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The Lyric Journey: Poetic Painting in China and Japan. By JAMES CAHILL. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Only a few scholars have careers long enough or productive enough to construct, and then deconstruct, intellectual and historical paradigms through which fields of study are understood. James Cahill is such a scholar. His numerous books and exhibition catalogues, and his countless articles and lectures have profoundly shaped the study of East Asian painting in the West, especially the study of painting by scholar-amateurs or literati. In his work of the 1960s and 1970s, Cahill mapped out the history of painting by these artists, whose ideals and tastes dominated Chinese painting from the Sung dynasty onward.
As Cahill himself has noted, his earlier writings helped to perpetuate idealized visions of lofty, poetically inspired literati who scorn profit and paint only as a means of self-expression. In his recent work, however, Cahill challenges many long-held beliefs about literati painting. In The Lyric Journey: Poetic Painting in China and Japan, based on the Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1993, he turns to the much-studied topic of the relationship between poetry and painting. Although the theoretical tenets of this relationship were articulated in the writings of scholars such as Su Shih, and although later literati artists frequently, and sometimes compulsively, inscribed poems on their paintings, Cahill's book presents the surprising and highly original view that the greatest works of poetic painting were produced by professional...