Old Masters Repainted: Wu Zhen (1280-1354): Prime Objects and Accretions (review)

Abstract

538 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1996 Joan Stanley-Baker. Old Masters Repainted: Wu Zhen (1280-1354): Prime Objects andAccretions. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1995. XXV, 536 pp. Hardcover $72.50, isbn 962-209-302-7. For years Joan Stanley-Baker has subjected Chinese paintings assigned to major masters to an intense scrutiny. Under her eye, some pictures emerge as genuine; others, betrayed by errors, faults, and weaknesses in painting, inscriptions, calligraphy , and seals, proclaim their fraudulent origins. She does not reject these fakes, but considers them vital to the unraveling of the history of Chinese painting, for they have what she calls "functional authenticity"; they have been instrumental in creating the received, and often distorted, persona of the artist. It is necessary to establish a core of truly genuine paintings from an artist's hand (the "prime" objects , as she terms them) and then to uncover ways in which certain painting subjects or styles have been assigned to the artist by later painters and forgers, who have vastly, and sometimes deliberately, modified or even totally revamped his original genius to make it conform to a later conception ofwhat it should be. Fakes of a given artist's works differ not only from the original but also from each other. They were not created all at one time, but represent varied "distances" from the original. Stanley-Baker proposes four distances: traced copies that function as "quasi-originals"; "evolved" images created by students or close followers who, while maintaining certain features ofthe master's art, introduce innovations of their own; "altered" images that are so far away from the master in time that their painter unwittingly introduces many elements ofhis own period or school or personal style; and "accretions," which represent entirely new additions to the master's oeuvre, with little relationship to the original style or expression ofthe master, but are distinct creations by the perpetrator (p. 10). Stanley-Baker demonstrates her methodology by determining Wu Zhen's true personal nature as reflected in his landscape and bamboo paintings. In this review, space permits only notes on her conclusions about a few of the ten landscapes and the six bamboo paintings attributed to Wu Zhen that she has examined firsthand. As a foundation, she endeavors to establish a Yuan dynasty period style in landscape painting. Since the Yuan falls between the Song and Ming, one expects Yuan landscape painting to preserve some Song elements and to forecast some Ming traits. In her evaluation, Song landscape paintings are highly descriptive of© 1996 by University objective perception. In Song works, all components and motifs are fully inteofHawai ? Pressgrated into the natural structure, creating "a sense ofstillness, a grand resonance" (p. 52), with brushwork subservient to the total expression. In early Ming landscapes , on the contrary, many social subtexts inform the pictures: space becomes Reviews 539 flattened, motifs protrude from their natural surroundings with an independence of their own, and brushwork strokes and dots also take on their own individual values. In describing the Song and Ming systems, Stanley-Baker uses standard landscape paintings, but when she wishes to define Yuan-period landscape style, even the Yuan temple mural landscapes are deemed unsuitable, and instead she quixotically proffers four non-landscape subjects. Turning to Wu Zhen himself, an analysis, in chronological order, offifteen documents by the artist himself, his contemporaries, and several later writers discloses that, contrary to received interpretation, Wu was deeply introverted and introspective. He was a loner; solitary eremitism was his genuine nature (pp. 84, 85). For him, a reclusive life was the only viable option. Thus the personality usually associated with Wu Zhen as politically disgruntled, asserting his disapproval ofthe foreign government by retiring into a life ofrustic leisure, especially as a fisherman recluse, is false. This fabricated persona begins to emerge in the late fourteenth century. In a 1369 poem colophon composed by Gu Ying on a bamboo painting by Wu Zhen, the writer does not refer to the images in the picture, but instead inserts "external, historical and literary references to allude to political or social ambitions, fulfilled or betrayed" (p. 87). The first reference to drinking and fishing as an alternative...