Way of the Brush. Fritz van Briessen

      CHAPTER

      THE STUDY OF THE TECHNIQUES of Chinese painting has been rather neglected in the West, perhaps because technique has been regarded more or less as a handmaiden in the service of the idea, which could therefore be ignored as of secondary importance. Painting, it has been assumed, must be the same kind of art everywhere, and consequently the same ways of looking at and judging Western painting must be equally applicable to Eastern and Chinese painting. This supposition has led to misunderstandings and misinterpretations, because Chinese painting, in contrast to its Western counterpart, cannot be fully appreciated without some knowledge of its techniques and methods.

      I shall try to demonstrate here just why technique plays such a decisive part in Chinese painting. This involves not only an explication why, fundamentally, Chinese painting reaches its culmination in absolute identity of idea and technique, but also requires an introduction to various of the essential techniques and principles by which a Chinese picture—its style and form already inherent in it from the very first brush stroke—comes to completion.

      To illustrate this unity of technique and idea, a unity which seems essentially to be an identification of opposites, it is necessary to start a long way back. To begin with, it will prove helpful to recount four of the most famous out of countless legends attributed to Chinese artists.

      Wu Tao-tzu, the great master painter of the T'ang period, was once journeying and decided to spend the night in a temple. The monks received him without enthusiasm and grudgingly supplied a small bare room. Wu Tao-tzu retired. The following morning he was up early, intending to leave his unfriendly hosts in a hurry. From the doorstep he cast a glance back at his somber lodging. And then with one sweeping motion of his brush the master painted a donkey on the wall of the cell. He had hardly left when the donkey stepped out of the wall, kicking right and left until the cell was a shambles. When the monks came running, the donkey quickly jumped back into the picture. But the monks understood how this was Wu's revenge for their unkindness.

      The following story has been ascribed to several early masters, and we pick the version linked with the name of the great Ku K'ai-chih. Ku one day decided to paint a dragon on the wall of his house. He guided his brush with full confidence, and after a while the dragon was finished except for its eyes. Suddenly the master's courage failed him. He simply did not dare to paint those eyes. When, many months later, he at last felt brave enough, he groped for his brush and with swift strokes dashed in eye and pupil. Within an instant the dragon broke into loud roaring and flew away, leaving a trace of fire and smoke.

      Another legend attributed to the same painter tells of a girl he loved but who did not return this emotion. Ku K'ai-chih painted a picture of the disobliging young woman, hung it in his room, and stuck a thorn into it. From that moment the girl became sick and faded away. She did not recover until she had responded to the painter's feelings and he eventually pulled the thorn out of her portrait.

      The most revealing of these legends about Chinese painters is the one which deals with the end of Wu Tao-tzu. The emperor had asked Master Wu to paint a landscape on the palace wall. Wu set to work and was soon able to lead the emperor to a magnificent painting in whose center he had drawn a gaping cave. The emperor was still expressing his admiration when Wu Tao-tzu directed firm steps toward the cave and vanished inside it. After the shape of his body had melted into the shadow of the cave, the entire painting disappeared into the palace wall.

      Diverse as these stories may be, they all have one common trait: the assumption of an extraordinarily close relationship between painting and magic, and of the resulting conclusion that a great painter is also a great magician—the greater the painter the more powerful his magical capacities. It seems that a demonstration of magic was proof of a painter's genius.

      The fact that such legends were still taken seriously as late as the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries suggests the persistence of the Chinese belief in the supernatural. In a world dominated by the supernatural, people could not possibly conceive of the brush stroke and the idea as being two distinct things, nor as existing on different levels, nor as representing the opposite poles of material and spiritual. In fact, this dichotomy has rarely existed in Asia. It is an expression of the Western mind and is most probably linked with the death of the world of magic. This is not the place to investigate the reasons for the overthrow of the belief in magic throughout the West. But surely we can surmise that is was partly due to the influence of Christianity, which turned its face against magic. There was never any similar development in the East, because the Eastern religions did not divorce themselves from magic and philosophy.

      Of course, in early times magic visions were known in the West too. Most scholars today believe the great neolithic cave paintings of Altamira in Spain or Lascaux in France to be magic paintings done in those dark, cold caves during the interglacial period by tribal witch doctors to appease the dangerous world and the wild animals that surrounded them and to charm the game they hoped to feed on. A distinction between technique and painting was then probably nonexistent. In an age of magic, technique is completely identified with the power to make magic. The greatest technician is also the greatest magician. The strength of the spell grows with the ability to paint. The equation may be put in another way: the magician of those bygone times was indeed the painter, but his artistic skill was only regarded as the measure of his power to make magic. The more authentically he could reproduce the appearances of the world around him—and his power was directed at these appearances—the stronger was the spell. He felt no artistic urge as such, for he was only a magician, and his painting craft proved itself by its effect.

      Though we have no knowledge of Chinese counterparts of Altamira and Lascaux, it seems most likely that the Chinese also went through this most primitive stage of art and magic. And the earliest Chinese paintings which have come down to us lend additional weight to the belief that the magic tradition in China followed much the same pattern as did that of the West. At the time of these earliest paintings, however, magic as such was already but a general background from which the artist had emerged as the dominant personality, though possessing magical powers—a complete reversal of the situation that we must presume to have existed in the prehistoric period. The Chinese painter was by now first and foremost an artist. If he was a great artist, he acquired magical power, and he was able to cast spells even though this was not any more the primary purpose of his art. Note that in China supernatural legends concerning artists are linked only with the names of great masters. As explained, magic was a proof of great genius. But genius was the essential factor, and magic