Art History 655 - Chinese Painting

The concept of landscape, or "mountains and waters" (shanshui), was a central preoccupation for Chinese artists, viewers, and collectors. Focusing primarily on the ninth to the eighteenth centuries, this course surveys historical changes in representations of nature through paintings produced for tombs, the imperial court, scholars, and merchants, but also through the decorative arts, private gardens, and imperial grounds. We think about what it meant to make paintings but also what it meant to view paintings. Reading primary texts in translation by seminal artists such as Guo Xi, Dong Qichang, and Shitao in conjunction with analysis of major monuments, students gain a foundation in the development of Chinese painting, while investigating the cultural, political, and economic contexts that have shaped ideas about landscape and environment. All readings in translation.

Open to Graduate students only. Chinese painting was not only a highly influential model for Korean and Japanese artists, but also a frequent touchstone in the history of European and American modern art. This course examines the range of genres, styles, and lineages of Chinese painting within court, literati, and merchant circles to understand its global influence. Working with a remarkable continuity and awareness of historical references from the Six Dynasties period to the last dynasty of China, painters presented particular arguments about the nature of representation and personal expression, ideas that seemed to anticipate later, modernist experiments. In order to understand Chinese painting?s stylistic innovations and how its audiences responded to seminal works, we will study canonical paintings by recreating works using historic painting manuals, as well as analyzing inscriptions and colophons in translation.