-137] The Problem of Portraiture in South India, Circa 970-1000 A.D. [pp. 139-179] Book Reviews Review: untitled [pp. 180-185] Review: untitled [pp. 186-188] Review: untitled [pp. 189-191] Back Matter [pp. 192-192]