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Feature: James Haddrell
THE British Museum has launched a series of
displays exploring the traditions and qualities of Chinese painting.
With subjects including birds, flowers, religion and figure painting
still to come, the series begins with landscape…
In the history of Western art the idea of painting a landscape
simply for its own sake is a relatively new one.
Over the centuries, European academies of art have maintained
a hierarchy of subject matter for artists, with grand scenes from
history or mythology usually appearing at the top.
While landscape painting remained entirely absent from this Western
hierarchy until the 17th Century, in Chinese culture landscapes
have existed at the top of the list since the Northern Song dynasty,
a dynasty from the turn of the last millennia.
The reason for this lies, at least in part, in the Chinese approach
to the natural world. The twin natural forms of mountains and
rivers, dominant in Chinese landscape painting, are not as distant
from humanity as is the case in the West.
They are not simply an arena in which mankind plays out its
various stories. Instead, they are seen to connect directly with
the two halves of human life – the mountain with the male
Yang and the river with the female Yin, the two halves of a harmonious
human existence.
The contemplation of mountains was also considered beneficial
to the Chinese soul, as the monumental rock formations exist in
close proximity to the heavens.
Where Western academics had devotional paintings of Biblical
scenes to aid meditation, Chinese artists had miniature mountains
in their studios, often made to order, occasionally found naturally
eroded to their pyramidal form.
One of the most striking things about the British Museum’s
Mountains And Water exhibition, aside from the
rare sight of large scale watercolours painted as much as 1,000
years old, is the way in which the landscapes dominate even the
apparently human stories.
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In the early 16th Century Taking
A Lute To Visit A Friend, or the more recent Washing
The Feet At Tiger Hill, at least 80% of the scenes are
filled with detailed landscape, with the titular events only discovered
on close analysis.
It becomes clear that this style of Chinese painting is designed
to be studied in each of its separate details, not absorbed as
a whole from a distance, and there is an unusual pleasure involved
in standing this close to a painting – not taking in the
overall composition at a glance, but reading the scene, following
the zig-zag path of the river up towards the sky.
The delivery of the lute, for example, is far from the whole
story – it is merely the place to start our own journey
up the mountain.
The relatively small collection of works on display makes it
almost impossible to chart an evolution of style over time, and
any attempt to do so is made even more difficult by the Chinese
tradition of imitating painters and styles from history, eliding
possible stylistic gaps between centuries.
Instead, in this exhibition, there is much more to be gained
from studying each painter and each work individually - from the
14th Century Ni Zan, who earned a reputation during his career
for using paint as sparingly as if it were gold, to the painter
of Taking A Lute To Visit A Friend, where a greater
depth of paint allows the trees to gradually appear from the mist.
Perhaps the most affecting painting is Wen Zhengming’s
Wintry Trees, a desolately imagined landscape of bare
trees. Painted in the 16th Century as a gift for a man who had
contributed to the funeral costs of the painter’s wife,
and lacking the soaring mountainous backdrop to raise the spirits,
it is this work which best demonstrates the uplifting nature of
the mountains everywhere else.
Standing close to read this painting, as the fine detail once
again encourages us to do, we find ourselves stranded, with no
river and no mountain to rescue us and carry us up to the heavens
above.
Many of the paintings on display in this exhibition were not
painted to be kept on permanent display, as is traditional in
the West, but on fragile scrolls in light sensitive water colours,
to be stored rolled up and brought out on special occasions.
This knowledge gives Mountains And Water itself
the feeling of a special occasion, a glimpse not only into the
history of Chinese art, but into the private, cherished moments
of the paintings’ former owners, before they are rolled
up and put away for another hundred years…
Mountains And Water: Chinese Landscape Painting
Until August 29, 2005
Room G91, British Museum, Great Russell Street, London.
020 7323 8000; www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk
Saturday-Wednesday, 10.00-17.30; Thursday-Friday, 10.00-20.30
Free entry
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