Art And Revolution In Modern China: The Lingnan (cantonese) School Of Painting, 1906-1951 (center For Chinese Studies, Uc Berkeley)

## List of Illustrations xiii \* First in John Fairbank, ed., Chinese Thought and Institutions (University of Chicago Press, 1957), 320-44, and subsequently as chap. 2, Confacian China and Its Modem Fate (University of California Press, 1958). ## xvi Acknowledgments And finally I come to the institutions that smoothed the way financially. The American Council of Learned Societies' role has already been mentioned. Later much appreciated financial assistance came from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Victoria Committee on Faculty Research and Travel. Canadian financing for a project started in the United States and researched mainly in China and Hong Kong-it seems a suitable mixture for a study of an art movement with such international and cosmopolitan characteristics. xviii Acknowledgments 3. Gao Jianfu in the uniform of the revolutionary army, 1911. (above, left) 2. Gao Jianfu with Cai Yuanpei at the artist's individual exhibition, Shanghai, 1936. (above right) 3. Gao Jianfu in his last years, Macao or Hong Kong, ca. 1950. (left) 4. Gao Qifeng in his mature years, probably during the 1920s. 5. Gao Qifeng in summer-weight scholar's robe, ca. 1930. This means that our concerns as scholars go beyond art history, nar-/ rowly defined. It is, of course, necessary to understand what they were trying to do as artists; for this, stylistic analysis is as important as literary sources. We must examine the Lingnan School's affinities with specific traditions in Chinese painting; the sources of foreign influence, Western and Japanese; and the technical problems of creating a new vocabulary for ink painting. Style is the language of art. To understand the artists' meaning, you must understand their language. Therefore, stylistic analysis is not a digression from these artists' place in the larger history of the era, but a way of clarifying it. The history and the art history come together in their lives. Both are needed to assess the Lingnan School's historical significance. It may seem like a commonplace to stress the integration of history and art history. All artists are part of the history of their times, although few have been so directly involved in public events as the founders of the Lingnan School. Similarly, art historians cannot work without a thorough understanding of the larger historical milieu, and historians must understand the value of art as a broadly illuminating part of the record for any historical era. Unfortunately, this has not usually been the case, especially for modern China, and, until recently, for history in general. Writing in 1973, Theodore Rabb, editor of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, lamented the distance between historians and art historians, especially the historians' reluctance to venture past the written record and look at artistic artifacts as part of total history. 1 Eleven years later, finding the situation changing in European history with the appearance of works like The Building of Renaissance Florence by the historian Richard Goldthwaite and Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Painting by the art historian Jonathan Brown, Rabb optimistically forecast "a great surge of a new form of interdisciplinary research." 2 This surge has not yet reached China, although, in earlier Chinese studies, a few waves are lapping at the shore. 3 This might seem strange, given the interdisciplinary background to so much of China studies in the West and the important role that art, particularly painting, played in China's high culture. However, in the study of modern China disciplinary specialization has eroded most of the old sinological tradition with its holistic approach to the field. More serious, a chronological as well as a disciplinary gap has opened between historians and art historians. Most of the latter have confined their serious scholarship to the high periods of Chinese art in the past, when it was unsullied by foreign influences or modern political pressures, while in China the political sensitivity of the recent past has inhibited serious research. 4 As for the much larger number of Western historians and social scientists who study modern China, most have not had much taste for the more abstruse parts of China's cultural tradition. Modern Chinese literature, mostly fiction, has achieved recognition for its relevance to the dynamics of modern social, political, and intellectual change. 5 But art, apparently one step further removed from social and political issues, has not received the same attention. The art historians are in Ming; the historians are into Mao. Meanwhile, modern Chinese art-the art of the twentieth-century revolution and of the period of East-West cultural confrontation-has awaited serious and integrated historical study. This is not to claim priority for art in the study of modern Chinese history or to pretend that it has been in the forefront of the cultural and intellectual revolution. Generally speaking, it has not. In the assimilation of Western influences, painting, in particular, lagged well behind political thought, social philosophy, serious literature, or urban popular culture. Why this has been so is only partly our problem, because in its early stages the Lingnan School was a notable exception to this rule. But, even where art has been conservative in the general cultural milieu, it still illuminates the tensions, problems, and atmosphere of its time. The general reputation for conservatism, for repetition or stagnation, is one of the main reasons that Qing and post-Qing art have been relatively little studied by art or cultural historians in China. Actually, Qing-period painting was probably neither so repetitive nor so devoid of innovation as many modern critics charge. It has received a bad press from modern Chinese nationalists and Western-centered historians of China. In fact, the late seventeenth century saw an explosion of creative talent that still echoes in the twentieth-century Chinese art world. 6 However, according to its modern critics, that has been the problem for the long and complex tradition of Chinese painting-too many echoes of previous periods, too much "after the manner of" earlier fnasters, too many subtle nuances within an accepted cultural tradition, and too few stimuli for change, a fresh look at the world, and new ways to express it. Opportunities to absorb new techniques and a new approach to art were not entirely lacking. In the late Ming and early Qing, Jesuit missionaries brought illustrated books, engravings, oil paintings, and even oil painters to China. This exposure to post-Renaissance European art, with its illusionistic techniques of fixed perspective, chiaroscuro, and shaded coloring, may have influenced some of the individualistic masters of the seventeenth century more than Chinese artists admitted or, until recently, later scholars recognized. 7 But, even if this earlier chapter of East-West contact produced something of greater artistic significance than the hybrid Chinese-Western style of the Jesuit court painter Giussepe Castiglione (also known by his Chinese name, Lang Shining) and his followers, it did not seriously deflect cultural and intellectual history, is the more subtle tension between nation and region. Revolution versus tradition, nation versus region-in a sense these are the warp and woof of all modern history as the juggernaut of technological and social change rolls over ancient empires, traditional societies, and local communities everywhere. But there are several reasons why the interplay between these two themes has been particularly complex and particularly important for modern China. To begin with, although the vast extent of the Chinese empire made for wide differences among its nation-sized constituent provinces, a literate high culture of unparalleled antiquity and continuity transcended those regional differences and helped hold China together. When that culture and the gentry-mandarin class that embodied it came under assault by modern revolutionaries, there was the danger that China would fall apart along regional lines. During the warlord years of the early twentieth century, that nearly happened as modern political and social revolutionaries struggled desperately to create new forces of national unity to replace the old ones they had helped destroy. In essence, creating a modern nation required overcoming both cultural conservatism and regional particularism-overcoming, but not obliterating, because even the most radical revolutionaries found that traditional cultural and regional characteristics did not simply fade away when faced with the imperatives of modernization. Instead, reshaped by modern nationalist ideology and a new social consciousness, these old elements were essential ingredients for building the new nation. From Sun Yat-sen to Mao Zedong and beyond, modern Chinese leaders have grappled with these issues in the cultural and intellectual as well as the political sphere. One purpose of this book is to show how the interaction between tradition and revolution, region and nation, has also manifested itself in modern Chinese art. And for that purpose the Lingnan School is particularly relevant precisely because of its regional character. These are artists who were political and artistic revolutionaries, yet felt strong ties to the traditional culture and sought to preserve the best of it in a new creative synthesis. They are provincials who, with new Western ideas and artistic techniques, sought to take the lead in remaking the national culture. Their story is an important part of the history of modern China's efforts to establish a new political, artistic, and cultural identity. \* Literally, the term means "painting life" but, although that did lead to some emphasis on directly studying the object to be painted, it did not always mean "painting from life" or "from nature." The Japanese Connection 27. Gao Qifeng, Autumn Eagle, n.d. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988. Ralph Croizier. Includes Index. Bibliography: P. 189-217.