214
PAINTING AND GRAPHICS
ing scroll reproduced here, an inscription by the artist Wang Yuanqi indicates his admiration and emulation of two masters of the Yuan period whose styles he has attempted to combine in the painting. Dubosc suggests in an essay about his collection that what we might call the "citational" mode invoked by the inscriptions in Ming- and Qing-period paintings can be understood by means of a comparison to French painting of the nineteenth century. "We should remember," Dubose writes, "that Manet, in some of his most famous paintings, reproduced very exactly compositions by Vehizquez."19 That the question of copying or reproduction is central to the Chinese paintings that captured Benjamin's attention in the late 1930s points to a connection to the concerns of the artwork essay, while the citational mode of the calligraphic inscriptions suggests a link to the Arcades Project. Benjamin's thoughts on the paintings in the Bibliotheque Nationale exhibition culminate in his consideration of "an antinomy which finds its 'resolution' in an intermediary element that, far from constituting a balance [un juste milieu] between literature and painting, embraces intimately the point at which they appear most irreducibly opposednamely, thought and image" or, in French, "la pensee et l'image." Later in the review Benjamin uses the term image-pensee, which would seem to relate to the German Denkbild, a word he used to describe the genre of his own brief, meditative writings, and which is usually translated as image de pensee in French. Following the art historian Georges Salles and citing the Chinese term xieyi, Benjamin refers to the art of Chinese painting as "first and foremost the art of thinking" ("l'art de peindre est avant tout l'art de penser") or an "idea painting" ("peinture d'idee"), the latter a notion he associated, in less elevated terms, with Wiertz, whom he described in the "Little History of Photography" as an "ungainly painter of ideas" ("ungeschlachter Ideenmaler"). In the "ink-play" of the so-called "literati-artists," in which calligraphy figures prominently as a medium integral to Chinese painting, Benjamin discovers a capacity to impart to the marks that make up the image a fixity and stability that is also and at the same time fluid and changing. "Thinking, for the Chinese painter, means thinking by means of resemblance," he writes, invoking a modality of thought central to his own work, from his earliest writings on language to the essays "On the Mimetic Faculty" and "Doctrine of the Similar" (both 1933). And since "nothing is more fleeting than the appearance of a resemblance, the fleeting character and the imprint of variation of these paintings coincides with their penetration of the real. That which they fix never has