Craig Clunas' Art In China - Oxford Art History Series

A history of art for non-professionals should be about the professional lives of the artists, what their works were, why we should be interested, what technical challenges the artist faced and solved, what innovations they made, who the patrons were or if the works were speculative, and what symbolism and allusion we illiterate modern viewers will otherwise surely miss. Something about who owns the paintings would be interesting. None of this has to be lengthy: where the artist bought their paint, when they used canvas or jute or paper, what are the identifying marks of their brushstrokes, that sort of detail can be left to essays in specialist journals, or very expensive reference books. Provenances and previous sale prices are for a catalogue from Christie or Sotheby. A little colour may help, if the artist was imprisoned by some Italian Duke, or had to flee to Portugal to escape the French, or something like that.

This is not what a post-modern art-history will give us. Post-modern commentary makes everything about power, politics, gender, and class. This is shame, because it means the texts are almost identical up to the names of people, dates and places, from one period or style to the next. Art is for rich people. Artists were not given the respect and celebrity they deserved, except for (enter names here). Women’s contributions have been erased from the record, but they probably produced better art than the men. Contributions by non-Europeans also erased from the record because White Fragility and racisim. Western art bad, indigenous art good, especially if it satirises the Europeans. Portrayals of deviance, subversive and Good; portrayals of heterosexual pleasure, patriarchal, oppressive and Bad. You know the drill.

The Oxford Art History series is full of it, and I have no idea why I bought this volume. Maybe I was expecting more.

The further back in time we go, the more art is about statues, pottery, mosaics, jewellery and other solid things that last. What remains belongs to kings, princes, dukes, bishops, knights, and wealthy merchants. If there was any pop-culture, it has almost vanished, unless it was on pottery. This is rather convenient for a post-modernist: they get to hob-nob with the rich and powerful, all the while holding their noses delicately against the whiff of modern sins, at the same time overlooking the legal and economic conditions of feudalism, which a modern middle-class person would find intolerable, but our post-modern scholars, one suspects, would rather enjoy, since they fancy themselves the courtiers of the powerful. Every now and then a satirical illustration will turn up on a wall or a jug, and the post-modern scholar will rejoice at this sign of “resistance” if it is to “colonial” powers (“resistance” to the local feudal lord was altogether too risky for the resistor for any traces to be left for us to find).

Craig Clunas delicately protests at the idea of “Chinese Art” and insists that it is “Art made in China”. The phrase “Chinese Art” suggests that there is a large body of work made in China that follows some common conventions, and over a long period of time, up to (say) 1950 or so, when modern telecommunications and travel started to homogenise those parts of the cultural world that saw a profit in it. In this sense, there is undoubtedly “Chinese Art”: elegant calligraphy, virtuosic drawing in ink of scenes and items from nature, stylised faces, and - this is something I learned from the book - huge landscapes overwhelming an event of significance in the lives of the people… what people, oh, there, almost hidden in that little house. No or few flattering portraits of emperors and their concubines; no scenes of piety at a shrine, with the client kneeling in profile to one side, as were common in the medieval times in Europe; no commemorations of famous victories… or at least none have come survived.

Where are all the celebratory paintings? Why were Chinese rulers immune to the grandiosity of their European counterparts? What were the technical challenges of painting on silk, and why did paper replace it? Why the tiny figures in vast landscapes? Why the lack of colour? Why all the painfully restrained and elegant pale blues and black and white sketching? What was the purpose of the calligraphy and stamps on an image? Why do the stamps seem so carelessly placed compared to the positioning of the calligraphy? Why did calligraphy have such a pre-eminent position in courtly society?

These questions can be answered in a paragraph at most, but require more than a paragraph of research. That’s the scholar’s job: to reduce hours of painful research and understanding to a couple of hundred words we mere mortals can understand.

My suggestion is that, big as it may be, China simply did not have the diversity of farmland and hence of crops and animals that Europe had. It does not now. Thus it could not generate the excess profits needed to support a (literally) rich culture. Also, Emperor Xuando issued the Edict of Haijin in 1434 that almost closed off the country from the rest of the world. There were Westerners - often traders and missionaries in China, but their access and influence seems to have been very limited.

Clunas mentions that there were art critics and manuals, but never quotes any. Art is more than a collection of products, it is also a practice guided by theories, and those are interesting in their own right. We do not need a huge tome of translations of art critics, but some extracts would be informative. Today there are dozens of books in print about how to draw and colour, and probably far more classes. Before the 1800’s there were, even in the Western tradition, very few books by artists about how to carry on the practice, and those help us appreciate what we look at.

Some of the illustrations are quite good - this isn't a book of high-gloss reproductions - and if you know nothing about Chinese Art.... I'd still find another book.