Volume 4, Number 9 · June 3, 1965
Chinese Art
By James Cahill
Chinese Art: Painting, Calligraphy, Stone Rubbing, Wood Engraving
by Werner Speiser, by Roger Goepper, by Jean Fribourg
Universe Books, 362, 174 plates (4 in color) pp., $37.50
This is another of the big, colorful, high-priced volumes that seem to have become the staples of the art book market. The texts of these books are seldom written because anyone really wanted to write them. They are usually commissioned by a publisher to accompany the plates, which are for him (and for most purchasers) the real matter of the book, the reason for its existence. Understanding this, we may read with some sympathy and qualified admiration the essay by Werner Speiser on Chinese painting that forms the major part of the volume. Speiser has covered more or less the same ground several times in his previous books. Here, in a repeat performance that he may well have undertaken somewhat reluctantly, he seems to be straining to avoid repetition. His success in doing so deserves praise, but it was at some cost. The publisher states that most of the illustrations for his essays were taken from previously unpublished pieces. Some of the newcomers are welcome, such as the album leaf by the entertaining late-nineteenth-century figure painter Jen Po-nien, who has been revived in recent years as a 'people's artist' in Communist China, but is scarcely known elsewhere. More often, however, the littleknown paintings are of decidedly less interest than the standard, often-reproduced ones they replace. In the end, Speiser's search for the unfamiliar seems forced, and, in the case of his text, unfortunate. A book like this one is not so much for specialists as for readers who come to Chinese painting for the first time, and for whom the same old things are not old or same at all. The danger of Speiser's approach is that those readers will be deprived of observations that are no less valid for having been made before, and of a revelation of the achievements of major artists who are represented here only by minor or doubtful works.
Review, 1316 words
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