Collection Publications: Chinese Painting and Printing of the Anhui School

Shadows of Mt. Huang: Chinese Painting and Printing of the Anhui School 

Anhui province is located inland from the southeast coastal provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, straddling the Yangtze River in China. Rich in natural resources but not in agricultural land, and located on or near waterways that were the channels of transport to the fertile Jiangnan or Yangtze delta region, Anhui- and especially southern Anhui- became a great mercantile center. In the new commercial economy of the late Ming, the Huizhou merchants (so called after the south-Anhui district of Huizhou or Xin'an from which they came) dominated the commerce of the whole empire, spreading out to supply a network of market cities. The great families of Anhui, preserving traditions of scholarship, supplied the government with many of its scholar-administrators for the bureaucracy, and newly-risen merchant families used some of their wealth to educate their sons to the same end. Southern Anhui was also the place where the finest papers, ink, inkstones, and brushes were manufactured, and…where some of the finest printing of the late Ming period was produced. In view of all these conducive factors, it is not surprising that a major school of painting grew up there in the late Ming and early Qing periods. The real florescence of the school occurred in the decades immediately following the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644 to the Manchus, and must be seen in the context of that shattering collapse of native Chinese rule. The relationship of art to history, here as always, can be understood on several levels. Some of the artists, such as the greatest of the Anhui masters, Hongren, became Buddhist monks or otherwise withdrew from public life to avoid involvement with the alien dynasty. They became, that is, what the Chinese call yimin, literally "left-over subjects." In the transition from Ming to Qing, the southern Anhui region had suffered more terrible depredations than most others, first from the peasant rebellions and local uprisings of the last decade of the Ming, and then from the bloody but futile resistance against the Manchu troops, which was strongest and most destructive in this region. Southern Anhui lay directly in the path of the advancing Manchus, and the pillaging by armies of both sides devastated the countryside; most of the great gentry families had their property burned and plundered. Much of the best painting of the Anhui school belongs, then, to the age of post-conquest restoration, and reflects in its forms the climate of feeling prevalent in that age. Like the late Yuan period scholar-artists who were their most revered models, notably Huang Gongwang and Ni Zan, the Anhui masters of this period seem to express in their thinly-painted, often unpeopled landscapes a desire for withdrawal from involvement with the human world, and a preference for the constants of both natural scenery and an indestructible cultural tradition. The typical styles of the Anhui masters, as we will see, were based on a dry, linear manner of drawing and on sometimes radical abstractions of natural form. Painting styles of this type had always been associated with a cultural elite, the Confucian literati, who, when they painted, were (in theory) non-professional artists, above commercialism; such styles carried connotations of aloofness and purity. How can their popularity in early Qing Anhui be compatible with the patronage of merchant families that must have accounted for much of the artists' support? Merchants were supposed to be uncultured, even "vulgar" people, and no doubt many of them, lacking gentry family backgrounds and traditional educations, were that. We advance the hypothesis that these styles, exactly because of their literati, "high-culture" associations, were attractive to a rising merchant class that wanted to establish ties with the educated elite, always the most prestigious class in Chinese society. When we are told (by Zhou Lianggong, friend and patron of artists of the time) that the possession of a Hongren painting conferred a reputation for "refinement" on the owner- the same had been said of Ni Zan's paintings three centuries earlier- we realize that such paintings were, apart from their intrinsic value, "status symbols." Anhui merchant families in the late Ming, we learn from a contemporary writer, had assembled huge collections of old paintings, paying the highest prices; and Wang Shizhen (1526-1590), a leading critic of art and literature of that period, attributes the great demand for Yuan dynasty painting in his time to the Anhui collectors. It was natural that they should support the production of paintings in similar styles by their contemporary local artists. A number of factors can be adduced to help account for the evolution of an independent school of painting in Anhui, and for the stylistic directions it took. One is the influence of the local woodblock-printing industry; several of our artists contributed designs for printed books, and for molded designs on ink-cakes that were later reproduced by woodblock. This is a fascinating side of Anhui's artistic tradition-where else but in China has ink been not only the favored medium for a pictorial art but also a minor art form in itself? Another factor is the pervasive effect of the local terrain, especially the spectacular scenery of Mt. Huang, on the styles in which it was depicted. If the wooded hills surrounding Nanjing virtually imposed on artists of that region a manner of brushwork suited to rendering rich textures, so did the spare, rocky peaks of Huangshan call for linear renditions of angular forms, and inspire effects of monumentality .In devoting so much of their art to the distinctive features of the terrain surrounding them, the Anhui masters follow a practice common among the earlier Suzhou painters. Both groups of artists were expressing their emotional bonds to their homeland, but also responding to a demand stimulated by local pride, and by the desire of visitors to the region to carry home pictures that reminded them of what they had seen. An important difference between the Suzhou artists' pictures of local scenery and those of the Anhui masters is that the former depict a cultural landscape, in which the points of interest tend to be temples, villas, the old abodes of Daoist hermits, places with historical or literary associations. Pictures of Huangshan and other celebrated sights in Anhui, by contrast, concentrate on the natural scenery itself: peaks, pine trees, waterfalls, seas of fog. Again, the difference seems to reflect a shift of emotional commitment from the world of human affairs to the natural world. A few notes on what to look for in the paintings, or how to look at the paintings, might be useful. The viewer who at first finds them cool and (in a negative sense) dry, even unexciting, is responding as the artists intended; this was meant to be a style that does not immediately appeal. Looked at longer, the paintings should (if the artists have been successful, and if we have been in our selection) begin gradually to reveal subtle strengths and partly-hidden structures not apparent on initial viewing. Developments in Western painting in this century have made us, perhaps, more responsive to abstract values of the kind that the Anhui masters pursued. We have also become attuned (perforce) to minimalist tendencies in art, and can better appreciate that aspect of Anhui painting than our grand­ parents could have. But minimalism was not an end; what we should watch for are the ways in which it was reconciled, in the best works of the school, with traditional values, and the dry, monochrome drawing used to construct pictures that fulfilled the old criteria for successful landscape painting: convincing rendering of space and mass, evocations of light and air, suggestions (however slight) of natural textures, some understanding of geological formations (however strange or abstract the forms might be), and a whole set of effects that recall exhilarating experiences in nature. To do this within their self-imposed restrictions was the goal of the Anhui artists. It was a goal in harmony with a long-established belief, Daoist or Confucian or simply Chinese, in the virtues of restraint and unostentatious achievement. We do not have to be Daoist or Confucian or Chinese to recognize the achievement, the "elegant solutions" to shared artistic problems that the paintings (among their other excellences) represent; we can understand , without accepting or even knowing about the theoretical positions that underlie it, the association of this style with the highest level of aesthetic refinement, and with humane values that transcend the aesthetic. Gombrich writes of certain Italian Renaissance paintings: "The rejection of richness and intricacy for the sake of clarity and simplicity probably presupposes a degree of aesthetic sophistication that can only be found here and, possibly, in Far Eastern art."3 Such sophistication is indeed found in Far Eastern art, and nowhere in more subtle and yet moving manifestations than the paintings of the Anhui masters. The development of the school as a whole can be traced through the pictures. The influence of Hongren in the early period, and a gradual weakening of that influence in the later, can be observed, and with it a softening of the austerity characteristic of the first phase. In paintings by Dai Benxiao, Mei Qing, Shitao, and others, it is not only the mountains and waterfalls that are the themes, but the responses to them of people portrayed in the pictures, and a certain deepening of emotional tone results. The dry-line manner gives way, in many later works, to a related but distinguishable technique of rubbing dark, dry ink onto the paper or silk, for an effect like charcoal drawing; this can be seen at its best in works by Cheng Sui and some by Dai Benxiao. The nuances possible within both modes of drawing, and the descriptive and expressive uses to which both are put, are among the aspects of Anhui painting that the viewer might keep in mind while looking at the paintings. A final word on forms and materials. The most characteristic product of Anhui school painting is generally considered to be the hanging scroll painted on paper, and that is what most museums and collectors look for…But a survey of the whole output of our artists reveals a greater diversity than that view would suggest; they did much of their best work in the smaller formats, the handscroll or horizontal scroll, the album, the fan painting, and also painted often on silk or (occasionally) satin, which discourages dry-brush drawing but has special capacities of its own. --James Cahill Professor, History of Art University of California, Berkeley