As far as the history of Chinese painting and calligraphy is concerned, the landscape paintings of the five generations of painters Dong Yuan and Ju Ran are like "mysteries".
Juran "Xishan Lan Ruotu"
Dong Yuan's "Summer Mountain Picture Scroll" (partial)
Dong Yuan's "Xiaoxiang Picture Scroll"
Although before Dong Yuan and Ju Ran, there were also some difficulties in the history of painting, for example, the well-known Gu Kaizhi, Li Sixun, Wu Daozi, and Wang Wei, their heirloom paintings were very few, and it was almost impossible to explore them in detail. However, having said that, for those very unlikely events, the direct elimination of the game seems to have little impact on the whole. The historical coordinates of Dong Yuan and Juran belong to the darkness before dawn, just in the "fog" before the boundary line.
What clears the fog is inseparable from the recent "sunning" of Dong Yuan's landscape masterpieces in various museums. For example, the "Xiaoxiang Picture Scroll" in the "Digital Forbidden City" of the Palace Museum, the "Xiashan Picture Scroll" and the "Xiajing Mountain Pass To Be Crossed" in the Cloud Exhibition of the Shanghai Museum and the Liaoning Provincial Museum, and Dong Yuan's "Creek Bank Map" in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Through them, the "enigmatic" shanshui master may be able to get out of the mystery and let the world have a glimpse of the true face.
The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms were a period of chaos in Chinese history. However, the Southern Tang Dynasty, which is in a corner of the Southern Jiangsu River, gathered a group of outstanding Chinese paintings. According to the literature, Dong Yuan served in the court of the Southern Tang Dynasty for five generations, and when the Southern Tang Dynasty was the lord, he participated in the court painting, but his status was not prominent. Unexpectedly, his status behind him became higher and higher, and after the Yuan Dynasty, he became the spiritual leader of the painting world, and any landscape painter had to declare "Learning Dong Yuan", and there were those who were attached to it, and there were also innovators.
People who are familiar with art history, when they look at such a list, immediately understand that the current art history has identified "Xiajing Shan pass to be crossed", "Xiaoxiang Tu scroll", and "Xiashan Tu scroll" as Dong Yuan's dominant style, which is not accurate. The reliable information in these three volumes of paintings is the inscription of Ke Jiusi and Yu Ji, which is what happened in the Yuan Dynasty. At that time, the more important connoisseurs Zhao Ziang and Tang Yan had completely different descriptions of Dong Yuan.
After Zhao Mengfu saw several authentic works of Dong Yuan in Yuan Dadu, he was excited, and in the Shu Xin Zha, he described in detail the characteristics of Dong Yuan's large-scale green paintings: "Recently, I have seen the double painting of Dong Yuan coloring big green and big green, and the true god is also a god. If it is imitated by people, it is an unrestrained release of Li Sixun also. The upper mountain and the lower boundary are all finely depicted with wave patterns, and the middle is a small river boat. Ho Ke Dang also. ”
This passage has also been quoted in the past, but it has not been seriously analyzed. It contains two important pieces of information, first, Dong Yuan's painting "is an unrestrained and unrestrained Li Sixunye", that is, from the perspective of style, Dong Yuan is not a restrained painting method, which is very important. Second, "the upper mountain, the lower boundary", that is to say, the picture is full of dengdeng, this style is completely different from most Song and Yuan landscape paintings, so Zhao Mengfu is particularly concerned about this link. In Dong Yuan's existing style, isn't this pattern shown in "Hanlin Chongting Tu"?
When editing the "Complete Works of Song Paintings", the editorial team visited the Kurokawa Institute of Ancient Culture three times in order to shoot this "Hanlin Chongting Map", and was able to complete it. However, from the details of the picture, Chinese and foreign experts still feel that this is a Song dynasty copy, not Dong Yuan's real pen.
There are several existing paintings of the Dongyuan model, which is the truth, which is obviously in the "fog". In order not to fall into a simple argument, the author suddenly thought that in history, Dong Yuan and JuRan said that there were natural commonalities in them. If you can analyze Juran's paintings again, you may be able to find more clues.
If you look at the theory of life, in the early years of the Nanjing Kaiyuan Temple, and then the lord Li Yu to Kaifeng Jukaibao Temple's Juran, the "fog" is even deeper. However, there are three axes of "Xishan Lanruotu", "Layered Rocks and Trees", and "Xiaoyi Earn Lanting", which are recorded in the song dynasty landscape paintings under the name of Juran, but they provide a rare decoding key for posterity.
In particular, the style and painting method of the last two landscapes are relatively close, and the clouds in the paintings are reciprocating, and the ink method changes in subtlety, which is very consistent with the concept of precision in Song painting. "Stream Hill Lan Ruotu" is a little different, because this painting is in the Cleveland Art Museum, and since the spring of 2002, I have visited it many times. At that time, in the early stages of preparing for the compilation of the Complete Works of Song Painting, the museum helped us to re-shoot high-quality images, which, when published, were very clear. The initial feeling was confusion, not knowing how so many unfamiliar points could appear in the painting.
However, in "Xishan Lanruotu", there are so many unfamiliar points, for example, the painting method of trees is very relaxed, and the brush is loose, according to the northern painting method, this is all unqualified, and now it seems that it will also say "no pen power"; for example, the outline of the mountain top is depicted at will, and there is a little repetition, and future generations dare not imagine that the famous giant will be so casual. On "Xishan Lanruotu", there are also some obvious eye-catching links, for example, the light ink method of the main peak has been dragged to the middle scene, leaving no space transition; for example, between the close scene and the middle scene, the mountain stone and the trees are completely close together, there is no buffer, from the photo, the space is very difficult.
These characteristics are completely different from the serious and compact painting methods displayed in several famous works of the Northern Song Dynasty, such as Guan Tong's "Guan Shan Travel", Fan Kuan's "Xishan Travel Map", and Guo Xi's "Early Spring Map". This makes people feel very unaccustomed and full of doubts, if you are familiar with northern landscape painting, then you must be unfamiliar with "Xishan Lanruotu".
Without the "Shangshu Provincial Seal" in the upper right corner of the picture, many people may not recognize that this is a painting before the middle of the Southern Song Dynasty, because it looks too relaxed, like a Yuan Dynasty painting. However, this seal is serious, coupled with the good texture of the painting silk, so that everyone is a little afraid to comment easily, and the discussion of this painting in the "Eight Generations of Relics" in 1980 is already the most radical discussion.
However, the two characteristics of Dong Yuan's painting described by Zhao Mengfu discussed above are all in line with the features in "Xishan Lanruotu" that are outside the mainstream landscape paintings of the Northern Song Dynasty.
There is a view in the academic circles that Chinese literati painting began with Wang Wei and reached the time of Dong Yuan, which was about two hundred years old. In the field of landscape painting, in addition to constructing the imposing southern landscape, the latter also uses delicate brushstrokes to make the picture complex and not chaotic, hidden and elegant. If you take a closer look at the pen used in "Xishan Lanruotu", especially the pen of mountain stones, trees and buildings, it can be called "relaxed" and "unrestrained". The scenery in the painting is on the top of the sky, down to the lowest part of the field, and many of the common blank spaces in song paintings in the middle are not all there, and they are painted everywhere, and even the pool is swept with light ink.
In the past, the incomprehensible information in Dong Yuan's paintings described by Zhao Mengfu was undertaken one by one for "Xishan LanRuotu", which is very surprising information. This unexpected undertaking shows that "Xishan Lanruotu" is a credible work of Dong Yuan and Juran School, and at the same time indicates that if Dong Yuan's authentic handwriting exists, it must be this relaxed and free painting method, rather than a tense painting method similar to that of the north.
This explains why Guo Ruoxuan's "Picture Seeing and Hearing Zhi" does not have a high evaluation of Dong Yuan: because Guo Ruoxuan is good at observing northern painters and speaks of the phrase "three landscapes", but he lacks appreciation for southern landscape paintings.
If we return to Dong Qichang's famous "Southern and Northern Sect" thesis, Dong Yuan and JuRan have developed a relaxed and relaxed style of landscape painting, which is completely different from the seriousness, height and majesty of the northern landscape. "Xishan Lanruotu" is an important original landscape painting of the early Northern Song Dynasty that has been overlooked because the study of painting history is not thorough.
(The author is an art historian and deputy editor of The Complete Works of Song Paintings)
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In the history of art, Dong Yuan has "transformed" five times
Because of the many mysteries in him, when people talk about Dong Yuan, they tend to see him as a concept rather than an independent individual. Looking back at history, we will find that Dong Yuan's image in art history has undergone five changes in more than a thousand years, and the interpretation of each period is different.
In the first stage, about before Mi Fu, Dong Yuan had not yet been discovered to be an extremely good painter. The Northern Song Dynasty art historian Guo Ruoxuan did not give Dong Yuan a good evaluation in the "Picture Seeing and Hearing Chronicle". It was not until Mi Fu that he was highly praised in the "History of Painting", "Tang has no such product, the grid is above Bi Hong", and he opened his eyes.
In the second stage, the late Northern Song Dynasty began to pay attention to Dong Yuan, and the entry about him in the Xuanhe Pictorial Notation was more detailed. However, judging from the contents of the records, he was also a painter with an unclear face, and the dragons and cattle were well painted, and the coloring landscape was the most famous. The ink landscape of "a piece of Jiangnan" that was most valued by later generations was not mentioned.
In the third stage, the first-class experts of the Yuan Dynasty, Zhao Mengfu, Tang Yuan, Huang Gongwang and others, they looked at some of Dong Yuan's original landscape paintings and described them in two styles: one was the "big green and big green" coloring landscape, and the other was the ink landscape. They believe that without Dong Yuan, Chinese landscape painting would be a different scene.
The fourth stage is Dong Qichang's contribution. In the late Ming Dynasty, there was already a lack of recognized authentic works of Dong Yuan, Dong Qichang started from "Xiaoxiang Tu" and "Half a Piece of Jiangnan", and later pulled "Hanlin Chongting Tu" and "Longsu Suburban Mintu" into the scope of Dong Yuan's paintings, reconstructed its historical image, and promoted to the grandmaster status of Nanzong in landscape painting.
In the fifth stage, the Fang family in the field of calligraphy and painting collection in the 20th century confirmed that "Xiajing Shankou To Be Du Tu", "Xiaoxiang Tu Scroll" and "Xia Shan Tu Scroll" were Dong Yuan's reliable styles. In the late 20th century, in the controversy surrounding the rare and famous landscape painting "StreamBank Map", the multi-faceted image of Dong Yuan became a modern academic issue.
(Original title: Decoding the "Enigmatic" Landscape Master)
Source Beijing Daily
Author Liu Jiuzhou
Process Editor Liu Weili