The Yuan Dynasty Page 1

Establishment of The Yuan Dynasty

Establishment of The Yuan Dynasty brings about a return to grassroots in Landscape Painting Hangchou (Hangzhou) fell to the Mongols in 1276; during the closing years of the twelfth century, the many independent Mongol tribes had been assembled into a formidable force.

By the opening years of the thirteenth century, the hordes swarmed out of their native Mongolian plains. A series of conquests forged an empire extending from the southern tip of Korea to the shores of the Caspian.

In 1206 their leader Temu¨jin proclaimed himself Genghis Khan – ‘Emperor of the Seas’. However, the Jurchen Dynasty of Jin, ruling in north China, held out until 1233, when a short-lived Mongolian Chinese confederation broke its power.

Genghis Khan’s grandson Kublai Khan established his northern capital of Peking (now Beijing)in 1260, and the following year he was proclaimed Emperor of China.

The Yuan Dynasty began its rule from the new capital in 1270, though the official chronology did not recognize its imperial title until 1280 after the final collapse of the Southern Song. There was a desire for a return to completeness in landscape painting, for the formats of the hanging and handscroll rather than the fragmental album painting.

There surfaced an attitude of political and social non-cooperation with the invading Mongol government, a strong desire to return to the virtues of the men of Tang and Northern Sung rather than associations with the weaknesses of the retreating men of the Southern Sung who were considered to be living on borrowed time .

‘Home again’, a handscroll painting by Qia´n Xua?n , highlights these desires. In this painting, a scholar-official returns from his disagreeable connections with the state to his rustic home in the country.

This work was painted in a very archaic style reaching back into the Tang dynasty and recapturing the work of Wang Wei in some respects.

Autumn colours on the Qiao and Hua mountains – Zhào Mèngfu

Zhào Mèngfu

Zhao Mengfu? was married to Guan Doasheng , an accomplished poet, painter and calligrapher.

His rejection of the refined, gentle brushwork of his era in favour of the cruder style of the eighth century is considered to have brought about a revolution that created modern Chinese landscape painting.

His landscapes are also considered to be executed in a style that focuses on a literal laying of ground. Rather than organizing them in a foreground, middle ground, and background pattern, he layers middle grounds at various heights to create a sense of depth.

This pattern of organization makes his paintings appear very simple and approachable. It was this characteristic that so many people valued about his style.

Zhao Mengfu? was the maternal grandfather of Wang Meng, whom I will mention later.

Please note: I have lost a page from the original dissertation. Therefore, I have relied on: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhao_Mengfu for this information.

Zhào Yong

Zhao Yong was the second son of Zhao Mengfu?.

This composition of Zhao Yong’s ‘Landscape with Scholar Fisherman’ is typically Yuan. The split in the picture is only a surface one as the space suggests in-depth the great expanse of water. The whole effect is pictorial, not calligraphic. It is primarily achieved by the parallelism between the two main trees as foreground symbols of the distant protruding point and rising mountain range.

Zhao Mengfu? and Zhao Yong’s work is typical of the Yuan conservatives, much of whose contribution was somewhat incidental to the traditionalism of what they conceived as the Northern Sung style.

Gao Kegong & Huang Gongwang

Chinese critics generally agree the greatest landscape painters of the Yuan Dynasty were Gao Kègong, Huang Gongwang , Wáng Méng, Wú Zhèn and Ni Zan.

Painting by Gao¯ Ke'go¯ng

Each worked in a distinctive style and profoundly influenced later landscape painters. Gao Kègong rose to a high official post under Kublai Khan. After 1275, he became President of the Board of Punishments. In the latter part of his life, he spent much of his time in Hangzhou, and some of his paintings seem to be almost literal renderings of that mist-drenched lake district.

His studies in landscape painting are said to have first concentrated upon the very personal style of Mi Fú and his son Mi Youren; later, he turned his attention to Li Chéng, Dong Yuán and Juran.

From these varied elements, the genius of Gao Kègong wove a style capable of expressing a wide range of emotions and impressions. These ranged from the imposing mass of a mountain to the soft, lush vegetation of the lower hills and a countryside threaded by waterways, as seen in ‘Clearing in the Mountains after a Spring Rain’.

The first part of Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains – Huang Gongwang

The horizontal strokes made with the side of the brush, so effectively employed to convey a sense of form and mass in this picture, are derived from Mi Fei and his son. It isn’t easy today to judge in even a general way the importance of Huang Gongwang . His contemporaries and later critics universally praise him.

However, his works are scarce, and few Eastern critics today agree on a body of his painting that can be considered genuine. He was a man of great learning, devoted to the arts of music, poetry and painting.

He is said to have retired from the world and, as a Taoist, lived the life of a recluse, wandering in the hills, constantly engrossed in the ever-changing aspects of nature and sketching scenes that were significant to him.

Mountain Village – Huang Gongwang

‘Mountain Village’, now part of a Private Collection in Japan, is very similar in composition to Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains .

The view of a small hamlet at the foot of a hill alongside a mountain stream is rendered very simply. The decisive, impressionistic drawing that translates nature so uncompromisingly into brush strokes and ink tones brings these works close to what may be called a painter’s paintings.

The observer who has no interest in this brushwork’s brush and ink qualities is apt to be left behind.

Again I am grateful to my friend Rose for bringing this YouTube link featuring Professor James Cahill discussing Huang Gongwang to my attention.

Wang Meng

Wang Meng and Ni Zan were probably two of this period’s most imitated and copied artists. Ni Zan, perhaps more so than Wang Meng, as his style was less complex.

However, both greatly influenced the scholarly painting which followed them. Both of these two painters generally accepted works were executed on paper Zhao Mengfu? had become the most desirable surface for the Yuan artists as it was considered more of a servant to the brush than silk.

The emphasis was now on the brushstroke, the painter’s touch, and the paper provided the solution.

Wang Meng was somewhat younger than Huang Gongwang, and though his birth date is unrecorded, we know he died in prison in 1385, having become involved in a political scrape at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty. Interestingly, on his mothers’ side, he was a grandson of Zhao Mengfu?.

He held office under the Mongols, but most of Wa´ng Me´ng’s energies and interests occupied landscape painting. Huang Gongwang, in some of his paintings, abandoned the use of ts’un (shaping lines) altogether, but Wang Meng piled on the ts’un inner markings and multiplied them to such an extent that the forms writhe and twist.

Fishing in the Green Depths – Wáng Méng

Wang Meng’s visions are curiously powerful, restless, and turbulent. They stand at the opposite pole from the quiet and lyrical repose of the Southern Song concepts. It may well be that Wang Meng, more than any other artist of his time, reflects the political and social turmoil of the fourteenth century.

His tortuous, writhing lines and restless, broken forms emphasise the variety and irregularity of nature as opposed to manufactured order in a way not found in the work of previous Chinese painters.

Wu Zhen

Tomb of Wu Zhen

Wu Zhen was another painter of strikingly original genius whose work did much to shape the styles of succeeding generations of artists. His gifts as a poet and calligrapher fortified the growing tendency to combine the arts in a single composition. He became an ardent Taoist and followed a life of isolation from worldly affairs.

In his landscapes, he followed the traditional style of Ju Ran closely, perhaps as handed down by such intermediaries as Chiang Ts’an.