My addiction to Chinese landscape painting began in 1965 at the V&A, in a travelling exhibition of the Crawford Collection from America. The catalogue entries were supplied by the doyen of Chinese art historians in Britain, Michael Sullivan, who died aged 97 just a month before the opening of this latest exhibition of Chinese painting at the V&A. His particularly well-written and stimulating books on Chinese art, especially Symbols of Eternity, published in 1980, kept my addiction smouldering until at last I felt I had to do something about it and wrote a novel, The Ten Thousand Things. Its central character is a 14th-century Chinese landscape-painter, Wang Meng, whose ‘total absorption in the language of painting’ reminded Sullivan of Cézanne. Wang’s masterpiece ‘Dwelling in the Blue Bien Mountains’ struck me as an overpowering image, not only of the grandeur and seductiveness of nature, but also of the turbulent times he lived through, the decay and collapse of the alien Mongol regime established by Khublai Khan, years of near anarchy and civil war ending in eventual triumph for the native Chinese under the first Ming Emperor.
Not much noticed except by his friends in his lifetime, Wang became famous 200 years after his death as one of the ‘Four Masters of the Yüan’, four great innovators and leading practitioners of the so-called ‘literati painting’.
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