The Dynasties Preserved

By ROBERT HUGHES

One of the scare stories about China that circulated in the '60s, especially during the brief ride of the Red Guards, was that Maoism had flung out the past: 3,000 years of willow-pattern tranquillity overthrown, Confucius and Mencius consigned to the paper shredder, and the arts of the ancestral dynasties--Chou and Han, T'ang and Sung, Ming and Chi'ing--abandoned as relics of decadent feudalism, replaced by the cast-concrete colossus of Mao or the agitprop poster of beaming, eupeptic tractor drivers exceeding their norm in Szechwan province.

This, like so many of our ideas about China, was a myth. In fact, the Chinese seem to have taken Mao's apothegm, "Let the past serve the present," with a literalness that Western archaeologists--hampered as they are by the depredations of the antiquity market--might envy. Since about 1950, China's policy for exhuming and classifying its own past has been very coherent and systematic. Indeed, no Western country has produced a state-funded archaeology program to equal China's. For the Chinese, archaeology has a political significance that it lacks in the West.

Recent Finds. From this official attitude has come what must arguably be the most beautiful exhibition Europe has yet seen in the '70s: "Treasures of Chinese Art," a loan show of some 400 recent finds from the People's Republic, on view at the Petit Palais in Paris through the summer. Later it will travel to London and early next year to Toronto. It is the fruit of almost ten years' negotiation between the Chinese and French governments, begun by ex-Culture Minister Andre Malraux and finished in detail by a group of orientalists headed by Vadime Elisseeff, chief curator of the Musee Cernuschi in Paris. Encyclopedic in scope--the objects on display range from rudimentary quartz and flint scrapers used by Peking Man in 500,000 B.C. to the exquisite porcelains and silver toilet articles of the Yuan dynasty, which ended in A.D. 1368--it is intelligently mounted, with unobtrusive panels of photos, documents and information: an ideal teaching show, in fact. But unlike most didactic exhibitions, it is crammed with masterpieces of breathtaking authority.

The centerpiece is Princess Tu Wan's funeral shroud. Found in 1968 in a Han dynasty tomb in Man-Ch'eng, less than 100 miles from Peking, it has already become an object of legend--the Chinese counterpart (at least in Western eyes) to Tutankhamon's gold mask. This is partly due to its extraordinary substance and workmanship: a complete body-armor of 2,156 slips of green and mutton-fat jade, each no bigger than a matchbook cover, intricately sewn and bound together with gold wire. Its archaeological interest is unique: ancient Chinese texts mentioned jade burial armor as the special privilege of imperial blood, but Tu Wan's shroud--together with its twin, made for her husband, the Prince Liu Cheng--is the first such suit yet unearthed. But that aside, the shroud has an almost hallucinatory air: a green and glittering robot of semiprecious stone, assembled round a dummy. The blunt toes and plated wedge of a nose point at the roof, the eyeless head rests as though in a machine's sleep on its gilt bronze pillow.

Hardly less spectacular than the shroud is a group of bronze horses--some drawing war chariots and supply wagons and one soaring through the air, rear hoof poised on the back of a swallow--that were found in 1969 in a tomb of a general. Prancing, caracoling or stiffly reined in, they constitute a lexicon of equine movement that Western art could hardly rival for another 1400 years. Behind the smooth, abstracted flow of the shapes--the bulge of crupper and belly echoed by the wheel's arc, the jaunty bronze tail answering to the S-bend of chariot shafts--lies a fascinating array of information about the way a squadron of Han cavalry looked and was equipped, from the shape of its war axes to the concave deflector hood behind which the chariot driver sat. The art of ancient China was always specific; when some unknown ceramicist of the T'ang dynasty (circa A.D. 700) made the Mongolian horseman fighting off a predator that was found, along with 877 other such statuettes, in the tomb of the Princess Yung-T'ai in 1962, he produced an image that still reverberates: the hairy brute from beyond the fragile edge of civilization, all rags, stink and sinew, licking his weight in wildcats.

Even for the nonscholar, it is a provocative show. Why, one wonders, does Shang bronze decoration--as in a superb ting, or rectangular bronze cooking pot with legs, made in the eleventh century B.C. and bearing four ritual masks--so resemble certain pre-Columbian and Northwest Pacific Indian styles? The impassive faces on this vessel, broad, empty-eyed and surrounded by heavy, cranklike forms, could almost have come from a Mayan stele. In front of a carving like the wooden unicorn (see cut)--if that is what the creature found in 1959 in a late Han tomb at Wu-Wei really was--one feels afresh the sense of recurrent surprise at the formal parallels that now and then crop up between ancient Eastern and some modern Western art. Harshly cut, as though with an adz, in a vigorous run of interlocking planes, charging forward with its thick tusk lowered aggressively to the horizontal, it might have stepped from an exhibition of sculpture by Lynn Chadwick or Eduardo Paolozzi in the 1950s.

But this rough beast is atypical; everywhere else in the show, line rather than slabby or hacked mass predominates, and the line is of an almost ethereal purity. It never jerks or breaks, but flows gently and continuously forward in its planned contours. This, combined with the grave and precise use of traditional materials, gives ancient Chinese art--almost irrespective of period--its look of inevitability, as if something quite other than caprice or emotion were guiding the maker's hand.

No profile could be stronger or better suited to its heavy substance than the swollen, gold-inlaid oval of the lidded bronze cup from the period of the Warring States; none more ponderous and full than the large gilt Han wine bowl with its sprightly gazelle and mountainous camel; none lighter than the cloudy white Sung wine vase nestling inside its lotus bowl. The persistent note of this triumphant exhibition is pleasure in fitness: the familiar dips and inflections of style across the centuries are shown in objects that, for all their variety of shape, purpose and meaning, are linked by their unswerving appropriateness as form.

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