Date: 23-05-2010
Owning Institution: British Museum
Publication: Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2010              
Subject:   18th Century  19th Century  20th Century  Now      

The British Museum’s main exhibition of the moment, “Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings”, triumphantly reveals the vital role played by sketches and studies in the development of new ways of seeing and thinking across fifteenth-century Italy. Many of the innovations that it charts, such as the discovery of mathematically calculated perspective, or the meticulous scientific studies of Leonardo da Vinci, were only enabled by developments in technology that made paper cheaply available for the first time. Without mass-manufactured paper, certain types of thought and experiment were simply impossible, and the same holds true for the spread of literacy and the rise of the readily available book: the new papermaking technology of the Renaissance also acted as a catalyst for the invention of printing, developed by Gutenberg in the middle years of the fifteenth century.

A rather smaller and somewhat less heralded exhibition at the British Museum, which opened recently in its Prints and Drawings Department, quietly sets such cultural achievements of western Europe in a global context. “The Printed Image in China”, a exhibition drawn from the entire range of the museum’s collection of Chinese prints, serves as a reminder that mass-manufactured paper and indeed printmaking had been developed in Asia almost a thousand years earlier. The show opens with what has been called the earliest extant dated woodblock print in the history of the world, the frontispiece to the so-called Diamond Sutra. Commissioned in 868, it is an image of startling intricacy which shows the Buddha, cross-legged and calmly impassive, sharing pearls of wisdom with a gnarled disciple who kneels before him in supplication, as all manner of fierce beasts and divine beings look on. The image is so rich in detail and so refined in technique that it evidently represents an already mature tradition of image-making, although just when the Chinese actually invented reproductive printing remains a matter for speculation. The exhibition contains a number of considerably more rudimentary wood-block printed scrolls, recovered by Marc Aurel Stein from the Thosand Buddha Caves in Dunhuang, Gansu Province, on his second Silk Road expedition in 1907. Some of these, such as the hundreds of identical figures of a seated Medicine Buddha repeated over a scroll of more than five metres in width, were almost certainly created as early as the second half of the seventh century. A period later remembered in European history as the Dark Ages would be forever associated, in China, with the spread of enlightenment.

The rise of Buddhism, which promoted the mass production of sacred texts and images to spread the faith, was a crucial driver in the development of the Chinese print. Depictions of Buddhist deities were created to aid prayer and encouraghe devotion. Some of the most beautiful examples in the present show date from the Tang or early Five Dynasties, such as the sinuous figure Avalokitesvara, who stands draped in flowing robes in the centre of a lotus blossom. The devotee who once owned this image of a statuesque Boddhisattva would have known every last line cut into the wood-printer’s block, from the figure’s minutely detailed toenails to the little branch of willow, symbol of healing, held in its right hand: the caption that runs down the right-hand side of the print includes the instruction, “With pure heart, every morning, recite the Boddhisattva’s name a thousand times.”

From the earliest prints associated with Buddhism, the viewer is transported to the courtly and sophisticated world of Ming dynasty China and beyond. Some of the most stunning images in the exhibition are a set of early eighteenth-century illustrations to the Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual: closely observed, brilliantly realised depictions of lotus flowers with worm-eaten foliage, irises in full bloom, rocks furiously patterned with lichen. Created using a sophisticated and complex system of multiple printing, which gives them their rich palette of colours, they amount themselves to a kind of garden preserved in portfolio form. Such images, a Chinese equivalent to the botanical studies and still life paintings of the West, combine an intoxicating sense of nature’s profusion with a countervailing aesthetic of spareness and rigour. This is particularly evident in studies of grasses, bamboo plants and leaves, where the use of the reserve or blank area of the print is so daring that it pushes the imagery – slight, subtle movements of leaf or shoot, wavering in space – almost to the point of abstraction.

From such sophisticated expressions of elite Chinese culture, the show switches suddenly into the world of the popular print, with a series of wonderfully fierce images of warriors whose function was once to guard ordinary Chinese households against evil spirits. Bring-in-Emoluments Military Door Guard is a blaringly multi-coloured, frowning, prolifically bearded and axe-wielding example from the eighteenth century, but the tradition of such figures would continue well into the modern period: Door Guard Yuchi Gong is a suitably bulging-eyed, green-garbed guardian spirit from the early twentieth century. This dizzying kaleidoscope of an exhibition accelerates as it reaches the modern period, culminating in a single room devoted to the stridently political work created by the artists of the so-called “Modern Woodcut Movement” in the early decades of the twentieth century; the somewhat sinister effusions of Maoist orthodoxy created by China’s army of artistic equivalents to Russia’s Soviet Socialist Realists; and a scattergun smattering of work created during the last twenty years.

“The Printed Image of China” offers a broad overview of the British Museum’s extensive but relatively little-known holdings – which amount,in fact, to one of the largest and most comprehensive of such collections outside Asia. Perhaps inevitably it makes huge leaps through time and space, but overall this is an engaging and bewilderingly rich primer in the fourteen-hundred year history of the Chinese print.