Unforgettable Paintings

THERE ARE SOME PAINTINGS I will never be able to forget, but only one of them is famous, Gauguin's Nevermore. A Hawaiian women lies naked on a couch, quietly listening to the conversation of a man and a woman as they walk past her door.' The rosy sunset glow of springtime in the background seems to spray skyward like mist, giving a feeling of transcendence to the scene, and yet for this robust woman, who looks about thirty years old, everything is over and done. The woman's face is coarse, with narrow slitted eyes, and she cups her cheek in her hand, sending her gaze slanting upward in a slyly flirtatious gesture so reminiscent of many a young Shanghainese woman that it strikes us as being quite familiar. Her body is the golden brown of hardwood. The dark brown of the sofa, though, is rendered in a shade more like ancient bronze, and little white flowers are visible on the sofa cover, semitranslucent like mother-of-pearl. Inlaid on this dark bronze background is the atmosphere outside: colored glass, blue sky, red and blue trees, a pair of lovers, a big clumsy bird from a children's fairy tale perched on a stone railing. Glass, bronze, and wood: these three textures seem to encompass the different worlds that we can touch with our hands, in a way that is as tangible as the woman herself. She must have loved with every fiber of her being and now "Nevermore." Although she sleeps on a civilized sofa, her head nestled on a ruffled pillow embroidered
'Chang seems to be mistaken here. The woman in the painting is Tahitian.
 with lemon-yellow flowers, there is still a primal sadness here. It is nothing like our own society, in which a woman no longer in her prime who wants love but has already lost it will almost certainly be confronted with count-less little indignities and grinding difficulties, to the point where her self-respect is torn and shredded. This woman is not prone to the same sedimented sadness, because she retains a sense of clarity and resignation. On her golden brown face, there's still a trace of an irrelevant smile, as if a mirror had cast a fugitive fragment of the sunlight outside across her face.
A painting called Thanksgiving by a not-so-very-famous American woman artist, on the other hand, belongs absolutely within the purview of modern civilization. It depicts a family busily embroiled in Thanksgiving festivities. The turkey is removed from an electric stove, the table covered with a tablecloth, under which mischievous children play. The rosy-cheeked housewife in a flowery dress is carrying an armful of plates and glasses out to the dining room. The kitchen floor is composed of big gray and green tiles, and across this gray and green expanse many others bustle back and forth in gusts of activity. This is very likely a comfortably middle-class family in a small American city, just back from church and ready to thank the Lord in the manner of their pioneering forefathers for another year of prosperity. They're hungry, and so they busy themselves preparing what will be an exceptionally hearty midafternoon meal. And while this is the very picture of an active and happy family, something is different from before, and, for some unknown reason, things aren't quite so simple as they used to be. Although these people are eating and drinking and talking and laughing, they look as if they're wearing shoes and socks that are wet from walking in the rain: damp, and cold, and sticky. Their movements, enthusiastic and agile as they seem, have an acrid quality, redolent of iron, calling to mind the spine of a streetcar moving swiftly down the tracks on a rainy day: dark as lacquer, water spattered, a steely blue turned pale.
A painting called Tomorrow and Tomorrow, also American, portrays a prostitute who has rented a room on the upper floors of a tall building, from the balcony of which many other skyscrapers are visible. She stands with her back to us, one hand resting against the door, gazing out. Blond hair falls to her shoulders, and her silk bathrobe is the reddish purple color of last year's bloodstains, the color of sin but also its proxy, for here there is only a flat exhaustion. Tomorrow and tomorrow again: silk stockings slip-ping down into a swollen pile around the ankles; the corner of a white iron bed frame, mussed pillows, slept-in sheets; and beyond the balcony the dark yet luminous shapes of the skyscrapers, piled like time itself, weighing more heavily with each passing day.
 There is no more profound painting of a prostitute than this. I also remember a painting on a similar theme by Lin Fengmian.2 It used to be that the only Chinese painter in the western mode whose work I liked was Lin Fengmian. His paintings of Annamese and Burmese women in their sapphire blue tunics have an extremely dexterous formal beauty. But the one painting that left an especially lingering impression on me isn't brightly colored at all. It depicts a young woman in a small Chinese town, clad all in black, walking alongside an earthen city wall, followed by a woman who is clearly her madam. Because the painting is composed primarily of pale washes, there is a feeling of rain in the air despite the fact that it is not raining, and one feels the warmth of their bodies through the damp cold all the more viscerally as a result. The woman isn't especially fashion-able, and her face is unformed, but one has the distinct sensation that she represents a certain sense of possibility for the common man, an expectation not unlike the vague loss and longing Meng Lijun felt for the fiancé she had not yet seen.3 This image by Lin Fengmian paints the prostitute from the perspective of the ordinary male, like the kind of Mandarin Duck and Butterfly fiction that never fails, even in its most vulgar and sentimental moments, to affect a bashful propriety. But there is no malice here. The attitude of the average woman toward the figure of the prostitute is far more complex. Besides feeling contempt and condescension, some envy her, especially upper-class women with too much time on their hands and too little companionship, whose inclination is to picture such a life as a roman-tic idyll. Women such as these would have to be sold into servile at a third-rate brothel before they could truly understand the bittersweet savor of such an existence.
There is a Japanese bijin ga called A Day in the Life of a Courtesan House in Twelve Pictures that portrays the life of a geisha over the course of twenty-four hours.4 The solicitous respect and gravity of the attitude the painter adopts toward his subject is difficult for artists here to understand. To be sure, China has had its share of famous courtesans, women such as Su Xiaoxiao and Dong Xiaowan, who distinguished themselves from the ordinary run of painted faces and went on to great distinction. But in China, it is
'An important figure in modern Chinese painting, Lin Fengmian (1900-1991) studied western painting as a young man in France and went on to serve as the head of the Zhejiang Academy of Art in Hangzhou.
3See n. 2 of the preceding essay.
4Bijin ga is a Japanese genre in painting and prints centered on the depiction of beautiful women (Injin), often drawn from the ranks of the geisha.
 a question of individual talent, while in Japan this phenomenon has already become a system (in Japan, anything can become a system). Geisha are rigorously trained and rule-bound sweethearts for the masses, and even the most trivial of their movements carries the weight of a tradition that brooks not the slightest deviation. Of the twelve pictures, I only recall the one that depicts life after midnight, when the geisha is changing into the wooden clogs that she wears in her own room. With one hand, she holds the front of her skimpy robe to prevent it from slipping off her shoulders and, with the other, grasps a stick of incense, from which a few slender wisps of smoke drift into the air. There is a maid in attendance, kneeling to one side, who is painted to look much smaller than her mistress. The geisha stands in place, seemingly far too tall. Her drooping neck is too slender and too long. Even the little white foot making its way toward the wooden clog is disproportionately small. And yet she knows full well that she is loved, even if she finds herself alone at midnight. And because she is secure in that knowledge, the night is all the more serene, all the more ageless.
The sole explanation I can offer for this idealization of prostitutes is the emphasis the Japanese place on training. Geishas are trained with exceeding care and thoroughness, which means that they come to approximate most closely a certain standard of feminine grace and beauty. This is the only scenario, in any case, that can explain how a geisha comes to stand in for the holy Madonna in Junichiro Tanizaki's novel Kami to Hito to no Aida (Between gods and mortals).5
As for the European Virgin Mary, in the days before the cinema, she was the one and only sweetheart of the masses, and all the great artists through-out the ages tried their hand at painting her portrait. Among these paintings is a work entitled Our Lady of the Immaculate Womb. It seems that the "oomph girl" of old is much the same as a "womb girl" today. We civilized moderns, however, are much more repressed than our forebears. Who now would dare to trade openly on the commercial appeal of an immaculate womb?
The Madonnas of various European countries represent divergent standards of beauty. There is the Dutch version, with her long, wispy blond hair and long, cold, and sculpted countenance, tinged with gold and possessing a jadelike pallor, not unlike Marlene Dietrich. Or the Italian, who resides in the countryside and looks like a fruit vendor, with her blue-black eyebrows, abundant flesh, and abundant charm. The Madonnas of Germany seem to
5Tanizaki Junichiro (1886-1965), also the author of Chijin no ai (Naomi), was aprominent modern Japense novelist.
 have been beaten into submission by their men: their pale, startled blue eyes project precisely the animated yet delicate beauty so beloved by the Germans. Yet what each of these religious artists wants to evoke is the same: an innocent country girl, extremely humble and modest, on whom fate has bestowed a solemn duty and, consequently, a new nobility. She holds her princely son in both arms, offering him up to all the world to see, for he will one day save the world with his own blood. There is no easy way for painters to represent the mighty wisdom of this child, so he is often portrayed as a wrinkled and wizened old creature. Sometimes, he is bundled in swaddling clothes, and she is unwrapping a corner as if opening a gift box containing a very expensive present. Sometimes, she plays with him or gazes gently toward him as he nestles in her arms. But these gestures always seem to take place to the silent accompaniment of countless spectators watching the play from outside the picture frame.
That is perhaps why I prefer Japanese paintings of the Old Maid of the Mountains and Kintaro to Madonnas. They are based on a folktale, but I am still not sure whether the Old Maid is Kintaro's mother or not. Kintaro is a hero of some sort, and he may have been raised by mountain spirits. The Old Maid of the Mountains has wild, black hair, a long, fleshy face, bewitching eyes, and a bleak smile that lends a dreamy, faraway cast to her expression. Her head is lowered, and her hair flies violently to one side, tossed by a wind so fierce that it threatens to knock down all the trees in the forest. Perhaps on account of the oblique angle, her breasts seem to start just below her neck and sag far below, like the proverbial sacks of flour. The crab-faced little Kintaro is curled up above her breast, staring wide-eyed, with a strange look on his face, occasionally reaching out with one hand to squeeze her nipples mischievously. She doesn't seem to mind in the least. She merely smiles bleakly as she attempts to divert him with a toy drum painted with little flowers that she holds in one hand. It's hard to say whether the look in her eyes is seductive, modest, or indulgent, or whether the willful cruelty and imperiousness of the dark little boy at her breast contain the seeds of a greater wisdom. This is a picture that says something fundamental about mothers and sons and, by extension, about men and women and their relations with one another. And since there is only one man and one woman here, with no one to watch the drama unfold, it has an elemental honesty, like a picture from the beginning of time.
Which reminds me once again of Raphael's most famous image of the Virgin, the Sistine Madonna, who cradles the child in her arms as she stands atop a mass of clouds, angels at her feet and a kneeling retainer by her side. The most endearing quality of this Madonna is her expression,
 which is suspended between fright and reserve by the sudden appearance of the celestial effulgence that surrounds her. A village maid, common as dirt, is abruptly elevated to the status of queen and selected precisely on account of her innocence and her lack of distinction. And yet, once she has been apotheosized, she needs to maintain the illusion that she is still ordinary—which is why the role requires playacting. This is not unlike the phenomenon in America whereby big companies choose a typical "average guy" to promote their products. The average guy likes to smoke X brand cigarettes, uses X brand razor blades, wears an X brand raincoat, approves of Roosevelt, and is against women wearing short shorts. Exposed to the eyes of the world, how long can the average guy stay average? This normalcy has a kind of abnormality about it, while the bewitched and bewitching appearance of the Japanese Maid of the Mountain seems that much more human and endearing.
Of the dreamlike paintings of the surrealists, the one that has left the deepest impression on me is an untitled picture of a woman sleeping in the desert. She has the broad, brown face of an Egyptian, slender, even dainty, hands and feet, and she is wearing a simple, sacklike robe, striped red on a white background. She is surrounded on all sides by endless sands; above the sand is the sky, which despite the lateness of the hour remains a pale blue, infused with a sand-swept golden luminescence. A yellow lion approaches to sniff at her body. There is a milky white bottle next to her head. One can only surmise that she has collapsed from exhaustion on her way to find water. A strip of sand, a strip of sky, and, lying inert between them, a body burdened by the weight of nature, in a state of deep, pure slumber, untroubled by dreams, nuzzled by a lion.
Another painting, called The Virgins of Night, has a similarly fresh way of invoking the atmosphere of terror. Four giant female figures, with Jewish features and long hair, stand looking at one another with their protruding eyes. They appear to be discussing something. Each of the round white stones at their feet shines in the moonlight. There is a brick wall in the distance, with a vaulted door through which the tiny black shadow of a man can be seen. He is in a sort of trance, for this is his dream.
When Chinese people paint with oil, they seem to be at an advantage, precisely because they are Chinese and thus able to excuse their disrespect for the basic principles of western painting by incorporating traditional Chinese techniques into their artwork. Without such trickery, they often find themselves hampered by the scholastic traditions of the West. I recently encountered the work of Mr. Hu Jinren, which is an exception to the rule. What surprised me most was his painting of white magnolia blossoms, silvery white in an earthen vase, with long rounded petals, translucent, but fleshy at the same time, stretching in this direction and that, as if they positively needed to indulge themselves in the luxury of blooming. These are lustful flowers, flowers determined to obtain what they desire. Their lust is tempered by joy and can be forgiven for that reason, like youth. Among the magnolias is a spray of winter jasmine that explodes into little gold flowers like a string of firecrackers. Even the little tea table is painted with real feeling: one can almost sense the calm forbearance of this courteous brown rectangle confronted by the clamor of color above its head.
There is another painting, slightly larger but also of white magnolias, slender and luminous, like jade or perhaps crystal, reminiscent of the cool savor of the little jade fish that the imperial concubine Yang Guifei is said to have held in her mouth whenever she suffered from a toothache. The forceful contours of a profusion of jasmine blooms intrude boldly into the scene, with a self-assurance about their own destiny that is at once graceful and domineering.
The background of both these paintings is the bluish purple you see on the backs of matchboxes. Seldom does one see this color used so effectively. In a painting called Dusk in Spring, the dark afternoon sky is the same stifling blue. In the park, surrounded by masses of green trees, two women walk swiftly down a little path, pursued by some unknown terror and heading toward some even more frightening place. Their retreating figures seem swollen, their big backsides move with an emphatic swing, and some-how the vulgarity only compounds the sense of impending terror.
Civilized people, tame and docile as they are, sometimes encounter a chilling sense of desolation, even when they abide by the rules. The Mountains in Autumn places another sort of terror on view: against a pallid blue sky and a low yellow sunset, two tall, emaciated trees are fore-grounded, their soft, slender branches swimming through the air like eels, coiled in a single mass, as two women, their necks drawn in and bodies huddled together against the cold, rush through a dusk that signals the early advent of winter.
In Summer by the Lakeshore, a woman sits by the water, underneath white clouds set in a blue sky. The wind ruffles a milky green tree, the noise of cicadas resounds through the air-the tableau is complete, but it seems there ought to be something else. Maybe a café with a bandstand shadowed underneath the trees, from which drifts a rendition of a popular song only freshly arrived in the provinces, its grainy sound merging with the lapping of the water and the buzz of the cicadas, vulgar in its insistence on being heard.
 There is a pile of charcoal briquettes next to the feet of the protagonist of The Old Serving Woman. She bends over, stretching her hand toward the fire, a white towel folded across her knees that only emphasizes her time-worn and battered hands. She wears a knit cap, and her enormous figure almost completely encircles the tiny little fire. She smiles to herself, queen of all she surveys. This is clearly the moment she enjoys most of all, which makes the picture so much the more miserable.
There is a still life with a scattered group of objects against a light brownish purple backdrop: a clean white bottle, a knife, water chestnuts, mush-rooms, lavender, a dishcloth. One seldom comes across such a deliberately cluttered composition in an oil painting. Only in the seventeenth century, after Chinese silks and porcelains had first arrived in the West, did English court painters begin to emulate Chinese New Year's paintings, in which various votive objects are arrayed in rows across a white background. Perhaps the Chinese flavor of this painting is neither intentional nor unintended. Its saturated squares of purple are so fresh and so luxuriant that one begins to imagine eating breakfast on a brilliant morning in the land of milk and honey.
Finally, there is Autumn in the Nanjing Mountains. A small road unfolds like a silvery creek. Two white trees are crowned by trembling yellow branches. It seems that the sun has only just risen. A little farther off stand two more trees, one blue, the other brown, rendered with careless strokes that might resemble Chinese brushwork if not for their formlessness. The man gazing at the scenery seems to have come from very far away; he has yet to catch his breath, so that even the vague blue contours of the mountains are still rippling in the distance. And because of this sense of the sudden and the incomplete, it may well be that this is merely a distant dream, conjured out of cock's crow and the chill of a sleeping mat.