The making of a modern art world institutionalisation and legitimisation of guohua in republican sha
The Making of a Modern Art World Institutionalisation and Legitimisation of Guohua in Republican Shanghai
Pedith
Pui Chan
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The Making of A Modern Art World
Institutionalisation and Legitimisation of Guohua in Republican Shanghai
By Pedith Pui Chan
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover Image: “A view of the opening of the Chinese Painting Exhibition, Paris,” Dushu guwen, 3 (1934), p. 10.
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Names: Chan, Pedith Pui, author.
Title: The making of a modern art world : institutionalisation and legitimisation of guohua in republican Shanghai / by Pedith Pui Chan. Description: Boston : Brill, 2017 . | Series: China studies ; Volume 37 | Revision of the author’s thesis (doctoral—University of London, 2009 ) under the title: The making of a modern art world : the institutionalisation of guohua in Shanghai, 1929 –1937 . | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016051519 (print) | LCCN 2016056973 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004338098 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9789004338104 (E-book)
Subjects: LCSH : Art and society—China—Shanghai—History—20 th century. | Art—Economic aspects—China—Shanghai—History—20 th century. | Art—China—Shanghai—Societies, etc.
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Acknowledgements vii
List of Figures ix
1 Introduction: The Hierarchy of Shanghai’s Art World 1
2 Institutionalisation as Practice: Societies, Periodicals, and Colleges 28
3 The Appropriation of New Cultural Capital: Art Exhibitions 119
4 The Business of Art: The Art Market 186
5 Conclusion 260
Appendix 1 Biographical Notes 269
Appendix 2 Art Societies Established during the Years 1929–1936 288
Appendix 3 Art Periodicals Established during the Years 1929–1936 294
Appendix 4 Survey of Exhibitions held during the Years 1919–1937 301
Appendix 5 Prices for 4-foot Landscape Paintings in the Hall Scroll Format during the Years 1929–1937 322
Bibliography 328
Index 350
Acknowledgements
This book could not have been possible without the contributions of many individuals and institutions. First of all, my heartfelt thanks go to my PhD supervisor, Craig Clunas who has played different roles in my academic journey, serving as a counsellor, mentor, devil’s advocate, and source of inspiration. He has broadened my intellectual horizons, setting a scholarly model for me to follow. For their love and trust, I wish especially to thank Mayching Kao and Harold Mok, for their continued encouragement and support. I also wish to acknowledge many scholars who have given me advice at different stages of my research: Michel Hockx, Nick Pearce, Timon Screech, Wan Qingli, Kuiyi Shen, John Carpenter, Julia Andrews, Yeewan Koon, and two anonymous reviewers of the book manuscript.
I am also indebted to the directors and staff of the Shanghai Library, Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, Duoyun Studio, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Shanghai Museum, and Shanghai Municipal Archives. My heartfelt thanks go out to Xiong Yuezhi, Lu Fusheng, Zhang Chunji, and Wang Zheng for their generous help and professional suggestions. I am especially grateful to Wang Zhongxiu, who generously shared his rare and precious material with me, and to the collectors Michael Yun-Wen Shih and Steward Wong for their generosity in allowing me to access their valuable collections of modern Chinese painting. Their comments were insightful and helpful.
The project was funded at different stages by grants from the Chiang Chingkuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, the Great BritainChina Educational Trust, the University of London Scholarship Fund, SOAS Scholarship Committee, the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong SAR , China (Project No. 154712), and the Publication Subvention Fund, Faculty of Arts, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Earlier versions of parts of the book have been published in Modern China and The Transcendence of the Arts in China and Beyond: Approaches to Modern and Contemporary Art. I am grateful to the publishers for allowing materials to be reprinted in a revised form: “The Institutionalization and Legitimatization of Guohua: Art Societies in Republican Shanghai”, Modern China 39:5 (Sept, 2013), 511–540, and “Art in the Marketplace: Taste, Sale, and Transformation of Guohua in Republican Shanghai”, in Rui Oliveira Lopes ed. The Transcendence of the Arts in China and Beyond: Approaches to Modern and Contemporary Art (Lisbon: Centro de Investigacao e Estudos em Belas-Artes (CIEBA ), Universidade de Lisboa: 2013), 72–104. My profound thanks also go to Anita Dawood and Caddie Lau who have assisted me in editing and formatting the manuscript, and Qin Higley
Victoria Menson and Michael J. Mozina, my editors at BRILL , who have worked patiently with me through the process.
My work would have been much more stressful and difficult without the friendship and support of prayers. I would like to convey my thanks to brothers and sisters from my fellowship. I also wish to thank my fellow graduate students at SOAS and colleagues: Sandy Ng, Yujen Liu, Yuping Luk, Vivian Lee, and Kwon Hyuk-chan, for their sound advice and friendship. My deepest debt of gratitude is to my family. My parents and sister have given me their endless love and wholehearted support. I also thank my husband, Wai Bong—whose commitment to me in spite of hardship and adversity, whose love and patience with me during these many years, and whose faith in God in the face of challenges and difficulties have sustained and upheld me. Finally, I owe my greatest thanks to God for His unfailing love and care, which continues to give me the courage, strength, and passion necessary to face all the challenges in my life.
List of Figures
1.1 Cover of Cixue jikan, 1.1 (1933) 15
2.1 Portrait of Hongwei jushi, Mifeng, issue 3 (1930) 47
2.2 Cover of Zhongguo xiandai minghua huikan (Shanghai, 1935) 59
2.4 Directory of the Painting Association of China, Zhongguo huahui huiyuan lu (Shanghai, 1936) 61
2.5 Cover of Meizhan, issue 1 (1929) 68
2.6 Cover of Meizhou, issue 9 (1929) 68
2.7 Cover of Mifeng, issue 1 (1930) 73
2.8 Portrait of Wang Yiting, Mifeng, issue 2 (1930) 75
2.9 Portrait of Feng Wenfeng, Mifeng, issue 9 (1930) 75
2.10 Portrait of Gu Qingyao, Mifeng, issue 14 (1930) 76
2.11 Ni Tian’s Portrait of Xue Daikuai, Mifeng, issue 2 (1930), p. 15 81
2.12 Landscape by Shitao, Mifeng, issue 1 (1930), p. 3 82
2.13 Paintings by members of the Bee Society, Mifeng, issue 2 (1930), p. 11 83
2.14 Advertisement for art book, Mifeng, issue 2 (1930), p. 12 84
2.15 Price-lists, Mifeng, issue 1 (1930), p. 8 85
2.16 Advertisements, Mifeng, issue 1 (1930), p. 8 86
2.17 Cover of Guohua yuekan, issue 1 (1934) 87
2.18 Cover with title executed by Ye Gongchuo, Guohua yuekan, issue 2 (1934) 88
2.19 Cover of Cixue jikan, 1.4 (1934) 90
2.20 Landscape by Huang Gongwang, Guohua yuekan, issue 4 (1935), p. 52 94
2.21 Landscape by Da Vinci, Guohua yuekan, issue 4 (1935), p. 58 95
2.22 Cover of Guohua, issue 2 (1936) 96
2.23 Huang Bore’s article “Fourteen Lessons of Guohua Methods,” Guohua, issue 3 (1936), p. 9 98
2.24 Opening ceremony of new academic year, the College of Art and Literature of China, 1930 99
3.1 A view of the Yifeng annual art exhibition, Yifeng, 3.7 (1935), p. 8 130
3.2 A view of the Two Yus, One Zhang and One Wang Guohua Exhibition, Shibao, 1929.1.6, pictorial page 132
3.3 A view of the Friends of the Cold Season First Calligraphy and Painting Exhibition, Shanghai Pictorial, 431 (1929.1.12) 132
3.4 Feature dedicated to fans entitled “These is A Speechless Message in the Movement of Fans,” Liangyou, 108 (1935), p. 35 142
3.5 Calligrapher Shen Yinmo writing on a fan, Liangyou, 107 (1935), p. 5 143
3.6 Mountains After Rain by Zheng Wuchang, He Tianjian, Sun Xueni and Xi Yanzi, 1931, 102 x34 cm, Zheng Wuchang, p. 26 146
3.7 Advertisement, Shenbao, 1926.9.17 (6) 158
3.8 Advertisement, Shenbao, 1930.11.14 (2) 161
3.9 Advertisement, Shenbao, 1931.2.6 (2) 165
3.10 Advertisement, Shenbao, 1931.9.5 (5) 167
3.11 Advertisement, Shenbao, 1931.12.11 (11) 168
3.12 Grand View of Yandang by Yu Jianhua, Meishu shenghuo, 26 (1936) 170
3.13 Advertisement, Shenbao, 1933.1.7 (14) 173
3.14 A view of the opening of the Chinese Painting Exhibition, Paris. Dushu guwen, 3 (1934), p. 10 176
3.15 A view of the opening of the Chinese painting exhibition, Berlin. Dazhong huabao, 7 (1934), p. 17 182
4.1 Pricelist of Xiao Xian, Jiuhuatang suo cang jindai mingjia shuhua zhuanke runli 189
4.2 Pricelist of Wen Heling, Guohua yuekan, 3 (1935), p. 32 190
4.3 Classified advertisement for selling painting and calligraphy, Shenbao, 1927.5.14 (+1) 196
4.4 Advertisement for Li Fu, Shenbao, 1929.4.8 (14) 200
4.5 Pricelist of Wang Yiting written in calligraphy by Wu Changshuo, Jiuhuatang suo cang jindai mingjia shuhua zhuanke runli 201
4.6 Discount coupons, Mohaichao, 2 (1930) 203
4.7 Advertisement for Zhang Yuguang, Shenbao, 1930.7.26 (17) 204
4.8 Crane by Zhang Yuguang, Shenbao, 1926.6.30 (+1) 205
4.9 Cover of Jinshi shuhuajia rundan huikan (Shanghai, 1925) 212
4.10 Pricelists, Jinshi shuhuajia rundan huikan, pp. 4–5 213
4.11 Pricelists, Mohaichao, 3 (1930), p. 27 218
4.12 Pricelist of Wang Yiting written in calligraphy by Wu Changshuo, Jiuhuatang suo cang jindai mingjia shuhua zhuanke runli 226
4.13 Advertisement for Wu Hufan, Shenbao, 1921.1.9 (1) 230
4.14 An introduction to Wu Hufan, Liangyou, 84 (1934), p. 19 233
4.15 Special pricelist of Yu Jianhua, Shenbao, 1929.12.27 (5) 237
4.16 Landscape by Yu Jianhua painted in the styles of eccentric artists, 1934, Dongnan lansheng (Shanghai, 1935), p. 16 240
4.17 An introduction to Feng Chaoran, Liangyou, 95 (1034), p. 11 242
4.18 Pricelist of Wu Zheng, Jinshi shuhuajia rundan huikan, p. 1 244
4.19 Clear Autumn in Wuxia by Wu Hufan (selected for the First National Art Exhibition), 1929, Meishujie tekan (Shanghai, 1929) 248
4.20 Mountains in Sunset by Ma Tai (in the style of the Song), 1932, Haishang huihua quanji, p. 444 250
4.21 Tour in Xianxia Mountain by He Tianjian (with colour and long inscription), 1936, Haishang huihua quanji, p. 502 253
4.22 Landscape by He Tianjian (in free-style and ink), 1935, Haishang huihua quanji, p. 501 254
4.23 Broad-brush landscape signed with Lusiwan ren by Wu Zheng, 1921, Wu Daiqui huagao (Shanghai, 1929) 255
4.24 Morning Mist of Streams and Mountains by Wu Zheng, 1940, Minchu shier jia: Shanghai huatan (Taipei, 1998), p. 111 256
4.25 Apricot Blossoms in a River Village by Wu Zheng (with artist’s seal Sulin zhongzi), 1944, Minchu shier jia: Shanghai huatan, p. 117 257
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Hierarchy of Shanghai’s Art
World
This book explores the social history of modern Chinese art through the lens of the “art world,” a sociological concept defined in particular by the sociologists, Pierre Bourdieu and Howard Becker. The book focuses on ‘national painting’ (guohua, 國畫) in Shanghai between 1929–1937, and the key players in this field. More specifically, this study explores the process of institutionalisation and legitimisation of guohua by looking closely at the development of, and roles played by artists, art societies, periodicals, colleges, exhibitions and the art market in Republican Shanghai; it reconstructs the operational logic of the Shanghai art world, focusing on changes in the hierarchies, networks, and discursive practices within the guohua subfield; and through this analysis offers a new perspective to advance our understanding of the transformation of guohua in modern China.
Referring to the indigenous Chinese art form of China—painting in brush and ink on silk or paper in conventional genres, namely landscape, bird-andflower, and figures—the term guohua, as used in this study requires some further context. Guohua, or literally “national painting”, was in fact a new term and a new concept which in the standard narrative of modern Chinese art history has long been associated with tradition, backwardness, and conservatism and been regarded as the binary opposite of innovation, Westernisation, and modernisation. Looking closely at guohua, the present study sets 1929 as the point of departure, when the First National Art Exhibition (quanguo meishu zhanlan hui, 全國美術展覽會)—a significant event in the history of modern Chinese art—was launched in Shanghai. It ends with 1937 when the devastating Sino-Japanese war began, generating considerable impact on the flourishing artistic activities in Shanghai.
In 1927, after consolidating its power in Nanjing, the Nationalist Government provided a relatively stable political environment for the development of cultural and commercial activities. Chiang Kai-shek aspired to use Shanghai as a model city of Chinese modernity and ascribed it with a particular importance.1 Sponsored by the state, the First National Art Exhibition was launched in 1929,
1 Marie-Claire Bergère, Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 213–41.
showcasing the artistic accomplishments of modern artists from all over the nation and demonstrating the collaborative power of a well-organised art community, in particular from Shanghai. The exhibition featured a wide variety of art forms, including guohua, western-style painting, and sculpture—among these, the number of guohua exhibits was the greatest, suggesting that guohua had for the first time been officially identified as the representative art form of modern China.2 Propelled by the First National Art Exhibition, guohua underwent further institutionalisation and professionalisation through modern art activities and institutions, regaining its prestige on the art scene in the following decade, particularly in its host city, Shanghai.
Although Chineses cities such as Beijing and Guangzhou played important roles in the process of modernisation of Chinese art, this book focuses on Shanghai, a world metropolis where ‘Chinese civilisation and Western modernity took a pragmatic form’ in the Republican period.3 As a hub of economic modernisation and a centre of cultural production of modern China, Shanghai offered favourable circumstances for the development of a modern art world. This is evident from the growing numbers of art societies, art schools, art magazines, and exhibitions launched in Shanghai, which outnumbered that of Beijing and Guangzhou. Shanghai has been examined extensively in historical literature, from the level of governance down to the mundane level of the everyday lives of common people—studies, which have brought to life many facets of the city.4 Shanghai also played an
2 Li Yuyi 李寓一, “Jiaoyubu quanguo meishu zhanlanhui canguan ji yi 教育部全國美術 展覽會參觀記一 [Viewing the First National Art Exhibition Presented by the Ministry of Education, Part 1],” Funü zazhi 婦女雜誌 [Ladies’ Journal] 15, no. 7 (1929): 1–5.
3 Bergère, Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity, 4.
4 Extensive scholarly literature is available on the study of Shanghai; selected important works include, Marie-Claire Bergère, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Frederic Wakeman, Jr. and Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California: Center for Chinese Studies, 1992); Christian Henriot, Shanghai, 1927–1937: Municipal Power, Locality, and Modernization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Frederic E. Wakeman, Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Sherman Cochran ed., Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, NY : East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999); Xiaoqun Xu, Chinese Professionals and the Republican State: the Rise of Professional Associations in Shanghai, 1912–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004); Ellen Johnston Laing, Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early-twentieth-century Shanghai (Honolulu: University of
unquestionably significant role in the transformation of modern Chinese art. Its unique historical position as an important port city in the early twentieth century cultivated extremely favourable circumstances to the establishment of art institutions, and the number of art societies, art schools and art periodicals based in Shanghai surpassed that of the other Chinese cities. In the late Qing period, the rise of Shanghai as a cultural hub paved the way for the development of a modern art world in the Republican era. While art historians have studied the development of art in Shanghai extensively, most scholarly enquiries have focused on the Shanghai School of the late nineteenth century, and few have dealt with the contribution of art to the construction of a modern, urban Shanghai in the Republican period.5 However, this has begun to change and there are now more scholarly analyses of the visual culture of modern Shanghai from an interdisciplinary perspective. These examine a range of issues pertaining to visual culture and Chinese modernity—including the art market, advertising, film, feminism and architecture— opening up a broad new vista of study for modern Chinese cultural historians and filling in the gaps in our understanding of the contribution of visual culture to the process of culture-building in modern Shanghai.6 The seemingly contradictory yet interwoven relationship between guohua and urban Shanghai, however, has never been analysed thoroughly—particularly in the
Hawaii Press, 2004); Catherine Vance Yeh, Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Wen-Hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
5 Selected literature on the Shanghai School includes, James Han-hsi Soong, “A Visual Experience in Nineteenth Century China: Jen Po-nien (1840–1895) and the Shanghai School of Painting” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1978); Claudia Brown and Ju-hsi Chou, Transcending Turmoil: Painting at the Close of China’s Empire, 1796–1911 (Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, 1992); Ju-hsi Chou ed., Art at the Close of China’s Empire (Tempe: Arizona State University, 1998); Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, Haipai huihua yanjiu wenji 海派繪畫研究 文集 [Studies on Shanghai School Painting] (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2001); Lai Yu-chih, “Remapping Borders: Ren Bonian’s Frontier Paintings and Urban Life in 1880s Shanghai,” The Art Bulletin 86, no. 3 (September 2004): 550–72; Roberta Wue, Art Worlds: Artists, Images, and Audiences in Late Nineteenth-century Shanghai (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2014).
6 Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Ken Lum and Zheng Shengtian eds., Shanghai Modern, 1919–1945 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2004); Jason C. Kuo ed., Visual Culture in Shanghai 1850s–1930s (Washington, D.C. : New Academia Pub., 2007); Joshua A. Fogel, The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Paul Pickowics, Kuiyi Shen and Yingjin Zhang eds., Liangyou, Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metroplis, 1926–1945 (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
context of the 1930s, when, as Leo Ou-fan Lee claims, a new urban culture developed, characterised by well-appointed public spaces such as department stores, coffeehouses, and dance halls.7 Focusing on the flourishing period of 1929 to 1937—the pinnacle of urban culture—this present study positions the practice of guohua within the context of modern Shanghai, aiming to offer a new perspective through which to view the production and consumption of guohua in modern China and to complicate our understanding of it, from a Euro-centric binary of east and west, and modern and traditional.
The Art World
Taking a sociological perspective to the production of culture, the artistic nature of an artwork is not an intrinsic and inalienable property of the art object, but rather a label attached to it by particular members of social groups whose interests are augmented by the object being defined as art.8 This view breaks from conventional art-historical approaches that focus on individual creators of art, offering instead, a broad and interdisciplinary perspective allowing a scrutiny of the close relationship between art and a given social structure. Becker suggests that “art as a form of collective action” involving some number (perhaps even a large number) of people, turns our focus from the works of art themselves to the social organisations and the networks of people who participate or participated in the production and consumption of works of art.9 According to Becker’s definition:
Art worlds consist of all the people whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works, which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art. Members of art worlds coordinate the activities by which work is produced by referring to a body of conventional
7 Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3–42.
8 Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1982); Vera L. Zolberg, Constructing a Sociology of the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. R. Johnson (Cambridge: Polity, 1993); Diana Crane ed, The Sociology of Culture: Emerging Theoretical Perspectives (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Jeremy Tanner ed, The Sociology of Art: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2003); David Inglis and John Hughson eds, The Sociology of Art: Ways of Seeing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
9 Howard Becker, “Art as Collective Action,” in The Sociology of Art: A Reader, ed. Jeremy Tanner (London: Routledge, 2003), 85–95.
understandings embodied in common practice and in frequently used artefacts. The same people often cooperate repeatedly, even routinely, in similar ways to produce similar works, so that we can think of an art world as an established network of cooperative links among participants.10
By perceiving artistic production as a collective action rather than stemming from the vision of an individual creator, Becker sees works of art as the joint product of all those who have cooperated to bringing them into existence. Within this theoretical framework, art production in modern China can be understood as a collective action, involving a great deal of human power and operating routinely through a division of labour. This broader view of art production allows for an analysis of how an object is labelled as art at some point in the process of its production, circulation, and consumption.
According to most contemporary studies of the sociology of art, the art world—a structured social institution within which art is produced, circulated, and consumed—has been understood within the context of Euro-American modernity.11 With its focus on the Shanghai of 1927–1939—a metropolitan city of modern China and home to a burgeoning and increasingly complex art world—this study offers an alternative sociological context within which to view this world. An analysis of this art world, in turn, offers a different and hitherto little-explored perspective through which to understand modern Chinese art.
Bourdieu’s idea of an artistic field, offers a sophisticated insight into the transformation of artistic styles and of the institutional structure of the modern Chinese art world. As defined by Bourdieu, a field is “a separate social universe having its own laws of functioning, independent of those of politics and the economy” and “a veritable social universe where, in accordance with its particular laws, there accumulates a particular form of capital and where relations of force of a particular type are exerted.”12 Each field is autonomous but simultaneously homologous in structure with other fields. Due to its autonomy, this “social universe functions somewhat like a prism which refracts every external determination: demographic, economic or political events are always retranslated according to the specific logic of the field.”13 This specific
10 Becker, Art Worlds, 34–35.
11 David Inglis, “Thinking ‘Art’ Sociologically,” in The Sociology of Arts: Ways of Seeing, 23.
12 Pierre Bourdieu, “Field of Power, Literary Field and Habitus,” in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, 162–64.
13 Bourdieu, “Field of Power, Literary Field and Habitus,” 164.
logic consists of nomos, which Bourdieu defines as a set of laws and rules developed by each specific field and shared among existing and new participants in the field. Described as the reverse of an economic field, fields of cultural production are for Bourdieu always sites of struggle, within which members are always in a conflict-oriented situation, struggling to take positions, competing for legitimacy and resources, and attempting to establish their distinction through the accumulation of cultural and economic capital, and their occupying of various positions within the field. Therefore, members’ artistic statements, dispositions, and actions all imply a position-taking of sorts in relation to existing works and positions in the field. Similarly, the range of positions adopted by any artist will depend upon their prior history within the field.
As maintained by Bourdieu, a variety of cultural, social, and symbolic resources can be conceptualised as capital when they function as social relations of power—that is, when they become the objects of a struggle for valued resources. Bourdieu categorises these instances of capital into four generic types: economic capital (money and property); cultural capital (cultural goods and services, including educational credentials); social capital (acquaintances and networks), and symbolic capital (legitimacy and reputation). Each type of capital can convert from one to another under certain conditions and exchange rates.14 Within this framework, members of the cultural community, whose form of capital is cultural, can be viewed as capitalists. Such individuals are in the dominant class because they enjoy the power and privileges that come with the possession of considerable cultural and symbolic capital.
It is the specific logic and history within a field that defines and confers value to different sorts of capital. Unlike the many sociologists who emphasise the impact of social structures on art and diminish what art historians consider the most important factor—artistic genius—Bourdieu found a balance between the two through his theory of habitus and fields. He suggested that a work of art was “produced in a particular social universe endowed with particular institutions and obeying specific laws,”15 For Bourdieu, art was produced by the meeting of a habitus—which reflected the social origins and personal trajectory of a given artist—and a field. In light of this concept, the transformation of the context within which modern Chinese art was realised and collected—from that of the old patronage system to that of a relatively
14 For a detailed discussion on the varied forms of capital, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (New York; London: Routledge, 2004).
15 Bourdieu, “Field of Power, Literary Field and Habitus,” 163.
autonomous art world—cannot be simply understood as a direct reflection of the drastic political and economic changes at the time, but should also take account of the specific logic and history of the field of art as a whole.
From the mid-1920s onwards, Yishujie 藝術界 (“art world”) became a popular term in Shanghai, appearing frequently in the print media. In 1925, a new column titled Yishujie was introduced in both the Shanghai Daily (Shenbao, 申報)16 newspaper in 1925 and the art periodical Art World Weekly (Meishujie zhoukan, 美術界週刊), established in 1926. This neologism, used broadly in newspapers, magazines, and periodicals of that period described a well-defined group of people, or community and can be seen as analogous to Bourdieu’s idea of an artistic field. While the definition of the term yishujie was not yet clear, columns such as those in Shenbao and Art World Weekly allow us to sketch a profile of the community or field described by this new term. In Shenbao, for instance, a considerable proportion of the paper’s news items, advertisements, reviews, and articles pertained to the art world, suggesting that art had by that time become an integral component of modern Shanghainese society, widely permeating the daily life of the general public.17 Two news reports published in the newspapers Shenbao and News Daily (Xinwenbao, 新聞報), in 1928 and 1929 respectively, are good examples that illustrate how the art world was perceived and presented in Shanghai:
Dinner of the Qiuying Association (Qiuying hui zhi yan, 秋英會之宴)
The day before yesterday, Zhao Banpo from Hanyang and Xie Gongzhan from Zhenjiang invited members of Shanghai’s literary and artistic fields (wenyijie, 文藝界) to dinner at Dajiali Restaurant. Invitation cards were sent to guests . . . [a list of seventy-eight names of artists, writers, and celebrities follows, including (in order of appearance) Zeng Xi, Pang
16 Shenbao was the most influential Chinese-language newspaper in the Republican period. Established by Ernest Major (1841–1908) in 1872, Shenbao had a wide news and feature coverage, including editorials on current issues, articles on local, national, and international news, as well as advertising, and literary pages. Circulated widely across the nation, it was sold in major cities, including Beijing, Tianjin, Nanjing, Hong Kong and Hangzhou. For detailed discussion on Shenbao, see Barbara Mittler, A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872–1912 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
17 All art-related articles published in the Shenbao have been organised and published in Yan Juanying 顏娟英, Shanghai meishu fengyun 1872–1949 Shenbao yishu ziliao tiaomu suoyin 上海美術風雲: 1874–1949 申報藝術資料條目索引 [The Heyday of Art in Shanghai: Index of Art Articles in Shenbao 1874–1949] (Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, 2006).
Lanshi, Zhu Guwei, Wang Yiting, Wu Zheng, and Xu Langxi.] However, probably due to the delayed delivery of invitation cards, only two-thirds of the invited guests were actually in attendance yesterday.18
Record of Two Beautiful Dinners (Ermei yan ji, 二美宴記)
The “Two Beautiful Dinners” does not mean dinners for the purpose of beauty, but for the benefit of the art world (meishujie, 美術界). On the 21st of this month, in fulfilment of Ms He Xiangning’s wish to call for paintings for philanthropic purposes, three gentlemen—Jing Zhiyuan, Chen Shuren, and Li Zuhan—invited twenty Shanghai artists to attend a dinner at Li’s house on Kade Road. On the following day, Huang Binhong of the Shenzhou Guoguang She Publishing House invited a hundred members of the art world, the press (baojie, 報界), and the literary fields (wenyijie, 文藝界) to another dinner, held at the Dadong Restaurant. I was fortunate to be able to attend both dinner parties. Owing to the importance of these dinners to the Chinese art world, I would like to make a record of both of them [. . . . . .] According to my memory, guests from the literary field included Hu Puan, Chen Zhuzun, Wang Xishen, etc., and from the press, Zhou Shoujuan, Yan Duhe, Yu Kongwo, Zhu Yingpeng, etc. The number of artists who attended was so numerous that it was difficult to count them, and included such artists as Cheng Yaosheng, Shang Shengbo, Wang Zhongshang, Zhang Hongwei, Zheng Manqing, Zhang Shanzi, Xiong Songquan, Chen Gangshu, Ma Qizhou, Cai Yimin, Yu Jifan, Wang Taomin, Huang Ainong, Zheng Wuchang, Xu Zhengbai, Wang Geyi, and Wang Shizi.19
The first report is a record of a dinner party celebrating the inauguration of an art society, the Qiuying Association. The party was hosted by Zhao Banpo 趙半 坡 (Dates Unknown) and Xie Gongzhan 謝公展 (1885–1940), who invited guests whom they considered members of the literary and art worlds. Another report, written by active young art critic Yu Jianhua 俞劍華 (1895–1979), describes two important Shanghai dinner parties. One was held by He Xiangning 何香 凝 (1878–1972), the wife of highly-ranked Republican government official Liao Zhongkai 廖仲愷 (1877–1925) and an artist engaged actively in raising funds to
18 Changsheng 長生. “Qiuying hui zhi yan 秋英會之宴 [Dinner of the Qiuying Association],” Shenbao 申報, October 4 1928, 21. All translations are mine unless indicated otherwise.
19 Yu Jianhua 俞劍華, “Ermei yan ji 二美宴記 [Record of Two Beautiful Dinners],” Xinwen bao 新聞報. “News Daily,” quoted in Wang Zhongxiu 王中秀, Huang Binhong nianpu 黃 賓虹年譜 [Chronology of Huang Binhong’s Life] (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2005), 215–16.
support a private school. The other was organised by revered cultural celebrity Huang Binhong 黃賓虹 (1865–1955), who gathered together professionals from the literary, artistic, and publishing fields to discuss the new directions and ongoing plans for the Shenzhou Guoguang She publishing house, which he had recently bought.
These two reports demonstrate that a community referred to as the art world had already emerged in Shanghai’s public sector by the late 1920s, suggesting that art production had become a public and collective activity during this time. The reports also give us an idea of how the term “art world” was perceived and used in the rhetoric of the popular press during the late 1920s, illuminating our understanding of the art world in China and highlighting its relation to society in general and the role it played in the cultural development of modern China at the time.
The Shanghai dinner parties’ newspaper reports included long lists of names of the people who were in attendance—these names were presumably familiar to the newspapers readers and clearly carried meaning and value. The order of the names listed in these reports also suggest an underlying logic— the beginning of the lists included people who were perceived as more important, for example Wang Yiting 王一亭 (1867–1938), Zeng Xi 曾熙 (1861–1930), and Huang Binhong. This indicates that the Shanghai art world was highly stratified according to the type and amount of capital inherited or accumulated by members of the artistic community in their struggle for symbolic legitimacy and recognition. Seventy-eight names which could be classified as included within the literary and artistic field appear in the first report, while in Yu Jianhua’s article, twenty-four names are listed and specifically classified into three categories: namely the literary and artistic field, and the print media.
With different purposes such as the inauguration of an art society, fundraising for a school, or the announcement of the handover of a publishing house— the dinner parties drew together members of the art community, most of whom were renowned Shanghai celebrities such as Zeng Xi, Zhu Zumou 朱祖 謀 (1857–1931), Wang Yiting, He Xiangning, Chen Shuren 陳樹人 (1884–1948), and Huang Binhong. The collective power of the members of this well-defined art community had become one of the most critical determinants of the success of a variety of ventures. At these gatherings, different issues related to the art world were discussed, and details of these events were then published in the public sphere—art had become a newsworthy public issue in the glittering metropolis of Shanghai. An astonishing number of people from the art world took part in the dinner parties; the dinner held by Huang Binhong for instance, was attended by around one hundred guests, implying that the number of people participating in cultural production in modern China far surpassed the number of artists recorded in the standard art history of the period. Compared
with imperial China, when art production mainly occurred in relatively private spaces, the surfacing of art production in the public arena brought to the fore a number of different actors who participated in the process of making a modern art world in twentieth-century China. To advance our understanding of the complex network of the Shanghai art world, this book deals with a variety of people holding different positions and together forming a complex network of relations in the Shanghai art world. In this regard, brief biographies of the individuals mentioned in the book are attached in Appendix 1.
The Stratification Order of the Shanghai Art World
The historical factors that lay behind the stratification of the Shanghai art world, and an understanding of what was regarded as cultural capital in the historical nexus of new, old, foreign, traditional, popular, and high cultures is of particular interest. At the turn of the twentieth century, the 1905 abolition of the Civil Examination system and the concomitant establishment of new educational systems marked the beginning of the rise of a new intelligentsia in China. The literati—a class that had long served as the pillar of the monarchicalbureaucratic system and had occupied a pivotal position in traditional Chinese society—was to experience dramatic changes with the decline of the old system. However, the drastic changes in social structure did not disturb the prestige and respectability they had hitherto enjoyed. After the downfall of the Qing dynasty, many Qing officials lost their posts and were forced to sell their paintings, literature, and calligraphy for livelihood. By doing so, they actively participated in cultural production for their own livelihood, as a means to weather the various political upheavals and social changes of the time. Due to their possession of immense symbolic, cultural, and economic capital, these Qing loyalists (yilao, 遺老) continued to hold high positions and became prominent leaders in the cultural community, continuing their dominance and influence in the art world during the early Republican era. Shanghai was one of the most popular safe havens for these loyalists fleeing the fallen Qing court. In the current research on the role played by the Qing loyalists in cultural production in the Republican period, scholars point out that those labelled yilao enjoyed a high social status within the cultural world due to their profound cultivation in Chinese classics. Most of them also possessed valuable collections of rare books and works of art, including ancient paintings, calligraphy, bronzes, and stele rubbings.20
20 For a thorough study of the influence of the Qing loyalists on the development of Chinese calligraphy and the cultural world, see Wai-yee Cheung 張惠儀, “Minguo shiqi yilao shufa
The identity of a yilao was thus viewed as symbolic capital, while a cultivation in Chinese cultural traditions and collections of books and art were counted as cultural capital. Ownership of these forms of capital allowed the loyalists to continue to enjoy dominant positions in the Shanghai art world, notwithstanding the loss of their official positions in the Republican political field. In the Shanghai art world, Wu Changshuo, Li Ruiqing 李瑞清 (1867–1920), Zeng Xi, and Zhu Zumou were some of the most prestigious and influential yilao. Due to their inclination towards canonical literati aesthetic traditions, these loyalists were profoundly cultivated in both calligraphy and painting and extolled the style of calligraphic painting that represented the very antithesis of the Shanghai School’s populist realism which catered to the tastes of the middle-class.21 These individuals became the tastemakers of their time; for instance, Zeng Xi, Li Ruiqing, and Wu Changshuo highly commended the eccentric artist Shitao, who eventually became one of the modern icons embraced by young guohua artists in the early twentieth century.22
With the restructuring of society that followed the establishment of the Republic of China, social valuations changed. New social and cultural celebrities came onto the scene in the Shanghai art world, including new elites and new merchants. As argued by Wen-hsin Yeh, a redistribution of social power and prestige took place against the backdrop of the rise of commerce in the early twentieth century, leading to the emergence of a new wealthy middle class with social legitimacy in Shanghai. During this period, when commerce and industry had become concerns of the nation and the state, merchants and compradors became new sources of wealth in modern China. The Qing government had sponsored commercial enterprises bred in a new hybridised culture, to strengthen the nation through commerce—these enterprises inevitably created opportunities for officials and merchants to collaborate on mercantile projects, where new lines of wealth and old lines of prestige were allowed to
yanjiu 民國時期遺老書法研究 [A Study of the Yilao Calligraphy in Early Twentieth Century]” (Ph.D. diss., Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002; Yang Chia-Ling and Roderick Whitfield eds., Lost Generation: Luo Zhenyu, Qing Loyalists and the Formation of Modern Chinese Culture (London: Saffron Books, EAP, 2012); Aida Yuen Wong, The Other Kang Youwei: Calligrapher, Art Activist, and Aesthetic Reformer in Modern China (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
21 Wen C. Fong, Between Two Cultures: Late-nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Chinese Paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 52–67.
22 For a discussion of the role played by Shitao in modern Chinese art history, see Wong, Parting the Mists.
blend together.23 In the Shanghai art world, new celebrities rose to power and held high positions in both the social and art worlds thanks to their possession of economic capital; in addition to cultural, social or symbolic capital. These new cultural leaders not only practised art but also used their wealth to financially support cultural events. Born in the last decades of the nineteenth century, most of these celebrities had undergone traditional training in the Chinese classics, and some of them had received degrees and served at the Qing court. Unlike the yilao, who were proud to bear the identity of Qing loyalists, these new celebrities described themselves using identities such as “merchantofficial,” “official-merchant,” “merchant-artist,” and “comprador artist.”
These hybridised identities are evident in personalities such as Li Pingshu 李平書 (1854–1927), Ha Shaofu 哈少甫 (1856–1934), and Wang Yiting, who were prominent merchants in Shanghai. Li had made considerable contributions to the construction of Shanghai’s infrastructure and was also a renowned art collector and dealer. Ha, an esteemed leader of the Muslim community in Shanghai, was also a successful and award-winning art dealer and collector. Wang was a successful comprador and a leading figure in the Shanghai commercial field. As recorded in Who’s Who in China (1936), the number of prestigious titles attached to Wang Yiting is overwhelming, including Chairman of the Chinese Electric Power Company, Chairman of the Shanghai City Chamber of Commerce, member of the board of directors for Shanghai city’s Bureau of Municipal Affairs, and committee member for numerous charity organizations and forty educational institutions.24 He established good connections with Japanese political leaders, artists, educators, and merchants, serving as an important mediator between the Chinese and Japanese art worlds to bring Sino-Japanese cultural and commercial activities to fruition.25 As members of the new merchant class, these men each possessed a new discipline of knowledge and information about commerce, which required further training beyond the classical Confucian educations. This had gained not only wealth but also social status and respectability, for these individuals. Li, Ha, and Wang were also founders and influential committee members of some of the most prestigious art associations established at the turn of the twentieth century, which are discussed in more detail in Chapter 2. Consequently, their
23 Yen, Shanghai Splendor, 9–29.
24 Who’s who in China: Biographies of Chinese Leaders, 5th ed. (Shanghai: The China Weekly Review, 1936), 249.
25 Walter B. Davis, “Welcoming the Japanese Art World: Wang Yiting’s Social and Artistic Exchanges with Japanese Sinophiles and Artists”, in The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art, ed. Fogel, 84–112.
experience and new knowledge began to inform the art world, with a subsequent impact on the dominant artistic practice of guohua.
Apart from the yilao and the new merchants, members of a new intelligentsia and entrepreneur class, also held high positions and played important roles in the Shanghai art world. This new class had received traditional classical training but were distinguishable from the yilao and new merchants in that they had been awarded obtained degrees through the Civil Examination and continued serve the new state government or presented themselves as a new social elite—they included personalities such as Huang Binhong, Ye Gongchuo 葉恭綽 (1881–1968), Di Pingzi 狄平子 (1872–1941), and Pang Laichen 龐萊臣 (1864–1949). While the yilao clung to their previous official status, the new intelligentsia and entrepreneurs repositioned themselves in modern society by taking on newly created roles after the fall of the Qing dynasty. For instance, Huang Binhong came from a merchant background and obtained a linsheng degree in 1886. He joined the Shanghai art world in 1907 and became a prominent art editor as well as a prolific art theorist. Well-known for his expertise in authenticating ancient paintings and calligraphy, his broad cultivation in painting and Chinese classics won him a reputation in the cultural world.26 Ye Gongchuo was born into a gentry-scholar family.27 Previously a Qing official, he continued in government service, serving the Republican government after the downfall of the Qing. As a key figure in the cultural world, Ye initiated and sponsored various important artistic events and activities in modern China, including the First National Art Exhibition, the establishment of the Painting Association of China and the founding of the Shanghai Museum. Di Pingzi and Pang Laichen were well-known for their private collections of ancient paintings and calligraphy. Pang’s collection, Xuzhai 虛齋 was claimed the “best of Jiangnan”.28 The quality and quantity of his collection is revealed in the twenty volumes of records for the Xuzhai collection.29 Di Pingzi was a renowned collector as well as a crucial figure in the publishing industry. Wang Meng’s
26 Wang, Huang Binhong nianpu.
27 Kuiyi Shen, “Scholar, Official, and Artist Ye Gongchou”, in The Elegant Gathering: The Yeh Family Collection, eds. Max Yeh, Michael Knight, and Li He (San Francisco: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 2006), 21–33.
28 Song Luxia 宋路霞, Bainian shoucang ershi shiji Zhongguo minjian shoucang fengyun lu 百年收藏:20世紀中國民間收藏風雲錄 [A Century of Collections: History of 20th Century Non-Imperial Collection] (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 1999), 182–88.
29 Pang Yuanji 龐元濟, Xuzhai minghua lu 虛齋名畫錄 十六卷 [A Record of the Xuzhai Collection, 16 volumes], (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1998); Pang Yuanji 龐元濟, Xuzhai minghua xu lu 虛齋名畫續錄 [Supplement of the Record of the Xuzhai Collection, 4 volumes], (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1995).
王蒙 (circa 1308–1385) Recluse in the Qing and Bian Mountains is, for example a most remarkable masterpiece in Di’s collection. Both Pang and Di received the Juren degree during the Qing dynasty and also participated in the commercial field. Pang was a successful industrialist, while Di established the Shibao 時報 newspaper,30 Mingbao 民報, and the Yu Tseng Book Depot (Youzheng shuju, 有 正書局), making use of the print media to promote and preserve the national essence, particularly painting and calligraphy.31
It is clear from the above examples that key social figures, including yilao, the new merchant class and the new intelligentsia/entrepreneurs, possessed enough cultural, economic and artistic resources to sit at the pinnacle of the hierarchical art world. They became one of a few authorities who had the symbolic power and were qualified enough to consecrate newcomers. Yilao were invited, for example, to set price-lists for young artists, to inscribe titles and compose prefaces for books, and to attend exhibition previews and illuminate other art events, which subsequently served to elevate the image and value of particular works of art or publications. The significance of this power of the Yilao for guohua and the art world, is explored in greater detail in a following chapter of this book. Building and maintaining good relationships with such figures ensured and enhanced one’s competitiveness in the art world. Bourdieu describes such relations within the art world as a “space of relations between positions,” a space made up of related individuals and institutions.
Teacher-student relationships also became a key means of consecrating young artists. For a young artist, becoming a disciple of a renowned artist would not only provide protection for the artist, but could also increase his symbolic, social and cultural capital. As seen in twenty-seven detailed entries included in the section of “Records of Teacher-Student Relations” (Shicheng jilüe, 師承紀略) in the Art Yearbook of China 1947 (Zhonghua minguo sanshiliu nian Zhongguo meishu nianjian, 中華民國三十六年中國美術年鑑), teacherstudent relationships were perceived at the time to be as important as educational credentials.32 Cultural celebrities and Qing loyalists Zeng Xi and
30 For a study of Shibao, see Joan Judge, Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).
31 Richard Vinograd, “Patrimonies in Press: Art Publishing, Cultural Politics, and Canon Construction in the Career of Di Baoxian”, in The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art, ed. Fogel, 245–72.
32 “Shicheng jilüe 師承紀略 [Records of Teacher-Student Relations],” in Zhonghua minguo sanshiliu nian Zhongguo meishu nianjian 中華民國三十六年中國美術年鑑 [Art Yearbook of China 1947], ed. Wang Yichang 王扆昌 (Shanghai: Shanghaishi wehua yundong weiyuahui, 1948).
Li Ruiqing for instance, taught the brothers Zhang Shanzi 張善孖 (1882–1940) and Zhang Daqian 張大千 (1899–1983). Zeng and Li made use of their social capital to establish a social and cultural network for the Zhang brothers, and used symbolic capital such as their brand name and calligraphy to introduce the brothers to the art world. This is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.
The names and calligraphy of these leaders were brands in and of themselves, conferring symbolic value on anything that bore them. For instance, Ye Gongchuo, one of the most prolific cover-writers in the cultural world, was invited to execute a calligraphic title for the cover of the Ci Scholarship Quarterly (Cixue jikan, 詞學季刊) (see Figure 1.1) as well as a painting catalogue for Zhang Shanzi and Zhang Daqian. Due to their cultivation in literature and art, these celebrities were also invited to compose prefaces for books in the hopes of elevating the symbolic value of those publications. In his study of the early twentieth-century Chinese literary field, Michel Hockx identifies such relations within the context of Chinese society as “ties of allegiance” (guanxi, 關係) of two distinct types: vertical allegiance, referring to teacher-student relations (shisheng guanxi, 師生關係), and horizontal allegiance, referring to peer relations (tongren guanxi, 同人關係).33
Figure 1.1
Cover of Cixue jikan, 1.1 (1933).
33 Michel Hockx, introduction to The Literary Field of Twentieth-century China, ed. Michel Hockx (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 10–11. For a detailed discussion of the ties of allegiance in the Chinese literary field, see Hockx, “Playing the Field: Aspects
All these relationships existed within Shanghai’s art world, and were key factors that governed and determined the success of newcomers. Building appropriate networks was a prerequisite for being able to stand out in this competitive art world, and joining art societies became one of the most effective ways of establishing both vertical and horizontal allegiances.
While the presence of celebrities illuminated various artistic events such as exhibitions, banquets, meetings, etc., emphasis was also given to the crucial financial support that these figures offered. A report published in the Shenbao for instance, listed in great detail not just the names of the attendees to an event but also the amounts donated to the Sino-Japanese Exhibition held in 1929:
4th December—at the 25th committee meeting of the Sino-Japanese Exhibition, attendees included Wang Yiting, Ye Gongchuo, Di Pingzi, Li Zuhan, Zhang Shanzi, Yao Yuqin, Wang Jiyuan, Wang Sun, Wang Xiaojian, Li Qiujun, etc. The accountant, Wang Chaisun, gave the financial report as follows:
Financial Report of the Sino-Japanese Painting Exhibition
Total expenditure: 6154.43 yangyuan; income from selling coupons: 2789.51 yangyuan; there is still 3364.92 yangyuan of debt. Both Chinese and Japanese members will share the debt equally. Our side, the Chinese, will be responsible for 1682.46 yangyuan, to be shared among our fellows, including Zhou Xiangyun, 200 yuan; Wang Yiting, Ye Gongchuo, Di Pingzi, and Li Zuhan, 150 yuan each; Zhang Sanzhi, Yao Yuqing, Pang Laichen, Zhou Xiangling, Wu Zhongxiong, Jin Qianan, and Wu Dongmai, 100 yuan each; Huang Binhong and Wang Chaisun, 50 yuan each; and 160 yuan from sales of goods. Altogether, sums totalled 1,760 yuan. 34
While traditional values—such as cultivation in painting and literature and possession of private collections of ancient works of art—were still essential constituents of cultural capital that could be converted into the symbolic capital of recognition and reputation in the art world, financial wealth gained greater currency in this world, becoming a more important factor for gaining respectability and prestige. Despite the attacks on traditional culture, at the level of everyday life, established social and cultural celebrities continued to hold high positions in society, enjoying the privilege of being perceived as public celebrities in modern Shanghai.
of Chinese Literary Life in the 1920s,” in The Literary Field of Twentieth-century China, ed. Hockx, 61–78.
34 Wang, Huang Binhong nianpu, 243.
Long regarded as an essential part of cultivation for members of the literati class, the practice of painting had never been treated as a separate profession in the discourse of literati culture in imperial China. The introduction of the term “art” (meishu, 美術) at the turn of the century however, suggests that it became an independent discipline. As the production and consumption of art shifted from relatively private and elite circles to the public space, this gave birth to a relatively autonomous art world that resonated with the artistic “field” as defined by Bourdieu within which specific logic and rules developed. The establishment of this art world, legitimised the profession of an artist and endowed it with a new position and identity in society.
In the late nineteenth century Shanghai experienced a tremendous influx of artists due to its relatively stable political state and flourishing economy. A plethora of artists also flooded in from all over the Jiangnan area, as a direct result of the devastating Taiping Rebellion. These influxes formed a critical mass of artists in Shanghai. In her study of the Shanghai art world in the late Qing period, Roberta Wue uses the word “community” in place of the oncepopular and frequently used “Shanghai School” to describe the late nineteenth-century group of artists active in the city.35 This reference emphasises the idea of these artists joined as a group by informal ties, especially professional ties of their own making.
The social stability and economic prosperity of Shanghai brought in a further influx of artists after the downfall of the Qing dynasty. This growing community of artists, fuelled by a booming economy, a growing publishing industry, and general commercial success, fostered the establishment of various new and modernised, formal and informal, artistic institutions. Professional associations, fan shops that served as art dealers and galleries, colleges, exhibitions, art markets, periodicals, as well as the modern media—mainly newspapers and mass-produced books—which bridged the gap between the art community and society are some examples of this. In the aftermath of the Qing era, the construction of a new social and political system became the collective goal of the new intellectual class of Republican China. The younger generation showed an enthusiasm for appropriating European knowledge and technology in the hope of enlivening the perceived moribund Chinese culture and society. New operating concepts, practices, and attitudes towards art
35 Roberta Wue, “The Profits of Philanthropy: Relief Aid, Shenbao, and the Art World in Later Nineteenth-Century Shanghai,” Late Imperial China 25, no. 1 (2004): 187–211; Roberta Wue, “Selling the Artist: Advertising, Art and Audience in Later Nineteenth Century Shanghai,” Art Bulletin, XCI /4 (December 2009): 464–481; Wue, Art Worlds.
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H. G. HINE
S little notice, considering the artistic importance of the subject, has been taken of the death of H. G. Hine, the eminent artist in water-colours, vice-president of the Royal Institute, who died a fortnight ago, aged eighty-three years. The explanation, I fear, of the scanty comment his death has evoked, is to be sought in the fact that the mass of that public which concerns itself with Art at all, is occupied chiefly with such art as exhibits an easy piquancy of treatment or an obvious interest of subject. Hine’s did neither; yet the best-equipped critics have long done justice to the steady perfection with which he dealt with those themes of serene weather upon ‘the billows of the Downs,’ which—superlatively though they were executed by him—he, with a hankering sometimes after other compositions and other effects, declined to consider his speciality Yet a speciality, of course, they were: those visions of turquoise or of opal sky, and of grey gold or of embrowned gold turf, with the long, restful sweeps and subtle curves, the luminous shadows, the points of light, with the shepherd and his flock on the ascending hillside, with the ancient thorn-tree bent by the winds of many an autumn.
Singularly unlike the work of strange refinement and unsurpassed subtlety which it was his wont to produce, was Hine himself, with his sturdy and sailorlike personality. Yet the character of the man was, in truth, not less admirable than the artistic finesse of his work. He found his true path somewhat late in life. His genius came to him almost as tardily, but then, perhaps, almost as powerfully, as did David Cox’s. He was long past fifty when—with a charm of composition not less certain than Copley Fielding’s, and with the genius of a far finer and fuller colourist—he began to do justice to the Sussex Downs, amid whose generally unconsidered scenery it had been his excellent fortune to be born.
(Academy, 30th March 1895.)
THOMAS COLLIER
E landscape art—the practice of which he had adorned by five-and-twenty years of noble work—sustains a profound loss in the death of Thomas Collier. He was born in the year 1840, at Glossop, on the Derbyshire border He early addressed himself to the career of a landscape painter; and it is true, no doubt, that his method was founded upon that of David Cox, nor is it possible that he could have set up for himself a better model of delicacy of observation, and of decisive and economical handwork. And the medium of Collier was —like that of David Cox—almost exclusively water-colour. His oil paintings were few, and, like Cox’s, they were executed chiefly in his later time. But, with him, the later time was still only middle age. Collier died when he was fifty-one: David Cox at seventy-six. Had David Cox left us at the age of Collier, he would hardly have been remembered to-day, and could have been an example to no one. Collier passed through no such prolonged period of preparation for mastery. He was already a master in his early manhood. His work cannot well be divided into periods: freedom of manner, largeness of vision and touch, belonged to him almost from the first. To the quite superficial observer of his drawings, it appeared that he painted only two or three subjects, and these on the same grey day. But to the real student of his work, the richness and variety of his resource is revealed. He observed and recorded differences of weather and light which escape all casual and all untrained notice; and if he was among the simplest and most vigorous, he was also among the most poetic recorders of English countryside and homestead—of farm, and coast, and moor. His work, exhibited in France, obtained for him the decoration of a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and here in England he was one of the most distinguished members of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours. But it is doubtful whether the opportunities afforded to the large public for seeing his work were
frequent enough to secure him that degree of actual popularity which was his due; and it is at all events certain that when the cabinet of sketches which he showed occasionally to his friends shall come to be known more widely, Collier will be accorded, without cavil or questioning, a lasting place among the Masters.
(Academy, 23rd May 1891.)
LORD LEIGHTON
B the death of Lord Leighton, the Royal Academy loses a great President and England a many-sided artist, who was certainly not far removed from being a great painter. It was more, perhaps, by the combination of so many various qualities of character and talent than by the firm possession of one especial vein of genius, that ‘our dear President, our admirable Leighton’—to use the words most fittingly applied to him by Sir John Millais—had come, of recent years at least, to be distinguished and known. The painter’s and designer’s art, evidenced in his youth, about forty years ago, by the ‘Procession of Cimabue,’ had not only never fallen into disuse, but had never come to occupy, in his mind, a secondary or comparatively unregarded place. But, along with the well-maintained devotion to the craft to which he had first vowed his affections a full generation ago, there had sprung up, partly of necessity and partly by reason of Lord Leighton’s exceptional temperament, many interests, exclusive of merely official duties, which occupied time and thought—so much so that if he had not added to the tastes of an artist the habits and qualifications of a great man of affairs, it would have been impossible for him to have successfully crowded into his life all the pursuits that engrossed it. It is easy for the ‘admirable Crichton,’ in these modern times, to degenerate into the Mr. Brook of Middlemarch—the not unamiable dilettante who was pretty certain to have once ‘taken up’ everything, and was pretty certain also to have dropped it. But Lord Leighton, great as was the diversity of his interests, was absolutely systematic and thoroughgoing; and, outside his especial art (in which his place, whatever may have been his deficiencies, was peculiar and unquestioned), he not only practised but excelled.
Leighton was linguist, student, antiquary, man of fashion, administrator, even philanthropist. His oratory was an accomplishment; albeit, in its addiction to ingenious ornament, his
style was not quite of our period. His tact in dealing with men and with affairs was almost faultless. His opinions were decided, and he never concealed them; yet, in uttering them, he hardly ever gave offence—never, indeed, to the reasonable. When all these things are remembered, and when there is added to them the recollection of a presence elegant and stately, and of a manner which, though it could well keep intruders at a distance, had singular and winning charm for the many whom it was intended to please, it will be fully realised what a difficult and heavy honour awaits Lord Leighton’s successor in his great function—that of President of the Royal Academy, and official representative of English Art. The Academy contains several painters of genius; several amiable and distinguished men of the world; but as those who can look back the furthest declare that no past President of whom they had any knowledge ever equalled Lord Leighton, it may well be doubted whether a future President is likely to equal him.
So much by way of rough indication of the character of the man, and of the public man. A further explanation of his individuality must, of course, be discovered in his Art; and even a cursory survey of it— and of the creations which were the events of his life—will disclose something of his strength, and something, too, of his weakness. The son of a physician whose life was extended to a most ripe old age, and grandson of Sir James Leighton, also a doctor—long resident at the Court of St. Petersburg—Frederic Leighton was born at Scarborough, on the 3rd December 1830. A Yorkshireman in fact— like William Etty, and another remarkable artist of a later generation, Thomas Collier—no one could have been less of a Yorkshireman in character than was the late President. To what is understood or conjectured to have been a Jewish strain in his blood are possibly to be attributed his profoundly artistic inclinations, which were manifested very early, and which, as the public knows, dominated the whole of his career. It is recorded that young Leighton received drawing lessons in Rome as long ago as the year 1842; and not two years afterwards he entered as a student at the Academy of Berlin. With Rome, perhaps, began that long series of Wanderjahre which made him so cosmopolitan an artist and so many-sided a man. He had some general education at Frankfort; then, after a removal to
Florence, where the American sculptor, Hiram Powers, was consulted with a view to an opinion on his ability, and prophesied that the boy ‘could become as eminent as he pleased,’ young Leighton’s father withdrew his long-standing objections to the adoption of painting as a profession; and the new decision was followed by a sojourn in Brussels and a longer stay in Paris. In Paris the youth attended a life-school, and copied at the Louvre. Next we hear of him at Vienna, where he was a pupil of Steinle, himself a pupil of Overbeck. Of Overbeck’s religious unction, Leighton had never a perceptible share. Something he no doubt owed to the leaders of the German Renaissance of Painting; but amongst these, more, it may be, to Cornelius than Overbeck. After his sojourn in Vienna, he was back again in Rome—these early and most prolonged wanderings are worthy of chronicle, because they had so much to do with the formation of the characteristics of the artist—and it was from Rome that he sent to the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1855 a picture which made no bid for immediately popular effect, which was nothing, moreover, of a ‘pot-boiler,’ and which made no concession to ordinary bourgeois liking. It was the canvas in which is depicted, with something of reticence and grace, and with a very learned draughtsmanship, the procession which passed through the streets of Florence, on its way to Santa Maria Novella, when Cimabue’s picture of the Madonna was carried in the midst, and honour and peculiar recognition—in which a whole city joined—were bestowed upon its painter. Elegant as the picture was, it did not lack favour; a certain relative warmth, a certain romantic spirit, the presentation of the ideal, it may be, in more homely form, pleased a generation familiar with Dyce, Maclise, and Cope; and the picture, as it happened, had an immediate success.
Paris was Leighton’s next halting-place, and now, an artist rising above the horizon, he was no longer likely to seek direct instruction from any one of the painters who were there at work; but he was associated with, and was to some extent influenced by, men like Ary Scheffer (whose ‘Augustine and Monica’ was long appreciated in England) and Robert Fleury He contributed almost without intermission, for the next eight or nine years, to the Royal Academy, and it was in 1864, when he was represented by an ‘Orpheus and
Eurydice,’ that he was elected to the Associateship—becoming in 1869 a full member. The year of his election to the Associateship was likewise the year of the exhibition of his charming and seductive invention, ‘Golden Hours.’ To the painter of mediæval or Renaissance history, and of themes avowedly classic, there was vouchsafed the expression of the romantic and the unquestionably poetic, and it is, no doubt, to the certain element of poetry that is in Lord Leighton’s work—far more, at all events, than to its austerer qualities of design, which never had any popularity at all, and which, even amongst painters, have gone terribly out of fashion—that is to be attributed part of the great favour which his art has enjoyed. In 1869 was shown ‘Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon,’ and in 1876 the second great processional, ‘The Daphnephoria.’ Two years later the ‘Arts of War’—not the least dignified and decorative of modern frescoes—was finished for South Kensington, where was already its companion, ‘The Industrial Arts of Peace,’ completed in 1873; another mural painting, that of ‘The Wise and Foolish Virgins,’ having, at an earlier date, been placed in the chancel of a fortunate parish church in Hampshire. The year of the completion of ‘The Arts of War’ was that of Lord Leighton’s election to the Presidency of the Academy, which he obtained, it will be remembered, in direct succession to Sir Francis Grant, with whose courtly qualities, and with whose large and manly sympathies, he combined a width of artistic outlook, a refinement of artistic expression, which had scarcely perhaps belonged to any President of the Academy since the days of its first leader, Sir Joshua Reynolds.
President, and knighted in consequence of that distinction in 1878, Leighton was given a baronetcy in 1886. In the interval he had not only proved beyond dispute his fitness for the responsibilities of the official position, which he filled, but—to mention only some of the most memorable of many works—had completed his own portrait for the Uffizi, had wrought the really grave and impressive canvas of Elisha raising the son of the Shunamite widow, and had, in his peculiar fashion, effected an alliance between luxury in colour and sculpturesque arrangement of ‘line’ in the great ‘Cymon and Iphigenia.’ In actual Sculpture, too—sharing the ambition of the men of the Renaissance for a triumph in various mediums—he had
produced ‘The Sluggard.’ It was extraordinarily clever, but perhaps its qualities were less truly sculptural than was some of his design executed in the older and more familiar material. Yet, if this particular work did not possess to the full all the great qualities that might have been expected in it, the order of Lord Leighton’s talent was one, nevertheless, which empowered him to succeed thoroughly in Sculpture, sooner or later; for, in Sculpture, while there was room for the generally unimpeded play of his own skill in design, there might have been a relief found from the exercise of his art in a path in which success to him was more uncertain and capricious—the path of colour.
It is too early, of course, to attempt to settle definitely the place of Leighton in English Art; but it is certain that his influence, whether as President or painter, tended to the extension of its vistas. An upholder of the Classic—never, with all his range, much in love with Realism—he was yet nothing whatever of a partisan, and—it may be mentioned as a characteristic detail of him in his daily ways—he was accustomed from time to time to purchase clever little drawings (sometimes the very last one would have thought he would care for) by artists who esteemed him as a President, but who regarded him very lightly as a practitioner of their own craft. Lord Leighton was perfectly aware that several circumstances limited—especially of late years—the appreciation of his work. He was not altogether insensible of its real defects—at all events, of peculiarities which were defects upon occasion. He knew that his ‘brush-work’ was not absolutely ‘modern.’ He must have allowed that, now and again, when it was by no means one of his aims to seek it, the texture of his flesh was porcelain-like, and thus mainly conventional. He was, confessedly, not greatly occupied with ‘values’ of colour, with the relation of part to part. He was at one—perhaps more than they knew it—with many of our newest artists in demanding a decorative quality; only the decorative quality of his choice was not always— was, indeed very seldom—that of theirs. A successful pattern of colour they could understand the virtue of. The Japanese, or Mr. Whistler, had taught it them. But a successful pattern of line, they were less capable of appreciating. They, for example, or some of them, execrated Bouguereau, and resented in some degree the
hospitality prominently offered to that distinguished Frenchman on the walls of the Academy. Lord Leighton, on the other hand, was, very possibly, not fully alive to Bouguereau’s vices or failings—to his mere smoothness, softness, not infrequent vapidness of human expression. But he valued justly Bouguereau’s possession of the best Academic graces, of faultless composition and subtle draughtsmanship. For these things—these best Academic graces— he himself strove. These, too, he generally, though not always, attained.
In regard to this particular matter, there were times when Leighton knew himself to be a vox clamantis in deserto. But he had his mission. It is an immense tribute to him to recognise that any one caring, as he undoubtedly cared, to be acceptable amongst his fellows—amongst the younger men, even, who were some day to succeed him—should yet have been so true to his particular message. But Lord Leighton had an admirable courage as well as a great patience and an untiring diligence. And there were times, fortunately, when it was brought home to him beyond cavil, that some educated appreciation existed of his own especial artistic qualities, as well as of those human virtues which made him, in many ways, so estimable a man, and so fitting a leader of men.
(Standard, 27th January 1896.)
SIR JOHN MILLAIS
F the second time within a few months the Royal Academy has lost its chief, while English Painting is deprived of its most popular representative, and contemporary English Art of one who was long its most vigorous and most varied personality Born at Southampton in 1829, the ‘son of John William Millais, Esquire, by Mary, daughter of Richard Evemy, Esquire’—as the official biographies relate— Millais was really the descendant of a Jersey family of long standing; but in character, personal and professional, he was typically English. It is partly by reason of the fact that, as a man and as an artist, Millais summed up some, perhaps, of the defects, many certainly of the great qualities, of our English race, that his popularity amongst all personal associates, and amongst the spectators of his decisive, strenuous, and eager work, was won so early, and has been so firmly held.
The man himself, during forty years or thereabouts of active adult life—the artist during forty years of scarcely relaxed endeavour —has been in thought, in conduct, in taste, and in production, preeminently healthy. Millais, in the generation and a half of his active life—for he began young—had seen fashions good and bad, foolish and reasonable, rise and pass away; but, save by the influences of his quite early days, the days of the Pre-Raphaelites, he has been practically unaffected. He has developed in the direction proper to himself. As time has passed, he and his sympathies have broadened and modified, and if we miss in much of the later work the intense and concentrated poetry of the earlier, that later work has qualities of its own that do something to compensate. The man himself, too— sportsman, man of the world, excellent comrade, hearty and sincere good fellow—has been essentially greater in his more recent than in his earlier times; for the temptations of a success, brilliant and uninterrupted, did him, as a man at least, little harm. Simple and
generous he was—by all the records of his fellows—when he was at ‘Mr. Sass’s Academy’ fifty years ago. Simple and generous— generous especially in thought and judgment as well as in action— he remained, when in the late winter of the present year he was appointed to the visible headship of the profession to which he had given so much of the energy of his life.
Sir John Millais was only nine years old when he gained his first medal at the Society of Arts—Mozart himself scarcely came before the public in more tender years, as an executant upon the limited keyboard of his day—and when he was seventeen, ‘Jack’ Millais was already an exhibitor at the Academy. He was only twenty when his ‘Isabella,’ from the poem of Keats, disclosed a new talent, almost a new order of talent; at the least, a personality that had to be reckoned with—an influence that had to be either accepted or fought against. Yet more marked by an artistic individuality which was, in part, a return to older conceptions and views than those of his day, were the ‘Carpenter’s Shop,’ ‘Mariana in the Moated Grange,’ the ‘Huguenot,’ and ‘Ophelia.’ These, or most of them, are typical PreRaphaelite pictures—the offspring of the tacit rebellion of a whole group of men, only one of whom, Mr. Holman Hunt, remains to give effect in his later life to the principles enunciated in youth. Dante Gabriel Rossetti—Pre-Raphaelite to the end, though of course with certain modifications—was another of those men; but years have passed since he went from us. The group was completed by others never as celebrated, nor, as the world judges, so successful. They painted their pictures; they made their illustrations; they wrote as well as drew, in the quaint publication called The Germ, which the lapse of time and the fad of the collector have since made rare and valuable. Truth, rather than convention, was the aim of their practice; but they were not peculiar in that,—all youth, if it is earnest at all, is earnest for truth, or earnest rather for that particular side of truth which happens just then to have been revealed, and of which it exaggerates the value. Much has been written about the PreRaphaelite ‘movement’ and its supreme importance—as if it were a great religious Reformation and a French Revolution rolled into one. In History it is destined to be remembered because it was a phase through which two or three men of genius passed—a something,
moreover, that for the moment welded them together It will not be recollected, because at a later time mere imitative weaklings, by the dozen, made feeble fight under what they professed to be its banner.
The interest, then, for sensible people, in Millais’s early pictures, lies, not in the fact that they were Pre-Raphaelite, but in the fact that they showed, many of them, an intensity of vision, a profundity of poetic feeling, which is the property of gifted and of eager youth. The passionate, constant devotion—the devotion of a minute which lasts, you feel, for a lifetime; the ‘moment eternal,’ as the great poet puts it —of the Puritan Maiden and of the Cavalier she helps, is the interest of the ‘Concealed Royalist.’ The burning love-affair of the ‘Huguenot’ is the interest of a canvas on which, before the days when the aesthete had invented ‘intensity’ of attitude, Millais had determined that his lovers should be intense, instead of sentimental. Millais was in those years occupied very much with the presentation, never of strictly sensuous enjoyment (Rossetti’s field, rather than his), but of violent emotion, and uncontrolled, almost uncontrollable, impulse. His people felt keenly, but with the elevation of poetic natures, or of a poetic mood. And Millais painted them when their blood ran high. He chose the incident that seemed to him the most dramatic in all their story. He painted them on the crest of the wave—at the moment of crisis.
This, however, like the more naïve Pre-Raphaelitism of a yet earlier time, was but a phase—remarkable now chiefly because it has been so absolutely outlived; nay, because so much of the view of life taken subsequently by its author has, dominating it, a spirit so opposed to this one. But the transition was not rapid: the ‘Autumn Leaves’ of 1856, and the ‘Vale of Rest’ of 1860, have, at least, the poetic quality to the full, though with no violence of emotion. Rather, they are suggestive and reticent; weird and extraordinarily expressive: in the one there is depicted the wistfulness of childhood, in the other the melancholy resignation of a nun to whom ‘rest’ means brooding on a Past more eventful and more poignant than the occupation of her present day.
Notwithstanding his later technical development, nothing that Sir John Millais has painted will be remembered more definitely and
firmly than these; and it is noteworthy that they are among the first pictures in which he relied in great measure upon landscape to express or suggest the sentiment which it was the picture’s business to convey. ‘Spring Flowers’ of 1860 was in a lighter and gayer vein, if it is, as we believe, the picture known originally as ‘Apple Blossom’— girls lounging in an orchard under the loaded and whitened boughs. ‘My First Sermon,’ in 1863, was more purely popular than anything we have named. It dealt with childhood almost in the spirit of Édouard Frère, but with its author’s singular realism of execution. ‘Vanessa,’ in 1869, marked Millais as occupied increasingly with technical problems—with the attainment of an almost novel boldness of effect. It is, like so many pieces of his middle and later middle time, brilliant in colour and brush-work. No one now thinks, we suppose, of claiming it as dramatic—that is, of connecting it especially with the character of the lady who came off second-best in the affections of Swift.
Very soon after the exhibition of ‘Vanessa,’ Millais, who had already sought impressiveness in landscape background, turned to pure landscape as a theme sufficient for the exercise of his art. He gave us then ‘Chill October,’ the October of the north and of the lowlands, with the wind passing over water, and the reeds and scanty foliage bent aside by its breath. The picture excited interest. It was visibly forcible. The conception of the scene, too, was unusual and, of course, unconventional; but in some later landscape work, Millais may have been at once nearer to Nature and nearer to the attainment of a perfected art. ‘New Laid Eggs,’ in 1873, with naïveté of expression and dexterity of handling, but with a rusticity not very convincing, was a ‘taking’ picture of happy, healthy, self-confident girlhood. Its importance, in the volume of its author’s work, was quite eclipsed the following year by the ‘North-West Passage,’ a canvas full of interest almost romantic, yet most direct in its record of character—the main figure being, indeed, a portrait of that Trevelyan who is associated in most men’s minds with the career of Shelley. He it was who in Sir John Millais’s picture posed as the sturdy sailor whose imagination engages him in a remote and unknown voyage. When, many years after it had been painted, the ‘North-West Passage’ was seen again in the Millais Exhibition, at the Fine Art
Society’s or at the Grosvenor Gallery, it was felt that at the moment of its execution the painter had reached the summit of his real artistic greatness, the masculine and potent hand here best executing that which had been prompted by a mind at its most vigorous. ‘A Jersey Lily,’ in 1878, was a tribute to the then girlish beauty of Mrs. Langtry, who at about the same period was recorded by Mr. Watts with exquisite simplicity. Again, just as in his diploma picture it had pleased Millais to invoke the name of Velasquez, and to perform a feat such as that to which Velasquez was most wont to address himself, so, in another canvas, in one sense more important—that of the three Miss Armstrongs playing whist with a dummy—it pleased him to follow visibly in the steps of Sir Joshua Reynolds—recalling his composition; the portrait group of the three Ladies Waldegrave being the one with which he on this occasion made it his business to vie. In 1879 Sir John was able to exhibit one of the masterpieces of portraiture—that record or idealisation of Mr. Gladstone of which the nobility and charm were instantly recognised—a canvas which of itself would be sufficient to prove that the faculty of poetic vision never finally deserted an artist who had seemed of late to concentrate his energy rather on dexterous execution than on the expression of profound feeling or elevated mood. The ‘Mr. Bright,’ which pretty closely followed the ‘Gladstone,’ was comparatively unsuccessful. And the illness of the sitter and the consequent incompleteness of his presentation on Millais’s canvas, made yet more disappointing the portrait of Lord Beaconsfield which hung upon the walls of the Academy in 1881. Next year, however, came the ‘Cardinal Newman,’ to atone for all that had been amiss—again a poetic vision, a worthy rising to the exigencies of a great theme, a performance at once decisive and tender, energetic, yet exquisitely suave.
(Standard, 14th August 1896.)
BURNE-JONES
U and suddenly, from an attack of angina pectoris, following upon the pest of influenza, Sir Edward Burne-Jones died yesterday morning. He was sixty-five years old, and he looked worn for his age—a man of delicate appearance, and certainly of great sensitiveness; yet, as it had seemed already, of much staying power, —a ‘creaking gate,’ as his friends thought, not so very regretfully, since destined, in all probability, to ‘hang long.’ But now his work and life have been arrested; the laborious days which he had lived for forty years of manhood are for ever over, and the wan face of the untiring craftsman, which bent eagerly over his task, and brightened with quick sensibility in the relaxation of the social hour, is for ever still. ‘Finis’ is written to the volume of achievement of one of the greater practitioners in what we may call the second generation of the English Pre-Raphaelites.
Of the first Pre-Raphaelites—of those of the first generation— more than one changed his ways, his work, his whole conception of Art, obviously, as time went on, and the most illustrious of them all— Millais—was far enough removed from a Pre-Raphaelite in the end. But of that distinguished and untiring practitioner of the second generation, whose hold, of late years at least, upon the English and to some extent upon the French public has become phenomenal, though it will not be constant, it is certainly to be noted that although there was, at different times, an unequal capacity, there was at no time visible change in the direction of his tastes or in the method of his work. Of the human figure Burne-Jones was not at the first an excellent, and was never, at any time, an absolutely faultless draughtsman. Yet the poetry of his figure-drawing, the almost feminine tenderness with which he followed the lines of dainty human movement, the dreamy grace that was in the place of strength, the elegant diffuseness, so to say, which was characteristic
of his style—never even by accident tense and terse—these things are noticeable in his earlier water-colours and in the very latest of his performances in this year’s New Gallery. It was as a water-colour painter that he first began to be known. A pupil of Rossetti, as far as he was a pupil of any one, Burne-Jones was from the beginning romantic, and he was affluent in colour.
But what, it may be asked, are the especial characteristics of Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s art, as it has been revealed not only in the designs for painted glass, mosaic, tapestry, in numberless pages decorated with beautiful ornament—such as the Morris translation of Virgil, and later, the great Chaucer—but likewise in the series of large pictures, the adequate display of which was, so to say, one of the raisons d’être of the old Grosvenor Gallery? He had indeed extraordinary individuality. He was amenable to influence, for all that; and the influence he felt the most—that of his true fellows—was exercised by the Italians of the earlier Renaissance: a period scarcely primitive, scarcely accomplished. Those early Italians, though engaging, were not really great draughtsmen of the human figure—not great draughtsmen in the sense of the Greek sculptors, or Michael Angelo, or Raphael, or Ingres, or Leighton, or Bouguereau. Sir Edward Burne-Jones, lacking the peculiar education which fitted the temperament and brought out the qualities of the men we have named last of all, not unnaturally sympathised with those in whom intention counted sometimes for more than execution. But it must not be thought that because the ever-inventive artist did not possess the Academic qualities, he was not, therefore, in certain respects, very remarkable in draughtsmanship. He drew with the ease of conversation; and, though never a master of accurate gesture—seldom dramatic in the representation of the particular hour or scene—he was a master of quaint and simple, and sometimes of elaborate, grace; and for the untiring record of the particular type of maidenhood, seen best perhaps in the ‘Golden Staircase,’ or in ‘Venus’s Looking-Glass,’ he stands alone. We name those pictures rather than, for instance, the ‘Days of Creation,’ or any of his various ‘Seasons,’ because in them he is at his happiest—his girls, though in the work of the suave decorator they are never essentially various, can be radiant as well as doleful. His men have
plenty of wistfulness, but they have rarely energy, strength, decision. They are even, in a measure, sexless. And of childhood, BurneJones has never been an inspired, or even, it would seem, a particularly interested chronicler.
Of course, it must be remembered that Burne-Jones is judged unjustly when judged by the rules of even the least narrow realism. He painted, not the world of our own day, or of any day—least of all the Kensington in which he lived, and slept, and had his studio—but a world he had imagined and created; a world his conception of which was fed, no doubt, by the earlier and graver of mid-Italian art. Imagination, now stimulated by legend, now supported by classic lore, and now the product of the brooding of an isolated mind—that is really the genesis, the raison d’être, the Alpha and the Omega of his art. Burne-Jones had, at his best, and especially in his middle period—the days of the ‘Chant d’Amour,’ with its fitly welcomed splendours of crimson and blue and golden brown—a wonderful gift of colour; and, even where the draughtsmanship of the human figure left something to be wished for, he was a marvellous, a loving, and a patient draughtsman of flower and of herb. The backgrounds of some of his inventions, in landscape and the architecture of towns, were of strange and mystic quaintness. Sometimes, in these, he recalled almost the spirit, the mystery, almost the charm, of the backgrounds of the prints by Albert Dürer. The great Dürer!—well, that is saying much. But we have left to the last what was perhaps Burne-Jones’s most essential characteristic, certainly his greatest accomplishment. We mean his gift of composition of line, his power of precisely and perfectly filling, and never overcrowding, the space it was his business to occupy. His composition of light and shade was less remarkable. He was a master of agreeable outline, of flowing and spontaneous tracery. But if it is not his imagination which is to keep his memory green, in the minds of the students of Art—and we doubt whether, with all his very individual merits, it really is—then it is that in which, in all our generation, and perhaps in all our English School, he may be accounted to have most possessed—the humbler faculty of patterning, of weaving faultless webs of subtle line over the surface, large or small, which was devoted to the exposition of whatever chanced to be his theme.
(Standard, 18th June 1898.)
BOSBOOM AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
T English cognoscenti of the modern type have now for some time recognised that in Dutch Art there is more than one great period that has to be reckoned with—that the great Seventeenth Century does not exhaust the achievements of this people. It may not be quite true to say of Dutch painting, as of French sculpture, that the traditions have been invariably preserved, and that there has been little break in the school; for the last century in Holland was a barren one—just as barren there as in France and England it was brilliant. The revival has been for later generations, and of those who did most to accomplish it some are yet living, in an old age not so very advanced, and others are lately dead. A history of this revival would be a great and worthy subject: it may yet, one hopes, be undertaken by some one writer qualified to treat it. Such a writer could not possibly be a person who had lived wholly within its influence. He would have to bring with him something better and wiser than the ungoverned admirations of the modern studio. A knowledge of the Past must be his. Meanwhile, we receive, and experience a certain satisfaction in receiving, even that fragmentary contribution to the subject which is made in the volume called Dutch Painters of the Nineteenth Century. Max Rooses—the keeper of the Musée PlantinMoretus at Antwerp—furnishes a general introduction, which is readable and fairly comprehensive, if not particularly critical. And many writers, whose collaboration is of necessity destructive of unity of idea, but whose individual opportunities of personal knowledge give the book something it might yet have lacked had it been written by one serious and capable critic, contribute biographical notes, authentic and amiable. The painters have been caressed, not analysed. That is exactly what the least instructed and least studious portion of the public is supposed to like, in the ‘text’ of its big
