sign in sign up
<<
Home , Lin Fengmian

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Note: you are reading an excerpt from: James Elkins, “Failure in Twentieth-Century Painting” (unpublished MS) Revised 9.2001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, , , , and some : 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 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 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 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. Few Western painters have gotten very close to Chinese painting, but some Chinese painters have traveled all the way to the West, and joined the many artists who orbit around Michelangelo and other central figures. In China this question demands more attention, and makes critics and artists more anxious, than it does in the West. There is still uncertainty and debate over whether Dong Qichang, a central figure in the Chinese tradition, might have strayed a little because of the influence of Western prints. Gong Xian, a slightly later painter, seems obviously Western to some viewers, and purely Chinese to others; and even now, nearly three centuries after his death, the question sparks intense discussion. Chinese historians occasionally defend some early- and mid- twentieth-century Chinese painters for the same reason—in order to save them from the charge of Western influence. Among twentieth-century painters Pan Tianshou is generally thought of as purely Chinese, but there is reason to say that some of his compositions are influenced by the West. Huang Binhong’s work raises similar questions: Chinese viewers tend to see it as purely Chinese, but there is evidence that the artist himself acknowledged the influence of Western chiaroscuro and three-dimensionality. Other stars have strayed even further. Gao Jianfu painted Western-style compositions using some traditional Chinese brushstrokes. Wu Zuoren painted Western style travel scenes in a vaguely N. C. Wyeth style, suffused with exoticism. ’s paintings are Western in technique, composition, anatomy, and chiaroscuro, and only Chinese in their narrative subjects and some incidental decoration. Lin Fengmian, often considered a model of East-West mixtures, appears to Part Two – 5 – 10: Lacking a unified style me as a minor painter of the period between the wars; he borrows pallid, decorative motifs from painters like Matisse and Dufy, and models them with watered-down versions of Chinese inkbrush strokes. Lin Fengmian returned to China, while other artists such as Zao Wuqi stayed on in Europe, becoming increasingly assimilated. Yet in China, even Zao Wuqi excites admiration as a Chinese painter—though his paintings are nearly indistinguishable from Parisian versions of abstract . Zao Wuqi’s work is a model for many others. The more time Chinese expatriates spend in the west, the more they adopt western styles wholesale, and trust their Chinese heritage to provide the Chinese elements in their work. Earlier I mentioned Xie Bin, a “fifth-generation” abstract expressionist who lives in Paris. His father Xie Jing-chien was born in Beijing, and does more obviously western style paintings of birds and flowers, in the loose watercolor style inaugurated for China by Lin Fengmian.2 The two are a paradigm of the generations of mid- and late-twentieth century Chinese expatriates. The galaxy schema has the virtue of showing how painters have risked losing, and how some have lost, the center of gravity provided by their native traditions. The schema also hints at the reason why Westerners feel relatively little anxiety when they contemplate non-Western influence on Western art, while Chinese artists and historians continue to be troubled by suggestions of Western influence. Michael Sullivan makes this point well when he stresses how such things as the rendering of “transient effects such as cast shadows” can cumulatively produce an “attack [on the] very essence” of Chinese painting.3 Even the question of Gong Xian remains a prickly one: chiaroscuro is taken as a deeper threat to the Chinese tradition than decorative Chinoiserie was to eighteenth-century French painting. Chinoiserie was a harmless diversion for the aristocracy; Gong Xian’s chiaroscuro (if it was Western) was a crack in the dike of Chinese visual culture. Boucher was just having fun; Gong Xian was undermining the foundations of his own tradition. Even in the late twentieth century, the question of whether or not Gong Xian was inspired by Western prints was very serious; some talks on the subject that I heard sounded more like the trials of a traitor than the assessment of a painter long dead. It can be an interesting excercise to redraw the picture so it conforms to your own ideas of proximity and distance. (Many Chinese readers, I guess, would prefer to relocate my sequence of twentieth-century Chinese painters significantly closer to the Chinese galaxy.) Yet the picture also has an important drawback, because it fails to capture the dissonance that is created whenever the two styles are mixed. If cultures behave like galaxies, then they can exchange painters readily, with no obstructions. In actual practice, however, the further an artist strays from his or her accustomed tradition, the more the work begins to fight with itself. It’s important to find a way to think about that internal strife, and when I have lectured on this subject in China I have adopted a second schema (Plate ). In each of these five models, China is on the left, and the West is on the right. I am Part Two – 6 – 10: Lacking a unified style imagining them as blood vessels or pipes: art comes up from the past, and it is redirected and combined so that it can move into the future. In the first model, Chinese painters take something from the Western tradition and use it to augment their own painting. Western art continues on a separate path, but part of it has been diverted and added to the stream of Chinese painting. Gao Qifeng proposed such a course of action early in the twentieth century when he said Chinese painters should “assimilate everything that is good” in the Western tradition, and then “move ahead,” in order not to find themselves “pushed backward.”4 His word, “assimilate,” is a crucial one: it supposes that things can be taken from the West and blended with indigenous forms. Gao Qifeng also spoke of “absorbing” the best parts of Western practice, and “carefully integrating them”: the same language that is used today for people, rather than paintings—and with the same mixed results. The second model does just that: as Kang Youwei said in 1912, Chinese artists should “integrate Chinese and Western” painting.5 Here again, there is no difficulty in blending the two traditions: they simply fuse. It is no accident that Kang Youwei admired Castligione; to believe in this kind of model it is also necessary to think that mere proximity will ensure a the effective unity of the two traditions. Nor is it surprising that Xu Beihong took Kang Youwei as a model for the future of Chinese painting. The third model is a variant in which the two traditions have to be pruned a little before they can be brought together. Here the Chinese tradition loses its literati painters and becomes a tradition made up more exclusively of professional painters skilled in realism. The Western tradition, likewise, loses its postimpressionists, cubists, and other modernists who were uninterested in naturalism. The purified parts of the two traditions then come together, forming a newly strengthened realism. This model is the one implied in Xu Beihong’s writing: take out the useless non-mimetic elements, and let both traditions work together on realism. As Lang Shaojun puts it, “Xu believed that Ming and Qing painting declined because artists neglected realism, just as modern Western art deteriorated when it rejected the classical tradition.”6 The fourth model is a combination of the first three. The idea, first proposed by Chen Duxiu in 1917, is to excise literati painting from the Chinese tradition, and then take the best of Western painting. Lin Fengmian proposed a system of this sort for the National Society: To introduce Western art; To reform traditional art; To reconcile Chinese and Western art; To create contemporary art.7 Part Two – 7 – 10: Lacking a unified style

Points two and three call for blendings, or mixtures, and the fourth point calls for fusion—a single new contemporary art, neither Western nor non-Western. The fifth model is the one proposed in the work of Huang Binhong and Pan Tianshou. Their idea is that each tradition should study the other, but refrain from borrowing anything. In practice, it is not possible to know about a kind of painting without feeling its effects; but Huang Binhong’s idea is to avoid intentionally importing some part of another tradition. Whether or not Huang Binhong and Pan Tianshou followed their own advice is another matter; what matters in this instance is that their position amounts to a fifth possibility. These models can easily proliferate. After my lectures and in seminars, Chinese critics have sometimes drawn me more schemata; a few look like sailors’ knots or diagrams from some engineering textbook. Yet I think these five capture the range of twentieth-century Chinese theorizing fairly well. The question in models one through four is the exact nature of the blending. Are the Eastern and Western streams going to remain clearly separate? Or are they going to mix so perfectly that they cannot be distinguished? I have added three details to help clarify these possibilities. The first one (bottom row, letter “a”) shows two traditions that have pressed together but have not merged. That is what happens, for example, in my imaginary painting that juxtaposes Matisse and Mi Fu. In my experience, this is far and away the most frequent kind of East-West mixture. Countless paintings blend easily nameable elements, plucked from very different times and places. A book called Artists of Chinese Origin in North America Directory offers an encyclopedic tour of the possiblities.8 For example, many artists have transported Chinese bird and flower painting to oils and acrylics, producing mixtures of Chinese compositions with Audubon, Roger Tory Peterson, Luiz Agassiz, and other natural history painters. The Directory gives examples of Chinese goldfish by Cheng-Khee Chee, and transparent meadowlarks in a field of irises by Aikang Cheng. Dan Qing Chen, an artist from Shanghai, is represented by a triptych that juxtaposes Chinese political events with pastiches of Caravaggio. John Chen populates Song landscapes with whimsical floating figures à la Chagall. Mozhi Chen, also from Shanghai, sets geometric structures in the style of Klee or Kandinsky against wet-brush Chinese landscapes. The Directory also includes William Fang’s Picture of Marilyn Monroe, a version of the famous photograph where she pushes her skirt down against a gust of wind, this time painted in a very free, Zen-like brushstroke as if Marilyn were a famous Zen monk, or a tangle of chrysanthemums and vines. The opposite tendency also occurs, where the paintings are more Chinese than Western: there are Chinese painters, for example, who make inkbrush paintings of landscapes, cats, deer, horses, and other animals in Western perspective, and using Western compositions. They are the descendents of Xu Beihong and Castiglione, and their pictures create the same stylistic clashes. Some of the Part Two – 8 – 10: Lacking a unified style most successful mixtures of this kind are made by artists who are aware of the jarring difference between the two kinds of picture-making. Wei Dong (b. 1968) reprises Castiglione by painting traditional Qing and Ming landscapes, and plonking giant surrealist figures down on them. Mong Landscape–Body Temperature (1995) is a landscape with three partly undressed women, one of them bound and gagged, a second in military gear, and a third holding a thermometer.9 Their skin is corrugated like Ivan Albright’s figures, and they are spotted with calligraphic seals. The marks that make up the landscape are Chinese, and the marks that comprise the figures are Western: Castiglione’s problem. The second kind of mixture, represented in Plate [ ] by the letter “b,” occurs when the Chinese and Western forms are not put together collage-fashion, but are blended in one and the same brushstroke. Among artists I have mentioned, Gao Jianfu is an interesting example: his marks are sometimes undecidably European and Chinese. The Directory offers several examples, such as a painting by the Beijing artist Che Chuang, who makes abstract expressionist canvases with a Chinese landscape “feel.” His is an especially common stylistic choice, shared by Zao Wuqi, Chu Teh-chun, and other “third-generation” abstract expressionists. The Chinese elements in such a work vary from inch to inch. Some marks might be more Chinese, and others less so. This is, in general, an intriguing and successful option. Qigu Jiang, a Shanghai artist, makes inkbrush bird- and-flower paintings that have some Western, and some Chinese, plants (Plate ). One leaf might be painted in a traditional manner taken directly from Xu Wei or from the 18th c. Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, and the next leaf might be taken from any number of naturalistic Western painters, from Constable to Matisse.10 Mao Lizi’s (b. 1950) Vandalised Mural: Buddha (1991) looks like a photographic detail of a wall painting, with lovely scratches and abrasions, and a stenciled red Mao face superimposed on the Buddha. He calls his paintings “bizarre and humorous,” and they are also sad.11 In the terms I am proposing here, Mao Lizi’s painting is a fusion of east and west—but only because it renounces Chinese brushtrokes in favor of western photorealism. There are many paintings, too, where the Chinese element is nearly absent, and the viewer has to discern a Chinese flavor or Chinese feeling. Zao Wuqi’s paintings are sometimes like that: by working firmly within the Western tradition of gestural abstraction, he risks erasing the Chinese element entirely. The opposite also occurs: there are painters who make traditional, Northern Song- style landscapes with Western-style brushmarks. The practices are often interesting, but they risk being wholly Chinese even when they set out to be mixtures of West and East. The final option is that the Chinese and Western elements be blended completely, leaving no trace of their respective origins (as in Plate , letter “c”). The problem with this option is that it virtualy always involves the erasure of either the Chinese or the Western elements in a painting. In Part Two – 9 – 10: Lacking a unified style that category is a painting by Shang Huang which could be mistaken for a Vlaminck (though it was painted in 1990), one by Liang Hong Feng that might be part of Hockney’s swimming pool series (except that it shows a diver in midair from directly behind, legs splayed in an unintentionally pornographic way), and a painting by T. F. Chen called Everlasting Cry for Freedom that resembles a Rauschenberg collage painting, with its verbatim copies of Guernica and Chagall, and the news photo of a man standing in front of a row of tanks, all presided over by a huge face of the State of Liberty, wearing sunglasses. Like Shang Huang’s and Liang Hong Feng’s, T. F. Chen’s painting is a Western picture that happened to be made by a Chinese artist. It is not for one person to decide what works best among these different schemata. My personal preference is twofold: I find I am attracted to work that attempts not to cross the traditions, as in the fifth schema; and when the work does mix East and West, I am most interested in paintings that effect a partial fusion, as in the schema I have marked “b.” I care most about work that tries to create new unities, and I tend to find disunified juxtapositions of East and West transparently obvious. Juxtapositions are also too easy: anyone can do them, but only a few people can forge deeper connections between Eastern and Western painting.

[ sections omitted ]

* At the beginning of his Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China, Michael Sullivan remarks that some of the illustrations he has chosen are not first-rate works of art. “If [this] were a book about masters and masterpieces,” he says, “it would be illustrated mostly with paintings in the traditional Chinese style, for even the least original of them is technically pleasing to the eye.”12 It’s an interesting comment, because it implies that traditional Chinese painting cannot fail as radically or unpleasantly as Western painting. Even when it is attacked “in its very essence” by such things as Western naturalism, Chinese art can rely on its tradition to cushion itself against abject failure. Sullivan doesn’t say any more about this, and I do not want to make too fine a point of it: but it raises the possibility that some kinds of art may not ever fall as far as others. Both radical failure and the radical denial of failure (in Duchamp’s practice) might be intrinsic to the Western tradition. It seems important to me to take this as seriously as possible. After all, failure was construed very differently in the Western middle ages, before the era of art. Utter failure, humiliation, abjection, and embarrassment are probably all embedded in the post-Renaissance Western concept of fine art. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea has a provocative chapter on the Part Two – 10 – 10: Lacking a unified style

“vulgarity” in Hans Hofmann’s notion of . In Clark’s view, Hofmann felt that serious abstract expressionism needed to be at continuous risk, and the risk had to be total. The unavoidable risk—and finally, one of the necessary goals—of truly committed gestural abstraction is the continuous possibility of producing abysmal works, works that fail so terribly that they cannot be experienced as abstract expressionism (they become, in the usual mismatched alternatives, pieces done by five-year-old chirlden, or wallpaper). Beauty and virtuosity have to be utterly jeopardized in order for the project to move forward: a lesson that has been ignored by the later generations of abstract painters. For other painters of Hofmann’s generation, things looked different: but I take Clark’s sense of Hofmann’s project as a talisman of what is sometimes necessary, and of how deeply failure can be lodged in painting: so deeply that it isn’t seen, and people think minor shortcomings are real failures.

Notes to Part II, Chapter 8

1 See my essay “Style,” Grove Dictionary of Art (New York: MacMillan, 1996). 2 Xie Jing-chien and Xie Bin, exh., La Galerie Arcima, Paris, July 1998. 3 Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), p. xxx [ÖÖ] 4 Lang Shaojun, “Traditional Chinese Painting in the Twentieth Century,” in Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting, edited by Richard Barnhart (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 307. 6 Lang Shaojun, “Traditional Chinese Painting in the Twentieth Century,” 317. 7 Quoted in Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China, op. cit., 48. 8 Artists of Chinese Origin in North America Directory (Westmont, Illinois: Point Gallery, 1993). 9 Illustrated in Reckoning with the Past: Contemporary Chinese Painting, with essays by Graeme Murray, Chang Tsong-zung, John Clark, and Yan Shanchun (Edinburgh: The Fruitmarket Gallery, 1996), 36-38. [Wei Dong] 11 Reckoning with the Past, op. cit., 97. [Mao Lizi] 12 Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), p. xxvii.