Literati Painters and the Convolution of Western Art History

The historian is interested in the inception of styles, not in their perpetuation. (Loehr,
1964) Chinese literati have fascinated Western artists and sinologists since the beginning of 20th
century, thus forming their general understanding of Chinese classical aesthetics. Virtually every
contemporary survey of Chinese painting history tends to inaugurate one of their overarching
category into to which some paintings are expected to fit the purported “literati”. Literati
painting was conceived as a mode through which the Confucian junzi (noble person) expressed
his ethical personality. “Literati painters,” on the other hand, were amateurs – they painted as a
means of self-expression, much the same way they wrote poetry; both forms were inheritances
from the Neo-Daoist era of the Six Dynasties of China. This enthrallment has fostered a search
for the main differences between the principles and aims of Chinese and Western painting.
However, despite the search to recognize the peculiarity of Chinese literati painting moving
within and beyond the conceptual borders of art history, problematize the entry of these kind of
art into Western Art historical discourse.
Literati painters chose to focus their entire lives on mastery of the art revealing the inner
character of the painter and communicating, through depictions of nature, man, or objects,
virtues, strength of purpose, and sensitivity towards the conditions of human life within China.
However, in consideration Chinese painting usually relies heavily upon analogies with Western
art. James Elkins, an art historian and art critic, concerned to understand the implications of this
procedure, asks whether in seeing and writing about this art can ever escape the Western
perspectives. He reiterated that the characteristic concerns of the discipline and its institutional
structure in academe originated in the West, and any piece of writing that does not address these
concerns nor fit within this structure would not be recognizable as art history. In the history of
European painting from Cimabue to the present, it would be hard to find any Western paintings
that could be confused with any art made in China, so the frequent reliance of scholars upon such
comparisons seems difficult.” The Western origins of art history create a disturbing interpretative
barrier that falls between the art historian and the objects of his study, in China or elsewhere.
This barrier is detectable in comparisons the art historian makes, consciously or unconsciously,
between works of art originating in China and works of Western art around which the edifice of
art history has been built. And therefore, Elkins argues that all art history, whatever its subject
and wherever its origin, is Western.
 In the case of art historical analysis of Chinese painting, Elkins signifies almost exclusively
the paintings made by nonprofessional scholar-amateurs known as literati. The literati painting
has its root in Han Dynasty, thrived in Song and has been one of the most important component
of Chinese culture throughout history to this day. It is mainly engrossed in personal erudition and
expression than in literal representation or an immediately attractive surface beauty. Compared
to Western, Chinese painting is traditionally more stylized, more abstract, less realistic and more
inclusive to its culture than Western types. And in fact, an overwhelming majority of literati
paintings use a limited number of imageries only, such as heart and brush on clouds, petals,
mountains, river, rain drops, breezes, seasons, among other natural elements, joining forces to
express the painter or poet’s inner emotions. It also emphasizes the importance of white space
and may be said to favor landscape painting over portrait art, or figure painting.

The conception of the literati Chinese painting is based primarily on Taoism, whose
central theme is ‘detachment. Indigenous to China, Taoism arose as a secular school of thought
with a strong metaphysical foundation around 500 B.C., during a time when fundamental spiritual
ideas were emerging in both the East and the West. One of its best example is the most famous
of all literati painters, Shen Zhou (1427-1509), who lived on China’s east coast, not far from the
modern Shanghai region. Shen Zhou was noted for the extremely broad range of styles he
commanded. He devoted himself to painting as the sole focus of his life, he was an accomplished
poet, but undertook no government responsibilities or other arduous employment. He
exemplified literati painting in another way by means of blending poetry and painting, the arts of
words, beliefs and images. One of his masterpieces is the so called, “Poet on the Mountain Top”.

“The Poet on the Mountaintop” celebrates the lone man (detachment) in the midst of nature,
remote from society.
 On the other hand, Western painting is distinguished by its concentration on the
representation of the human figure, whether in the heroic context of antiquity or the religious
context of the early Christian and medieval world. The human form of course has been central to
the content of Western painting for centuries. Portraitist like Lucian Freud began to focus on
portraiture from 1950s, often nudes (though his first full length nude was not painted until
1966),to the almost complete exclusion of everything else, and by the middle of the decade
developed a much more free style using large hogs-hair brushes, concentrating on the texture
and colour of flesh, and much thicker paint, including the “Girl with a white dog”. It is an example
of an interim work in process, sharing many physiognomies with paintings before and after it,
with relatively tight brushwork and a middling size and viewpoint. The colours of non-flesh areas
in these paintings are typically muted, while the flesh becomes increasingly high and variably
coloured. By about 1960, Freud had established the style that he would use, with some changes,
for the rest of his career. The later portraits often use an over life-size scale, but are of mostly
relatively small heads or in half-lengths. Later portraits are often much larger. In his late career
he often followed a portrait by producing an etching of the subject in a different pose, drawing
directly onto the plate, with the sitter in his view.

Girl with a white dog, 1951–1952, Tate Gallery. Portrait of Freud's first wife, Kitty
Garman, the daughter of Jacob Epstein and Kathleen Garman

Aforementioned, Chinese literati painters as an object lesson is still a colossal, protracted

specimen of a unceasing tradition that is older and historically complex as Western painting.
Perhaps in fifty years, as China becomes more prosperous, art history will become a hybrid
discipline. At that point, the situation, which Elkins analyzes, will be reversed. While such a
change is a long way in the future, it is necessary to uninterruptedly changeround prime cultural
concepts in order to make sense of smaller ones.
 REFERENCES
"Gustave Loehr: Rotary's Forgotten Founder" by Tom Emery (Carlinville, Ill.: History in Print,
2003).

http://www.indiana.edu/~ealc100/Art9.html Chinese Literati Painting -- Page 9 The fruition

of literati painting in the early Ming -- Shen Zhou

China’s Literati Painting By Ben Wang, Senior Lecturer, Sept. 25, 2015
Jason C. Kuo, ed., Stories From Other Mountains: Chinese Painting Studies in Postwar America
(Washington, D.C., New Academia Publishing, 2009.) My own paper for that conference can be
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Chinese Painting Studies.”

Loreta, P 2017, 'The Embodiment of Zhuangzi‘s Ecological Wisdom in Chinese Literati Painting
(wenrenhua 文人畫) and Its Aesthetics', Asian Studies, Vol 5, Iss 1, Pp 221-239 (2017), no. 1, p.
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HARRIST, R 2011, 'Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History/The Great Image Has No
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Augustin, Birgitta. “Daoism and Daoist Art.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/daoi/hd_daoi.htm
(December 2011)

Augustin, Birgitta. “Eight Daoist Immortals in the Yuan Dynasty: Note on the Origin of the Group
and Its Iconography.” Orientations 41 (September 2010), pp. 81–87.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Literati, Encyclopædia Britannica, September 07, 2012,
https://www.britannica.com/topic/literati

Indiana University, EALC E232, R. Eno, Spring 2008, TRADITIONS OF LITERATI PAINTING