The endgame, and the Qing eclipse1

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 23-48
Author(s):  
James Elkins
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Chinese Painting ◽  
Landscape Painting ◽  
The West ◽  
Unusual Structure ◽  
Western Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contemporary Painting ◽  
Chinese Landscape Painting

Presented as an archival text for the Journal of Contemporary Painting, James Elkins’ ‘The endgame, and the Qing eclipse’ is an abridged version of the the final chapter of a book-length study, Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History (Hong Kong University Press, 2010). Elkins demonstrates the unusual structure of the history of Chinese painting, whereby the Ming decline and Qing eclipse have no real parallels in the West. Yet, as a counter-hypothesis, he argues that Late Ming and Qing artists appear to art history as a form of postmodernism. In itself, this represents a nuanced reading of the temporalities of modern and postmodern periods (which challenges comparative approaches and indeed the fundamental structures of western art history). Crucially, the account provides ways of thinking about how Chinese landscape painting is viewed through the lens of art history, a discipline that Elkins claims is partly, but finally and decisively, western.

Whose hobbyhorse now?: A revised Foreword for Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History1

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 11-21
Author(s):  
Jennifer Purtle
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Sole Source ◽  
Landscape Painting ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Western Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chinese Landscape Painting

This article constitutes a new Foreword for James Elkins’s Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History. Reflecting on this work a decade after it was first published, this Foreword seeks to position Elkins’s text with respect to current debates about appropriation, decolonization, race, whiteness, privilege and a problematic, colonialist, EuroAmerican notion of ‘the global’. Now the questions I asked ten years ago in response to Elkins’s text are more pressing than ever: how can the history of the art of non-western cultures be figured in their own terms, and how might such a project operate without transposing the object of inquiry entirely into western epistemological frameworks and strategies of academic inquiry? This article seeks to consider how Elkins’s text both de- and re-centres the discipline of art history so that the western tradition alone no longer dominates its master narrative and serves as sole source of its conceptual lexicon. Moreover, this article posits that from Elkins’s text we might contemplate a future in which the western tradition might become marginal within the discipline of art history, its established terms, discourses and practices incommensurate with newly centred analogues drawn from non-western cultures.

scholarly journals Metaphysics of Nature: art-critic analysis of Chinese paysage painting by T. Burckhardt

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
И.В. Фотиева ◽  
М.Ю. Шишин
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Painting ◽  
Landscape Painting ◽  
The West ◽  
Sacred Art ◽  
Chinese Landscape Painting

Статья посвящена наследию еще недостаточно известного в России  философа, культуролога, искусствоведа Титуса Буркхардта. Дается обзор раздела одной из его ведущих работ «Сакральное искусство Востока и Запада. Принципы и методы», посвященного пейзажной китайской живописи. Отмечается точность и глубина проводимого Буркхардтом анализа как художественно-выразительных средств, так и философско-метафизических основ китайской пейзажной живописи, а также ее отличия от близких европейских течений. The article is devoted to the heritage of the philosopher, culturologist, art critic Titus Burkhardt, who is still not well known in Russia. The authors give an overview of the section of one of his leading works "Sacred art of the East and the West. Principles and methods", dedicated to landscape Chinese painting note the accuracy and depth of the analysis conducted by Burkhardt, both artistic expressive means, and the philosophical and metaphysical foundations of Chinese landscape painting, as well as its differences from close European art currents.

scholarly journals The grotesque as it appears in Western art history and in Ian Marley’s creative creatures

Literator ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-54
Author(s):  
R. Swanepoel
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Western History ◽  
Western Art ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Grotesque

This article presents a theoretical exploration and reading of the notion of the grotesque in Western history of art to serve as background to the reading of the original creatures in the “Tracking creative creatures” project.1 These creatures were drawn by Marley, based on imaginary creatures narrated by his five year-old son, Joshua. The focus in this article is on the occurrence of the grotesque in paintings and drawings. Three techniques associated with the grotesque are identified: the presence of imagined fusion figures or composite creatures, the violation and exaggeration of standing categories or concepts, and the juxtaposition of the ridiculous and the horrible. The use of these techniques is illustrated in selected artworks and Marley’s creatures are then read from the angle of these strategies.

Nizam al-Mulk Remembered

2018 ◽  
pp. 127-148
Author(s):  
Neguin Yavari
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Fifteenth

The focus in the fifth and final chapter is on the afterlife of Nizam al-Mulk, of his legacy as well as of his representations. By the late fifteenth century, in Timurid Iran, Nizam al-Mulk is already the stuff of legend. In one historian’s estimation, the vizier is a veritable eleventh-century avatar of the martyr par excellence of Shi’i lore Husayn b. ‘Ali (d. 680), and the progenitor of modern Iran. But the story of Nizam al-Mulk does not end with his metamorphosis into a crypto-Shi‘i and a proto-Iranian patriot. In the 2010s, it is Nizam al-Mulk who is the most regularly invoked exemplar of legitimate Islamic governance, exhorting prudence and expedience to guide the Iranian polity through the treacherous waters of nuclear negotiations with the West, and to domesticate outlier and extremist fervor. The Iranian invocation of Nizam al-Mulk differs radically from his depiction in modern Sunni—Arab or Turkish—historiography. That living legacy is the true history of the laureled vizier.

Wilderness in Ancient Chinese Landscape Painting

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-266
Author(s):  
LuYang Chen ◽  
Ziao Chen ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Ecological Environment ◽  
Chinese Painting ◽  
Landscape Painting ◽  
Chinese People ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Natural Landscape ◽  
Cultural Connotation ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Chinese Landscape Painting

Chinese painting is dominated by landscape painting, which is a unique form of artistic expression for Chinese people, while landscape generally refers to nature. Wild natural landscape can be called “wilderness,” which embodies the vitality and upward vitality of nature, and also contains unique cultural characteristics. “Wilderness” is the most important “original ecological” environment in the natural environment. Its existence has natural, ecological, and aesthetic significance. It is nature in its primitiveness and ecology in its wildness; the aesthetic lives on in it. Compared with Western landscape painting, it pays particular attention to realism, good at depicting beautiful natural scenery and recording the reality of scenery. On the other hand, Chinese landscape painting pays more attention to the expression of connotation. Chinese landscape painting focuses on nature, takes meaning as its purpose and pursues culture. Chinese landscape painting is the outstanding expression of wilderness spirit, which is mainly manifested in three aspects: (1) Chinese landscape painting is of the same origin as “Tao” (道); (2) the “wilderness” in landscape painting has a strong vitality; (3) “wilderness” has a special cultural connotation. China’s wilderness is not ecological, but is vibrant; not in the dust, but out of the dust; not in nature, but in culture.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Jaś Elsner
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Landscape Painting ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
Human Interventions ◽  
The University ◽  
Chinese Landscape Painting

The chapters gathered in this volume are the product of a conversation at the Center for Global Ancient Art in the University of Chicago. They address a theme that has had exceptional trans-cultural traction for well over half a century in art history as a discipline—with long scholarly (“secondary”) and historic (“primary”) literatures as well as deeply established visual genres in both European and Chinese landscape painting. Likewise, landscape is a key issue in all areas of archaeology—from questions about the placement of monuments to the understanding of human interventions in natural topography through such methods as field archaeology....

scholarly journals Connected Material Histories: A response

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
CRAIG CLUNAS
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
First Year ◽  
The West ◽  
Hard Drive ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Act Up ◽  
The Way

In giving the very first lecture that first-year History of Art undergraduates at Oxford will hear, I usually employ the practice of giving them a sheet of paper with nothing on it but the outlines of the land masses of the globe, and ask them to draw a line round ‘the West’. The idea was inspired by a reading of Lewis and Wigen's 1997 bookThe Myth of Continents(‘justly celebrated’, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam says), and remains a useful pedagogic act, up to a point, for the reasons so clearly laid out in that book; also, it breaks the ice, it gets a buzz of conversation going in the room, it certainly foregrounds the topic, central now to art historical enquiry, of the way in which ‘representations are social facts’. But the reason I do not ask them to draw a map round ‘the East’ is that I suspect it would be too easy, or at least done too quickly, and indeed the boundaries of both ‘East’ and ‘Orient’, as ‘Europe's Other’, can be shown to have fluctuated much less than have the boundaries of what, for most Oxford students, is still, if somewhat tenuously, ‘us’ or ‘here’. Wherever ‘the East’ is, it all lies (as Subrahmanyam points out in his lecture) in that assuredly -etic part of the world called Asia. I might, in the privacy of my own hard drive, choose to categorize those European images which I need for teaching as ‘Non-Eastern’ (to balance the ‘Non-Western’ rubric on which my specialist options appear in the syllabus). But that is not a category widely used, or at least not in my own discipline of art history.

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