At 83, Joan Stanley-Baker May Be the Only Art Historian Willing to Say the Emperor Has No Clothes

Her greatest hope is to build a complete “history of authentic Chinese paintings” and an “art history without masters.”

Joan Stanley-Baker (Xu Xiaohu) is 83, with silver hair and a blue robe, and when she talks about herself she switches back and forth between “I” and “Xiaohu.” She is an outlier among art historians everywhere, for one reason: she loves being the child who points out that the emperor has no clothes. The “emperor,” in her case, is usually a research method the field has agreed on — or a conclusion it has agreed on.

Is it worth doing?

The writer A Cheng's verdict: “Ms. Xu has done something very important. Her methodology appeared fairly early on, but right up to today it still has decisive meaning for us. It is a new method, and she is the one who established it. If you're interested, you can keep going down that road. So I'd say Ms. Xu founded a generation. She established one. The methods that came before hers were, to my eye, clearly not as complete.”

Xu's own advisor disliked her method, but the “founding of a generation” went ahead anyway. The book — 《被遗忘的真迹：吴镇书画重鉴》 (The Forgotten Authentic Works: A Reassessment of Wu Zhen's Painting and Calligraphy) — brought controversy and, in far smaller measure, recognition. It helped her earn a doctorate from Oxford's Oriental Institute, and it was backed by Roger Goepper, Europe's leading authority on Asian art history; Ernst van der Wetering, director of the Rembrandt Research Project in the Netherlands; and Paul Taylor, a researcher at the University of London.

Chen Danqing's verdict: “Xu Xiaohu studies the authenticity of old paintings case by case, down to a single point of doubt. The work is dry and endless, full of surprises and utterly thankless — the excitement is always followed by the suffering. But she has kept at it for fifty years.”

That persistence cost her, of course. She went to Bennington College in Vermont, then to Princeton to study Chinese art history under Wen Fong, where she got her first training as an art historian. She and Fong disagreed, and she was expelled.

After Princeton she went to Japan and stayed four years. In 1971 she returned to the United States and conducted a marathon interview with Wang Jiqian (C. C. Wang), the U.S.-based collector, connoisseur and painter of Chinese painting and calligraphy. In 1980 she came to Taiwan, where she studied the classical painting and calligraphy in the National Palace Museum in Taipei while teaching at National Taiwan University. There she began to work out her own way of authenticating Chinese paintings.

From then on, three strands of experience fused into one method: the “structural analysis” she was trained in at Princeton; the connoisseurship she absorbed in Japan, which cares about aesthetics rather than names and insists on a rigorous physical examination of the old painting itself; and what she learned from interviewing Wang Jiqian. That method produced a series of conclusions. 《自叙帖》 (Autobiography), a landmark in the history of calligraphy, is not the work of the Tang monk Huaisu but of a Ming-dynasty calligrapher. Of the more than 50 surviving works at the National Palace Museum in Taipei attributed to Wu Zhen, one of the Four Masters of the Yuan, only three and a half are genuinely his.

That is where 《被遗忘的真迹》 (The Forgotten Authentic Works) came from. Her position is heresy: “The job of art history is to sort out how works of art stand in time. But much of the art history we write today is biography for great masters. We may have gotten our own job wrong. A work doesn't need to be filed under some master's name. I take each one simply as an object, a work in itself, and study how it evolved and how it relates to the ones before and after it. To find the truth, what I want is to look at that painting correctly.”

The book also let her feel she had finally answered to her father and grandfather. Her grandfather, Xu Shuzheng, was a general of the Anhui clique of Beiyang warlords, who won fame for recovering Outer Mongolia in 1919. Her father, Xu Daolin, was a jurist trained in Germany and a pioneer of Republican constitutional law; he served as a counselor on the National Government's Supreme National Defense Council and as head of the Executive Yuan's political affairs department. Her mother, Barbara (Chinese name Xu Bijun), was a German woman her father met while studying abroad.

This past October, Xu's new Chinese book, 《南画的形成：中国文人画东传日本初期研究》 (The Formation of Nanga: An Initial Study of the Early Transmission of Chinese Literati Painting to Japan), came out. It surveys the Chinese paintings that reached Japan before 1799, and traces how the Japanese Nanga school took shape out of the way literati painting developed in China and was received and transformed in Japan.

And her greatest hope is to build a complete “history of authentic Chinese paintings” and an “art history without masters.”

What follows is a selection of her own words, grouped by theme. The wording may differ a little from what she said; we note that here.

On Authority and Truth

1. As a child I already thought adults were stupid. What they said always trailed along behind some untrue set of values — your feet ought to be bound a little smaller, or, you scored 45 on the test, what will people think? What kind of thinking is that? And so what if the grown-ups insist on thinking that way? This life is ours. We are the ones who have to live it.

2. What struck me most deeply is that the Japanese have no habit of copying the ancients, and no notion that a craftsman is far beneath a master. But sometimes, facing outward — on the international stage, at their art festivals — the authorities want to fake it, to show that Japanese art is modern. And by modern they mean Western in style. It's a very strange idea.

3. Traditional connoisseurship keeps insisting that the emperor is wearing clothes. The first thing it points to is the signature: if anything is wrong, the signature is wrong and the painting is real. Of course every painting was really painted by somebody — but who? The signature may be fake, and yet everyone still starts from the signature. All these grown-ups, that is how every one of them talks.

(So) you have to see that each era has its own structural approach. Take the relation between an egg and an ear of corn: it will be painted differently from one era to the next. Is the egg unusually large and the corn unusually small, or the reverse? Is the painter trying to show three-dimensional space inside a two-dimensional surface, or to show two-dimensional space, or is it only the brush and ink themselves? Different eras do it differently.

I wanted to examine paintings the way people examine ceramics. Chinese connoisseurs are very good with ceramics — they touch a piece and they know. With paintings we don't do that. We look at the box it came in, and the box says Su Dongpo. So it becomes Mr. Su's great treasure. We've been fooled — fooled from the very start.

1. The two most famous artists in Japan today are not artists at all. One is Takashi Murakami, the other Yayoi Kusama. Both of them make an enormous amount of money. One of them (meaning Kusama) is simply her own body. Every morning she has this compulsive nervous motion; she has to make these things, and every dot she puts down is alive. But it carries no meaning, no metaphysical expression of any kind. She is just painting the hole. It is like — I — am — eating — a — meal (drawing the words out), and I'll eat it right in front of you. That is not art.

The pictures the other one prints look like curtains.

1. (If young people want to understand art history) first, don't read books. You should read them, just not first. Archaeologists do the same thing — they read the books, then go dig, and when they dig up a fork they say, this belonged to so-and-so, this is such-and-such. That's terrible. Look at the object first. Look at it closely, with your own heart and your own eyes, and a lot of questions will come. Why is it red? What does that mean? Where did it come from? And so on.

Once you have communicated thoroughly with the work yourself, then go read the books. And you find that the books say something else entirely. What's in the book is what a teacher said, or what the ancients said. What matters most is what people living at the same time as the work said. How did people of the Song describe Wen Tong? Then I go to the Palace Museum and look, and this Wen Tong bamboo is so stiff, so mechanical, so repetitive, so clumsy, and the brushwork so dainty — nothing like what they described. Then you know the Wen Tong those people saw and the Wen Tong in front of me now are not the same thing. This painting — the name on it is wrong.

On Her Father and Family

1. As a child in Gele Mountain, Chongqing, I would sit on a little stool and listen to my grandmother tell Romance of the Three Kingdoms, tell me about Yue Fei, tell Journey to the West — she could tell them all, and tell the story of my grandfather going to Mongolia just as vividly. I do feel rather ashamed, because they were all traditional scholars of that kind: the Twenty-Five Histories, Tang poetry, Song ci — they had it all by heart by about age eight, went over it again at thirteen, and by their twenties never forgot it for the rest of their lives. I never even looked at any of it, so I feel very ashamed.

2. My father's influence was enormous, of course. All my life my father was away from home. It was for the country — everything was Generalissimo Chiang this, Generalissimo Chiang that. He was Generalissimo Chiang's secretary, so wherever Chiang went, he went. Never home.

3. (When I left China for the United States) we were at the point of “Mencius Meets King Hui of Liang” in school — ninth grade. May 27, 1949. That was the second time I stood at the bow of a ship watching my father on the shore and felt I would never see him again as long as I lived. The first time was during the bombing of Nanjing, when my mother held me and we watched my father standing in a huge crowd of people; I cried and cried and cried, certain I would never see him again. I didn't see him for a whole year, and to a three-year-old a year is a lifetime. When I left at fifteen, that lifetime felt even longer. By the time he came to the United States, I'd already had my first child.

4. (Around 1949) I asked him, “You could help — why won't you help? You have so much political experience. Those people who just came out of the countryside, what do they know?” My father said, “That is exactly why I couldn't work over there. First, they asked me three times to take part in founding the Communist state. But I couldn't, because I had sworn an oath — I am a member of the Nationalist Party. I said, but this Generalissimo Chiang of yours is no good. He said, you don't understand, I follow Confucius, not Mencius. And he explained the difference between the two. He said, Mencius says that once a ruler is no good you should stop serving him. But the Confucian school says: Chiang is no good, so I remonstrate with him, again and again. If he goes down, I go down with him. I will never leave my lord. So I stay loyal to my party.”

Art Insights We Don't Quite Grasp But Find Impressive — You Might Find Them Useful

1. On the painting spirit of the Tang and Five Dynasties, Northern Song, Southern Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing

Put simply, the Tang has the cosmology of a great empire. In every painting — even something out of a tomb, with a dead person lying there — you still get distant mountains, a distant sunset or sunrise. The whole universe runs right out to the edge of the frame. Its view isn't this bed and a few flowers beside the bed; it is the (whole) vast universe.

Then from the Five Dynasties and Northern Song we have only about five paintings. There is one from the Five Dynasties, a bamboo and rock. Through the painting itself you can feel the value of the whole universe, and feel that the spirit within it, the presence of the divine, is bigger than man. He expresses it through the painting itself — a divine presence far greater than man. Wonderful! Whether he paints bamboo or a landscape, the impact is tremendous.

From that era straight down to the present it is all downhill: less and less divine, more and more human. And then the human isn't enough either — now there's the human being's furniture, what's inside it, his little trinkets, his social dealings. Everything gets in, all the small stuff, like gossip, like rumor, just watching what people are up to.

Then we reach the 20th century, and it is all design, or irony. Our dissatisfaction with this, our dissatisfaction with that. Very, very rarely does it praise the beauty of the universe or the presence of the divine. How lovable the value of our life is, how we ought to love this life and stay in close touch with the divine — that is gone. So it has become material through and through.

2. On The Formation of Nanga

I originally wrote it for James Cahill and Shūjirō Shimada, to fill out the chapter on Japanese Nanga that Cahill introduced to us. He was the one who brought Nanga to America. He had studied Chinese art history in Japan for years, and while there he found this kind of painting, thought it was fascinating, collected Nanga works and put on an exhibition to introduce it. Reading his account, I grew curious about where these things actually came from.

At that time — the Tokugawa period, the early Qing — the two countries had no official contact. So how did an influence that large get in? And why did Japanese painters end up painting something not at all like Chinese Southern School painting? Even where it looks similar on the surface, there is nothing of the same meaning underneath. So this book is about a visual change produced by a misunderstanding at the level of values.

They claimed not only to be painting a certain subject but to be using a particular Chinese brush method — yet Japan had no concept of brush method at all, let alone the habit of Chinese brushwork. So they suddenly took up a literati-painting tradition that was already second- and third-hand in China itself, centuries old and revivalist… and they had no way to sit down and talk it over with Chinese people.

The Northern Song literati said: we don't paint the physical thing, we paint the spirit of the thing — we bring out the spirit of the landscape. The people of the Yuan misunderstood that. They misunderstood the core of the scholar-official tradition and said instead: we paint to bring out my spirit. Their universe shrank, and the whole use of the brush changed. Then the Ming said: we paint in the brush-idea of the Yuan masters — a total, fundamental misunderstanding — and they started copying, laboring over second-hand art, until the whole of art had its feet bound, its head bound, its heart bound. And creation was gone.

The literati painting movement was, at bottom, an unhealthy idea and an unhealthy practice. No government required it of anyone, nobody told them it was good — they said it was good themselves, and then jumped straight into the trap. Without noticing, people drift away from the real, away from the true, for the sake of — not curiosity, how do I put it? They don't go out and look into something with their own mind to see how it really stands. They wear clothes other people have worn and say words other people have said, said a third time, a fourth time, second-hand, third-hand and misheard along the way, and the rumor grows falser and falser, less and less true.

But it also grows more crowded. Thousands, tens of thousands of people all say: ah, what we revere is the brush-idea of so-and-so. It reaches the point of a complete misreading of reality, everyone trailing along behind a pointless set of values. This book is about how that misunderstanding spread, and what it did.

Artistically, though, in Japan — which never went through the process of turning the Four Masters of the Yuan into idols — nobody could possibly care in earnest. You paint a landscape with a bit of hemp-fiber texture-stroke, put the wrong name on it, call it the brush-idea of Huang Zijiu, or Ni Yunlin, or even Dong Yuan or Li Cheng: a brand-new work with a famous name, and brushwork with no connection to the old Chinese paintings it claims to come from.

3. On the Japanese and the Chinese tradition

As for Nanga, the great monks who brought it from China were remarkable. At the time the Japanese were under government orders to study Chinese culture and take up the idea of “loyalty” — the character zhong. They wanted to use that character to make the Japanese love their country the way the Chinese did, and above all to be loyal to their Shogun. So the Shogun set up schools of Chinese learning everywhere.

Many artists went to Uji, where a great Chinese-style temple had just been built. Manpukuji, of the Ōbaku sect, is a branch of Wanfu Temple, the Ōbaku headquarters in Fuzhou. The monks there were men of the late Ming, of the Wanli era. When they wrote calligraphy or painted bamboo, the brush came out thick, heavy, clumsy, crowded, dense.

Japanese artists dutifully copied it — heavy, thick, crowded. It made them unimaginably uncomfortable. Copying the Chinese models, they got very close likenesses; painting their own things, they did something else. Japanese brushwork is lighter. Take the katabokashi technique that Ike no Taiga invented: the brush is loaded half with ink and half with water, and the result is very clear. He disliked overlapping strokes, disliked muddiness. Japanese taste wants purity, so the Chinese influence on them was in fact very slight.

Because they never believed you had to paint in Huang Zijiu's brush-idea to become a noble painter. That is a Chinese idea. They thought: we're supposed to paint Huang Zijiu's brush-idea? Let's try it — two or three strokes, simplify it, and suddenly it turns light and good to look at. And they said whatever they liked: I'm studying Ni Yunlin, I'm studying Li Cheng, when they had never seen an original. It was for fun, a new and exotic experience, with none of the social value the thing carried at home. But in Taiga's hands it opened into a fresh, living flower of its own.

They copy, but they take what they've copied and turn it wholly into their own life, without giving up the life inside them. Look at Japan today: whatever America has, they have. They wear Western suits, they work nine to five in offices. That is the thing they do for the outside world — Western behavior.

4. Art has to be connected to the divine

The purpose of art is to hold a conversation with the divine. The highest presence of the divine that our own soul can express comes out through art. Even if I have been dead three hundred years, five hundred years, you see it and you feel it. Look at Fan Kuan's Travelers Among Mountains and Streams: you look and you are moved beyond words, as if you were seeing the Buddha, seeing the divine. It is in fact a mountain. Why, looking at it, do you feel it is divine? Because he painted that feeling of the divine, expressed through the mountain itself. So a metaphysical transmission of the divine, made then, crosses time and space and reaches us. People today have nothing. Nothing at all. This isn't art. I don't consider it art. It's business.

Cover image via Wikipedia