This book presents a survey of Chinese painting from the eighth to the 14th century, a period during which the nature of China's pictorial art changed dramatically. Illustrated by works in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the author begins by describing the advent toward the end of the Bronze Age of figural representation in Chinese art, and next traces the development of Chinese landscape painting from the third to the tenth century. He then moves on to discuss the art of the Sung dynasty, when the imperial government was increasingly absolute and repressive. In this period artists shifted from a realistic rendition of nature to more symbolic representation of single flowers, rocks and trees. By the time of the Yuan dynasty, following the Mongol conquest of 1279, objective representation in art had been replaced by imagery that drew on the artist's inner response to his world. Because it was believed that the meaning of a painted subject, made complex by personal and symbolic associations, could no longer be expressed without language, the painter began to inscribe poems and incorporate calligraphy in his works, the multiple relationships among word, image and calligraphy forming the basis of a new art. At this stage Chinese art entered its richest and most diverse stage f development.

Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 8Th-14th Century (Princeton Monographs in Art and Archaeology, No 48)

Arts & Photography

Fong, Wen C.

History & Criticism

Yale Univ Pr

This publication celebrates the promised gift to The Metropolitan Museum of Art from the Oscar Tang family of twelve major works from the C. C. Wang Family Collection, one of the great private collections of Chinese old master paintings to be assembled in the twentieth century. Ranging in date from the tenth to the early eighteenth century, these works significantly extend the Museum's holdings and reveal those areas of Chinese painting of particular interest to Mr. Wang. An accomplished artist, Ch'i-ch'ien Wang, a resident of New York City since 1949, began collecting paintings in Shanghai more than seventy years ago.Among the twelve paintings presented here is the famed Riverbank, attributed to the tenth-century master Dong Yuan (active 930s-60s), one of the patriarchs of the scholarly Southern school of landscape painting. An essay by Wen C. Fong presents an in-depth stylistic analysis and contextual history of the painting. A physical analysis of the work is also included.An extended essay by Maxwell K. Hearn examines all twelve paintings.

Along the Riverbank Chinese Paintings from the C.C. Wang Family Collection

Hearn, Maxwell K.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Only two major exhibitions from the fabled Chinese Palace Museum collections have been seen in the West - the first in London in 1935-36 and the second in the United States in 1961-62. These two exhibitions provided an extraordinary stimulus to the study of Chinese culture, revolutionized Asian art studies in the West, and opened the eyes of the public to the artistic traditions of Chinese civilization. Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei is the publication that accompanies the third great exhibition of Chinese masterworks to travel to the West.Written by scholars of both Chinese and Western cultural backgrounds and conceived as a cultural history, the book tells the story of Chinese art from its foundations in the Bronze Age and the first empires through the rich diversity of art produced during the Sung, Yuan, Ming, and Ch'ing dynasties, contrasting China's absolutist political structure with the humanism of its artistic and moral philosophy. Synthesizing scholarship of the past three decades, the authors present not only the historical and cultural significance of individual works of art and analyses of their aesthetic content, but a reevaluation of the cultural dynamics of Chinese history, reflecting a fundamental shift in the study of Chinese art from a focus on documentation and connoisseurship to an emphasis on the cultural significance of the visual arts.National treasures passed down from dynasty to dynasty, the works of art that now form the collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, originally constituted the personal collection of the Ch'ien-lung emperor, who ruled China from 1736 to 1795. Two centuries after Ch'ien-lung ascended the dragon throne, when the Japanese invaded China in 1937, the nearly 10,000 masterworks of painting and calligraphy and more than 600,000 objects and rare books and documents - which had earlier been moved from Peking to Nanking following the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 - were packed in crates and evacuated to caves near the wartime capital, Chungking. It was not until after World War II that the crated treasures were moved to their present home in Taiwan, where today they represent a major portion of China's artistic and cultural legacy.

Possessing the Past Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei

Watt, James C.Y.

During a crucial period from the 1860s to about 1980, Chinese painting was transformed into a modern expression of its classical heritage. This book draws on a selection of modern Chinese paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in order to explore this period, discussing issues of modernity and creativity in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Chinese painting. 
Wen C. Fong deals with both traditionalist and modernizing Chinese masters from the comparative perspective of East and West, traditional and modern. He begins by examining the last traditional "revival," the epigraphic school of painting, and the rise of a populist art in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai. Next he focuses on painters who absorbed the lessons of Western realism, in particular one artist who followed the Ecole des Beaux Arts and one who adapted the model of the Japanese Nihonga painters, and on three great traditionalist masters, two of whom were professional populist painters. Finally he explores Chinese painting from about 1950 to 1980 by the second generation of artists and teachers in the national academies who, having been trained by traditionalist and Western-style teachers, developed their own schools of influence in their search for a new synthesis of Chinese and Western methods.

Between Two Cultures: Late-Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Chinese Painting from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection

A landmark reference volume devoted to Chinese calligraphy, a unique and beautiful art form with a three-thousand-year tradition Chinese calligraphy, with its artistic as well as utilitarian values, has been treasured for its formal beauty for more than three millennia. This lavishly illustrated book brings to English language readers for the first time a full account of calligraphy in China, including its history, theory, and importance in Chinese culture. Representing an unprecedented collaboration among leading Chinese and Western specialists, the book provides a definitive and up-to-date overview of the visual art form most revered in China.
The book begins with the premise that the history of Chinese script writing represents the core development of the history of Chinese culture and civilization. Tracing the development of calligraphic criticism from the second century to the twenty-first, the fourteen contributors to the volume offer a well-balanced and readable account of this tradition. With more than 600 illustrations, including examples of extremely rare Chinese calligraphy from all over the world, and an informative prologue by Wen C. Fong, this book will make a welcome addition to the library of every Western reader interested in China and its premiere art form.

Chinese Calligraphy (The Culture & Civilization of China)

Ouyang, Zhongshi

Yale University Press

Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute: The Story of Lady Wen-chi. A Fourteenth-Century Handscroll in The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rorex, Robert A.

This publication celebrates the promised gift to The Metropolitan Museum of Art from the Oscar Tang family of twelve major works from the C. C. Wang Family Collection, one of the great private collections of Chinese old master paintings to be assembled in the twentieth century. Ranging in date from the tenth to the early eighteenth century, these works significantly extend the Museum's holdings and reveal those areas of Chinese painting of particular interest to Mr. Wang. An accomplished artist, Ch'i-eh'icn Wang, a resident of New York City since 1949, began collecting paintings in Shanghai more than seventy years ago. Works from his collection, long known to Western scholars and connoisseurs, are now in many American public institutions and universities. The Metropolitan owns some sixty works formerly in this collection, the twelve presented here constituting the most recent addition to the Museum's holdings from this source. Along the Riverbank is published on the occasion of the exhibition "The Artist as Collector: Masterpieces of Chinese Paintings from the C. C. Wang Family Collection," which includes most of the works acquired by the Museum from Mr. Wang since 1973.Among the twelve paintings presented here is the famed Riverbank, attributed to the tenth-century master Dong Yuan (active 950s–60s), one of the patriarchs of the scholarly Southern school of landscape painting. It is generally recognized as one of the rare extant paintings marking the inception of the monumental landscape tradition in China. An essay by Wen C. Fong presents an in-depth stylistic analysis and contextual history of the painting. A physical analysis of the work is also included.An extended essay by Maxwell K. Hearn examines all twelve paintings. The major examples of landscape art include Simple Retreat, by the renowned scholar-artist Wang Meng (1308–1385), who drew inspiration from the vision of landscape created bv Dona Yuan and other tenth-century painters. In addition to landscapes, the collection features several important figure paintings, including Palace Banquet, by an unknown Academy painter of the Southern Tang dynasty (967–75) and a long monochrome narrative by Zhao Cangyun, a late-thirteenth-century survivor of the Mongol conquest. The genre of flower-and-bird painting is represented by Mandarin Ducks and Hollyhocks, a pictorial metaphor of marital happiness by the leading early Ming academic master Lii Ji (active late 15th century), and by Two Eagles, a defiant symbol of political resistance by Bada Shanren (1616–1705), a member of the Ming royal house who lived through the occupation of China by the Manchus.(This title was originally published in 1999/2000.)

Along the Riverbank: Chinese Paintings from the C. C. Wang Family Collection

Beyond Representation surveys Chinese painting and calligraphy from the eighth to the fourteenth century, a period during which Chinese society and artistic expression underwent profound changes. A fourteenth-century Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) literati landscape painting presents a world that is totally different from that portrayed in the monumental landscape images of the early Sung dynasty (960–1279). To chronicle and explain the evolution from formal representation to self-expression is the purpose of this book. Wen C. Fong, one of the world's most eminent scholars of Chinese art. takes the reader through this evolution, drawing on the outstanding collection of Chinese painting and calligraphy in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Focusing on 118 works, each illustrated in full color, the book significantly augments the standard canon of images used to describe the period, enhancing our sense of the richness and complexity of artistic expression during this six-hundred-year era.
Placing equal emphasis on stylistic analysis, social context, and cultural values. Professor Fong considers several issues in Chinese art history: style and its social functions, the changing fortunes of the artist, antiquity and synthesis as guiding principles, and the Chinese view of creativity and change. In this exploration he highlights three areas of artistic accomplishment: narrative painting, the depiction of landscape, and the calligraphy and calligraphic painting of the scholar officials. Moving from art to history he outlines the schism within the Confucian state during the later Sung and the Yuan dynasties between the ruling imperial ideology and the humanist philosophy of the scholar officials, with the consequent rise of literati painting as the true voice of the Chinese artistic sensibility. The branching off into official and private narrative is mirrored in religious painting: while professional craftsmen continued the practice of courtly techniques in the painting of icons, Taoist and Ch'an Buddhist painters adopted scholarly aesthetic principles to create new, highly individualistic images and styles. Unlike narrative representation, which had a long history of development prior to the Sung, landscape painting began to emerge as a preeminent art form in the tenth century, reaching its zenith during the Northern Sung (960–1177), a golden age of art and cultural development. From the second half of the eleventh century, painters turned increasingly from more objective naturalistic landscape to landscape imbued with human emotion, breaking away from officially sanctioned pictorial conventions to create more symbolic representations of single flowers, rocks, and trees.
By the time of the Yuan dynasty, following the Mongol conquest of 1279, objective representation in art had been replaced by imagery that drew on the artist's inner response to the world. At this time, the painter began to inscribe poems and incorporate calligraphy in his works, the meaning of the painted subject made complex by personal and symbolic associations enhanced by its expression in language. With the multiple relations between word, image, and calligraphy forming the basis of a new art, Chinese painting entered its richest and most diverse stage of development. (This title was originally published in 1992/93.)

Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, Eighth-Fourteenth Century

<div>&nbsp;(This title was originally published in 1980/81.)</div>

A Chinese Garden Court: The Astor Court at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Murck, Alfreda

Between Two Cultures, by Wen C. Fong, based on a selection of modern Chinese paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, explores the crucial period from the 1860s to about 1980, when Chinese painting was transformed into a modern expression of its classical heritage. Unlike classical Chinese painting dating from before 1860, which has commanded in-depth study from a learned and sophisticated audience in the West, modern Chinese painting has been little explored. The first comprehensive assemblage in the West of paintings on this subject, the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection comprises works in the classical Chinese medium of ink on paper and in the traditional formats of scrolls, album leaves, and fans. The volume deals with both traditionalist and modernizing Chinese masters from the comparative perspectives of East and West, traditional and modern. Dr. Fong begins his exploration with the last revival of traditional Chinese art, that of the epigraphic school of painting, and the rise of a populist art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai. His discussion continues with painters who absorbed the lessons of Western realism, which they viewed as part of Western science and technology. Special attention is devoted to Xu Beihong (1895–1953) and Fu Baoshi (1904–1965), who followed the teachings, respectively, of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Japanese Nihonga style. The work of three great traditionalist masters, Qi Baishi (1863–1957), Huang Binhong (1865–1955), and Zhang Daqian (1899–1983), is also analyzed, with emphasis placed on Qi and Zhang as professional populist painters. This is followed by a discussion of painting in mainland China from about 1950 to the 1980s by the second generation of artists and teachers in the national academies. These painters, having been trained by traditionalist and Western-style teachers, developed their own schools of influence in their search for a new synthesis of Chinese and Western methods. One of the central questions posed in the book is, what is "modern" in twentieth-century Chinese painting? Some view modernity as the Westernization of Chinese art; others search for elements of modernity in Chinese painting history. The book closes with the author's own reflections on realism, expression, and modernity and, more specifically, the question of creativity in both traditional and modern Chinese painting. [This book was originally published in 2001 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]

Between Two Cultures: Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Chinese Paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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