Way of the Brush. Fritz van Briessen
the similarities he thinks he sees—behind which actually lie fundamental differences—-produce misunderstandings which will prevent his ever approaching the heart of Chinese painting.
Something must be added here to the remarks already made on the concept of originality in East and West. The Western student of Chinese painting may notice what he thinks is a lack of development, and for no good reason he assumes that all art, in every country, must show development. This leaves out of reckoning the fact that until quite recently China had an essentially static culture. And this culture emphasized not progress but preservation, not change but tradition. There was certainly no recognized principle of change. If Chinese culture has undergone some development in spite of this, then it is because the human spirit is naturally given to change, no matter what restrictions are placed in the way. But the Chinese system has discouraged such a predisposition much more strongly than other cultures, and the resulting antipathy to change is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the extraordinary continuity of the Chinese civilization.
Until the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty and the end of the empire, the cultural history of China had rolled on without a break. The wonderful endurance of this civilization, with all the richness of its inner mutations and movements, was the soil in which Chinese painting took root and flowered for nearly two thousand years. In effect, the end of the traditional civilization of China was also the end of its traditional art. Much of what has been produced in art since the year 1911 will probably be thrown away as a late flower of a dying civilization. This need not mean in practice that the values of Chinese painting—if the new regime does not destroy them for ideological reasons—are bound to disappear completely. It may much rather mean that the obstacles which formerly stood in the way of radical changes in the practice of art will now vanish, and that—from a sociological point of view—the painter may find a new freedom to combine his traditions with the spirit of his own age.
So far as Chinese art is concerned, we are living in a final phase from which no strong new developments have yet come forth. There are certain fundamental reasons why such new developments are unlikely to appear. To start with, the great age of the brush has yielded to the banal age of the fountain pen. This means that young students no longer study the use of the brush during the period when their hands have the full flexibility of youth. In sociological terms, the structure of Chinese society has changed so much that the painter is no longer necessarily a scholar. Most people consider that it takes too long to educate a person in the use of the brush and that it is not possible by traditional methods to express modern ideas on politics, industrialization, and national reconstruction. Finally, the old-style painter, with some exceptions, finds it impossible to exist, because people no longer buy traditional paintings. They are too expensive, and besides, they have a reactionary flavor about them. So the painter is dependent on official commissions. Chinese painting has therefore reached its end, and we have all the more reason to study it in its various forms because we are in a position to survey a movement which is now over.
The Mustard-seed Garden, then, from which all this body of ideas has been drawn, is not a book of rules but a sort of list of suggestions. The academic painter who follows each of these suggestions will paint in a dry, tedious, and uninspired way. But the creative artist who has thoroughly absorbed their meaning thereby wins his freedom. So again we have come back to the same point: technical skill is prerequisite to any advance beyond technique. This does not mean that technique is to be neglected but, on the contrary, that without any apparent effort the technique is inextricably involved in the work of art as a whole.
In order to achieve this degree of facility, Chinese painting has produced an extraordinary variety of basic rules, aids, and methods which the young artist more or less learns by heart, so that he can apply them whenever he wishes, spontaneously and without self-consciousness. As a result, the Chinese painter suffers from none of those Western complexes which arise from asking: "How shall I paint it?" In China the answer to this question is taken so much for granted that it never arises at the moment of artistic creation. Technical inhibitions have seldom stopped a Chinese artist once he has got going. But at the same time—and this has already been noted—the fact that painting technique is something that can be learned has resulted in some rather ordinary works remaining alive, even if anemically so. And the fact that many commonplace or downright bad Chinese paintings are to be found in Western museums and collections is due to the inability of the Western eye to mark the difference between mediocre and good, between second-rate copy and work of art. For these differences are too minute to be recognized at first, or even at second, look.
During the course of centuries Chinese painting has developed innumerable type forms which can be put together by the painter to form a painting. These forms are something like algebraic ciphers which only become significant when the formula is applied. They are etudes, but not yet sonatas. One could find many similar analogies. If one remembers that Chinese painting—and this will be more fully explained later—expresses certain fundamental principles of life, then one cannot help comparing it with the Ars Magna of Raimundus Lullus, or the Mathesis Universalis of Leibniz, or finally with the Glasperlenspiel of Hermann Hesse. These are only three of the countless attempts of mankind to create an art of combination which is capable of presenting all the thoughts and feelings of the human spirit and which makes imaginative use of all the symbols of the human spirit in ever new arrangements and ever new relationships.
In such syntheses we are confronted with something quite different from a mere imitation of the outward forms of nature. It is true that this sort of imitation of the world around us is up to a point inevitable, for only in nature can we find the symbols and signs we need in order to play the great Glasperlenspiel. But the reproduction of the visible world was never the only, nor even the main, aim of Chinese painting. The inventing of simplified symbols to stand for the phenomena of the visible world proves that for the Chinese it is more important to interpret things symbolically than to set them down realistically. Nevertheless, Chinese painting has naturally developed forms in which one can certainly recognize definite objects in nature: the bamboo grove or the pine tree, a late homecomer or a bird in flight.
A certain degree of abstractness is reached without, however, completely abandoning objective appearance. Even the painters of the Ch'an (Zen) school, who turned the techniques of brush and ink into a play of self-expression, hoping to gain insight from the movements of the brush inspired by the subconscious mind; even those painters who—to use a modern word—-distorted; even these stopped short of pure abstraction in their calligraphy and made their bird, fish, or tree still recognizable. And yet the habit of projecting philosophic ideas into visible terms, of demonstrating Yang and Yin with the brush, was very highly developed.
The possibility of mastering technique, as mentioned already, depends on learning to handle the brush in all its peculiarities. Brush technique, as the Chinese understand it, became an acquired discipline through arduous practice and reached a point where it became instinctive and spontaneous through absolute control. The brush stroke was itself a disciplined spontaneity, as it were. We are here in the presence of Taoist doctrine, the sort of thing we learn from the story of Prince Hui's cook and of the man from Ying.
Here again analogies suggest themselves, though at first sight they appear quite incompatible with this art. A brush stroke resembles nothing so much as a sword stroke, the release of an arrow, the judo grip, the sumo throw, the karate chop. They all have one thing in common: they require an extraordinary discipline and concentration of mind on the stroke, the throw, the blow, the grip, with exact co-ordination of mind and body achieved through controlled breathing. They achieve such incomparable perfection of expression that they go beyond the merely physical purpose into the realm of the spirit, and this the Chinese call Tao. In the West we have at least one activity which approaches this Eastern form of expression, and that is golf. This may seem rather a far-fetched comparison. But in fact a golf stroke involves all the same elements of precision and concentration. If golf does not lead to a spiritual experience in the West, as it may do in the East, the reason lies only in the different attitudes of the players. However, it is worth noticing that the Chinese and, far more, the Japanese have a very special talent for this sport in which long spells of relaxed walking and controlled breathing make possible a perfect performance.
We have reached the stage at which technique takes the foremost place in our minds. It has been shown