The Cultural Politics of the Brushstroke

Martin J. Powers
In Identity and Violence Axmxtyz. Sen observed, "A major source
of potential conflict in the contemporary world is the pre-
sumption that people can be uniquely categorized based on
religion or culture."' The book in fact documents some of
the unspeakable horrors that otherwise good people visit
upon others because they have learned to view them as
rivalsalien beings possessing no values in common with
themselves. Sen's book may be read as a sustained attack on
the Huntington hypothesis, the view that scholars can iden-
tify essential and durable differences in the values espoused
by cultural groups, especially between the West and "the
Rest."^ Sen argues that the assumption of fundamental dif-
ference in cultural values can be misleading because no one
is ever simply a "Ghristian" or an "Englishman" but adopts
multiple roles and identities ("father," "neighbor"), many of
which we may share with putative "others." What makes Sen's
book relevant for historians of art is the fact that Huntington-
like views have been common in our discipline since its incep)-
tion in the eighteenth century. Ever since Johann Joachim
Winckelmann published History of Ancient Art in 1764, art has
been treated as a clue to what are perceived as fundamental
values of different and competing civilizationsfor Winckel-
mann, Greek/Western versus Egyptian/Oriental.^ Neither
Samuel Huntington's nor Winckelmann's claims, however,
stand up to close scrutiny. In reality, these narratives are
neither historical nor sociological; rather, they are best un-
derstood as a form of cultural politics. "Gultural politics"
refers to those narratives constructed by intellectuals who see
themselves as representing their own nation in competition
with other nations. Intellectuals engaging in cultural politics
typically seek to establish the superiority of their own nation
by spinning a cultural myth that flatters their own ethnic
group and denigrates others. From its inception, the history
of art lent itself readily to the fabrication of self-serving
cultural narratives, and so histories of art played a major role
in the national myths developed from the eighteenth
through the twentieth centuries.*
There is nothing new in noting the complicity of our
discipline in the formation of nationalist narratives, but
what is less often observed is the paradox inherent in that
relation. National myths, after all, stress purity of culture
and stability of values: Westerners love freedom, while
Orientals are slavish, to take Winckelmann's example
again. Yet the cultural politics necessitated by such myth-
making is anything but pure. Gultural politics
is by nature dialectical: it arises when an intellectual from
one tradition interprets, or reinterprets, another tradition;
is often defensive, devised in response to a challenge from
some Other; and
is often strategic and opportunistic rather than the product
of deeply held beliefs. Intellectuals constructing a national
myth may resort to equivocation, substitution, misprision, or
displacement in defense of their imagined nation's honor.
Gonsider Louis Le Gomte's (1655-1728) response to the
magnificence of Ghinese imperial architecture (English edi-
tion, 1697):
I confess that medley of beams, jices, rafters and pinions,
bears a surprising singularity, because we must needs
judge that such a walk was not done without great ex-
pense: but to speak the truth, it proceeds only from the
ignorance of their workmen, who never could find out
that noble simplicity which becomes at once the solidity
and beauty of our buildings.''
Much of what Le Gomte wrote on Ghina adopted an us/
them framework and aimed to bolster European pride in the
face of another advanced civilization. At the time, the larger
cities in Ghina were larger than any in Europe, a fact Le
Gomte found intimidating. But then, "One comfort, my lord,
is that these proud cities which stiled themselves Ladies of the
Universe, have been forced to open their gates to the Gospel,
and are pardy subdued by our religion." From a twenty-first-
century perspective, this sounds more like sour grapes tban
ethnographic description. Likewise, in the passage on archi-
tecture. Le Gomte was impressed with the complexity and
magnificence of imperial buildings, so in defen.se of Euro-
pean honor he argued that, unlike European buildings, Man-
chu architecture was wanting in its lack of simplicity. Unfor-
tunately for Le Gomte's argument, the reigning architectural
style in France at the time he wrote was the Baroque!
It is possible, of course, that Le Gomte actually perceived
Baroque architecture as simple, but if so it is puzzling that he
would judge Manchu palaces as more complex than Baroque
palaces. Gonsidering Le Gomte's defensiveness on any num-
ber of topics, I am inclined to read this as yet another
instance of the transformative power of cultural politics, for
within a dynamic of cultural competition, the rival's produc-
tions are always too complex or too simple; too severe or too
permissive.^
In this view. Le Gomte's vision of European architecture
was shaped by his encounter with Ghinese buildings, but the
process could not be expressed as "influence." Rather, the
challenge Ghina posed to his own national myth forced Le
Gomte to redefine in binary terms a practice that the French
and Qing courts, in fact, shared in common: architectural
elaboration as a sign of magnificence. What this little encoun-
ter reveals then is not a Huntingtonian clash of stable values
but a strategic substitution in response to cultural competi-
tion. Le Gomte ascribed different values to Ghina and France
opportunistically, even to the point of denying contempora-
neous practice in France. Such opportunism is a characteris-
tic feature of cultural politics.
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE BRUSHSTROKE 3 I 3
1 XiaGui (act. 1180-1224), Twelve
Views of Landscape, detail. Southern
Song Dynasty (1127-1279), handscroll,
ink on silk. The Nelson-Atkins Museum
of Art, Kansas City, Mo., Purchase:
William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 32-159/2
(artwork in the public domain;
photograph by John Lamberton,
provided by the Nelson-Atkins
Mviseum of Art)
Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to dismiss such an
exchange as merely self-serving. Gultural politics has been an
important driving force in the evolution of style, particularly
in the modern era. It may well be that international cultural
polidcs is a common feature of ardstic movements we style
"modern." One way to illustrate its role in the evolution of
style is to trace the cultLiral politics of the brushstroke from
early modern times into the twendeth century.
Scales of Value
If we view styles as shaped by competition between intellec-
tuals who identify with separate, competing polities, then
some viewing practices must have been shared with one or
more "others." Gonsidered this way, styles may be better
thought of as encoding scales of value, values that can be
negotiated across cultural boundaries. It is evident, for in-
stance, that Le Gomte knew how to assess the magnificence of
Qing architecture. A comparable conflation of elaborate
workmanship and social valuea similar scale of valuewas
current in the French court at that time, as well as in many
other early modern courts across Eurasia. In this respect
Winckelmann was correct: style can encode social values.
What does not follow is the notion that different values
correspond to stable and distinct cultural regions.
A structural peculiarity of scales is that every scale has two
ends. If detailed elaboration sits at one end of the scale, then
plainness sits at the other. If naturalism and finish sit at one
end, then flatness and sloppiness lie at the other. It is never
the case that one end of the scale is without value. On the
contrary, both ends of the scale represent values, and each
derives meaning from the other. In other words, visual values
are correlativeas one increases, the other diminishes. Gon-
sequently, the idealistic view of artisdc stylethat it is infi-
nitely variable and its meanings endrely convendonalre-
quires some qualification. Though styles are infinitely
variable on a micro scalejust as no two pieces of popcorn
are entirely alikeit would appear that, on a macro scale.
there are limits to the variability of style, because vision offers
us only so many scales.^ One can imagine scales of complex-
ity, legibility, similitude, or spatial depth, and further reflec-
tion no doubt would disclose still more, but not a great many
more. This is good for the historian of art, for it makes
comparative study possible. It was useful for our ancestors as
well, for it made cultural politics possible.
If the two ends of the scale are correlative, it follows that
the values at one end remain available to groups wishing to
disdnguish themselves from those advocating the values at
the other end. When this happens, an apparent clash of
values is likely to occur, one that might lead the advocates of
either end to assume the presence of durable and fundamen-
tal difference between "us and them." In our art history
surveys, the classic instance of such a clash is the rejection of
naturalism in favor of self-expression at the end of the nine-
teenth century. Richard Shiff has warned against reductive
accounts of the transformadon from transparent (naturalis-
tic) to opaque (surface materiality) styles, but nonetheless he
observed, "For the modernist, self-expression becomes most
evident when the normative look of represented objects is
transformed by the material substance of paint applied to a
surface."'"* Granted, "every picture may seem to possess both
transparent and opaque features," but it is not difficult to
understand why a tension developed between transparency
and opacity in the late nineteenth century.^" Artistic asser-
tion, after all, demands the artist's personal intervendon into
pictorial space, and such interventions tend to expose the
fiction in fictive space.'^ One might object that naturalistic
works also can adopt a manner that privileges brushwork, but
it would be anachronistic to interpret the resulting facture as
self-expressive, or even as an early type of self-assertion that,
ultimately, would lead to expressive brushwork.'^ Rather, in
the case of a work by Xia Gui (Fig. 1), as with one by Anthony
Van Dyck, the bold brushstrokes do not prohibit a naturalis-
tic effect when the work is viewed from a distance. In such
cases facture serves as a display of artistic "assurance," "man-
3 1 4 ART BULLETIN JUNE 2013 VOLUME XCV NUMBER 2
2 AluibuLed to i.iii C^ai (act. ca. 1080-1120), Fisli Swimmmg amid Faliing Flowers, detail, late llth-early 12th century, handscroll, ink
and color on silk, image only 10% X lOO'/a in. (26.4 X 255.3 cm). Saint Louis Art Museum, William K. Bixby Trust for Asian Art,
97:1926.1 (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by Saint Louis Art Museum)
ner," or virtuosityqualities likely to impress a courtly pa-
tron. This, of course, is precisely the opposite of that bald
rejection of aristocratic taste encoded in literati painting or
in a canvas by Paul Czanne.'^
In the traditional narrative, Cezanne's self-assertion is in-
terpreted in nationalist terms, as the inevitable expression of
a Western love of freedom, individualism, and so on, but I
would like to make of this correlative pair a test case to
illustrate the instability of cultural "values" across temporal
and national boundaries. We shall see that far from convey-
ing the essence of anyone's Volksgeist, the expressive mark is
nothing less than a distinct artisdc domainlike pictoriality
or ornament. Pictures representing objects in the "real"
world can be found in most art-making traditions. All such
instances of "pictoriality," no matter where they occur, re-
quire special skills and expectadons to decodethe ability to
imagine pictorial space on a two-dimensional surface, for
instance. As ornament requires an entirely distinct set of
cognitive skills, few in China or Europe would view ornament
as a source of information about real objects in space. Like-
wise the expressive mark elicits yet another set of cognitive
processes such that the viewer can read lines, brushstrokes, or
dabs as traces of the artist's inner state. These cognitive
processes can operate with brushstrokes, pencil lines, drips,
indentations, or any mark made by the human hand. That is
one of the reasons why "the expressive mark" was able to
acquire value in multiple cultural contexts.
Let's begin by looking at an earlier moment when natural-
ism and self-expression occupied opposite poles on a shared
scale of vidue. As students of Chinese painting surveys know.
Chinese artists developed techniques for rendering light and
shadow, texture, three-dimensional form, and deep space
over a period of several centuries. Between the eleventh and
thirteenth centuries, artists in China were producing the
most illusionistic works to be seen anywhere on the planet
(Figs. 1-4).'* Crides of the time marveled how artists could
make you feel "as if you were actually there" and boasted that
modern artists far surpassed classical masters in that re-
spect.'* Those same students of Chinese painting surveys also
know that by the late eleventh century, these pictorial
achievements were being ridiculed as litde more than creifts-
man's tricks, a sentiment often encapsulated in Su Shi's (1037-
1101) famous lines: "If anyone discusses painting in terms of
resemblance/His understanding is nearly that of a child."'^
While few examples of Song literati painting survive, what
we have is sufficient to provide some sense of what theory
meant in practical terms. In Qiao Zhongchang's (active late
eleventh century-after 1126) scroll referencing a poem by Su
Shi (in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mis-
souri, Figs. 5, 6), the artist intervenes to radically fiatten
space, reduce texture, or eliminate shadow (compare this
work with Xu Daoning's Fishermen's Evening Song, Fig. 3), and
everywhere reveals his idiosyncratic brushstroke (compare
the details of these works. Figs. 4, 6). Judging from Mi Fu's
(1051-1107) comments on Su Shi's brushwork, the expres-
sive power of such strokes was by no means lost on the
Northern Song literati: "When Su Shi painted vthered trees,
the trunks and branches were bent and twisted without ends,
and his rock texture strokes were hard and weird without
ends, just like the pent-up twistings in his heart."' ' In Mi's
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE BRUSHSTROKE 3 I 5
3 Xu Daoning (970-1052), Fishermen's
Evening Song, detail, ca. 1049, hand-
scroll, ink and slight color on silk. The
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas
City, Mo., Purchase: William Rockhill
Nelson Trust, 33-1559 (artwork in the
public domain; photograph by John
Lamberton, provided by the Nelson-
Atkins Museum of Art)
4 Detail of Fig. 3
view it was not the rocks or trees that manifest the artist's
pent-up feelings but the texture strokes themselves.
As with Czanne, this could be interpreted in nationalist
terms, but it is well to bear in mind that Song literati painters
developed their styles in competition with the court.** Since
the court valued naturalism and finish, the literati had little
choice but to move in the direction of coarser brushwork
that, as a by-product, left clear traces of the artist's choices.
Flattening space suddenly and radically likewise was an un-
mistakable sign of the artist's personal intervention, in fla-
grant contradiction of the scale of value chosen by a cultural
rival. In essence, the literati rejected courtly values by revers-
ing a shared scale of value. For the literati, naturalism sat at
the negative end, while coarseness and facture marked the
positive side of the scale.
Cultural Politics and Style
By the late thirteenth century literati scales of valtie had
become dominant; by the fifteenth century, naturalism no
longer prompted serious debate. The arrival of the Furope-
ans changed all that. Suddenly, the very existence of Euro-
pean painting constituted a challenge to literati scales of
value, and vice versa. In his journals of 1581 to 1610, the
Jesuit Matteo Ricci offered an assessment of Chinese painting
that would be echoed by most European observers right
through the nineteenth century:
The Chinese use pictures extensively . . . but in the pro-
duction of these . . . they have not at all acquired the skill
of Europeans. . . . They know nothing of the art of paint-
ing in oil or the use of perspective in their pictures, with
3 1 6 ART BULLETIN JUNE 2013 VOLUME XCV NUMBER
5 Attributed to Qiao Zliongchang (act. late lllli centuiy-after
1126), 12th century, a section of Illustration lo Su Shi's Second
Prose Poem on the Red Cliff, handscroll, ink on paper, 11% X
220y8 in. (29.5 X 560.4 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of
Art, Kansas City, Mo., Purchase: Nelson Gallery Foundation,
F80-5 (artwork in the public domain; photograph by John
Lamberton, provided by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art)
the result that their productions are likely to resemble the
dead rather than the living.'
It is not difficult to divine what sits at the positive end of
Ricci's scale of value: illusionistic skill, following the rules of
perspective or foreshortening, and the requisite finish. Hav-
ing said that, one should not overlook hints of anxiety. First,
the passage takes shape as an "us/them" contrast. Ricci rec-
ognizes that people in China, like those in Europe, use
pictures extensively as works of art. China, in other words,
rivals Europe in this respect. However, despite having pro-
duced pictures for centuries, they still have not managed to
learn how to paint in oil or to apply the rules of perspective.
This is a snub, pure and simple, and one that displays the
agonistic stance adopted by many European travelers to Chi-
naor other countriesin the early modern period.
This is not to imply that Chinese critics were indifferent to
the European challenge, or that they experienced less anxi-
ety than their European counterparts. Consider Wu Li's
(1632-1718) defense of Chinese scales of value:
Our painting values originality, not resemblance. We call
this "inspired and free." Their painting is all about shad-
ing, volume, and resemblance, and is achieved by labori-
ously following convention. It's the same with signatures.
We sign at the top of the painting [that is, conspicuously]
while they sign at the bottom. The use of the brush is also
different in all respects. It's always this way, I've never been
able to explain it!"^"
"Originality" here is expressed in the phrase "to cast aside
conventional practices (and establish a style of one's own)."
Yi, one of many Chinese terms for varieties of freedom,
implies release from a state of bondage, in this case, bondage
to the conventional rules of naturalistic painting.^' Like the
Ricci statement, this passage is structured as an "us/them"
binary, literally so in Chinese: ivo/ bi; wo/ bi. Thus, Wu begins
by taking the Other as a potential rival whose very existence
suggests an alternative economy of picture making. But
whereas Ricci had no inkling of literati theories of self-ex-
pression, Wu Li had categories for describing illusionistic
painting. Terms such as "laborious" or "conventional" hark
back to the Song literati critique of naturalism. And just as
Ricci complained of a lack of skill so as to denigrate Chinese
painting, Wu Li cites that very reliance on skill to disparage
Western painting. The two men shared a common, correla-
tive scale of value, but they defended opposite ends of that
scale.
Skill rests at the fulcrum of the debate because artistic
agency turns on it. Since ancient times, at both extremities of
Eurasia, ruling elites demanded evidence of skill, ingenuity,
and (later) intelligence commensurate with the patron's so-
cial status. Because skill was revealed in levels of finish, detail,
and (later) naturalism, and because these qualities can be
easily assessed, even the most ignorant nobleman could hold
an artist to certain standards. Artists bent on expanding
artistic agency therefore had first to dismiss skill as a criterion
of value, and this is precisely what Su Shi and his compatriots
did in rejecting the refined taste of the court. Pierre
Bourdieu, in his analysis of nineteenth-century French artists,
put it this way:
In the field of art, for example, stylistic and technical
principles tend to become the privileged subject of debate
among producers (or their interpreters). Apart from lay-
ing bare the desire to exclude those artists suspected of
submitting to external demands, the affirmation of the
primacy of form over function, of the mode of represen-
tation over the object of representation, is the most spe-
cific expression of the field's claim to produce and impose
the principles of a properly cultural legitimacy regarding
both the production and the reception of an art-work.^^
It is no accident that the literati critique of courtly taste
occurred only after the demise of aristocratic privilege in the
tenth century.^^ The rise of a public art market, independent
of courtly commissions, disengaged the work of art from any
utilitarian context and, from then on, provided a social and
financial base for competing scales of valuecompeting
stylesranging from Xu Daoning's deep space (Fig. 3) to Qiao
Zhongchang's twisted spaces (Fig. 5). Following Bourdieu's
reasoning ftirther, intense competition between different art-
ists and their supporting critics all but demanded the inven-
tion of terms for "original," or "free," as this is the vocabulary
of artistic distinction.^** Therefore, we should be careful not
to fall victim to Wu Li's rhetoric, however familiar it may
sound. As we shall see, this rhetorical posture was no more
stable in China than was the attachment to naturalism in
Europe. Before long, Chinese and Europeans would find
themselves exchanging positions in the naturalism-versus-
expression debate.
Throughout the eighteenth century, European artists con-
tinued to criticize Chinese painting for its lack of naturalism,
while Chinese artists continued to defend the expressionist
credo. In his book The Little Mountain Painting Manual, Zou
Yigui (1686-1766) developed a new defense for expression-
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE BRUSHSTROKE 317
6 Detail of Fig. 5
ism, at the same time that he demonstrated a deeper under-
standing of the achievements of European painting:
Westerners are good at geometry, therefore when it comes
to shading and spatial depth, their painting is exact in
every detail. In their paintings of figures or architecture,
everything has shading, and their use of color or brush-
work is completely different from Ghinese practice. In
composing shadows they calculate the way they diminish
according to the rules of geometry. In paintings of palaces
or walls, you feel as if you're about to walk into them.
Students can learn a few tricks from them, by way of
catching people's attention. But they have no brushwork
to speak of, and their skill is that of the craftsman. Gon-
sequently it cannot be classified as art.^^
Note that Zou also adopted an "us/them" argument. He is
not unappreciative of European art, but he understands that
its technique is incompatible with what he calls brushwork.
For Zou, brushwork was required for personal assertion. As
Shiff more recendy observed, "For the modernist, self-expres-
sion becomes most evident when the normative look of rep-
resented objects is transformed by the material substance of
paint applied to a surface."^ Since personal expression was
required for a painting to achieve the status of "art" in Qing
Ghina, Zou argued that European painting was not art at all
and thus could not be compared with Ghinese art.
This latter argument is, of course, a defensive gesture. The
best way to deal with your rival in the cultural sphere is to
place him or her outside the category of rivalry altogether. Sir
Kenneth Glark adopted a similar ploy in his study of land-
scape painting. In order to claim landscape as a unique
Western achievement, he had to deal with Ghina, and he
maintained that Ghinese landscape painting could not count
as landscape because it did not employ one-point perspective
(of course, neither did many European landscapes). The
argument is rhetorically effective but specious, as W. J. T.
Mitchell has shown.^^ Such an argument is of interest mainly
because it reveals the author's anxiety and, ironically, his
recognition of the Other as a genuine rival.
What is more interesting in Zou's argument is the role of
brushwork. Expressive brushwork was not new to Ghinese art
criticism, but what is new here is the identification of brush-
work with "Ghineseness." In this passage, expressive brush-
work becomes the identifying feature of a cultural tradition
set in opposition to an Other, and which defines itself in
contrast to that Other. This may be the first time that the
expressive mark was deployed in international cultural poli-
tics, but it would not be the last.
There is much more at stake here than petty rivalries over
cultural primacy. I noted above that scales of value are cor-
relative. Normally, the values assigned a positive value remain
positive. But once a "nation" (that is, its intellectuals) finds
itself locked in a dynamic defined by cultural binaries, this
dynamic can encourage rival nations either to converge or to
diverge along the poles of the scale. In the first case, national
rivals may develop favored features of style more rapidly in an
attempt to outdo one another. In the latter case, cultural
binaries can encourage rapid or extreme divergence away
from some perceived Other, the opposite end of the scale.
The first scenario helps us to understand the mutual ac-
commodation of Jesuit painters and Ghinese painters at the
courts of Kangxi (r. 1661-1722) and Qianlong (r. 1735-96).
It has long been observed that court painters during these
periods increasingly adopted a highly finished style empha-
sizing architectural detail, soft tones, deep space, and, in later
periods, more and more shading.^* For the most part, Ghi-
nese court artists achieved these effects without actually em-
ploying European techniques. There is no denying, however,
that the scale of value increasingly came to resemble one that
Europeans could assess and admire.
In the second scenario, competition with a group favoring
the opposite pole can lead to rapid or extreme developments
in style. Gzanne and the Postimpressionists might be seen as
3 1 8 ART BULLETIN JUNE 2013 VOLUME XCV NUMBER 2
7 Bada Shanren (1626-after 1705),
Fish, from an album of flowers, birds,
insects, and fish, Qing dynasty, 1688-
89, ink on paper, 10X9 in. (25.5 X
23 cm). Freer Gallery of Art, Smith-
sonian Institution, Washington, D.C.,
Purchase, F1955.21h (artwork in the
public domain; photograph provided
by Freer Gallery of Art)
exemplifying this dynamic, with the academy standard mak-
ing its presence felt in their art chiefly by virtue of its absence.
Something similar may have occurred in Ghina during the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when radical
experiments in pictorializadon supplanted the previously
dominant Suzhou school.^'' As mendoned earlier, displacing
naturalistic standards had been a cause clbre during the
eleventh and twelfth centuries, but by the sixteenth century
this was no longer a contentious issue. Not so in the paintings
of Bada Shanren (1625-after 1705), Shi Tao (1641-ca.
1717), and other masters of that period; in their work, we
might say that naturalism is ever present, but only by virtue of
its radical absence (Fig. 7).
It seems problemadc to attribute this shift to European
"influence," as the standard of value is the exact opposite of
that found in European scales of the time,'^'' but it does not
follow that European art was not part of the historical dy-
namic within which such styles evolved. The European pres-
ence revived naturalism as a challenge, a challenge that
called for a strong assertion of "Ghineseness." Precisely this
kind of dynamic is evident in both Wu Li's and Zou Yigui's
remarks, where Ghinese paindng is defined as expressive
brushwork in contrast to the laborious and conventional
pracdces required for European-style naturalism. The pres-
ence of such a challenge may have encouraged the themad-
zation of brushwork at the expense of even minimal natural-
istic conventions, thereby jump-starting rapid development
toward that more self-conscious abstracdon identified by
scholars of late Ming painting.^^ Such self-consciousness is
one of the by-products of cultural politics, for it forces intel-
lectuals in one locale to reimagine themselves in reladon to
a challenge issuing from some other locale.
Reversible Rhetorics
Zhengji (1813-1874) wrote Y, Fantasy Studio's Introduction to
the Study of Art not long before Gzanne took to trashing
academic standards. In that book he provided yet another
defense of Ghinese paindng, but this defense was likely aimed
at compatriots who were beginning to denigrate self-expres-
sive styles in favor of post-Renaissance scales of value. For
trendy Ghinese intellectuals of this period, naturalism came
more and more to be understood as the visual correlate of
"science," those practices that had enabled the English to
defeat Ghina in the Opium Wars. As Zheng saw it, however,
the heart of the issue remained brushwork:
Some say that foreign paindng is better than scholar paint-
ing. Most likely it's just that such people haven't yet
learned the marvels of brushwork. In painting, how could
one ignore brush and ink? Yet in foreign painting, the
brushstrokes don't appear as strokes and the ink can't be
seen as ink. It is only concerned with capturing the form
and its shading, the image resembles those in life and
that's all there is.^^ .
Notice that Zheng also begins with an us/them binary and
even uses terms that essentialize both "scholar [Ghinese]
painting" (ruhua) and "foreign painting" {yihua)^^ Such en-
dfication is often the consequence of cultural encounter and
the rivalry it engenders. He then maps these national distinc-
dons onto "art" by poindng out that foreign paindng sup-
presses the status of pigment as pigment so as to enhance
illusionism. But by this time the contrast as stated no longer
obtained. Zhengji was unaware that brushwork figured sig-
nificantly in the painting of Edouard Manet, Gzanne, and
other European masters of this period. Moreover, in the
generadon after his death, Europeans and Ghinese would
reverse their posidons in the naturalism-versus-expression
debate.
On the European side, Roger Fry may have been the most
important figure in bringing about the reversal. Fry had
grown up in a cultural environment highly receptive to the
artistic sensibilities of East Asia, especially Japan, but he main-
tained an interest in other parts of Asia as well, including
Persia and the Middle East.^* Just as significant. Fry lived in a
world of competing nadon-states. The "France" and "China"
of the late nineteenth century were not the same as those that
occupied Le Gomte's attention. Granted, Zou Yigui sought to
associate the stroke with Ghineseness, and when Le Gomte
defended "France" he was no doubt thinking of the French
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE BRUSHSTROKE 319
polity. Nonetheless, during the nineteenth century, following
a Hegelian logic, "nations" came to be seen increasingly as
the products of an intrinsic national character. This attitude,
plus the newly evolved international legal apparatus govern-
ing interstate relations, set the cultural politics of the twenti-
eth century apart from that of earlier times.^ We might
expect, then, that the cultural politics of Fry's theories would
differ from Ricci's, Wu Li's, or those of just about anyone else
prior to this time. Previous writers quite naturally defended a
local scale of value, which is to say, a local economy of art
production, along with its embedded visualities.^^ Both Eu-
ropean and Chinese artists, moreover, framed their pictorial
practice in relation to an international dynamic defined by
cultural politics. Fry's theories by no means transcended that
politics, but Fry, facing a more formalized and routinized
system of international relations, embraced openly the inter-
national character of the enterprise.
As Roslyn Hammers has noted,^' Roger Fry asserted as
early as 1910 that the future of art in Europe would be
determined by its relation to Asian artistic practice:^*
When once the cultivated public has grown accustomed to
the restraint, the economy of means, the exquisite perfec-
tion of quality, of the masterpieces of Eastern art, it will,
one may hope, refuse to have anything more to say to the
vast mass of modern Western painting. And then, perhaps,
our artists will develop a new conscience, will throw over
all the cumbrous machinery of merely curious represen-
tation, and will seek to portray only the essential elements
of ^^
Note that Fry identified Western painting with "the cumbrous
machinery of merely curious representation," or post-Renais-
sance naturalism. It was Asian art, in contrast, that would
guide modern artists in their pursuit of the "essential ele-
ments of things." In 1910, the "essential elements of things"
referred to what was extracted in the process of abstraction.
That same year Fry translated an article by Maurice Denis on
the art of Czanne, which gave an account of the value of
abstraction in painting:
Painting oscillates perpetually between invention and im-
itation: sometimes it copies and sometimes it imagines.
These are its variations. But whether it reproduces objec-
tive nature or translates more specifically the artist's emo-
tion, it is bound to be an art of concrete beauty, and our
senses must discover in the work of art itselfabstraction
made of the subject representedan immediate satisfac-
tion, a pure aesthetic pleasure.'*"
Here abstraction refers to the "extraction" of the essence of
an object, a point of view that Fry identified with Asian art.*'
Despite Fry's admiration for Asian art, I am unaware of
anything in Chinese critical theory that pursues such a line of
argument. Traditional European art had derived its authority
from the claim that it represented "truth," where the guar-
antor of truthfulness was a convincing degree of visual fidel-
ity, even if nature had to be "improved" in the process.*^ Fry's
argument here, like Piet Mondrian's early experiments with
abstraction, can be understood as evolving out of the classical
view, even if adopting an agonistic stance in relation to it.^^
The "truth" represented was no longer a literal transcription
of appearances but rather an abstraction of the object's es-
sence. "Essence," of course, had been a core concept in
European philosophy from classical times on, but nothing
like it figures in the criticism of art in China. China and other
Asian traditions had another role to play in Fry's argument, as
we shall see.
Rhythm and Brush
At this stage I should reveal that Fry's remarks on Asian art,
which could be constrtied as an early manifesto of modern-
ism, were published in a book review entitled "Oriental Art."
The book reviewed was Laurence Binyon's Painting in the Far
East, published in 1908. In that book Binyon endorsed a
variety of art-critical categories common in the writings of
Chinese critics. Among these was the dichotomy between
expression and naturalism privileged in Zhang Yanyuan's
ninth-century history of art, as well as the ideal of the calli-
graphic brushstroke as the chief medium of expression:
In the art of the T'ang there was a conscious effort to unite
calligraphy with painting. By this we must understand that
painters strove for expression through brush-work which
had at once the life-communicating power of the lines that
suggest the living forms of reality and the rhythmical
beauty inherent in the modulated sweep of a masterly
writer; for to write the Chinese characters beautifully is to
have a command of the brush such as any painter might
envy.**
Since the late nineteenth century the term "rhythm" had
entered into the lexicon of art criticism, for example, in the
writing of Alois Riegl: "With rhythm, that is, the sequential
repetition of the same appearances, the coalition of the parts
to an individual entity became immediately obvious and con-
vincing to the beholder; and where there were several indi-
vidual elements it was rhythm again which was able to create
a higher unity."*^ As late as 1905, Fry was still using the term
in this sense.* By 1906 "rhythm" found a role in the writings
of the Japan scholar Ernest Fenellosa and poet Ezra Pound,
though it still harbored some sense of repetition, as in the
rhythm of a poetic line.*^ About the same time, however,
Herbert Giles, who famously modified Sir Thomas Wade's
Mandarin Chinese transliteration system, had adopted
"rhythm" as a translation for qiyun. Chinese critics employed
this term to refer to body movements expressive of personal
character in art.*^ This use of "rhythm" imbued the English
term more specifically with the emotive power of the human
gesture. In 1904 Binyon had employed this translation in
Burlington Magazine.*^ By 1910, Fry appears to have given the
term a Binyonesque infiection:
No one could look even at the reproduction given in Mr.
Binyon's book of a painting of a dancing girl without
feeling the greatness and originality of Matabei, without
recognizing the spontaneity and force of the imaginative
pulse which here realises so intensely the vital unity of
rhythmic movement, and presents it in forms so austerely
and nobly restrained."
320
BULLETIN JUNE 2013 VOLUME XCV NUMBER 2
"Rhythmic movement" here refers to the "rhythm" of Bin-
yon's book, a term implying spontaneous, evocative, bodily
motion. Today, the language of self-expression has entered
so deeply into the rhetoric of "modern" art that it is difficult
for us in the twenty-first century to appreciate how novel was
the conflation of brush movement and personal emotion in
1910. Its novelty is apparent, thotigh, in the pains Binyon
took to explain the notion to his readers in his 1908 publi-
cation:
According to native historians [in China], it [painting]
came into existence at the same time as the art of writing;
and throughout the history of China the two arts are
intimately connected. A fine piece of calligraphy is valued
as highly as a fine painting; and what is most prized in a
picture is that the brushwork should be as personal to the
artist as his handwriting. In either case the strokes should
be full of life, an immediate and direct communication of
the artist's mood and thought to the paper or silk on
which he paints.^
One "native historian" Binyon refers to is likely Guo
Ruoxu, the late eleventh-century critic who first articulated
the theory that an artist's brushstroke, like his signature, is a
direct record of his character:
It is always the case that a painting must entirely convey
the artist's character (qiyun) if it is to be hailed as a
treasure in its age. . . . This is contingent upon natural
genius and proceeds from the depths of the artist's soul. It
may be compared to the commonly practiced art of judg-
ing signatures. We call these "heart-prints," for it is first of
all in the springs of the heart that one imaginatively cre-
ates forms and lines. When such lines are in harmony with
the heart, they are called its "prints." For example, with
painting and calligraphy, it begins with thoughts and emo-
tions which then are impressed upon paper and silk. How
should such works not be considered prints? If signatures
reveal a man's dignity and condition, how should painting
and calligraphy not likewise reveal the quality of his per-
sonality? In this respect painting is just like calligraphy.^^
In these few lines Guo articulated a theory in which the line
produced by the artist's movement simultaneously records
and expresses the artist's character. Variants of this theory
informed Wu's, Zou's, and Zheng's cultural politics, but
these artists did not necessarily all mean the same thing. Like
many significant ideas in history, this one was highly fungible,
as well as adaptable. At the time Guo wrote, qi, or "character,"
could still harbor some reference to a man's social back-
ground,*^ not unlike the English term "character" as em-
ployed before the mid-eighteenth century.'"'' At roughly the
same time that Guo wrote, however, literati artists would take
as the referent of brushwork a man's peculiar, idiosyncratic
character. Or even his "pent-up feelings," and by the time of
Wu Li or Shi Tao, artists would go to extreme lengths to
encode personal idiosyncrasies into their brushwork.'^ Still,
all of these artists, from Guo on down to Shi Tao, relied on
the conflation of stroke and personal character.
So versatile was this idea that Fry seized on it the following
year in his "Essay in Aesthetics," 1909, where he codified for
Western readers the unity of gesture and expression. Yet in
this essay the principles he espoused were thoroughly hybrid.
He pointed out that the long scroll format of Chinese paint-
ing, for instance, flatly contradicted traditional criteria for
pictorial unity, thus liberating modern artists to ignore clas-
sical dicta. He also developed further the "modern" idea that
elements of design, in themselves, have the power to elicit
emotional response. The most important of these formal
elements was the "rhythm of the line with which the forms are
delineated. The drawn line is the record of a gesture, and
that gesture is modified by the artist's feeling which is thus
communicated to us directly."*
Fry's "rhythm" in this passage is that of Giles and Binyon, a
translation for qiyun in Guo Ruoxu's sense. Nonetheless, the
association between the artist's personality and artistic touch
was by no means unprecedented. By the late nineteenth
century some artists in France had begun to associate the
formal aspects of painting and prints with emotive power.*^
By the time that Giles offered "rhythm" as a translation for
qiyun, Paul Gauguin was applying the term criture both to an
artist's brushwork and to his handwriting. Drawing on the
principles of graphology, Gauguin noted that Cezanne's
strokes were separate; they did not blend into one another as
conventional norms required. This, in turn, was interpreted
as a rejection of that "perfected execution" demanded by
convention and, therefore, a mark of moral integrity.* Par-
allels in both Tang and Song calligraphy and painting would
not be hard to find, a fact that suggests a structural principle
at work rather than "influence."*^ In each case, naturalism
and facture sat at two ends of a sharedif contestedscale of
value, and so those appropriating the side opposite natural-
ism and finish would need to assign moral value to coarseness
and facture.
This is not to imply, however, that Fry's understanding of
expressive gesture was either intuitive or widely accepted at
the time. In his book The Flight of the Dragon, 1911, Binyon
bemoaned the persistent hegemony of Greco-Roman ideals
of representation and the lack of any theory capable of
investing the new styles with meaning. For his part, the most
viable alternative was Xie He's (sixth century) "Rhythmic
Vitality, or Spiritual Rhythm [qiyun] expressed in the move-
ment of life."^" Binyon identified this concept with the ex-
pressive power of brushstrokes capable of conveying the per-
sonal thoughts and emotions of the artist:
"The secret of art," says a 12th-century critic, "lies in the
artist himself." And he quotes the conviction of an earlier
writer that, just as a man's language is an unerring index
of his nature, so the actual strokes of his brush in writing
or painting betray him and announce either the freedom
and nobility of his soul or its meanness and limitation.
Personality, in the Chinese view, counts enormously. . . .**'
Here again Binyon references Guo's essay, which by this time
had been rendered fully into English.''^ Clearly, the moment
was ripe for theories linking the artistic mark with an artist's
interior state. All that was needed was a concept sufficiently
fungible as to function successfully in an international cul-
tural context. The theory of the gestural mark was just such
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE BRUSHSTROKE 321
an idea. As it was not a notion that came naturally to Fry's
contemporaries, though. Fry would have to explicate the
concept repeatedly throughout his career, up to and beyond
the republication of his "Essay in Aesthetics" in 1920.*^^
The Cultural Politics of Naturalism
It appears that, by the beginning of the second decade of the
twentieth century, modernist theories were already character-
ized by disctirsive hybridity. But one should not imagine that
the cultural politics of naturalism had come to an end. Two
years after Fry published his review, Aby Warburg, in a lecture
at the Tenth International Congress of Art History in Rome,
1912, declared the core achievement of the Renaissance to
have been the eradication of "Oriental" elements from West-
ern art:
"Our sense of wonder at the inexplicable fact of supreme
artistic achievement can only be enhanced by the aware-
ness that genius is both a gift of grace and a conscious
dialectical energy. The grandeur of the new art, as given to
us by the genius of Italy, had its roots in a shared deter-
mination to strip the humanist heritage of Greece of all its
accretions of traditional 'practice,' whether medieval. Ori-
ental, or Latin. It was with this desire to restore the ancient
world that 'the good European' began his battle for en-
lightenment. . . ."''*
"Genius" here presumably refers to national genius, a Hege-
lian quality transmitted by the spirit of a particular Volk.
Granted, Warburg's "Oriental" referred specifically to the
Middle East, but it seems unlikely he would have regarded
those other arts that Fry admired any differently. In his
extensive analysis of this lecture, E. H. Gombrich concluded
that Warburg, in fact, identified the Orient with "the dark
forces of the mind."^^ He therefore relegated the Orient to
traditional, or premodern, status, while reaffirming the "su-
preme artistic achievement" of the very tradition that Fry's
modernism had sought to replace with Asian values only two
years earlier. The culture wars initiated in the sixteenth cen-
tury were as vital as ever, but now the structural tension
between naturalist and expressive theories of art was being
projected onto a nationalist frame.
In China, also, the naturalism/expression dialectic as-
sumed a nationalist guise, but in this case Chinese intellec-
tuals adopted the arguments and tropes of Europeans and
Americans. Liang Qichao (1873-1929), for example, de-
scribed China's national character as despotic, chaotic, and
slavish, while the West was construed as rational, scientific,
and individualistic. Lu Xun adopted many of the same epi-
thets in his accounts of Chinese national character, both
fictional and otherwise. Chen Duxiu wrote in "Revolution in
Art" that the "realistic" spirit of Western art could be a cure
for the repetition and loss of originality that, he claimed, had
characterized the art of the Qing dynasty.
Scholars have not failed to notice the resemblance between
these epithets and American missionary accounts of China's
"national character."^' It is only in recent years that scholar-
ship in China has recognized in this rhetoric the active
hegemony of a European mode of nationalist discourse. The
racialist and essentialist foundation for this discourse was a
product of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Euro-
pean thought. By accepting the apologetic writings of the
missionaries, itself a product of cultural politics, Chinese
intellectuals essentially surrendered the arguments of Wu,
Zou, and Zheng to European critics. This left them no other
recourse than to embrace watered-down versions of post-
Renaissance scales of value, a strategy that was bound to be
disparaged as derivative. As a result, works originally defiant
of traditional styles, such as those of Bada Shanren (Fig. 7),
would no longer be seen as "original," to use Wu Li's lan-
guage. Individualism and originality now were conflated with
scientism, and only a style marked as "Western" could satisfy
that standard.
As with Le Comte, the dynamics of cultural politics led
twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals to deny basic facts
about their own cultural practices, but ultimately what we
find in China is quite distinct from anything we have seen
previously. Le Comte massaged the facts in defense of his
own group, but Chinese intellectuals often denigrated their
own group, even when the facts would have suggested other-
wise. Such practices, perhaps best understood as a form of
self-colonization, were to play a significant role in the cultural
politics of modern China.
Meanwhile, as Fry's theories waxed influential in the West,
the opposite camp continued a stout defense of European
naturalism. Only a few years after Warburg's address, the
primacy of mimesis was reasserted in a catalog prepared for
the Burlington Fine Arts Club: "A single line may mean
nothing beyond a line; add another alongside and both
disappear, and we are aware only of the contents, and a form
is expressed. The beauty of a line is in its result, in the form
which it helps to bring into being."^ In this passage, both
"form" and "result" refer to a meaningful form, an object. Fry
responded cordially but forcefully in Burlington Magazine,
1918:
"The beauty of a line is in its result, in the form which it
helps to bring into being." Here the author has undoubt-
edly pointed out the most essential quality of good draw-
ing. I should dispute rather by way of excessive caution his
first statement, "A single line may mean nothing beyond a
line," since a line is always at its least the record of a
gesture, indicating a good deal about its maker's person-
ality, his tastes and even probably the period when he
lived; but I entirely agree that the main point is always the
effect of two lines to evoke the idea of a certain volume
ha\'ing a certain form.''^
"A line is always at its least the record of a gesture, indicat-
ing a good deal about its maker's personality," is a good
summary of Guo Ruoxu's theory as explained by Binyon. But
it was precisely this view that troubled the Burlington Fine
Arts Club author, and small wonder why; the difference
between the latter and Fry exposed a deep chasm separating
post-Renaissance European art from what we now call mod-
ern Western art. Is an imageeven an "abstracted" image
requisite for expression, or can pure form itself convey emo-
tion? Is it the purpose of line to extract the essence of an
expressive image, or is its function to transmit the artist's
psychic state through gesture? This exchange makes appar-
3 2 2 ART BULLETIN JUNE 2013 VOLUME XCV NUMBER 2
ent the fact that the view formerly espoused by Guo, Wu, Zou,
and Zheng, and here championed by Fry, remained foreign
to many Europeans as late as 1918.
Later that year Fry published the essay "Line as a Means of
Expression in Modern Art," in which he applied to Henri
Matisse many of the critical categories articulated by Binyon.
In addition, he introduced the term "calligraphic" in its
modernist sense:
The quality of line which, while having an intelligible
rhythm, does not become mechanical is called its sensi-
tiveness. And here the most obvious thing is clearly that
the line is capable of infinite variation, of adapting itself to
form at every point of its course. It clearly demonstrates
Matisse's intense sensibility, and it is for that reason that I
called it provisionally calligraphic.'"
While "calligraphic" may sound natural to us in the twenty-
first century, it was anything but natural in 1918, as is evident
from Fry's elaborate gloss on the term:
The word calligraphic conveys to us a slighdy depreciatory
sense. We have never held calligraphy in the esteem that
the Ghinese and Persians did, we think at once of the
vulgar flourishes of the old-fashioned writing master. But,
in fact, there is a possibility of expression in pure line, and
its rhythm may be of infinite different kinds, expressive of
infinite varieties of mood and condition."
Apparently, calligraphy was not yet regarded as an appropri-
ate descriptor for modern artists, at least not such that Fry
could take it for granted. Instead, he felt compelled to ex-
plain to his readers that an unmannered, individualized,
highly expressive "calligraphy" offered new possibilities for
modernist art. Fry was attempting no less than to establish the
expressive brushstroke as the scale of value for what was at
that moment emerging as a "modern" mode of expression: "I
have dwelt thus at length on this question of calligraphy
because in my next article I shall point out that Matisse's new
and subtle rhythm, so curiously contradictory of the assertive
rhythms of academic art, is in turn becoming a kind of
standard of calligraphy for the modern artist."'^
Fry's calligraphic theory almost immediately achieved cod-
ification in the works of Fry imitators. A year after he pub-
lished the essay on line, D. S. MacGoll attempted to general-
ize Fry's theoiy as a standard for drawing. Using ice-skating as
a metaphor, he wrote:
From helpless, floundering gesture the advance has been
made to controlled gesture, and the trace of these gestures
on the ice has the metrical constitution of rhythm. The
goal, then, of this stage of drawing is rhythmical gesture. It
has no purpose outside of itself: it represents nothing; it is
merely the graphic trace of a point moving under the laws
of balance.'*
This, too, recapitulates Guo's theory, but in this context it
solved a key problem for Fiy and other modernists, namely:
How can pure, abstract form, divorced from any image, con-
vey meaningful content? As noted earlier, abstraction had
been valued since the early years of the century, but its
meaning then was close to "extraction," where the artist's
goal remained the pursuit of some essential truth about an
object, an approach that was consistent with classical Euro-
pean thought. In this passage, by contrast, MacGoll posited
the line itself as a vehicle of meaningnot that the line was
beautiful, but that it carried meaning. No longer need the
line refer to some eternal truth. Rather, the line "represents
nothing; it is merely the graphic trace of a point moving
under the laws of balance." That graphic trace conveys infor-
mation about the artist's personality or mood, but these are
fleeting, personal qualities, not universal truths such as had
been associated with the "beautiful line" previously. By this
time, the radical hybridity of modernist rhetoric evidendy was
a fact of life. As late as 1927 Fry did not blush to refer to such
Western masters as Sandro Botticelli, or even Jean-Auguste-
Dominique Ingres, as "Ghinese."'* The ultimate irony, how-
ever, is that by the 1930s, Ghinese critics bent on defending
traditional brushwork would have to do so, literally, on Roger
Fry's terms.
Fry's Theories in China and the United States
Just as naturalism continued to recruit defenders in Europe,
so did the brushstroke have its advocates in Ghina, and in
Ghina the character of the debate was no less nationalistic,
and no less hybrid, than in Europe. In 1930 Feng Zikai wrote
an essay entided "The Triumph of Ghinese Art in Modern
Art." As with Ricci, Wu, Zou, Zheng, Fry, and Warburg, his
argument was structured along an us/them axis and sought
to paint "Eastern" and "Western" culture in binary terms.
Gonsequently, Feng constructed "Western" art as mere imi-
tation. "Eastern" art, he claimed, in contrast, typically strips
nature down so as to capture the essentials. This, of course, is
a recapitulation of Fry's argument, with little basis in premod-
ern Ghinese art theory. William Schaefer has recently ana-
lyzed Feng's essay and observed its relation to early twentieth-
century theories of modernism. His conclusion is that "such
stark civilizational binary oppositions were completely un-
done through actual practices of picturing where the greatest
number and variety of pictures were collected and circulated
at that time: the print media."'*
It should also be obvious that the rules governing Feng's
cultural politics were the same as obtained on the other side
of the world. Just as Warburg thrilled to the eradication of the
"Oriental" in Renaissance art, so Feng rejoiced over the
"Easternization of Western art."' Glearly, Feng, following
Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, and other twentieth-century intellec-
tuals, had accepted the "national character" account of cul-
tural expression developed by European racialist thinkers in
the nineteenth century. But then, such views were all but
universal among intellectuals around the globe at that time.
More interesting is his adaptation of Fry's theory of line to
support his nationalist argument:
You can pretty much say that, prior to the Postimpression-
ists, there is no line in Western art. . . . In Impressionist
painting, all you have are dabs of paint, you don' t see any
lines. Before that, with the Realists, such as in Millet's
charcoal drawings, although lines may be distinct, for the
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE BRUSHSTROKE 323
most part they function as the "boundary of a form."
Those lines that can, in themselves, have some expressive
effect, are extremely few. The great mural paintings of the
Renaissance also show not a hint of a true understanding
of line. But when you get to the Posdmpressionists, as
explained above, then Gzanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and
others stressed the expression of the soul's movement and
power, and chose line as the sole medium for expressing
the soul's rhythm.'^'^
Like Mi Fu and Fry, Feng understood the difference between
an expressive object and a mark that was expressive in itself.
Yet in this passage Feng rendered "rhythm" not as qiyun but
rather chose "Ivdong," a literal transladon of Binyon's and
Fry's "rhythmic movement." This new term clearly aligns with
Fry's "rhythm," itself originally devised to convey those ideals
of personal expression embodied in qiyun, thus inflating
hybridity to another power.
Feng's self-serving claims might well rankle Western apol-
ogists even today, but Feng was correct to notice thatto
borrow the terms of my argumentthe rhetorics of Ricci and
Wu Li had, in fact, reversed their geopolitical locadons.
According to the Huntington hypothesis, this is not supposed
to happen. Feng was mistaken to interpret this reversal in
Hegelian terms as the triumph of the Ghinese spirit. From
the perspective of the twenty-first century, we can now see
that, first, various competing groups had been lining up
along the two poles of the naturalism/self-expression scale
for centuries prior to this; and, second, ardsts and critics had
often chosen one pole or the other for local, pracdcal, and
opportunisdc reasons within a dynamic of intercultural com-
petition.
By the 1940s Fry's role as chief priest of modernism had
been appropriated by his admirer Glement Greenberg,
whereas Binyon's role as leading Asianist had been assumed
by George Rowley. This new order emerges clearly in Green-
berg's 1950 review of Rowley's book Principles of Ghinese Faint-
ing, for it recapitulates some of the themes found in Fry's
writings decades earlier: "And when it comes to the use of the
brush, that use which conveys exact feeling with every touch
and harmonizes each touch, as an individual facet of feeling,
with the unifying emodon of the whole picturethen the
Ghinese masters certainly have no equals."'^** By now the
underlying logic in this passage should sound familiar. At
that moment, of course, a new wave of interest in Asian art
was sweeping across the United States. This time the object of
admiradon was not the delicate brushwork of Song academi-
cians but the brutal ink attacks of the so-called Zen masters
(Fig. 8).' However, as Bert Winther-Tamaki's scholarship
shows, the easily recognized origin of this patently "calli-
graphic" stroke seems to have only intensified competition
over its ownership.*" In fact, despite his positive review of
Rowley's book, Greenberg declared defensively that "not one
of the original abstract expressionists . . . has felt more than a
cursory interest in Oriental art. The sources of their art lie
endrely in the West."**' We must bear in mind that this was
the moment when the Abstract Expressionists were redefin-
ing the meaning of modernism in American terms.^^ Whether
cultural politics sdmulated the rapid development of a rougher,
more purely calligraphic stroke (Fig. 9) is open to debate, but
8 Toyo Sesshu (Japanese, 142U-156), Haboku Splaslied Ink
Landscape, 1400s-early 1500s, hanging scroll, ink on paper,
281/4 X lOVs in. (71.9 X 26.7 cm). The Cleveland Museum of
Art, Gift of the Norweb Foundation, 1955.43 (artwork in the
public domain; photograph provided by The Cleveland
Museum of Art)
it is a reasonable assumption that cultural politics contrib-
uted to the new regime of cultural purification.*^^
Apparently, credit for the expressive mark was as vital for
1950s American critics as it had been for Feng Zikai in the
1930s, or Zheng Ji in the nineteenth century, or Wu Li in
the seventeenth. And one could follow the story forward,
through Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichten-
stein, and up to the present. The question is: What do we
learn from this longue-dure survey of the valorized brush-
324
BULLETIN JUNE 20KS VOLUME XCV NUMBER 2
9 Franz Kline (American, 1910-1962), Accent Grave, 1955, oil
on canvas, 75i/4 X ^1% in. (191.1 X 131.4 cm). The Cleveland
Museum of Art, Anonymous Gift, 1967.3 (artwork 2012 The
Franz Kline Estate/Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York;
photograph The Franz Kline Estate, provided by The
Cleveland Museum of Art)
stroke? Recall that historians and social scientists sometimes
portray sets of valuessuch as self-expressionas character-
istic of national groups. What we have seen so far suggests
that, first, cultural values can be more fungible than national
myth would imply. Such "values" and their attendant rheto-
rics are better conceived as resources that can be exchanged
and adapted when local circumstances favor it. Second, cul-
tural politics encourages an "us/them" binary dynamic,
which, ironically, is necessarily interactive. Some modernist
styles appear to have evolved within just such an international
dynamic. Third, cultural competition along the two poles of
a common scale of value can encourage the rapid or radical
development of forms, institutions, or ideas.
The Expressive Mark
There remains an unanswered question: the visual power and
rhetoric of the expressive mark functioned equally well in
Asia and in Europe, so much so that everyone wanted credit
for it. Why did something similar not occur with, say, orna-
ment? Why didn't the ptirsuit of pictorial naturalism become
a major focus of international modernist competition?
As every historian of art knows, pictures and ornaments are
not styles. They are better thought of as domains, each of
which demands special cognitive funcdons and distinct ex-
pectations for viewing. What distinguishes an ornament from
a picture, therefore, is not its style but its referent. The
primary referent of a picture is the world "out there"; its
content is a set of claims about things. Yet the primary
referent of ornament is its owner, or so I have argued else-
where.*^* The qualities instantiated in ornament (richness,
refinement, excess) acquire meaning in relation to the owner
to whom those qualities are attributed. The expressive mark
(as opposed to brushy virtuosity) likewise differs fundamen-
tally from pictures in that its content is the artist's interior
state, for example, his "pent-up feelings." Whether the artist
chooses to privilege the brushstroke, splashed ink, dripped
oil paint, dents in a compressible substrate, or a pencil line,
the artist is both the subject and the primary referent of the
expressive mark.^
If this argument has any purchaseand I recognize that
further discussion is warrantedthen it makes little sense for
anyone, whether Wu Li or Clement Greenberg, to claim
ownership of the expressive mark, any more than someone
could claim ownership of pictoriality or ornament. Granted,
certain naturalistic techniques, such as one-point perspective,
or certain types of expressive mark, such as "flying white,"*
can be traced to specific cultural traditions, but the mark
itself belongs to no one, just as pictorial similitude belongs to
no one tradition.
The expressive mark is special in one respect: pictoriality
has been employed across the globe since prehistoric times,
and ornament, likewise, is ancient. In contrast, and by defi-
nition, appreciation for the expressive mark cannot arise
except in societies in which the idiosyncratic, interior states
of nonnoble individuals can acquire commercial value, as
well as the status of cultural capital. One would imagine that,
at a minimum, this would require the decline of inherited
social roles and the rise of an open art market (that is, places
where ready-made, fine, that is, high-quality art could be
purchased for personal collection by anyone with enough
money). Certainly, these conditions were present both in
Europe and in China when this domain of artistic action
became prominent. That is why the expressive mark appears
late in history, and that may be why both Chinese and Euro-
pean masters regarded such practices as something worth
boasting about. Unfortunately, a full discussion of the social
history of this practice would take us too far from our sub-
ject.**^ Suffice to say that, should we view the expressive mark
as a separate domain of ardstic actioninstead of merely as
another styleit would help to explain why it did not simply
die away after the 1960s but continues to recur in novel forms
to this very day (as in the work of Anselm Kiefer or Joyce
Pensato). It would also follow that the various claims to
ownership of the expressive mark should be analyzed within
the history of cultural politics, rather than taken at face value.
Having returned to the problem of culture and genius, it
will be fitting to allow E. H. Gombrich the last word:
Alas, in the seventy years that have passed since Warburg's
death, our pride in being Europeans has been dealt a
devastating blow. At the same time we have also had to
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE BRUSHSTROKE 325
learn utterly to distrust national, racial or cultural stereo-
types. . . . You cannot tar whole civilisations with the same
brush.
Martin J. Powers is Sally Michelson Davidson Professor of Ghinese
Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan and former director
of the Genter for Chinese Studies. Each of his two books has been
awarded the Levenson Prize for Best Book in Ghinese Studies in the
pre-1900 category [Department of the History of Art, Tappan 120A,
855 South University Avenue, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
Mich. 48109, mpow@umich,edu].
Notes
I am grateful to the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, for supporting
the research for this essay.
Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.
1. See Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006),
XV.
2. Samuel Huntington, "Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3
(Summer 1993); 22-49.
3. See Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art His-
tory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 34-36, 54-60.
4. A classic discussion of this problem can be found in Robert Nelson,
"The Map of Art History," Art Bulletin 79, no. 1 (March 1997): 28-40.
5. Louis Le Comte, Mmoires and Observations . . . made in a late journey
through the empire of China (London: Printed for Benj. Tooke . . . and
Sam. Buckley 1697), 79.
6. Ibid., 89.
7. As Kathleen Wilson has obsei-ved of eighteenth<entury England in
"The Good, the Bad, and the Impotent: Imperialism and the Politics of
Identity in Georgian England," in The Consumption of Culture, 1600-
1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Anne Bermingham and John Brewer (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1995), 237-62.
8. On macro styles and micro st)'les, see Martin J. Powers, Pattern and Per-
son: Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), 42-43.
9. Richard Shiff, "Cezanne's Physicality: The Politics of Touch," in The
Language of Art History, ed. Salini Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 131.
10. Ibid.
11. In practice it is not quite so clear-ctit. Artists working in a naturalistic
mode can develop a unique style, but it will be a style that adheres to
ihe rules of pictorial illusion. And artists working in naturalistic styles
certainly can express something, but typically it is not their own, idio-
syncratic emotions but the emotions elicited by the objects they place
into their fictive space. See Michael Bright, "The Poetry o Art," Journal
of the History of Ideas ib, no. 2 (April-June 1985): 259-77.
12. Not that some haven't tried: see Martin Warnke, The Court Artist: On the
Ancestry of the Modem Artist, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993).
13. For a study of the rhetoric of artistic virtuosity in early modern Italy,
see Philip Sohm, Pittoresco: Marco Boshini, His Critics, and Thar Critiques
of Painterly Bj^ushwork in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Italy (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 66-69.
14. James Cahill has stressed the significance of this fact for accounts of
European art history. Cahill, "Some Thoughts on the History and Post-
History of Chinese Painting," Archives of Asian Art 55 (2005): 17-33, at
18.
15. Martin Powers, "Discourses of Representation in Tenth- and Eleventh-
Century China," in The Art of Interpreting, ed. Susan Munschower, Pa-
pers in Art History from Pennsylvania State University, vol. 9 (Univer-
sity Park: Department of Art History, Pennsylvania State University,
1995), 89-125.
16. iiliy^'fK, j l ^Ai ^. For a discussion of this famous phrase, see
Stisan Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting: Su Shih to Tung Ch'i-ch'ang
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 32.
17. ? ( : S S ) fPt*. feTtLaS : ^?!^**^^^,
iOM+li. Mi Fu, qtioted in Pan Yungao, ed., Theories of Painting by
Song Dynasty Authors [in Chinese] (Changsha: Hunan meishu chuban-
she, 2003), 160-61.
18. Powers, "Discourses of Representation," 96-104. See also Hui-shu Lee,
Exquisite Moments: West Lake and Southern Song Art (New York: China In-
stitute, 2001), 44-47.
19. Matteo Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci;
1583-1610. trans. Louis J. Gallagher, SJ (New York: Random House,
1953), 22. See also James Cahill's discussion of this passage in The Com-
pelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 30-35.
20.
Wu Li (1632-1718), Colophons from the Well of Ink [in Chinese], in Heart-
Prints for the Study of Painting, 8 vols, (n.p., 1878), vol. 4, 47a-b.
21. For a discussion of "originality" as a translation for Chinese critical
terms, see Katherine Burnett, "A Discourse of Originality in Late Ming
Chinese Painting Criticism," Art History 23, no. 4 (November 2000):
522-58.
22. Pierre Bourdieu, "The Market of Symbolic Goods," in The Field of Cul-
tural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993),
117.
23. The classic account of this can be found in Peter K Bol, "This Culture
of Ours": Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1991), 32-48.
24. Ibid., 117-19.
25.
i t t ^Al i fn. Zou Yigtii (1686-1766), TAe/.fe Mountoin
Painting Manual, in A Compendium of Essays on the Study of Art: Ming and
Qing Periods [in Chinese], ed. Wang Bomin and Ren Daobin (Beijing:
Hebei Publishing, 2002), 477.
26. See n. 9 above.
27. W. J. T. Mitchell, "Imperial Landscape," in Landscape and Power (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 11-13.
28. Wang Yao-t'ing, "Xin shijielang shining yu qinggong xifeng" [New
Visions at the Qing Court: Giuseppe Castiglione and Western-Style
Trends], in New Visions at the Qing Court: Giuseppe Castiglione and West-
em-Style Trends (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 2007), 12-18.
29. Jonathan Hay, Shi Tao: Painting and Modernity in Early Qing China (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 250-56.
30. The case for European influence was advanced in Cahill, The Compel-
ling Image, 1735.
31. Wai-kam Ho and Dawn Delbanco, "Tung Ch'i-ch'ang's Transcendence
of History and Art," in The Century of Tung Gh'i-ch'ang, ed. Wai-kam Ho
(Kansas City, Mo.: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1992), 3-41, esp. 32-
37.
32. Ks:
Zheng Ji (1813-1874), Fantasy Studio's Introduction to the Study of Art, in
Wang Bomin and Ren Daobin, A Compendium of Essays on the Study of
Art, 771-72.
33. For an analysis of this passage as well as the "scholar painting versus
foreign painting" theme, see Kong Lingwei, "Foreign Painting and
Scholar PaintingTwo Different Responses to Western PainUng Meth-
ods by Two Different Communities during the 17th and 18th Centu-
ries" [in Chinese], New Art History, no. 4 (2002): 58-65.
34. It would be worthwhile for scholars schooled in Japanese and Persian
art, for instance, to investigate the rhetorical uses of these traditions in
Ery's work. My topic is the cultural politics that developed between
China and Europe, as much in the realm of art theory as artistic prac-
tice, so I will not be pursuing Ery's interest in other parts of Asia. Eor a
general treatment of the problem as it relates to Japan, see Vivien
Greene, "Aestheticism and Japan: The Cult of the Orient," in The Third
Mind: American Artists Contemplate. Asia, 1860-1989, ed. Alexandra Munro
(New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2009), 59-71.
35. Eor a discussion of these changes, see Lydia H. Liu, The Clash of Em-
pires: The Invention of China in the Modem World (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 2004), chap. 4, 108-39.
36. Eor a review of the problem of changing visualities in early modern
China, see Craig Clunas, "Practices of Vision," in Pictures and Visuality
in Early Modem China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997),
esp. 111-33.
37. In her master's thesis, written under the direction of Thomas Crow,
326
BULLETIN JUNE 2013 VOLUME XCV NUMBER 2
Roslyn Hammers linked Roger Fry's Socialist concerns and his Omega
Workshop to his cosmopolitan views on art. She also documented his
early interest in theories of art from China, incltiding his review of
Laurence Binyon's survey of Asian art in the Quarterly Reuieiu. Roslyn's
thesis was the initial inspiration for the research I undertook that led
to the completion of this essay. Roslyn Hammers, "Socialist Concerns
in the Aesthetics of Roger Fry" (master's thesis. University of Michigan,
1988).
38. A stripped-down core of the argument about Fry and Chinese art the-
ory presented here was published some years ago in Chinese: Martin
Powers, "Modernism and Cultural Politics" [in Chinese], in Refiections:
Chinese Modernities as Self-Conscious Cultural Ventures, ed. Song Xiaoxia
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 94-115. A still shorter and
earlier exploration of the topic appeared, also in Chinese, in idem,
"Xiandai zhuyi yu wenhua zhengzhi" [Modernism and Cultural Poli-
tics], Du Shu, April 1998, 16-25.
39. Roger Fry, "Oriental Art," Quarterly Review 212, no. 422 (January-April
1910): 239. See also Hammers, "Socialist Concerns," 22-24.
40. Maurice Denis, "Czanne," trans. Roger E. Fry, "Czanne," pt. 1, Bur-
lington Magazine for Connoisseurs 16, no. 82 (January 1910): 214.
41. While Fry clearly recognized the emotional power of forms as early as
1909, he did not at that time see any need to dispense with recogniz-
able form. As Richard Shiff notes in his analysis of that essay. Fry con-
ceded "the two purposesemotional expression and illusionistic depic-
tionneed not exclude each other." However, he seems to have held
that abstracting objects from their natural environment cotild enhance
the emotive force of natural forms. Shiff, "From Primitivist Phylogeny
to Formalist Ontogeny: Roger Fry and Children's Drawings," in Discov-
ering Child Art: Essays on Childhood, Primitivism and Modernism, ed. Jona-
than Fineberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 159-60.
42. The literature on truth and post-Renaissance naturalism is extensive,
and most readers will not require further reading, but essays relevant
to this argument include Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Paint-
ing of the Anden Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980),
7-10; and David Summers, Thefudgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism
and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987),
1-11.
43. In his analysis of abstraction in the early work of Mondrian, Yve-Alain
Bois notes that in the early years Mondrian created rebtislike forms
emblematic of the universal essence of the objects depicted. Then he
encountered the work of Czanne: "Thereafter, Mondrian's art is en-
tirely devoted to a kind of high-stakes redefinition; it seeks the 'es-
sence' of painting and the elimination of any 'particular' perception
that would hinder its apprehension. Recognition of the painting's sur-
face as the irreducible unity of pictorial art becomes the logical starting
point of Mondrian's task." Mondrian's qtiest, presumably, occurred
parallel to, but independent of, Roger Fry's theorization of abstraction.
Bois, in Piet Mondrian, 1872-1944, by Bois et al. (New York: Leonardo
Arte, in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C,
and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994), 313-62, at 313-14.
44. Laurence Binyon, Painting in the Far East: An Introduction to the History of
Pictorial Art in Asia, Especially China and Japan (London: Edward Arnold,
1908), 68.
45. Alois Riegl, "Leading Characteristics of the Late Roman 'Kunstwollen' "
(1893), in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 169. It is possible that others
had tised this term for visual art earlier than Riegl, but I have not
found any instances, though discussions of rhythm in aesthetics appear
in German after 1893, for example, in Max Ettiinger (1877-1929), Zur
Grundlegung einer Aesthetik des Rliythmus (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius
Barth, 1899) (my thanks to Claire Zimmerman for this reference). My
concern here is to show that, to begin with, Binyon and Fry were by no
means the first to apply the term to visual art; and, second, that after
1905 both men used the term in a sense very different from that of
Riegl.
46. In 1905, for example, speaking of Jan van Eyck, Roger Fry says that
"there is not a fold of drapery that does not fall harmoniously with
its neighbors, not a spray of foliage which fails of the rhythm ex-
pressive of organic life." Later in the same paragraph Fiy maintains
the viewer will find that "down to the smallest atomic divisions of
the parts the pervading sense of creative ptirpose informs and ani-
mates the design. Now, this implies a highly-developed sense of the
relationship and rhythm, and these are the essentials of that unity
which Reynolds so rightly praises." Rhythm, here, refers to a bal-
anced spacing of repetitive elements, such as drapery folds or
branches, and this spacing is thought to enliven a composition.
Rhythm is not yet inextricably wed to line. Fry, "Introduction on the
Discourse of Sir Joshtia Reynolds," in A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christo-
pher Reed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 44. My
thanks to Molly Warnock for this reference.
47. See Haun Saussy, "FenoUosa Compounded: A Discrimination," in The
Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition/Ernest
FenoUosa, Ezra Pound, ed. Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 17, 33-35.
48. For a review of debates surrounding the meaning of this term, see Mar-
tin J. Powers, "Gesture and Character in Early Chinese Art and Criti-
cism," in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Chinese Painting, 4
vols. (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 1992), vol. 4, 909-31, esp. 915-
23.
49. Laurence Binyon, "A Chinese Painting of the Fourth Century," Burling-
ton Magazine fcyr Connoisseurs 4, no. 10 (January 1904): 44.
50. Fry, "Oriental Art," 225-39.
51. Binyon, Painting in the Far East, 51.
52.
mm. mmmm
Translation adapted from Guo Ruoxu, Kuo fo-hs's Experiences in Paint-
ing, trans. A. C. Soper (Washington, D.C: American Council of
Learned Societies, 1951), 15.
53. My thanks to Jonathan Hay for raising this point.
54. For example: "The Emperor went yet a step further, for perceiving that
the number of princes of blood was very great, and that the ill conduct
of many of them might in time bring their quality into contempt, he
published an order that none should hereafter bear that character vAth-
out his express leave, which he gave to none but those who by their
virtue, understanding, and diligence in their offices, did very well de-
serve it." Here "character" is set in apposition to "quality," which, at
that time, referred to social rank. Le Comte, Mmoires, 246; and "Let us
see what the Duty of Toleration requires from those who are distin-
guished from the rest of Mankind, (from the Laity, as they please to
call us) by some Ecclesiastical Character, and Office; whether they be
Bishops, PriesLs, Presbyters, Ministers, or however else dignified or dis-
tinguished." John Locke (1632-1704) and William Popple (d. 1708), A
letter concerning toleration humbly submitted, etc. (London: Printed for Awn-
sham Churchill, 1689), 18, emphasis added in both citations. A more
modern understanding of the term appears in the English translation
of Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary (London: Printed for Thomas
Brown, 1765).
55. Jonathan Hay, speaking of Shi Tao (Shi Tao, 210), gave a description of
this phenomenon: "As Wai-kam Ho and Dawn Delbanco have written:
'Qi (strangeness) was the new Ming criterion for naturalness, replacing
the old literati concept o ya (refinement and elegance) as zheng (or-
thodoxy). . . . By the late Ming . . . qi was . . . a basic ingredient for
ya. . . . Thus, qi and zheng were no longer oppositional but synony-
mous.' However, as IJohn] Hay points out, the implications of the
epistemic transformation were general and not restricted to the dif-
ferent varieties of individualism. In particular, the new authority of
subjectivity was associated with an acknowledgement of personal feel-
ings (qing) that lies behind the intense lyricism of much seventeenth-
century painting, including Shi Tao's."
56. Roger Fry, "An Essay in Aesthetics," New Quarterly 2 (April 1909): 185-
86.
57. Phillip Denis Cate, "Japonisme and the Revival of Printmaking at the
End of the Centuiy," in Japonisme. in Art, ed. Society for the Study of
Japonisme (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1980), 279-89.
58. Richard Shiff, "Czanne in the Wild," Burlington Magazine 148, no. 1242
(September 2006): 610.
59. The Song case has been discussed above. For an example of calli-
graphic coarseness conceived as a mark of moral integrity, see Amy
McNair, "Su Shih's Copy of the 'Letter on the Controversy over Seating
Protocol,' " Archives of Asian Art 43 (1990): 38-48; and Ronald C Egan,
Word, Image and Deed in the Life of Su Shi (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, Council on East Asian Studies, 1994), 8-16, 261-65.
60. Laurence Binyon, The Flight of the Dragon (London: John Murray,
1911), 11-12. Binyon cites a variety of alternative translations on these
pages.
61. Ibid., 14.
62. Taki Seiichi, "The Principles Chi-Yun and Chtian-Shen, in Chinese
Painting," Kokka, no. 244 (September 1910): 67-76. I am grateful to
Michelle Huang for this reference. See Huang, "Enchanting the Occi-
dental: The Aesthetic Value of Song Landscape Painting in the Con-
ception of British Modernists" (paper presented at the Association of
Art Historians, Glasgow, April 2010).
63. Roger Fry, "An Essay in Aesthetics," in Vision and Design (1920; New
York: Brentano's, 1924). Seven years later he continued the theme: "A
painting was always conceived as the visible record of a rhythmic ges-
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE BRUSHSTROKE 327
ture. It was the graph of a dance executed by the hand." Fry, "Some
Aspects of Chinese Art," in Transformations (1927; New York: Doubleday
Anchor Books, 1956), 97.
64. Aby Warburg, quoted in E. H. Gombrich, "Aby Warburg: His Aims and
Methods; An Anniversary Lecture," Journa; of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes (,2 (1999): 268-82.
65. Ibid., 279.
66. Zhou Ning, "The Image of China in the West," in China in the Eyes of
the Wortd: A Study of the Image of China beyond China's borders [in Chi-
nese] (Nanjing: Nanjing University Press, 2007), 106-7. See also Chen
Duxiu, "Revolution in Art," New Youth 1 (January 1918): 85-86 [in Chi-
nese] .
67. Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, Nationat Culture, and
Translated ModernityChina, 1900-1937 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1995), 18-24.
68. Catalog of an exhibition at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, quoted in
Roger Fry, "Drawings at the Burlington Fine Arts Club," Burtington Mag-
azine for Connoisseurs 32, no. 179 (February 1918): 5.
69. Ibid.
70. Roger Fry, "Line as a Means of Expression in Modern Art," Burlington
Magazine for Connoisseurs ?>'i, no. 189 (December 1918): 202.
71. Ibid., 202-3.
72. Ibid., 206.
73. D. S. MacCoU, "Mr. Fry and Drawing," pt. 2, Burlington Magazine for
Connoisseurs M, no. 195 Qune 1919): 255.
74. "Botticelli is another case of an essentially Chinese artist. He, too, relies
almost entirely on linear rhythms for the organisation of his design,
and his rhythm has just that flowing continuity, that melodious ease
which we find in the finer examples of Chinese painting. Even Ingres
has been claimed, or denounced, as the case may be, as a 'Chinese'
painter. . . ." Fry, "Some Aspects of Chinese Art," 7-8.
75. William Schaefer, "Picturing Photography, Abstracting Pictures: The
Domain of Images in Republican Shanghai" (paper presented at "The
Art of Enlivenment," Harvard University, October 24-25, 2008), type-
script, 1.
76. Feng Zikai, "The Triumph of Chinese Art in Modern Art," Emtem Mis-
cellany 27, no. 1 (1930): 1 [in Chinese].
77. Ibid., 8: giEpf!iSoilirSf)a#IiM^iaTi|iI*!SW^. Ti. IP
(rhythm) ifm-fl^fiJ. Schaefer, "Picturing
Photography," 5-6, has discovered similar arguments in the work of
Zong Baihua and others, observing as well their nationalist positioning.
78. Clement Greenberg, "The Art of China: Review of the Principles of Chi-
nese Painting by George Rowley," Nation, 1950, 44, reprinted in Clement
Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O'Brien (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986), vol. 3, 42-44.
79. See, for instance, Robert B. Hawkins, "Contemporary Art and the Ori-
ent," College An Journal 16, no. 2 (Winter 1957): 118-31. The landscape
illustrated here, along with other works by so-called Zen masters, was
published in Hugo Munsterberg, "Zen and Art," Art Journal 20, no. 4
(Summer 1961): 198-202. That work and the one that illustrates Haw-
kins's article, like many of the masterpieces discussed by Binyon and
Fry, might not be regarded as genuine by experts today.
80. "Nonetheless, and in spite of the eager manner in which American art-
ists appeared to consume Asian concepts, materials, and images, a strik-
ing pattern of denying the relevance of Asian culture to American art
also emerged during the postwar period, especially when the move-
ment that became known as Abstract Expressionism was canonized in
culturally nationalistic terms as a uniquely American style of modern
art." Bert Winther-Tamaki, "The Asian Dimensions of Postwar Abstract
Art: Calligraphy and Metaphysics," in Munro, The Third Mind, 145.
81. Clement Greenberg, " 'American-Type' Painting" (1955, rev. 1958), in
Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 220,
quoted in Winther-Tamaki, "The Asian Dimensions," 145.
82. See, for instance. Serge Guilbaut, "1955: The Year the Gaulois Fought
the Cowboy," in "The French Fifties," ed. Susan Weiner, special issue of
Yale French Studies, no. 98 (2000): 167-81.
83. So effective was this campaign that artists in Asia continue to exploit
the ironies of using ink painting in the contemporary art world, ironies
resulting in part from the planting of an American flag on the gestural
brtishstroke. See Joan Kee's nuanced account of the politics of ink
painting in contemporary Korean art, "The Curious Case of Contempo-
rary Ink Painting," Art Journal 69, no. 3 (2010): 49-73.
84. Powers, Pattern and Person, 78-81.
85. A moment's reflection will make it apparent that pictures, ornaments,
and marks can all have a variety of secondary referents, but this, too,
would take us too far from the present subject.
86. "Flying white" is the term Chinese critics gave to the effect achieved
when sweeping the brush rapidly with dark ink and a relatively dry
brush. Typically, this leaves long, white streaks on the paper or silk
where the ink failed to adhere to the substrate. American artists such
as Franz Kline and Mark Tobey, working in oil paint, made frequent
use of this technique.
87. The historical parallel between the development of an art market in
China and in Europe was observed decades ago, but this fact has pro-
voked surprisingly little discussion. Joseph Alsop, The Rare Art Traditions
(New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 33-67.
88. Gombrich, "Aby Warburg," 278.