The reception of European art in China and Chinese art in Europe from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth century

Abstract

Despite geographical distance and cultural dissimilarity, the European and Chinese sides of the early modern debate over what constitutes “fine art” start from similar premises and arrive at similar conclusions. Europeans concluded that Chinese painting should only be regarded, at best, as decorative art and never as “fine art”—and so has no place in the tradition of the grand masters, and Chinese concluded that European painting, despite its technical mastery of the secrets of visual illusion, should only be regarded as illustration and so belongs to the craft of painting and not the tradition of fine art in China, the tradition of scholar or literati painting—their version of le grand gout “grand taste.” The inability to see with different eyes or to judge except in terms of one’s own cultural and aesthetic standards, the lack of trans-cultural objectivity, all these mark both the European and the Chinese mentality of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Prisoners in their own cultures, each side could only think as they did. The mutual enrichment that did occur despite such limitations of taste and judgment happened on the peripheries of art and not at its core—Chinese painting added significantly to European notions of decoration and design, and European painting added significantly to the art of illustration in China, all while leaving basic standards and assumptions intact. With the confluence of decorative and fine art in Europe during the nineteenth century and with the confluence of the popular crafts and the tradition of literati painting in China during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in China, the dichotomies that so marked earlier eras began to fail, to be replaced by increasing sensitivity on both sides to the possibilities of creating new visions, new expressions, new techniques, through the amalgamation and fusion of differences.