This book highlights a major masterpiece of Chinese art in the British Museum, rarely on display for conservation reasons. It makes available new, high-quality digital photography of the famous Admonitions Scroll, plus text on its iconic status and the mysteries surrounding its attribution.
"This fascinating book guides the reader through the details of the scroll's dating, authorship and provenance, explaining how the painting relates to Gu Kaizhi and reflects his artistic genius. New photography brings this delicate and rarely exhibited work to life, scene by scene. The author also explores the scroll's calligraphy, its history over many dynasties as it passed through the hands of collectors and connoisseurs, and its iconic status in the modern world."--Jacket
Over thousands of years, the art of Chinese painting has evolved, while also staying loyal to its traditional roots. Despite various schools of thought, styles and techniques, three primary categories have emerged across the discipline: landscape, figure and bird-and-flower. Using fine ink and water brush strokes on paper or silk, Chinese artists have developed a unique style—one that's famous throughout the world.This book highlights 50 Chinese paintings, pulled from museum collections in China and around the world, including British Museum (London), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas), Osaka City Museum of Art (Osaka), Palace Museum (Beijing), Palace Museum (Taibei) and Shanghai Museum. The paintings shown are representative of the categories, historical periods and styles of this artistic tradition.Detailed professional interpretations and notes allow readers to learn more about the pieces themselves, the artists and the context in which they were created. Plus, photo enlargements of key details get readers up close to these masterpieces.As one of the world's oldest continuous art forms, Chinese painting has a truly special history. This comprehensive guide allows modern readers to travel through time, experiencing important moments in Chinese history and society through beautiful pieces of artwork.
"Together the text and illustrations gradually reveal many of the major themes and characteristics of Chinese painting. To "read" these works is to enter a dialogue with the past. Slowly perusing a scroll or album, one shares an intimate experience that has been repeated over the centuries. And it is through such readings that meaning is gradually revealed."--BOOK JACKET.
There is a unique genre in traditional Chinese painting, in which artists would use painstaking detail to pinpoint everyday life in a certain place at a certain point of history. It provides a compelling insight into the forgotten lives of China's past.
The tenth-century Chinese handscrollThe Night Banquet of Han Xizai(attributed to tenth-century artist Gu Hongzheng), long famous for its depiction of a decadent party hosted by a government official, is used by De-nin Lee to explore how art objects are created and the many sociopolitical eras and individual hands through which they pass. By the tenth or eleventh century, and in earnest by the thirteenth, viewers of Chinese paintings lodged their responses to a work of art directly on the object itself, in the form of seals, inscriptions, and colophons. The scrawls and markings may amount to distractions for the seasoned admirer of European easel painting, but Lee explains that a handscroll painting without its complement of textual accretions loses its very history. Through her deft detective work, we watch the Night Banquet handscroll-much like the enigmatic seventeenth-century Cremonese instrument in Francois Girard's filmThe Red Violin-travel through the centuries from owner to owner and viewer to viewer, influencing and being influenced by the people who contemplate it and add their thoughts, signatures, and seals to its borders. Treating the scroll as a co-creation of painter and viewers, Lee tells a fascinating story of cultural practices surrounding Chinese paintings. In effect, her book addresses a question central to art history: What is the role of art in a society? De-nin Leeis assistant professor of art and Asian studies at Bowdoin College in Maine. "A tour de force of historical scholarship,The Night Banquetis an engaging narrative that at times reads like a detective novel. Lee investigates every individual who saw, wrote on, or commented about the scroll, and she leads the reader on an enticing journey of discovery that provides both an overview of Chinese history and an in-depth reading of this extraordinary work of art."-Ankeney Weitz, Colby College "Lee has been immensely successful in her quest to uncover the history and changing significance of the Han Xizai scroll, detailing what a spectrum of career officials, connoisseurs, collectors, and emperors had to say about it--sometimes disapproving of the subject matter as licentious and immoral, sometimes considering it a vehicle for comment on current political situations. A masterful study, rooted in extensive original research, rich in detail and interpretation,The Night Banquetis a major contribution to the study of Chinese painting and to Chinese culture in general."-Ellen Johnston Laing, University of Michigan
The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures traces the three-thousand-year history of the emperor's imperial collection, from the Bronze Age to the present. The tortuous story of these treasures involves a succession of dynasties, invasion and conquest, and civil war, resulting in valiant attempts to rescue and preserve the collection. Throughout history, different Chinese regimes used the imperial collection to bolster their own political legitimacy, domestically and internationally. The narrative follows the gradual formation of the Peking Palace Museum in 1925, then its hasty fragmentation as large parts of the collection were moved perilously over long distances to escape wartime destruction, and finally its formal division into what are today two Palace Museums-one in Beijing, the other in Taipei. Enlivened by the personalities of those who cared for the collection, this textured account of the imperial treasures highlights magnificent artworks and their arduous transit through politics, war, and diplomatic reconciliations. Over the years, control of the collections has been fiercely contested, from early dynasties through Mongol and Japanese invaders to Nationalist and Communist rivals- a saga that continues today. This first book-length investigation of the imperial collections will be of great interest to China scholars, historians, and Chinese art specialists. Its tales of palace intrigue will fascinate a wide variety of readers.
A history of the reception of Chinese painting from the sixteenth century to the present What is Chinese painting? When did it begin? And what are the different associations of this term in China and the West? In Chinese Painting and Its Audiences, which is based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery of Art, leading art historian Craig Clunas draws from a wealth of artistic masterpieces and lesser-known pictures, some of them discussed here in English for the first time, to show how Chinese painting has been understood by a range of audiences over five centuries, from the Ming Dynasty to today. Chinese Painting and Its Audiences demonstrates that viewers in China and beyond have irrevocably shaped this great artistic tradition. Arguing that audiences within China were crucially important to the evolution of Chinese painting, Clunas considers how Chinese artists have imagined the reception of their own work. By examining paintings that depict people looking at paintings, he introduces readers to ideal types of viewers: the scholar, the gentleman, the merchant, the nation, and the people. In discussing the changing audiences for Chinese art, Clunas emphasizes that the diversity and quantity of images in Chinese culture make it impossible to generalize definitively about what constitutes Chinese painting. Exploring the complex relationships between works of art and those who look at them, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences sheds new light on how the concept of Chinese painting has been formed and reformed over hundreds of years. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.
Drawing on the British Museum's extensive collection, this book explores the traditional hierarchy of materials and techniques reaching back as far as the Han Dynasty in the third century BC. In the history and character of the works under scrutiny, this sumptuously illustrated book conveys an understanding of Chinese art in all its great variety.