On Art

...Li-ch'i fruits and leaves are carved on a perfect red lacquer box, a small miracle of natural forms and geometric patterning...

...In the course of wars, natural disasters, or changes in taste, however, important works of art have been known to disappear, their former existence testified to by a web of circumstantial evidence...

...then????all too soon????Chinoiserie...

...To my own not very knowledgeable sense of Chinese art, the latter view seems correct...

...The Western counterpart of such linear elegance and discreteness of shape is Brancusi...

...In our own country, valuable works of painting and sculpture are gravitating irrevocably toward the museums with the blessings of the Internal Revenue Service...

...They are the tokens of martial, ceremonial and quotidian tastes among a rich and powerful class long since dead...

...The care the Chinese lavish on the edible should make them prime targets for that culinary explication of culture in which Claude Levi-Strauss seems to be engaged...

...Not only are the traditions often alien to Western attitudes, but????especially in the field of early painting????forgeries abound, some of them as nearly ancient as the works they copy...

...Whatever one might feel about the religious significance of such a custom, it had its economic and social advantages, combining the planned obsolescence of household goods with the political removal of possibly troublesome persons...

...Delicate and shimmering porcelains, ritual axe blades, jade pendants, lacquer boxes, bronze vases, clay figurines, arrayed in their cases against rolls of pale lemon silk, seem more like religious relics than the objects of customary use among diplomats and warriors, priests and courtesans...

...In addition, Chinese collectors had a reverence for even the unused papers of earlier periods????one imagines them trembling, like Mal-larme, before the awesomeness of the blank sheets????and later copies executed on such papers further compound the problems of attribution...

...Puritanical scholars found it a shameful example...

...The recent excavations of Masada, the fortress in which the Jews made a heroic last stand against the Roman legions, has its national implications for a country surrounded by hostile forces...

...The private catalogue of the 17th century Chinese collector, Kao Shi-ch'i, for example, is an invaluable record listing the items in his collection, the prices paid, and his personal estimates of the works????that is...

...A more recent case is the rediscovery of two Bernini portrait busts in the basement of a Florentine church, their attribution on stylistic grounds verified by old documents recording the original commissions...

...The whole subject of Chinese painting is such a mare's nest, and the understanding of this fact such recent news that one authority on the subject has remarked that any sizable Western collection, brought together before the last decade or two, is bound to consist largely of forgeries and false attributions...

...Restrained and exquisite in their shapes, they are the products of that decadent and hedonistic period when the court moved south to Hangchow for political reasons, cultivating its gardens and buying its century and a half of freedom through large amounts of tribute paid to the always restless northern brigands...

...Often, these works become the prizes of war or the pearls of private collections...

...One thinks particularly of the bronze yu (a ritual wine container) from the Yin or Shang dynasty, the gentle fulness of its oval belly curving upward from its plainly banded foot, or of the jade discs and amulets, slender and perfect in their forms...

...From these vigorous assaults upon form one moves into the sleekness of T'ang figurines and the nearly breathless fragility of Sung porcelains????delicate, flowershaped bowls with the palest blue-white glazes, incised with subtle patterns of peonies and lotuses...

...War and natural catastrophes, as well as the funerary tradition have proved a boon to the archeologist...

...Indeed, such works were commissioned expressly for the grave...

...Forgeries in porcelains were sanctioned, too, and vases of a preferred period were reproduced down to the royal kiln marks...

...Added to this are the outright forgeries...

...The inveterate habit of the Chinese for copying masterpieces down through the ages makes authentication difficult...

...the master's favorite chair and jade amulets were laid to rest along with his left-over wives and faithful servants...

...And everywhere the vegetal prevails: bamboo shoots, mushrooms, clusters of grapes, plump melons nestling in their vines...

...there were the extended virtues of Ming...

...This additional history, made up of personal catalogues, private memoirs, institutional records, is the special province of art historians and scholars...

...Chinese antiquities, though, have accounted for a large part of the King's archeological and artistic interests, and the 150 items from his private collection now on view at the Asia House Gallery form a choice selection of the pursuits of a lifetime...

...The exhibition, which travels to Cleveland, San Francisco and Kansas City before returning home, provides a connoisseur's view of the development of Chinese art forms (except for paintings, which are not included in the exhibition) ranging from the Bronze Age to the 18th century...

...A painting or a piece of sculpture by a recognized master develops an auxiliary history, aside from the private history of the artist...

...Occasionally, they are the objects of spectacular thefts, but nowadays the celebrity of such works makes it impossible for the thieves to dispose of them...

...The fact that cities and tombs have been buried under rubble, abandoned, and gradually erased from the memories of succeeding generations, is the surest guarantee that he will find something worthwhile in his diggings...

...The ingenious variety with which craftsmen have decorated the circle????that difficult form-????is a measure of their artistry...

...In a history so vast, stretching well beyond the millennium Before Christ, it is safer, by far, to settle for the general and anonymous perfections...

...To begin with, there are the ripe, satisfying early works, initially barbarous in their appearance...

...One of the more intriguing aspects of archeology is that it so often proves useful in the service of national pride...

...After that, the Mongols moved in...

...The recent excavations in China, reports of which reach the West from time to time, may have significance for the leaders of the present regime (whoever they may be) as reminders of the ancient glory and military prowess of their country...

...A cultured, lively time, when there were always villas in the hills and pleasure barges upon the West Lake, it was a period for later propagandists...

...Even at this early stage, the Chinese are masters of form and proportion...

...Only an expert familiar with the varieties of clay, the types of glazes and the firing techniques used in a particular period is apt to detect the difference between an ancient original and an ancient copy...

...The Western critic who launches into Chinese art does so at his peril...

...In other times, the nearly missing panels of Ghiberti's bronze doors might well have turned up under the spade of some future archeologist...

...Even today, the old mortuary custom survives in a harmless way...

...copies or anonymous earlier works supplied with spurious provenances, forging the identifying seals and inscriptions with which noted Chinese collectors marked the works in their possession...

...They are the periods when valuable artifacts and works of art were decidedly earth-bound, consigned to the tombs of their Egyptian, Chinese or Peruvian owners...

...It is hardly strange that the Israeli Army should have taken an interest in the project and provided equipment and engineering skills...

...Museums like the Frick in New York and the Gardner in Boston are mausoleums in which the spirits of the proud possessors are enshrined among the treasured acquisitions of their lifetimes...

...Rhinoceros horns are carved into elaborate art nouveau fantasies involving blossoming flowers and intricate stems...

...Bronze mirrors writhe with dragons and lions amid twining foliage?myths and realities woven into circular continuums...

...Works of art may still not be beyond such a fate????as witness the recent floods in Italy????and the international effort required to prevent it gives us some idea of how much cities of the past had to leave buried under tons of mud...

...those paintings he By James R. Mellow The Mystery of Chinese Art intended to keep, those he might give as gifts, and those he considered forgeries which might suitably be presented to his undiscern-ing Emperor...

...The early stages of a civilization are more often the preserve of the archeologist...

...the more esthetically minded felt it was a last great flowering...

...There are other modern parallels: a pottery horse's head from the Wei dynasty, still bearing traces of blood red paint, as savage in its stylization as the horse's head in Picasso's Guernica...

...And it is not surprising that King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden, a confirmed archeologist since his youth (he has taken part in excavations in Greece, Italy and the Far East), has turned his attention to his own backyard, recovering some of his country's most important early artifacts...