On Monday afternoon I walked across Central Park to the Met Museum to view the current exhibit Masterpieces of Chinese Painting. This was a large show that stretched through several galleries in the Asian wing. Most museums would be thrilled to have a fraction of the works on display for their own collections, but the Met's holdings of these priceless works are so vast that the exhibit has to be staged in two rotations.
Years ago, while a student at Fordham, I took a course in Chinese landscape painting and still remember the feeling of serenity I experienced sitting in the darkened lecture hall while the professor fed slides into a projector and briefly described each work as it appeared onscreen. That same sensation of peace came over me once again on Monday as I wandered from room to room under the subdued lighting. Much more so than Western art, Chinese painting has a spiritual dimension. Heavily stylized and filled with symbolic imagery, there is nothing loud or ostentatious in these paintings. They subtly draw the viewer into an alien world filled with mists where sages sit in contemplation and fishing boats glide silently along the river. The artists themselves were often government officials and members of the emperor's court or else wandering poets and Buddhist monks.
Since the exhibit proceeded in chronological order, the best came first with extremely rare paintings from the Tang dynasty. To one side as I entered was Night-Shining White by Han Gan, Done in ink on a handscroll and surrounded by imperial seals, this work - a portrait of the Emperor Xuanzong's favorite charger - is probably the most famous depiction of a horse in art history. A millennium after it was painted, the steed seems alive as it paws the ground and rears its head.
The next work that caught my attention was Emperor Xuanzong's Flight to Shu, painted by an unknown artist in the Southern Song dynasty. What's curious about this work is that many years ago I acquired from the museum's gift shop a full-size reproduction that still hangs framed in my living room. The title on the reproduction, though, was given as The Tribute Horse which I'd always assumed to be a reference to the riderless mount shown among the entourage slowly making its way through the mountains. At the current show, however, a different explanation was provided the viewer.
"In 745, after thirty-three years of able rule, the Tang emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–56) fell in love with the concubine Yang Guifei and became indifferent to his duties. When Yang's favorite general, An Lushan, rebelled in 755, Yang Guifei was blamed. Forced to flee from the capital at Xi'an to the safety of Shu (Sichuan Province), the emperor was confronted by mutinous troops demanding the execution of his lover. Reluctantly assenting, Xuanzong witnessed the act in horror and shame and abdicated soon after. This painting depicts the somber imperial entourage after the execution."
In this interpretation, the empty saddle then belongs to the executed Yang Guifei
It's startling to realize I have stared at the reproduction every day for so many years without ever having known the true meaning of its iconography. I couldn't understand why the painting had been given the wrong title - especially as the story of the executed Yang Guifei is one of the most celebrated in Chinese literature - until I came across an article written by Alan Priest, curator of Far Eastern Art, in an October 1943 Met Museum bulletin. He wrote:
"The peculiar thing about our picture is that across one of the most majestic of Chinese landscapes there moves a procession of riders, bepomped and glittering, so sure of themselves that they seem completely unaware of the scene through which they pass... One might, however, advance an explanation for it: as a courtly compliment the painter was depicting the passage of one of the famous tribute horses of the T'ang emperor T'ai Tsung. (If so, this is the only time a painter weighed imperial glory against immortal hills.) Such a suggestion may go too far in guesswork, but something of the sort is happening."
At some point then after Priest had published his article new information must have come to light that allowed the museum staff to correctly divine the true meaning of the painting. It would be interesting to learn the backstory of the research that enabled this reinterpretation.
To be continued...
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