Art
Chinese Art at Burlington House
BURLINGTON HOUSE is looking beautiful. How has it been done ? There is an inexpressibly rejuvenated air about it : yet is not the art of China notorious for antiquity and conservatism ? Perhaps it is because for once there are not too many pictures ; perhaps it is because the gold frame was unknown in China, and still is. But bay, this air of up-to-dateness of elegance, of exclusiveness, of the " last- word " has managed to prevail is a mystery. There are 3,080 things ; but even when there are also 8,080 people there, I do not believe that the visitor will feel that sense of " too much " which invades the spirit in great shops some- times, and even more sometimes in great exhibitions. I suppose a' good deal of the credit for imposing on a vast building and a vast collection this air of unity, this repose. must go to Mr. Leigh Ashton, who planned the fittings and arrangements. The old notion of Chinese art as something bright, and variegated with strong-patterned and strongly con- trasting colohrs, is only one side of the story. There is another side, and almost without our knowing it we have been so deeply influenced by it that I think it would hardly be too much to say that the cult of the simple interior, the same cult which one sees in all branches of modern art, is partly of Oriental inspiration. At any rate, the appreciation of early Chinese art has gone hand hi hand with this movement. The influence reached us perhaps first through the intermediate art of Japan ; Japanese or Chinese in these matters is all one. The plain celadon-green, brown or cream-white vases and bowls of Chinese ceramics are so intimately associated with this simplicity-cult in Japan that I should say there are three or four whole rooms at the exhibition wh ?re paintings and pottery combine to produce an effect wl.R1 is both Chinese, Japanese, and modern European.
It is in the management of these rooms that special skill has been shown. Perhaps one of the most beautiful paintings in the exhibition, by an artist of the Yfian dynasty (fourteenth century) Kao Ko-Kung, No. 1059, is shown here with that singleness of effect which reminds us, as we look at it, that we have heard that in the East they show only one painting at a time. Another painting, which comes from Japan, will remind us that " Chinese " and -" Japanese " taste arc distinctions we need not, in some connexions, be too precise about. It is the famous Wet Sparrows of Mu-Chi, of the ,thirteenth century (No. 1117). It is a national treasure, and belonged to one of Japan's national heroes, a great patron of art, the Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa. It is simply two birds on a branch done in a few strokes and smudges of Chinese ink. Nothing, in a way, could be more " Japanese." Or again, to go to quite another part of Burlington House, the room where sculpture is usually shown. Here again we seen forms which we associate with the Buddhism of Japan far more than with that of China as most of us know it, where the gorgeous Lamaistic art with its strong Tibetan flavour predominates, in Pekin especially. Here, too, is seen the art of the T'ang dynasty in pottery of almost Italian vigour. The fact is that there are very feW Sides' of Chinese art which have not had their counterpart both in Japan and in the West ; and there are some, particularly Buddhist sculpture, for which we turn to Japan just as much as to China or more so to find the most perfect flowering Of the spirit—certainly not a material spirit—which inspired them.
Indeed, one of the chief discoveries one makes about the art of any nation when one can see it, as one can see Chinese art at Burlington House., in all its multiplicity, is that art is not a 'national thing at all. There is, however, one side of Chinese art which if not national is at least indigenous, and certainly • peculiar. This aspect is that shown in the first room, where the earliest relics of the feudal age of China arc shown. There is about some of these an impressiveness that is forbidding. The chief monument of this primitive phase is the great altar-set formerly the property of the Viceroy 'Yuan Fang, lent by the Metropolitan Museum, New York (319). These extraordinary bronze vessels represent what I can only call the crustacean period of China. •
It is life, but life in a form alien, fascinating, and a little horrible ; life which has assumed the eternal static, armoured impenetrability of the chrysalis. The awe-inspiring plated
hides of prehistoric reptiles, with their apparently meaningless eicreseetices;- come into our minds in connexion with some of its manifestations. Perhaps the two most remarkable examples of this antediluvian. aspect of Chinese art are the two " wine-vessels " of bronze, of which one comes from the Musee Cernuschi, Paris, and the other from the collection of Baron Sumitomo. The latter is a Japanese National Treasure. Both represent, in a terrifying symbolism, without drama, without passion, a tiger clasping and apparently about to devour a human figure. " An age of sacrifices and omens " indeed is here before us in its most ominous aspect. To pass from the atmosphere of this first room to the second is like leaving Mexico to find ourselves in modern Paris. The room is dominated by a carpet hung on the walls (No. • 477) ascribed to the 15th century A.D. Enthroned on high in front of it is a fignre which might be early Gothic ; a figure which smiles at us serenely, which does not sit tailor-wise like the Buddha we arc familiar with, but as though on a throne, his legs crossed in an attitude reassuringly European. Here, too (No. 482) is the stone BOddhisattra from the Victoria and Albert. Museum (Eumorfopoulos collection) standing in an attitude of graceful calm like some slim modern girl whoSe quiet air of receptive intelligence attracts us at a cocktail party.
But perhaps the loveliest of all the inlaid bronze objects of this age of civilised splendour (the Han dynasty 206 B.C.- 220 A.D.) is the ring (375) from the Bliss collection, Washington, U.S.A. The staff-end, too (380) though it is ascribed to the " Period of the Warring States " (481-221 B.C., makes us think of modern Europe and Versailles, or the Wars of the Roses, rather than of anything more primeval. When we reach the next room, where at the Royal Academy Exhibitions the small pictures arc hung, we arc in the full blaze of a civilised epoch. The flat table-case containing mirrors is a revelation. Chinese art is here seen at its least " Chinese ,' stage. The lovely painting, No. 755, Herd of deer in a Grove, might be a Pisanello. It is ascribed—ambitiously but not without justification—to the Five dynasties (907-960 A.D.). The art. of this period, in painting, is considered by many experts to have almoSt completely disappeared ; but there is no escaping the stylistic arguments which have made the experts see in this lovely tapestry-like composition a reflection, at any rate, and possibly an example, of the nationalistic ,art of the period which succeeded the T'ang dynasty, the age of the wonderful tomb-pottery figures of horses and camels, and preceded the Sung dynasty, when nationalism in painting becanie a cult encouraged by emperors. Whatever its chances of authenticity, the painting No. 997 ascribed to the Emperor Hui-Tsung of this dynasty, litho lived from 1082-1135 A.D., may be taken as exemplifying in its most exquisite form the refined nature-worship of the court academy of that date.
We are now in Gallery 'IV, and have reached the corner room of a series of galleries which are the best-designed in the whole exhibition. Porcelains in delicate monochrome tints fill show-cases along the walls ; the eases jut out to form bays, in each of which are masterpieces 0painting, scrolls in quiet tones of grey, landscapes of Whistlerian reticence. One cannot indeed help thinking of America at her best here, of the refined intellectual Puritanism of Boston. No sense of oriental luxury hangs about even the rare and precious porcelains. Rare they surely are, for they represent a phase of Chinese Art which pottery experts even twenty years ago hardly imagined had survived. There is for instance, in Gallery IV, a whole 'ease of the almost mystical Ju ware. Passing down these galleries, we are among porcelains tlmt have the subdued lustre of jade and ivory, among " paint- ings " that have the delicacy and strength of drawings by our own old masters. Any lingering feelings we have cherished that Chinese painting is or should be merely decora- tive arc here dispelled. Among many, a scroll (1837) by a sixteenth-century artist, Hsii Wei, is one of the loveliest creations of Chinese draughtsmanship. The silvery greys and deep 'tones of the ink-strokes remind us that paper, ink and brush are the media of Chinese " painting " : that we must not look here for the polished surfaces of our own oil-painting, the glowing colours and rounded forms of Western Art. Chinese painting is always really drawing. Eyen when it is extended to a colossal scale, as in the mighty landscape (1904) by Tung Ch'i-Ch'ang, we feel merely as though some giant
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