Where learning and art proved a potent mix

Who belongs to this exclusive club is a matter of much scholarly contention, but the quality of their works is not ZHAO XU/SU QIANG/MICHELLE OTTMAN

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but when that consists of stealing the very creativity that puts food on an artist's table, it is inevitable that he or she is going to devise a way to stop it happening.

In Chinese art this has included artists using almost impossible-to-replicate brushstrokes and stamping their work with seals apparent only to the painter.

The painter Qian Xuan (1239-1299) was a prodigious user of personal hallmarks. Qian, who lived in a time of dynastic change, admitted to having signed works with "a byname never used before", in order to "stop and shame my imitators". What makes this particularly remarkable is that Qian, also a much-celebrated poet and essayist, had long championed the view that true artists should not be influenced in their creative work intent to pander, and that their works certainly should not be traded for money.

It is a familiar proposition in Chinese art history, one that lay at the heart of what was known as literati painting.

"As the name suggests, literati paintings were done by people who were reared on the country's literary tradition," says Zhang Zhen, an expert in ancient Chinese painting and calligraphy with the Palace Museum in Beijing.

"And since they belonged to the sophisticated social elite and were presumably well-off, they didn't have to sell their works to live. They painted not for a clientele, but for themselves, and for them painting was more a form of entertainment and introspection than a means of living."

For these artists, painting was, in a word, cathartic. The still waters under their brushes served up reflections of themselves as cultured, sensitive men. (And yes, they were, to a man, men). Some saw their professional counterparts, who were often born into poor families and received little education apart from how to paint, as worth less than themselves.

Origin

Zhang says that while the origin of literati painting can be traced to an earlier time, it was only during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), a pinnacle in Chinese art and literature, that more literary-minded people with an artistic bent began to experiment in broadening painting's languages and meanings.

And this movement, for want of a better word, found a forceful advocate in Zhaoji, or Emperor Huizong (1082-1135), the eighth ruler of the Song Dynasty, whose artistic achievements tower over some of the best-known artists in Chinese history.

Huizong perfectly fits the bill that Yang Danxia, Zhang's colleague at the Palace Museum, offers for a literati painter.

"A literati painter must be one who had a fairly good mastery of Chinese literature and calligraphy. Consequently, his works exude feelings befitting an enlightened, sensitive mind. Painting with a literary subtext - that's what they were aiming for."

These criteria changed what was depicted on paint scrolls, especially later on. Colors were giving way to black ink and a detail-obsessed style to a freer, less arduous one. However, this did not entail less thought, but the opposite.

Natural scenery was often preferred, partly because it required less training to paint mountains and rivers than it does for other genres, portraiture for example. The painting would often depict a world with an otherworldly beauty and serenity, distant, even desolate.

Theories concerning the application of ink and brush developed based on calligraphic principles. "To write or to paint, people in ancient China used the same brush," Tian says.

"And they eventually sought to judge paintings against criteria similar to those used in judging works of calligraphy, looking for the strength and smoothness of brushstrokes."

Men of letters

And being men of letters, these literati painters had a natural impulse to express their feelings on paper, and would waste no opportunity to do so. One salient example is Emperor Huizong, whose own works seamlessly merged the arts of poetry, calligraphy and painting.

"The practice of inscribing a painting - writing down the painter's thoughts, often in the form of poetry, on a finished work's empty space - started during the Song Dynasty," says Zhang. "The fad quickly became standard practice. During the Qing Dynasty (1636-1912), there was almost no piece of literati painting that wasn't inscribed."

Mindful of the inscriptions that would later appear, in composing their works painters took full account of the calligraphy that would appear with the painting, an aesthetic consideration far broader than the question of where the calligraphy would be placed. One example is an ink painting of fish by the Qing Dynasty painter Li Fangying (1695-1756). The calligraphy on the right side of the painting effectively evokes the riverbank and indicates the water that was never painted.

Maxwell Hearn, chairman of the Department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, says: "What is striking to me is that the educated elite of China has, since Song times, practiced painting and calligraphy as related forms of self-expression. Certainly this was only possible because of the universal competency in calligraphy, which was one of the distinguishing factors in what it meant to be an educated individual in China. In the West, good handwriting did not necessarily lead to a competency in drawing. ... Consequently, the practice of penmanship among literate individuals did not lead to a class of literati artists in the West.

"Instead, the creation of wall paintings or paintings in oil on canvas required the mastery of an entirely different set of skills and media. Furthermore, paintings were usually time-consuming undertakings that involved specialized materials. Consequently, painting became the purview of specialists - professionals - who worked on commission. Only in the last century has painting in the West been regarded as the pure expression of individual painters."

Clear answer

So in China who was qualified as a literati painter and who was not? Despite the efforts by art critics and historians, especially in modern times, to answer that question, there is no clear answer.

"In ancient China a learned man was expected to take government office," says Zhang. "That explains why literati painting was at times called, rather strangely to modern ears, 'paintings by the officer class'. In fact many learned men did not end up being office holders. Some might have failed the royal examinations, and some refused to serve a new regime."

Apart from that, during the Qing Dynasty, with education becoming accessible to an increasing number of people, there were less government posts than qualified candidates. So to regard someone as a literati painter by dint of a government post he held is absurd.

Further complicating the picture is that there was never a set style for literati painting. Some well-known painter-poets had personal tastes that inclined more towards a subtle, delicate court style, practiced by professional painters on the emperor's payroll. And on rare occasions, professional painters with little education, Qiu Ying, for example, produced works that amounted to visual poetry. Both have traditionally been considered literati painters.

Yin Jinan, an art historian and professor at the Central Academy of Art in Beijing, has suggested a new way for making such delineations.

"The word literati implies a group," he wrote in an essay. "A man could be called a literati painter if he painted and socialized with members of the group. Neither style nor educational level alone could be considered a deciding factor."

In other words, to be remembered as a literati painter, one had to stay within the circle.

Yang has a very different take on the question.

"Today, people tend to emphasize the difference between professional and literati painting, pitting one against the other. In fact, the boundary has always been very fuzzy. Among most literati painters there was no lack of respect for their professional counterparts."

Yang cites as an example Tang Yin (1470-1524), a renowned literati painter who studied for years under a professional painter.

And some, among them Qian Xuan, probably had an intimate understanding of the hand-to-mouth existence of many low-level professional painters, brought on either by personal misfortune or as a result of what was happening at the time. (Qian's lifetime coincided with the fall of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) at the hands of Mongols, who later set up the powerful Empire of Yuan.)

"Literati painters were forced to step into the same marketplace as their professional counterparts, where they had to outwit the anonymous imitators to defend their own financial interests," Zhang says.

One example was literati painters' use of a seal, often inscribed with their byname or motto. While the tiny square of scarlet red formed a delectable contrast with the inky brushworks, it also helped the painter to announce himself, and the buyers to recognize his painting.

Reflecting on the fact that Chinese painting history over the past millennium has largely been the history of literati painting, Yang says this was more or less inevitable.

"It's not unlike today: While painter-artisans make up the bulk of the group, it is only a handful of masters whom history will eventually remember. In the case of literati painters, they were the ones who wrote the history."

James Cahill, internationally renowned Chinese art historian and collector, once wrote that Chinese painters, by inscribing and stamping their works, knowingly added a "self" onto the painting and therefore avoided the possibility of creating the visual illusion loved by their Western counterparts. Instead of being led directly into another world, the viewers are constantly reminded of the painter's presence.

Commenting on this phenomenon, Yang says: "The literati painters, steeped in ancient Chinese philosophy, believed in the unity of man and nature. They found a place for themselves in their paintings of mountains and rivers because that's where they thought they belonged."