Literati Painting ASIA360
墨习： playing with ink
1. The scholar-artist; gentleman amateur
2. Painting as a partner to calligraphy and poetry, expressing the true character
of a gentleman, calligraphy is an expression of moral character
3. Spontaneous expression of ethical / morel character
4. Independent, don't belong to a clique
岁寒：retaining integrity under adversity
Literati artists; scholars; loyalists, dissenters; recluses; eccentrics; hermits;
remonstrators; exils; elite, aristocrats; government officials,
tradition and modernity Ai Weiwei
Scholar-artist: dissenter within/ outside the system
Serious play
Eccentric/ non-conformist
Zhuang Zi
Some basics
Names: family name,
Romanization: Pinyin, Wade-Giles (used in Taiwan& by older scholarly text)
Dynasties/ reign periods; see textbook for dates of artists & periods
Glossary of terms found in textbooks,
The early development of Chinese painting
Neolithic pottery
Brush and ink use standard by Eastern Zhou 2500
Materials and formats
Ink, ink stone, brushes, paper, silk
Functional/ architectural/ funerary,
Temple, palace and tomb walls (Murals)
Screens, hanging scrolls, hand scrolls (read from right to left)
Much later; fans, album leaves,
Ritual and funerary art, E.g. Mawandui tomb
180 BE
Silk name banner in innermost tomb of lady Dai
funeral banner
Confucian funerary ritual
Ancestor worship
Mourning ritual
Burial/ coffins/ tombs
Didactic narratives of filial sons and other moral exemplars,
Rise of buddhism
disunion; fall o fHam empire,
Decline of confucianism/ centralized state
Rise of buddhism and buddhist art
Rise of individualism (link to Daoism)
Emergence of educated artists and connoisseur/ collectors
Portable scrolls
Sinicized non Han regime (Buddhist)
realistic portraits/ human figures./ animals; using outline, colour, boneless
washes
Dunhuang 敦煌
Gu Kaizhi 顾恺之
Legendary figure associated with beginnings of scroll painting
Very little know about him but copies of three famous scrolls give sense of his
influence
Wise and benevolent women: 5 meters long, ten sections each story or anecdote
unconnected to the nest section
Sui and Tang
Unification
Brilliant, cosmopolitan, prosperous, creative
Periodization of painting
High Tang 盛唐
Middle and late Tang
阎立本
Aristocrat, tomb designer for Tang founder, Prime Minister
Political paintings recording the matters of empire
(tribute visits by non-Han peoples, protracts of earlier emperors, an artisthistorian)
李思训 （651-716） Blue and green landscapes (青绿山水）elephant's tusk
Associated with "dense" court painting style on silk
吴道子 （710-760） rival with 李思训
untrammelled spontaneous loose style, known of this brush play
patron deity of temple builders and decorators,
outside the court; public art; religious murals
High Tang
Three trends
Public art (but turning inward/ private taxes and domesticated scenes in tombs)
Court art especially paintings of court lades, bird, horse
The Palace Lady
杨贵妃 imperial consort of emperor
Femme fatale who destroyed an empire
embodiment of the plump, full faced palace lady image painted by Zhang
Lady Guoguo's Spring outing
Ladies preparing New Woven
Both extant only as copied by 徽宗
周昉
韩干，照夜白
王维
James Cahill
Song lectures
Song reunification after century of warfare
Imperial family: art patrons and artists
Establishment of civil bureaucracy: merit based system
Independently minded intellectual class emerging
Song painting is the golden age of painting
Shift from wall painting to scrolls/ elite pastime
Scholar artists
Imperial art academy esltablished
Art theory and art history texts
Landscapes
Flower and bird painting
Fan Kuan
Tri-partite composition, secular figures in lower foreground; rising knoll with
temple;
great peak above
Tilting tops to peaks
Guo Xi
Professional painter, favourite artist of emperor Shenzong & follower of Li Cheng
Grand landscapes
可游，可行，可居，可望
我是北地忍不住的春天，春天淡墨的光，春光，mountain mist
蟹爪的树枝，
Song urbanization
Massive urbanization/ population growth in the N.Song
Landscape painting as an escapes; roaming in the imagination
Guo Xi; Convention of looking at vertical landscape painting at a distance; gaze
at or ramble through in imagination, or best of all live within real thing
Wang Shen
Powerful military family; emperor
Shenzong's brother in aw
Friend and fellow anti-reformist conspirator with Su Shi (underwent banishment&
punishment)
Exchanged poems and paintings with Su Shi indirectly
Literati painting; Su Shi and his circle
Su Shi played pivotal role in establishing ;iterate painting genre
Painting becomes a gentleman's pastime, poetry&calligraphy and painting
A means to express emotions
Painting is appreciated best by a like minded individual
Conveying the personality of an artist
Wentong, 文同
Bamboo artist, bending but no yielding, ink bamboo genre, symbol of a
gentleman, integrity virtue,
Lived among bamboo until he understood the way of it,
bamboo lodged in his mind and brought forth in spontaneous paintings
James Cahill
Creation of nature, Zhaohua, nature has no purpose, natureness, greatness of
Northern Song,
Artistic creation-- 造化, transcendent , no plan, no purposefulness
James Cahills lecture review
造化 not, Creation of nature, Zhaohua, nature has no purpose, natureness,
greatness of Northern Song,
Artistic creation-- 造化, transcendent , no plan, no purposefulness, 胸有成竹, 手
中有笔，心中有笔
庖丁解牛，信手，forgetting skills, the wheelwright and the butcher
mind and making one's in accord with it, trusting to the hand
Spontaneous creation like natural process, 张旭，醉酒，李白，苏轼，米芾
Painting and calligraphy
Same brush, painting takes on aura and status of calligraphy
Huang Tingjian 黄庭坚 famous and calligrapher known for his bold, asymmetrical
style wrote on parallels between the arts
镜花水月，
Poetry: meaning beyond words
Painting: ideas within landscape
Poetry: paintings with sounds
Painting: soundless poems
Calligraphic strokes shaping literati, painting style and monochromatic taste.
Simple symbolic motifs (rock, old tree, bamboo, pin, plum, orchid)
Scholar-artists moving away from landscapes painting by late Song
Su Shi calligraphy
Cold food festival in Huangzhou Poem scroll
Hand-scroll details
米芾 Poem wirtten go a boat in the Wu River
Colour is like cosmetics: vulgar; painting should be simple and refined
Emperor Huizong 徽宗
Artist, aesthete, calligrapher, student of Daoism, builder of palaces & garden
Founded Imperial Art Academy 1104
Painting exams
Painting a peacock; which foot?
Auspicious signs and portents
Ma Lin
New social elite- shape of society until 20th century
Scholar entry scholar officials
Civil service examinations
Different relationship with imperial court developing
Local administrator heads of local lineages
All eliter immersed in unified cultural system based on confucianism, give new
shapes by end of Song as Neo-confucianism
Strong cohesion of thought through education based on Chinese classics,
increasingly
Southern Song survival
barbarian at the border
理学 school of principle, becomes main orthodoxy
心学 School of mind
Re-orientation of confucianism taking into account threats/ rivals; buddhism and
Daoism
fundamentalism
Restorationism
钱选
Dry anti-pictorial, intellectual
No foreground or background
Influence of Dong Yuan
Revered by Yuan landscape artist
Zhao Mengfu's art
Landscapes, horses, figures, flowers and bamboo
Best known as a horse painter but his landscapes establish major innovations in
style and practice
Antique spirit
Connoisseur will recognize that they adhere to old models and are thus
deserving of approval.
People who paint in a detailed and delicate manner with bright colours consider
themselves to be proficient artists.
Archaic model
Deliberate primitivisim
Anti-realism
2 essays
500 words
2 images, compare and contrast
Name, Names of the work, in the context of literati arts
themes, North Song onwards, slides. a list of artists and images, James Cahill
Final essay
They paint just as nature is formed.
Hold official roles
Grandeur noun, Grandiose adjective
黄公望
倪瓒
Epoch making brushstrokes revered by 17th
Poor background, great learning
Fllower of Zhao Mengfu in producing
Li principle natural order
Strip away the inessentials, if there is too much, it will put your work into the
artisan style
Pingdan Plainness and blandness; highly values quality in literati painting
Simple
王冕
Yuan plum master; sold paintings
Explicit kinship stressed between purity of artist and the jade essence image of
the wind battered
Literati--literatus
Art History 360 Review
Amateur and other ideals
Identity who when what
Contexts philosophy politics
Rule dynasty
Blandness, spontaneity, monochromatic ink
Landscape painting seems a way for escape from urban world
Audience is set for like-minded people
Role of painting, paintings are used as gifts
hand scrolls, handing scrolls
Calligraphy, poem, poetry, painting
Landcapes
-mountains, water, temple, pavilions, retreats
Natural images: trees, bamboo, plum, orchid, pine, rock, animals
People: hermits, monks, scholar, fisherman
Abstraction, simplicity, spontaneity, play,
artlessness, state of nature,
Brushwork- mind print
Intellectual, unromantic, anti-illusionistic
Pingdan: blandness, monotony of motifs
Archaism: an archaic word or style of language or art
Models and counter-model
Archaism: learn from past masters
Academy painting: professional artistic
rejected aesthetic/ Patronage
Imperial patronage
Buddhist/ Daoism painting
Awkwardness in the painting
literati painting (文人画, wenrenhua), is a term used to denote art and artists
which stand in opposition to the formal Northern School of painting. Where
professional, formal painters were classified as Northern School, scholarbureaucrats who had either retired from the professional world or who were
never a part of it constituted the Southern School.
Literati painting is a term used to denote art and artist which stand in opposition
to the formal Northern school of painting. Where professional, formal painters
were classified as Northern school, scholar-bureaucrats who had ether retried
form the professional world or who were never a part of it constituted.
Generally, Southern School painters worked in monochrome ink, and
focused on expressive brushstrokes and a somewhat more
impressionistic approach than the Northern School's formal attention to
detail and use of color and highly refined traditional modes and methods.
The stereotypical literati painter lived in retirement in the mountains
or other rural areas, not entirely isolated, but immersed in natural
beauty and far from mundane concerns. They were also lovers of
culture, hypothetically enjoying and taking part in all Four Arts of the
Chinese Scholar as touted by Confucianism, that is,
painting, calligraphy, music, and games of skill and strategy. They would
often combine these elements into their work, and would gather with one
another to share their interests.
Literati paintings are most commonly of landscapes, and feature men in
retirement, or travelers, admiring and enjoying the scenery, or immersed in
culture. Figures are often depicted carrying or playing guqin (zithers), and
residing in quite isolated mountain hermitages. Calligraphic inscriptions,
either of classical poems or ones composed by a contemporary literati (the
painter, or a friend), are also quite common. However, while this sort of
landscape, with certain features and elements, is the standard
stereotypical Southern School painting, the genre actually varied quite
widely, as the literati painters themselves, in rejecting the formal strictures
of the Northern School, sought the freedom to experiment with subjects
and styles.
History[edit]
Beginning in the 18th century, the attitudes of the Chinese literati (the
scholar-bureaucrat in retirement who devotes himself entirely to a love of
culture) began to be taken up by Japanese artists. As the Japanese literati
(文人, J: bunjin) were forbidden to leave Japan, and had little access to
original Chinese works (or to meeting the literati themselves), the lifestyle,
attitude, and art changed considerably in Japan. Outside of native
Japanese inspirations, these bunjin gained Chinese influence only
through woodblock-printed art books which attempted to reproduce and
communicate the Southern School ideals and methods. The Southern
School (C: nanzhonghua, J: nanshūga) came to be known as nanga in
Japan.
Literati[edit]
The scholars, scholarly civil servants, or literati of Imperial China, where
all schooled in Confucianism known as the School of Literati. In early
China the term refers to the class of people that went through traditional
Chinese education. There were sets of Chinese civil service
examinations, including Chinese literature and philosophy. Passing
the exam was a requirement for many government positions. These
individuals were the mandarins, and referred to those who held
government positions.
Zhu Yuanzhang 朱元璋
Ming founding emperor
Peasant, buddhist novice, rebel, warlord, emperor
Autocrat, legislator, tyrant,
Ming peace, prosperity and decline
Elite enjoyed life of pleasure leisure, avoiding official posts if possible
Connoisseurship; collecting; luxury/ exotic items gardens
Wang Yangming
心学 school of the mind
Rise of Merchant class
unprecedented wealth of merchants
Mid Ming Suzhou
Wealthy educated men of leisure, retired scholars avoiding service in capital
Scene and mond combined through image and text
Painting as social currency but also serious endeavour evoking friendship,
remembrance, philosophy, values, friendships
Shen Zhou
Early twisted dynamic forms and dry brushwork influence of 王蒙，黄公望， 吴镇
陈洪绶