V
The history of our subject in Western civilization
has a close parallel in
the Far East, although the evi-
dence is even
more fragmentary and its frame of refer-
ence
difficult to interpret. As early as the eighth cen-
tury, toward the end of the T'ang dynasty, there were
Chinese
painters using procedures astonishingly similar
to Cozens' Method. Their style, called i-p'in
(“untram-
meled”),
is known only from literary accounts such as
that concerning one of them,
Wang Mo:
Whenever he wanted to paint a picture, he would first drink
wine,
and when he was sufficiently drunk, would spatter
the ink onto the
painting surface. Then, laughing and sing-
ing all the while, he would stamp on it with his feet and
smear it with his hands, besides swashing and sweeping it
with the
brush. The ink would be thin in some places, rich
in others; he
would follow the shapes which brush and ink
had produced, making
these into mountains, rocks, clouds,
and water. Responding to the
movements of his hand and
following his inclinations, he would bring forth clouds
and
mists, wash in wind and rain, with the suddenness of Crea-
tion. It was exactly like the
cunning of a god; when one
examined the painting after it was
finished he could see
no traces of the puddles of ink
(S. Shimada, 1961).
Such a display of sprezzatura was surely an extreme
manifestation of the i-p'in style. Yet Wang Mo and
the
other “untrammeled” painters had a catalytic
effect
upon the development of Sung painting analogous to
that of
Cozens on the Romantics. Their works may
not have survived for long, but
descriptions of their
methods did, providing future artists in both China
and
Japan with a model of the creative process stressing
individual
expression and an exploratory attitude to-
ward
the potentialities of ink technique.
There are later accounts, ranging from the eleventh
to the nineteenth
century, of painters soliciting chance
images in ways comparable to those
of the i-p'in
pio-
neers. None of the surviving examples,
however, ap-
proach the freedom of Cozens'
“blotscapes.” It is hard
to say, therefore, how
accurately the literary sources
reflect actual practice. One recurrent
element in these
accounts is the claim that the work—almost
invariably
a landscape—looks as if “made by
Heaven” or
“brought forth with the suddenness of
Creation,” rather
than like something made by man. Such terms of
praise
imply that the picture in question seems completely
effortless
and unplanned; a work of nature, not a work
of art. This aesthetic ideal
must have led the Chinese
to the discovery that certain kinds of veined
marble
could be sliced in such a way that the surface suggested
the
mountain ranges and mist-shrouded valleys charac-
teristic of Sung landscapes. The marble slabs
would
be framed like paintings and supplied with an evoca-
tive inscription (Figure 22). Since they were small,
durable, and produced in large quantities, it seems
likely that
some of them reached the West with the
expansion of the China trade in the
eighteenth century.
If so, these Far Eastern chance images may have
helped
to stimulate the train of thought that produced Cozens'
Method.
