Vadas József (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 11. (Budapest, 1991)

FERENCZY Mária: A modernizáció megjelenése a századeleji kínai ábrázolásokon

NOTES 1. The forerunners of the New Year prints — the images of the gate-keeper deities painted on, or carved into, door-leaves — are mentioned in the texts of Antiquity. The spread of the New Year pictures proper — i.e. mass-produced blockprints for annual festive use — started in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the history of this, cf. the English summary of Wang Shu-ts'un's researches: WANG 1986. 2 For a description of the living variant of this technology illustrated with photos, see in UNTERRIEDER 1984: pp.20-27. The greatest and the most influential centre, in which two famous shops had been known since the seventeenth century is Yang-liu-ch'ing, in the vicinity of Tientsin, Hopei province. In the second half of the nineteenth century the majority of the families living there still earned their living by producing these prints. The style of these New Year prints that can be regarded as having had the closest ties with the traditions of high art is that in which the colours are serene, with pastel colours being preferred and block printing being frequently amplified with hand-colouring. For this and other centres, as well as the main styles, cf. WANG 1986. 3. The New Year prints were discovered for Western scholarship by V. M. Alekseiev and Ed. Chavannes in 1906 when the two made a journey in China together, studying living beliefs and the forms of expression of folk art, as well as pursuing classical Chinese studies. Alekseiev collected about three thousand prints during the journey and published a long series of studies on them (there is a selection of these in: ALEKSEIEV 1966). Several ethnographical museums in Europe possess collections of New Year prints from the beginning of this* century, but none of them can match Alekseiev's. A pioneering study on Chinese popular religion was published by II. Maspero in Paris in 1928, illustrated with New Year prints among other things (MASPERO). In 1942 contemporary New Year prints were exhibited by the Centre Franco-Chinois d'Etudes Sinologiques in Peking, accompanied by an excellent bilingual catalogue: DUBOIS (unfortunately without illustrations). I would like to thank Mr. Pál Miklós for having put this rare book at my disposal. It was only in recent years that major interest was shown in this theme: a part of the material collected by CHAVANNES has been published by ELIASBERG, living elements of the tradition have been studied by UNTERRIEDER. In Leningrad an album was published presenting the best prints from the Alekseiev collection (CHPP 1988). In the 1950s the artistic value of the New Year pictures was analyzed in the Chinese People's Republic (A YING), and some picture books were published (e.g. YANG-LIU-CH TNG). Great progress was made in the middle of the 1980s both with regard to collecting material and to research, primarily owing to the efforts of Wang Shu-ts'un and his circle (a summary of their results in: WANG 1986). In 1989 a quarterly periodical was launched with the title The Art of the New Year Prints (NHYSH). As far as I could judge from the numbers I had access to, it aims at the exploration of tradition, but primarily at promoting actual practice not independently of the problems of national identity and the propagandistic possibilities inherent in these pictures. 5. With a single exception (no.13.), the origin of each piece is known: they were bought by the Museum from two bequests (nos. 1., 2., 4., 5., 7., 8(1)., 9., 12., 14. from the one and nos. 3., 6., 8(2)., 10., 11., 12., 15. and 16. from the other). Those making the bequests were both former World War I POWs who returned from Siberia to Hungary by way of the Far East and bought these pictures as cheap souvenirs somewhere in a small town at the Manchurian Chinese-Russian frontier. The origin of the Leyden Museum of Ethnography's New Year pictures from the end of the last century presents similar problems; two of its best pieces have been published by GAY Tjang-tek: Some Chinese Popular Block-Prints in: Mededelingen van Het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden No. 15. Leiden 1962. pp.26-36. 6. The pictures have been given titles to facilitate identification, the original titles, if any, having been given in the descriptive sections. In the descriptions, following the basic data details, colours etc. are given only in cases where they have a bearing on the explanation. The sequence of the descriptions has been determined according to the themes and* to their relationship to tradition. In the literature quoted, the thematic divisions generally discern four ..or five main groups while examining one of them: representations of gods and mythical heroes/ scenes, expressions of good wishes through magic pictures and symbols, representations of theatres, scenes from plays, and representations of everyday life, as well as block-prints of later origin similar to political pamphlets. (Cf. CHPP 1988: pp. 9-11.) It is shown by the variety in the content of the pictures presented here that this kind of thematical division, though by no means groundless, is rather too simplistic and rigid: both the representations of my-