Forgács Éva (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 9. (Budapest, 1989)
MIKLÓS Pál: A Hopp Ferenc Keletázsiai Művészeti Múzeum új szerzeménye
Therefore the information on the colophons is misleading. Anway, there must be serious doubts about the authenticity of the colophons. The first, introductory colophon is dated in Yong-he-gong, in the year 1667; but Yong-he-gong (,,Palace of Harmony and Peace") received that name only in 1723; until that time it was the princely residence of the future Yongzheng before his accession to throne. It is true that from this time, the Palace step by step became a Buddhist monastery, where the lamas were mostly Mongols and Tibetans." Among them, this sort of painting was probably held high. But what is most likely is that the colophons are simply late fakes. More research must be done, both related to the scroll, and the colophons. The real difficulty is the total absence of written sources about such painting. The Chinese attitude was always disdainful towards provincial and or pleueian paintings. The learned (wen-ren) did not pay any attention to the works of illiterate craftsmen (Hua-gong : ,painting-worker"). On the other hand, they went into exaggerated eulogies about insignificant paintings — commonplace landscapes, improvised bamboo-leaves or rocks, and, chiefly, xunskilled copies of the ancient masters — if they were brushwork, more precisely brush-jokes, be learned dilettantes. This attitude is still alive today. When I went in Peking two years ago to the Palace Museum, and there asked a very eminent scholar of this period for help in solving the ,,riddles" of this picture, he answered: ,,Oh, this king of painting is not interesting at all . . . We have many masterpieces from that period, awaiting study . . ." And, disguested, he removed off the slides of my picture. Perhaps the absence of masterpieces will heb us to concentrate our attention here, in Europe, on this kind of Chinese painting. We always appreciated the authenticity, in all senses of the painting. It is one of the fundamental criteria of our western aesthetics. I think, this anonymous scroll is a genuine work as a pictorial experience and achievement, and as a document of social anthropology, and, surely, as a document of social anthropology, and, surely, as a document of the Chinese pictorial ,,craft" and of plebeian painting, as well. In this respect, this painting is more interesting and more precious to me, than a routine work or a twelfth-hand copy, let it be by the brush of a 18th century learned painter, let it be after the masters of ancient times, e. g. after Fan Kuan or Ni Can: the study of such ,,masterpieces" offers us nothing in the way of art history. 8 But the study of plebeian pictorial work — and other works of art — can direct us to more fruitful tendencies in Chinese art history — i. e. to the questions John A. Pope asked — and towards social anthropological research within our discipline.
