Day 76 - Landscape scroll
July 31, 2018
Gallery 210 is the first gallery in a special exhibition called "Streams and Mountains Without End," which centers on different traditions of Chinese landscape painting. The gallery's three sections focus on the majestic landscape, the poetic landscape, and the magical landscape. Ironically, the last of these feels the most familiar to me, perhaps because of the analogues in European art. A lapis lazuli sculpture of an arbat in a cave conjures up paintings of Christian hermits in mystical settings, for example, while a Daoist holy man floating in the air reminds me of the Madonna on a crescent moon, not to mention the fiddler on the roof!
The connection between poetry and images in Chinese landscape painting was, I learn, profound. One of the placards quotes a saying: "Poetry is formless painting; painting, poetry in form." Some painters were also poets, or adopted famous poems as their subjects.
What really seizes my attention, however, are the long landscape scrolls exhibited in the "majestic landscape" section, because they force me to look in a new way, immersing myself literally step by step as the scene unfurls before me. The scrolls, a placard reminds us, are like a journey through space but also through time, since the whole cannot be seen at once, only in stages.
Today's object is such a scroll, perhaps 20 feet long, painted by Zhao Zuo in 1611-1612. Obviously, a single photo cannot do it justice. I like the naturalism of the drawing and the shading (if I didn't know it was painted, I might guess that charcoal was the medium), and the alternation of complex scenes and empty space. (This last is becoming quite the theme of my recent blog entries!) But what I love is that near the beginning of the scroll there appears a narrow path that leads past a little village, continues alongside a forested mountain, and terminates at a body of water. And it leads me as well, making me feel that I am walking along that path into the landscape.
The connection between poetry and images in Chinese landscape painting was, I learn, profound. One of the placards quotes a saying: "Poetry is formless painting; painting, poetry in form." Some painters were also poets, or adopted famous poems as their subjects.
What really seizes my attention, however, are the long landscape scrolls exhibited in the "majestic landscape" section, because they force me to look in a new way, immersing myself literally step by step as the scene unfurls before me. The scrolls, a placard reminds us, are like a journey through space but also through time, since the whole cannot be seen at once, only in stages.
Today's object is such a scroll, perhaps 20 feet long, painted by Zhao Zuo in 1611-1612. Obviously, a single photo cannot do it justice. I like the naturalism of the drawing and the shading (if I didn't know it was painted, I might guess that charcoal was the medium), and the alternation of complex scenes and empty space. (This last is becoming quite the theme of my recent blog entries!) But what I love is that near the beginning of the scroll there appears a narrow path that leads past a little village, continues alongside a forested mountain, and terminates at a body of water. And it leads me as well, making me feel that I am walking along that path into the landscape.
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