Art History Chinese art E-Book

Stephen W. Bushell

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 62

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

As the centre of Far-Eastern art, China has always fascinated Westerners, who take an interest in its religious leaders and savants as much as in its artists. Sophisticated and mysterious, Chinese art has persistently developed for 10,000 years through unequalled talent, which long ago established its artistic preeminence. Admired and imitated by all, today Chinese paintings and porcelain are the timeless reminders of a decadent past which continues to astound people around the world. Dealing not only with architecture, sculpture and painting but also with bronze and porcelain, this text offers a complete panorama of Chinese arts and civilisation until the fall of the Empire in 1911.

Leseprobe

Stephen W. Bushell

Pierre Emmanuel Klingbeil

CHINESE ART

© 2024, Confidential Concepts, Worldwide, USA

© 2024, Parkstone Press USA, New York

© Image-Barwww.image-bar.com

All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world.

Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

ISBN: 979-8-89405-003-4

Contents

Introduction

Architecture

1. The Roof

2. Military

3. Civil

4. Funereal

5. Religious

Carving and Lapidary Arts

1. Carving

2. Lapidary Arts

Manufactured Materials

Porcelain

Pictorial Art

List of Illustrations

Child’s maroon satin dragon robe, early 19th c. Satin. Teresa Coleman Fine Art, Hong Kong.

Introduction

China has not remained as closed as it is said to have been. It mingled with other civilizations incessantly, to the point of producing mixed civilizations, as in Indo-China and in Tibet, for example. It knew the worlds that were the farthest removed from it. In the sixteenth century, after the Mongol conquest, Beijing was perhaps the most cosmopolitan and the most open city in the world. The Portuguese and the Venetians sent their merchants there, and artists and savants come from in India, from Persia, and even from western Europe.

Until Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China with its capital at Beijing on October 1, 1949, as far back as we look into the past of China, it seems not to have moved. The myth period of its life ends about the century of Pericles; the apogee of its vital power oscillates between the fifth and the fifteenth century of our era, its decline begins at the hour when the Occident is about to put its stamp on history.

Two principal forms which give the character to Chinese architecture can be traced back to their beginnings: the tent form, which was adopted from their Mongol conquerors, and appears in the typical pagoda in the form of the broad overhanging eaves, which divide its stories. The porcelain tower at Beijing is a famous example of this form of architecture. The second form of architecture was introduced with the worship of Buddha from India.

The old Venetian traveler Marco Polo describes Kuisai, the city of heaven, the Chinese wonder of the world. The king’s palace stood in a park ten miles in extent. The palace was enclosed by countless terraces shaded by golden roofs, resting on thousands of columns. Endless picture galleries, and a vast wealth of wood carving adorned it. Within lay a gigantic courtyard, paved with many colored marbles, from which through many arches charming views were opened of lakes and lawns and groves. Pavilions and bridges with semicircular arches richly painted, added brightness and gaiety to the scene. Every part, up to the loftiest roof, was decorated with the same minute care.

In painting, the Chinese excel rather by careful execution of details than by boldness of conception. The Chinese painter is not so much an artist as a craftsman; his work is purely decorative. Even the paintings on rice paper, which are the best-known examples of Chinese pictorial work, are quite decorative in feeling, they are worked up with wonderful care, and the execution is remarkably smooth. The painting on porcelain and the lacquer ware are the highest achievements of Chinese art.

It was scarcely before the Ming dynasty, in the fourteenth or in the fifteenth century that the Chinese painters looked closely at the birds, the fishes, and the flowers. Let us for the moment disregard the direct pure, and clear portraits whose candid penetrating glance astonishes us; let us also forget the embroidered screens and the decorative paintings with their tremulous movement that recalls the flutter of wings. We then perceive what the great painting of China is; it invades our spirit like a wave of music. It awakens intimate and vague sensations, impossible to seize, but of a limitless profundity. We cannot discern their origin or their end. The transformation is complete and constant. And through it, when the Chinese paints or rather evokes things like the depths of the ocean, he does it with a poetry so profound that it creates reality, the immensity of space is suggested. Space is the perpetual accomplice of the Chinese artist.

Juyong Pass, 15th c. 50 km northwest of Peking.

Anonymous, Qin Shi Huang, From a 19thc. Korean album, 19th c. Paper, Folio. British Museum, London.

Anonymous court artist, Portraits of the Kangxi Emperor in court dress (1662-1722), early 18th c. Hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk, 278 x 143 cm. Palace Museum, Peking.

From century to century, with the strange slowness that characterizes the activity of the Chinese, their painting, which had been taken into the service of the imperial court as soon as it left the monasteries, followed the evolution of their other means of expression. It turned to traditionalism, and did so with an obstinacy especially dangerous, since, if painting is to live, it must remain the most individual of all languages. Here it developed in an almost unbreathable atmosphere of formulas, of rules and canons which were written clown in twenty thousand works, codes, histories, lists of practitioners, titles of pictures, and technical treatises that transformed the art of painting into a kind of exact science and engendered thousands of imitators and plagiarists of an ability beyond belief.

Here we have at once the anchor that holds firm the soul of China and its pitfall. The architecture of luxury, the pagodas and the palaces, reveal this in the clearest light. Everything in them is preconceived and artificial, arranged for the demonstration of a certain number of immemorial rules of metaphysics and common sense. The faience and the enamel of the roofs, the blues, the greens, and the yellows, shining in the sun under the veil of dust always hanging over them, exist above all for the joy of the eyes, although each one of them symbolizes a meteorological phenomenon, or the forests, the plowed land, the waters, or some other strip of the earth’s robe.

But beneath the great need for unity and calmness, fetishism and magic patiently assert their rights. The placing of the edifice, the invariable uneven number of roofs superimposed on one another and turned up at the comers — a memory of Mongol tents— the little bells jingling at the slightest breeze, the monsters of terra cotta on the openwork cornices, the moral maxims painted everywhere, the scrolls of gilded wood, the whole mass of thorn bushes, arrises, crests, brisling and clawlike forms— everything shows how constantly the Chinese were concerned with attracting the genii of wind and water to the edifice and to the neighboring houses, or of keeping them away.