Art in Theory. Группа авторов
I and II of Art in Theory: The West in the World. In an anthology without pictures, we are restricted to tracing the development of changing ideas as expressed in words. Our periodization must therefore of necessity be regarded as provisional, and more appropriate to some media rather than others. It is beyond our present scope to represent the specifically visual dimension of this constructed representation of the world across a wide range of artefacts including not only paintings – in such genres as still life and landscape – but also prints, decorated objects and surfaces in both two and three dimensions, such as ceramics and wallpapers, as well as maps and the plates of illustrated books.
This complex matrix of changing representations of the world (at the interactive levels of both (visual) art and (verbal) language) and the flows of power inscribed in economic, military and political relations in the world, is where we can ultimately trace the changing ideas of art with which the present anthology is by definition concerned. Yet that is to say everything and nothing. In the end, we can neither accept traditional accounts in their entirety, or indeed revisions of them in their entirety, but nor can we wish them away. In terms of a conventional history of art and of design, the eighteenth century was long understood in terms of a series of now‐questioned style labels such as ‘baroque’, ‘rococo’, ‘neo‐classicist’, ‘picturesque’ and, most pertinent to the present volume, ‘chinoiserie’. Most of these, it has to be confessed, still linger on in our heads, however much more recent work has insisted on relating the art to deeper sociohistorical trends: absolutism, parliamentary democracy, land enclosures, nascent industrialization and the Seven Years War for global supremacy fought out between Britain and France and their respective allies. Steering a course between these differing emphases, the first section includes examples of both fictional and factual accounts of what made ‘the Orient’ seem different from Europe. These range from pioneering ‘Orientalist’ accounts of Islamic culture by figures as different as Antoine Galland and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to the exotic fantasies of the Arabian Nights and William Beckford’s Vathek. A different take on the sense of Eastern ‘difference’ can be found in Montesquieu and Goldsmith: both using fictional oriental characters, Persian and Chinese respectively, to shine a critical sidelight on the corruption and artificiality of their own societies.
Further selections concern the impact of an idealized notion of China, and the pervasive fashion for things Chinese which gained ground in Europe during the eighteenth century. These range from more or less plausible rehearsals of the virtues of Chinese material culture, especially gardens, to the quite different note struck by George Staunton’s deflationary encounter with the realities of China which derived from first‐hand experience gained during his participation in the British Embassy to China led by Lord Macartney in 1793. Standing somewhere between the idealized exotica and Staunton’s plain assessment of China stands Sir William Jones’s proposal to found a Society for the study of ‘Asiatick’ culture. Jones is now sometimes criticized for having relied on the researches of uncredited Indian assistants, but be that as it may, his Enlightenment‐inspired admiration for and curiosity about Indian culture stands in marked contrast to the normative attitude of British imperialists in the nineteenth century.
One of the recurring problems facing us in these early parts of the anthology, and discussed in the introduction to the book, concerns the relative unevenness of the written historical record: the fact that we have more textual accounts by European writers about their encounters with the wider world than we have reports by Arabic, Indian, Chinese, African or American writers of encounters with Europeans. Nonetheless, other kinds of trace do exist, notably those in the broad field of the visual arts. To single out only a few, these include Mughal miniature paintings in India, some of which contain figures in modern European dress as well as visual representations of motifs taken from the Christian Bible. Eighteenth‐century Japan saw the development of ukiyo‐e prints, depictions of the ‘floating world’ of contemporary urban modernity in the capital Edo – the very images which in the mid‐nineteenth century became a stimulus for French artists of the nascent avant‐garde seeking to arrive at adequate representations of their own ‘modern life’. Certain of the Japanese prints show clear evidence of a fascination with European perspective and play off against each other the characteristic effects of a Japanese engagement with surface, colour and contour and a European representation of perspectival recession. In West Africa, metalworking in sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century Benin grew out of a long indigenous tradition of bronze casting. Three‐dimensional cast metal sculptures often include images of Europeans, probably Portuguese mercenaries working for the Oba, as well as soldiers accompanying the Portuguese traders themselves. But something else is happening with the unique Benin ‘plaques’ which adorned the Oba’s palace. There can be no proof, but there is a possibility that these resulted from West African artists seeing two‐dimensional printed illustrations in Christian Bibles.
One of the most extensive of these interactions took place in eighteenth‐century China, where a number of Jesuit missionaries worked in the Qing emperor’s court in both map‐making and painting. Some became integrated into Chinese court culture and had long careers there, including Guiseppe Castiglione, who adopted the Chinese name Lang Shining, and worked in China from 1715 until his death in 1766. During this time he worked on many large‐scale paintings in what has been described as a ‘hybrid Chinese‐Western style’, recording important imperial events in which a Chinese approach to landscape painting is combined with European perspective space in which the figures are deployed. In both China and India, other hybrid forms of art evolved in which native artists painted European figures in a ‘native’ style, either for sale to colonial merchants or soldiers and their families to commemorate their time in the ‘exotic’ East, or for export sale in Europe itself. All of these kinds of visual art, as well as related craft work, if they can be read and accorded due prominence in the historical record, can enrich and complicate the sense we have of the multifarious encounters of people living in the wider world with the Europeans who forced themselves into those worlds in the centuries before fully fledged modern imperialism became the order of the day (cf. Wood, Western Art, 2014).
Section IIB involves a change of focus. Rather than Europe’s long‐standing fascination with the riches of the East, this section concentrates on the variety of ‘New Worlds’ that European expansion encountered in the eighteenth century. The first of these – America – had of course been known about for some time, and the earliest accounts can be found in Section IB. The Spanish plunder of South America had already made it for some time one of the richest countries in Europe. But by the eighteenth century, Spain was in decline, and it was the plantation economies of the Caribbean, based on the institution of quasi‐industrialized transatlantic slavery, that made the most notorious contribution to enabling Europe’s definitive take‐off into modernity. It was at this point that cities like Bristol and Liverpool, based on the proceeds of the ‘triangular trade’ between Britain, West Africa and America, became crucial building blocks for the emergent British Empire. The section includes several texts bearing upon questions of material culture, race and slavery in the Americas. And for the first time, we are able to record not only the accounts of Europeans but also the dissenting voices of those on the receiving end of European power.
The second main focus of this section lies on the other side of the world. By the final third of the century, the protracted struggle between Britain and France for global domination was in the process of being concluded. After the American revolution, Britain lost the United States, but in the same geopolitical shake‐out, gained India – which went on, of course, to become the so‐called jewel in the crown of the British Empire in the nineteenth century. We include here extracts from William Hodges’ late‐eighteenth‐century account of his travels in India, and the monuments he observed. Hodges’ narrative is one of the few extended reports by a professional artist of his own first‐hand reactions to the art of a distinctively different culture.
One of the extraordinary things about Hodges is that he had already had experience of an even more radically distinct society, having been the official artist on Captain James Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific in 1772–5. Hodges did not write about Oceania, but he left an unparalleled visual record of its people and their material culture. Cook had actually