Forget the Masters to See Art History as It Really Was

This methodology comes from the fact that everyone is fascinated by viewing art history through the names of great masters. But when we speak of art history, we mean the history of art—not a history of masters. It is not about whom a certain master married, who taught him to paint, or the year he died. It is about what works from that period looked like. This history is the history of art, not social history told through great masters. We may begin with a master's name, of course, but we should not become absorbed in his life and social background—or, especially, in the material contained in colophons—at the expense of looking at the painting itself. I do not mean that I never discuss artists. But I later realized that I had written more than six hundred pages about three and a half authentic works by one painter, Wu Zhen, without saying a single thing about his life. By conventional standards that may seem inconceivable. But what I was pursuing was the period to which an object belonged: were those paintings actually made by him, in his time, or were they made in another era? How could I determine when these paintings were produced? When we have no other basis, trusting a person's name is unreliable. If we used this other method to examine Chinese calligraphy and painting, we would avoid the enormous mistakes repeated throughout the twentieth century—errors that should embarrass us before scholars of Western art history. Suppose an alien arrived and said, “Hello. I hear you have something called Chinese calligraphy and painting. Have you studied it well?” I could only answer that we have not. “How many years of calligraphy and painting do you have?” At least two thousand years, I would say, for which genuine works survive. The alien might then ask: “Can you describe the calligraphy and paintings of, say, the second century—counting from the beginning of the Common Era? What about the third century? The fourth? The fifth?” And so on through time. Let us focus on the most recent millennium, from the tenth century to the twentieth and twenty-first. Can you distinguish its periods clearly? Can you look at a work and tell me at once that it dates from the second half of the thirteenth century? I would have to say that we humans do not work that way. We organize things by names: this bears a signature attributed to Zhuge Liang, that one to Sun Yat-sen, so we file each beneath the famous person. We do not reckon by centuries. The alien would reply, “No wonder all your paintings look the same. I can leaf through your books from beginning to end and learn nothing; everything looks so similar.” I would whisper that a large proportion of them were made in the same period. No wonder they resemble one another. That is really what has happened. Now that we are in the twenty-first century, as I said, a new and somewhat brighter era has arrived. We should begin to sort this out, because this is indeed an extraordinary heritage and tradition. Yet its basic chronology remains unresolved. We cannot really compare ourselves with historians of Western painting. They do have an advantage: their objects were attached to walls or floors from the beginning, whether as paintings or mosaics. They could not be carried away, and they were hard to forge. By the Renaissance, however, paintings could be rolled up and removed, and forgeries began to appear there too. I will say no more, because I cannot afford to offend everyone. I can offend people in my own country, so we can quietly admit that we have many fakes. But there are many abroad as well, hanging in museums. Art history, then, should be studied without masters. I am calling for this method so that students can begin more objectively, rather than setting out to find Zhuge Liang. When we study Western art history, we learn that style continually evolves with time. A colleague once told me, “Your theory of style is very old-fashioned. We no longer think that way.” I found that amusing. You yourselves are already over twenty. You know how many times styles have changed during those twenty years—what became fashionable and what people stopped talking about. When you look at a painting, you can roughly tell at what point in your lifetime it was made. Tastes and interests change. The pattern is somewhat abstract: change does not run in a straight line from A to Z. Structurally, I have found that it traces a circle, but the circle is a screw or spiral. It comes around again to this place, but not to precisely the same point—it spirals upward. Take the “ground plane.” When we look at a painting, we should ask whether its ground plane—from the very front of the picture all the way to the back, from before our eyes to the distant horizon—is continuous, whether it bends, or whether it is not explained at all. This is structure. You can see it clearly, almost step by step; I will show you in a moment. In the Yuan dynasty, it was exceptionally consistent. When we studied at Princeton in th…