Creating paintings with poetic resonances, sometimes with ties to specific lines of poetry, is a practice that began in China in the eleventh century, the Northern Sung period. Cahill vividly surveys its first great flowering among artists working in the Southern Sung capital of Hangchou, probably the largest and certainly the richest city on earth in this era. He shows us the revival of poetic painting by late Ming artists working in the prosperous city of Suchou. And we learn how artists in Edo-period Japan, notably the eighteenth-century Nanga masters and the painter and haiku poet Yosa Buson, transformed the style into a uniquely Japanese vehicle of expression. In all cases, Cahill shows, poetic painting flourished in crowded urban environments; it accompanied an outpouring of poetry celebrating the pastoral, escape from the city, immersion in nature. An ideal of the return to a life close to nature--the "lyric journey"--underlies many of the finest, most moving paintings of China and Japan, and offers a key for understanding them.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
[Cahill] disturbs common assumptions and establishes unexpected connections in painting history, directs attention to unjustly neglected works and raises numerous issues well worth debating.
--Tony Howes (China Review )
This generously illustrated book has all the appurtenances required by scholars, taking its place in the thousand year, Oriental tradition of study and debate about the meaning, style and social role of painting. Yet its agreeable prose, based on the author's lectures, reflects his interest in reaching the general reader. That's fortunate, since Cahill's comparison of Japanese and Chinese painting holds plenty of lessons for Westerners unfamiliar with Asian arts. (Times Picayune )
--Tony Howes (China Review )
This generously illustrated book has all the appurtenances required by scholars, taking its place in the thousand year, Oriental tradition of study and debate about the meaning, style and social role of painting. Yet its agreeable prose, based on the author's lectures, reflects his interest in reaching the general reader. That's fortunate, since Cahill's comparison of Japanese and Chinese painting holds plenty of lessons for Westerners unfamiliar with Asian arts. (Times Picayune )
About the Author
James Cahill is Professor of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing Book,
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This review is from: The Lyric Journey: Poetic Painting in China and Japan (Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures) (Paperback)
Cahill's enthusiasm for Chinese painting directly excites me.
I especially enjoyed his argument that establishes a difference between realistic painting and poetic painting. Another lecture introduces the charming Japanese artist, Yosa Buson.
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