The Met museum in Manhattan has turned a large part of its Asian art floors over to a temporary exhibition of all the finest Chinese paintings from its vaults: “Masterpieces of Chinese Painting From the Metropolitan Collection” will be on until October 11.
The paintings on display span roughly a thousand years, from the end of the first millennium a.d. to the end of the second. Nonetheless, the paintings’ contents are remarkably homogenous: Nearly all are landscapes—the Chinese countryside, verdant, multi-peaked mountains adorned with streams and waterfalls. As the exhibit placards point out, the Chinese word for landscape painting literally means “mountain and water.”
It’s the consistency of the paintings’ subjects that makes the show so interesting. Around 1000 a.d., Chinese and European painting techniques were not radically different—compare the Bayuex Tapestry to a contemporary Chinese court painting, and you see similar figurative drawing in a shallow plain. Over the thousand years that followed, European painting went through a dozen radical changes of style, through the discovery of perspective, the Renaissance, Mannerism, the Baroque and Romantic periods, Impressionism, Expressionism, and so on. European art of the 19th century was as dissimilar to it 9th century counterpart as modern football is to the Roman game harpastum (from which it appears to have evolved).
Conversely, over that same period, Chinese painting stayed constant: it is chess to European painting’s football. The rules stayed the same while the technique was refined over and over again to a point of tremendous subtlety. Nonetheless, the style of a Qing Dynasty landscape from the 18th century can be directly compared to Song Dynasty landscape from 10th, in more or less the same way Garry Kasparov could have played chess with Louis XIV.
Monet painted Rouen Cathedral over and over again, showing the subtle changes in light from hour to hour and season to season. The Met’s Chinese painting show has the same idea, on a grander scale.
