ART REVIEW; Calligraphy in Harmony With Poetry and Painting
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: September 22, 2000
In China, painting, poetry and calligraphy were the dream team of art: the ''three perfections,'' they were called. Any truly evolved person was adept at each. And discussion about any of them was framed in the same terms: rhythm, touch, tone, spiritual energy.
An eloquent exhibition titled ''The Chinese Painter as Poet'' at the China Institute Gallery examines this three-way partnership through some four dozen paintings, several of them of the very first rank, dating from the Song dynasty (960-1279) through the 20th century.
Some of the pieces are based on poetic themes, but don't include words. Others have verses of popular poems, like Tao Qian's ''Peach Blossom Spring,'' that gentle requiem for a lost Arcadia, written on their surface. In still others, and there are many of these, the artist has inscribed his own poem directly onto the painting as the final touch in a virtuoso multimedia performance.
Even integrated in a single work, though, the three media had hierarchical implications, with calligraphy often on top. Writing, after all, gave poetry its visibility and permanence. And in Confucian thinking, which valued words above everything, any ink-and-brush painting worth its salt was based on calligraphy. The influential control-freak theoretician Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322) insisted on this.
Both forms used the same tools and shared a ''palette'' of tonal nuance. Because calligraphy had distant roots in pictographs distilled from natural forms, both writing and painting were thought to be hardwired to nature itself: its energy flowed from the body, through the brush and into the ink. The resulting strokes and lines were like a polygraph readout of the soul, revealing its moral strengths and exposing its disharmonies.
Poetry, which was to many the art of arts, was comparable as a moral instrument; natural vitality coursed through it like sap through a tree. When it merged with writing and painting, an aesthetic force field was set up. And this is the magnetic terrain explored in the China Institute show, which has been organized by Jonathan Chaves, professor of East Asian language and literature at George Washington University.
The story begins in the Song period on a somewhat inorganic note, with a smallish hand scroll by the artist Mi Youren, on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The painting is of mountains covered with mist as soft and damp as breath on a glass. A short poem by the artist appears in the upper left corner.
It reads: ''Marvelous mountains, innumerable, reach to heaven's end; misty, clearing, dark or light, beautiful day or evening. As a record that you, Sir, have visited this place, I leave this playful brushwork of mine here inside your house.'' (The translations of this text, and of the others on paintings in the show, are in labels, an excellent idea.)
At this point, all the ingredients of what Mr. Chaves calls the integral poem-painting are in place, if not yet quite glued together: a painted image, a chunk of characterful calligraphy and a poem, which in this case sets up a conventional traveling-through-landscape metaphor and a polite first-person dedication.
More than a century later, things are different. In a fantastic little piece by the great Yuan artist Ni Zan, titled ''Wind Among the Trees on the Streambank,'' words and image unite in an achingly emotional statement. Four almost bare, shivery trees stand isolated near open water. Four columns of verse, written in a crisp, austere hand, descend on the right, echoing the trees's flexed lines. They speak of age, of winter and of Ni's wife, who has died. The result is a personal fusing of calligraphy, painting and poetry that Zhao dubbed ''idea-writing'' or ''mind-writing'' and considered ideal.
The poem-painting is by no means always fraught with heavy psychic weather. In a delightful album page titled ''Poet on a Mountaintop,'' by Shen Zhou from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), a tiny figure stands on the edge of a cliff staring wonderingly out at a poem as big as a billboard suspended in space. And in a monumental hanging scroll by Wen Zhengming from later in the same period, a scholar-hermit sits in a dense pine grove, as snug as a squirrel in its burrow, playing his zither, blissed out on nature. A poem by Wen about the pleasures of tuning in and dropping out, floats high above. Written in the first person, it implies that the whole image is a self-portrait.
The show ends with a 1981 painting by the contemporary artist Ho Huai-shou: an overhead shot of rooftops in a rainstorm, with a Verlainesque poem by Dai Wangshu (1905-1950) trickling like a dark rivulet down the side. Here, as throughout the show, the painted image sometimes dominates the calligraphic word, though precisely the opposite balance is evident in ''The Embodied Image: Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection'' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where writing is everything and representational painting is all but absent.
The two exhibitions, very different in size, have many aesthetic and personal links. And as a pair they give an instructive look at how the interactive mechanism of word-and-image in Chinese artworks.
To begin with, compare a single scroll from each show: one by Mi Youren at the China Institute with another by his famous father, Mi Fu, at the Met. The son uses a poem like a label to establish his landscape as the site of a journey. (There is speculation that the ''sir'' for whom the piece was created was his father.) By contrast, Mi pere's fabulous calligraphic scroll, ''Poem Written in a Boat on the Wu River,'' actually is a journey. Visually abstract but dramatized through words and brushed lines, it unfolds, incident by incident, in real time and space, right there in front of you, across the scroll itself.
Other polymath artists -- Wen Zhengming, Zhang Ruitu, Shitao -- show up in both exhibitions, wearing different hats. And viewers shy of, or put off by, the complexities of Chinese art, might do well to get their feet wet at the China Institute, with its recognizable images and sorted-out media, not to mention its heart-stopping poems, then move on to the more rarefied Met gathering, where the word takes on a multidimensional life of its own.
However approached, these shows together offer the best opportunity this city has seen in years to plunge straight into the center of a major, underknown art form, one in which image and language, spirit and intellect, forge an indissoluble, perception-altering partnership.
''The Chinese Painter as Poet'' remains at China Institute Gallery, 125 East 65th Street, Manhattan, (212) 744-8181, through Dec. 10.
Photo: Shen Zhou's ''Poet on a Mountaintop,'' a Ming dynasty album page. (Nelson-Atkins Musem of Art)