Unified Style

8 L a c k i n g a u n i fi e d s t y l e Note: you are reading an excerpt from: James Elkins, “Failure in Twentieth-Century Painting” (unpublished MS) Revised 9.2001 This page was originally posted on: www.jameselkins.com Send all comments to: [email protected] A painter who lacks all style, who is compelled to mimic others, is unoriginal: the subject of Chapter 3. It is a different matter to be unable to find a voice, a manner, or a consistent approach, so that it’s necessary work work by cobbling together different styles. Stylistic mixture was frequently a deliberate strategy in twentieth-century painting, for example in cubist collage, dada, surrealism, pop art, and some postmodernism: but in the majority of cases a lack of unity remains the inevitable sign of beginner’s painting. When a student painter hasn’t found a voice, she will try different things, sampling one and then another, until eventually (hopefully, in graduate school) something emerges that ties the work together, and a unified style emerges—it’s a mysterious accomplishment, one that is not prone to clear analysis.1 Outside the West, lack of unified style is a serious problem, not only because intentionally disunified styles such as surrealism tend to be less popular, but because each artist has to face the problem of bringing their own country’s art into some reapprochement with aspects of Western painting. In this chapter I consider disunified painting in several regions of Asia: China, India, Japan, and the Central Asian Republics. Afterward I look at Part Two – 2 – 10: Lacking a unified style some vexed cases of Western painting, where disunity might have been actively sought and unity expertly avoided. Unhappy mixtures of styles in modern Chinese painting Arguably, the combination of Western and non-Western forms is one of the most difficult problems facing non-Western painters in the twentieth century. It is more difficult to make a successful mixture of Western and non-Western forms than it is to achieve compelling realism, or move a style forward, or even forge an individual voice. It is harder because many painters have mastered a degree of realism or found their places in some avant-garde: but in China, in the last four hundred years since Western influence has become widespread, there have been virtually no successful mixtures of Western and non-Western forms. The problem is that the two traditions can seldom be put together to make a unified work. The painting almost always falls apart into two halves. It is a deceptive problem, because the painting may look unified when it is made: historically, painters and their critics have not always perceived the hetereogeneity of the works. Time and again, painters think they have achieved some viable union of Western and non-Western forms, only to find that as time passes, their synthesis distintegrates. It is an oil-and-water problem: Western and Chinese elements can be mixed, but like olive oil and wine in a vinaigrette, they spontaneously dissociate into separate layers. From a painter’s point of view, a lovely cloud might be nothing more than a lovely cloud: but from the perspective of history, the cloud belongs to some specific tradition. Perhaps it is a sinuous Persian cloud from a Safavid painting; or maybe it is a rounded scroll-like cloud from an Olmec relief, or even a swirling vortex created from a digitized image in Photoshop. Whatever the origin, the cloud carries its history with it. This is sometimes a hard lesson for artists, who want to imagine they can take elements at will from different cultures. It might seem that the cloud can be plucked at random from history, with no consequences. But sooner or later, the painting will be seen by people who know more of the history, and then the cloud will declare its allegiance to a particular historical tradition. Because this is a situation common to many different contexts, let me put it in hypothetical terms. Say I paint a landscape using the beautiful faint looping clouds that were made famous by the 11th c. Chinese painter Mi Fu (plate --). I might think of them as nothing more than “formal choices”—that is, things I have picked because of their shapes, and not their historical affiliations. And let’s say that I paint a figure in this landscape, something inspired by the paper cutouts Matisse made in the last years of his life. Matisse’s figures have gentle curves with sharp points, so they look compatible with Mi Fu’s clouds. I may well think that I have produced a workable amalgam of East and West. Part Two – 3 – 10: Lacking a unified style But consider what happens when the work is exhibited, and people begin to take it seriously. A Chinese viewer trained in inkbrush painting will think of the whole tradition of literati painting, from the Southern Song Dynasty to the present. The Mi Fu-style clouds will conjure a long and complicated history; they will refer to China’s deep past, and to the difficulties of keeping that past alive. A Western observer versed in modernism will think of Matisse’s cutouts, and of related streams of Western modernism from the 1920’s onward. The gentle curves will remind such an observer of many moments in Matisse’s career and in the works of his contemporaries, such as Picasso’s Peace Dove and Dufy’s airy landscapes. The associations will differ with each viewer: but every viewer will sense some history, and the picture will refer to two very separate traditions. The salient fact is that each form brings its history in tow. No form exists outside history, because historical examples are what give it meaning. In that sense, there is no such thing as pure form (or “significant form,” in Clive Bell’s phrase). Forms are like the engine cars of long trains: each one brings the weight of a long tradition along with it. I don’t mean that the ideal viewer of a painting is an historian trained in the relevant traditions; but rather that viewing itself is an historical activity. In the earlier history of Chinese painting the most famous example of the inevitable disintegration of dissimilar styles is the Italian Jesuit painters Giuseppe Castiglione (plate ). He traveled to China, learned Chinese language and painting, and had a successful career as a court painter. In 20th c. China he remained very well known, and several generations of painters have taken him as a model of combined Eastern and Western elements. His trademark paintings depict Western-style horses, painted in a strong, convincing chiaroscuro, set Chinese-style landscapes. The horses look plump and healthy, in the Chinese fashion, but they are rendered in a way that is entirely alien to the indigenous history of Chinese horse painting. Castiglione’s landscapes are not untouched by Western elements, but they mainly follow Ming and Ching Dynasty landscape painting. Castiglione’s paintings have often been judged to be successful, but only, as far as I know, by Chinese viewers. When one of his paintings now held by the Palace Museum in Taipei toured the United States a few years ago, I heard visitors laughing at it. The idea of painting a Chinese landscape and filling it with Western horses seemed ludicrous, even to viewers who were only discovering Chinese painting for the first time. How could bulky, solid-looking hor ses possibly exist in the ethereal setting of an inkbrush landscape? Wouldn’t they plunge right through the ground? And how could a real horse live off of flat Chinese grass? This sense of absurdity may seem extreme, but it is exactly what is at stake in many mixtures of Western and non-Western art. The failure rate is very high. This is not a problem that can be solved by a formula, and there is no adequate account of the way that such mixtures might Part Two – 4 – 10: Lacking a unified style work. In thinking about this, I have sometimes imagined the East and West as two galaxies, each one with millions of painters, like stars (Plate ). Each galaxy has its central artists, the ones that are at the core of the galaxy: in the West, artists like Michelangelo and Raphael; in China, artists like Wang Wei and Li Cheng. The majority of painters orbit those central figures, following well-worn paths. Astronomers have found that when galaxies pass one another in space—a random event, one that doesn’t mean the two have some affinity for one another—they begin to distort. The gravitational attraction sets up tidal waves in each galaxy, pulling it out of its accustomed shape. A few stars even begin to leave the fold of their native galaxy, traveling out into space, forming “streamers” that connect the two galaxies. Some stars make it all the way to the other galaxy, and others go part way, and then are recaptured. In this model Western artists (in the galaxy at the lower left) have been feeling the pull of Chinese art since the eighteenth century, when Chinoiserie was a fad in Europe. Later, the impressionists, postimpressionists, and fin-de-siècle artists like Whistler went a little further toward the East (especially toward Japan, which I have not drawn here). The West has also felt the pull of even more distant galaxies, as I’ve indicated at the bottom: Picasso and Braque were drawn, briefly, to African art; and later twentieth-century artists such as Nancy Spero, Ana Medieta, and Joseph Beuys tried to recapture the flavor of prehistoric art.

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