Ai was arrested in Beijing on April 3, an event his studio assistants recorded on Twitter (translation here).  Evan Osnos reported on the day’s events in a New Yorker dispatch.  Police claim that Ai is being investigated for “economic crimes.”

Artists and arts professionals around the world are circulating a petition for his release.

Read more about Ai Weiwei’s work in Evan Osnos’s excellent New Yorker profile.  And watch a short documentary about Ai that Frontline/World aired on PBS.

[Poet Su Hui's huiwen] express genuine, heartfelt emotions, but as they are embedded in an endless puzzle of characters, they ostensibly exist in a space of intense privacy. Readers of the poems become voyeurs. We pry, configure, and unlock the secrets of the palindrome, ultimately becoming furtive admirers of both Su Hui’s private feelings and her exceptional talent. This secrecy is a by-product of an intuitively accepted principle in Chine: self-expression is an extension of the body, and a woman’s revelation of inner thoughts and feelings consequently is like a public disrobing. Su Hui’s silk-woven palindrome describes a world of private interiors. In Empress Yang’s world feminine expression was also conceived in terms of interiors, of private thoughts and feelings. Exposure does not happen of its own accord but rather takes a particular effort, such as that of Wu Zetian, who brings Su Hui’s creativity to public notice.

These are surface thoughts that the story of Su Hui’s silk-woven palindrome elicits, but a closer look reveals something different: Su Hui’s interior world was never intended to be truly private … Empress Yang also took pride in her talent and accomplishments, and her practice of art similarly operated within well-defined boundaries. Moreover, Empress Yang recognized that the interiority of her world was part of a necessary illusion. As I demonstrate later, her effectiveness as a ruler from behind the screen depended on her willingness to obey the same rules of agency, even though the nature of those rules was such that her talent and creativity, even her very person, would become misconstrued and lost.

Empress Yang, Hui-shu Lee writes, “was arguably the most important female art patron of the Song dynasty” besides being “a major player in court politics” — “she worked closely with favored court painters (Ma Yuan and Ma Lin) to help produce paintings with poetic inscriptions that are both exquisite works of art and meaningful modes of expression.” And yet, she has “remained an obscure and little understood figure.” This book should change that.

The shortlist:

Molly Emma Aitken, The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010)

Çi?dem Kafescio?lu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul: Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision, and the Construction of the Ottoman Capital (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009)

Juliet Koss, Modernism after Wagner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010)

Hui-shu Lee, Empresses, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010)

First up: Aitken. Molly Emma Aitken’s hefty and beautifully illustrated book, which won the award, concerns Rajput painting, which “flourished between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in the kingdoms that ruled what is now the Indian state of Rajasthan.” They “depicted the nobility and court spectacle as well as scenes from Krishna’s life, the Hindu epics, and court poetry.” (Oddly the book’s press release says “between the 16th and 19th centuries.”)

In her introduction, Aitken writes:

Studies of Indian painting have long shied from questions of why to pursue ever more refined questions of what, when, and who … Descriptions of meaning in Indian painting have typically ended … with narrative and iconography … [Q]uestions of choice and motivation have been elided by a notion of tradition, which has presupposed that Rajasthani court painters painted the way they did because they belonged to a culture that deeply valued the past … Sustained traditions resist interpretation because they are, by definition, repetitions of what has come before … However, traditions are valued only if they answer certain exigencies in the present … This book unpacks tradition incrementally, in a series of concrete, empirical case studies of the formal content of Rajasthani court paintings … In the absence of period texts on art, formal analysis is one of the only and also one of the best means we have to guide interpretations … Here is a rich opportunity to plumb a sustained aesthetic tradition for its operative intelligence.

Aitken, who earned her PhD from Columbia in 2001 under Vidya Dehejia, is an assistant professor at The City College of New York, though not for long, I suspect! Tenure seems inevitable for winners of such an award, not to mention better book sales. Stratospheric sales, probably not. You would think that, at the very least, every university library on the planet would collect a book given the profession’s top honor, but WorldCat shows recent Morey winners in as few as 300 libraries — 700 at most.

These painters are unjustly ignored in the West, Yeng writes:

The tradition of studying and collecting historical Chinese art is well established, and during the last several decades, scholars and collectors have taken up the cause of contemporary Chinese avant-garde and experimental art in earnest. An extraordinarily rich category of Chinese art, however … has gone largely unremarked in the West … These four artists, in ways unique to each, understood and absorbed the essence of centuries of Chinese painting and aesthetics … they successfully met the challenges associated with the advent of China’s “discovery” of Western art, and overcame the suspicion–sometimes outright rejection–of the Chinese tradition that it provoked … and they consistently maintained artistic integrity in spite of an increasingly commercialized and politicized art market.

Yeng argues also that the Chinese contemporary artists who are today so popular among Western elites owe a debt to their countrymen of a century ago:

Even though some established contemporary diaspora artists are not actively ink painters, their successes were built upon the integration of Chinese cultural elements and Western avant-garde idioms … Chinese ink painting in the twentieth century has given rise to a new generation of artists who critically absorb their cultural and artistic heritage and innovatively reinterpret rather than mimic the past, who understand the trajectories of artistic progress, and who have the ability to “draw” the future. Qi Baishi once said, “Who imitates me, his art dies.”

Anna Chave, Graduate Center, CUNY (chair)
Andrea Bayer, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Virginia Fields, LACMA
Erica Hirshler, MFA Boston
Anne Woollett, J. Paul Getty Museum

Today I’ll look at Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection and the Stella Kramrisch Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, edited by Darielle Mason. By the by, it seems worth noting that two of the three shortlisted books this year concern the decorative arts, and that two of the three concern Asian art, as have various winners in past years. (Past winners available online, though not past shortlists.)

According to the catalogue, Bengali kanthas are made “from fragments of old family garments and recycled threads … to celebrate marriages and births.” They are “ritual actions, women’s personal expressions, intergenerational bonds, icons of cultural and national identity, links with the ancient past, representations of cosmic reintegration [and] works of art.” They are functional, used as “bed and floor cloths to seat honored guests, blankets and wraps to keep warm … shrouds and palanquin seating … prayer mats, while tiny elongated pieces were often created to enfold mirrors, combs, and other personal items that also had ritual uses.” Most weren’t made to last, but “Elaborately embroidered or especially beloved pieces would be carefully preserved and passed down through generations.”

The kanthas reproduced in the catalogue are visually rich. The base is thin white cotton fabric, atop which appear various images, some representational, mostly in red and blue. There is “a wonderful variety of textures, from intermittent swells to ripples to densely regimented ridges” and indeed they often seem to be landscapes unto themselves.

The catalogue includes five provocative essays. In the first, Pika Ghosh “explores her family’s connection with kanthas in a personal reflection [as well as] ethnographic research to discuss the roles that kanthas and kantha-making continue to play.” In another, Ghosh embarks upon “a ground-breaking study of the religious narratives depicted on these textiles.” Katherine Hacker “examines how, during the first half of the twentieth century, the kantha was transformed from the product of a women’s craft into a symbol of tradition, heritage, nation, and, ultimately, fine art.” Niaz Zaman “has been gathering examples of inscribed kanthas over many years, and she uses this written evidence to probe the layers of Bengali society and women’s place in it.” Finally, conservator Anne Peranteau “documents her analysis of the materials and techniques of the kanthas in the Kramrisch and Bonovitz collections, as well as comparative examples.”

The catalogue concludes with portraits of Stella Kramrisch and the Bonovitzes. In an essay, Darielle Mason paints a vivid portrait of the late Kramrisch, a onetime Philadelphia Museum curator, who led a fascinating life that spanned Moravia, Vienna, Calcutta, and Philadelphia. It verges on the hagiographic at times, but retains some critical distance.

Mason’s treatment of the Bonovitzes is altogether different. Here a short biographical profile precedes an interview with Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz. She is an artist; he is a lawyer and a trustee of the museum. The couple helped underwrite the exhibition and its catalogue, as the copyright page notes, and I’m tempted to say they got their money’s worth. Their profile is vacuously laudatory: “his passionate conviction,” “has often been called a visionary by his peers,” “internationally acclaimed”:

Jill exudes an ethereality, wonderfully tempered by the contemplative candor of her speech, each phrase seeming to blossom forth, freshly thought. In contrast, Sheldon is pent energy and staccato sentences, broken by sudden stillness as he listens with almost feline focus.

Ick. The Bonovitzes may well be this wonderful, but what place does all this have in an exhibition catalogue? Mason’s subsequent questions to the couple are far from probing, and produce little of interest, as far as I can tell. I’m glad the Philadelphia Museum got the Bonovitzes’ collection (assembled in the early part of last decade) in the bargain, but I sure wish it had happened in a more seemly and scholarly fashion. Even the Bonovitzes’ kantha dealer got a page-long plug in the catalogue.

In related news, Tyler Green writes on “The Albright-Knox’s big, embarrassing mistake.”

These lesser known paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries “were intended not so much for pure aesthetic appreciation as for hanging on particular occasions such as New Year’s celebrations and birthdays, or for serving particular functions, such as setting the tone in certain rooms of the house or illustrating a story.” Produced not by the famed amateur literati painters but rather by professional artists, these works “fell outside the categories of painting praised by critics and preserved by collectors, which were valued, by contrast, as individual creations and personal expressions of prestigious masters.” They “explore the real world around them far more freely” and illustrate contemporary “fascination with erotic culture … and revise our understanding of gender” and the use by Chinese painters of European styles. It appears that in this genre women were often the artists and the intended consumers.

According to Cahill’s blog, the book was originally to contain a long sixth chapter, “Chinese Erotic Paintings and Prints,” which he has spun off into another book. Cahill also describes in his blog the frustrations he encountered publishing an excerpt of the book in a Chinese journal.

… I am aware of the paradox inherent in adopting linguistic models for a book that champions the value of material culture. I am also aware that, in doing so, I am to some extent swimming against the tide. The dominance of a linguistic model in the social sciences has sustained recent criticism from a number of scholars, among them the art historian David Summers, who has argued that whereas language is conventional, works of art ‘are embodied under certain conditions, and these are only secondarily conventional” … my own conceptual framework is a bricolage of ideas drawn not only from scholarship on other premodern frontier regions (notably Anatolia, Armenia, Spain, and Sicily) but also from a myriad of disparate disciplines, including art history, anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, and linguistics … [I]mplicit in my use of contemporary theoretical work is a rejection of any notion of a ‘return to the object’ as if it were preexistent or self-subsisting. A subsidiary aim of the book is, therefore, to contribute to a negotiation of the (often-marked) boundaries between empirically driven and theoretically informed scholarship on pre-modernity …

Working in Australia has also opened Iida’s eyes to how her nation’s art is viewed from abroad. “Everyone is really interested in Japanese art,” she explained, “but, for them, the dominant discourse is still Takashi Murakami and his Superflat theory.” Murakami’s mid-1990s theory that playfulness, decorativeness and lack of depth are the dominant characteristics of Japanese visual expression — from classical painting and ukiyo-e through to manga, anime and contemporary art — is still, it turns out, the key reference point for the international audience. “It’s really a problem of translation,” Iida explained. “There’s nothing else they can refer to. (Art historian) Shigeo Chiba’s books aren’t translated, and for a long time catalogs and Web sites weren’t bilingual either.”

… Melissa Chiu, museum director at Asia Society in New York, and the author/editor of several catalogs for exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art (herein Chicona, AAP’s, not Chiu’s, neologism), has written a brief, intimidatingly titled book that offers an elementary “paint by the numbers” introduction … According to Chiu’s Chinese Contemporary Art: 7 Things You Should Know, the 7 things you should know are: 1. Chicona began decades ago; 2. Chicona “is more diverse than you might think”; 3. Museums and galleries in China and abroad have promoted Chicona since the 1990s; Government censorship influences Chinese artists; 5. The Chinese artist diaspora has returned home; 6. Chicona museums in China are on the rise; 7. The world is collecting Chicona. And here, courtesy of ArtAsiaPacific, are 7 things you don’t want to know about Chicona: 1. Much Chicona is overpriced by any standards; 2. Chinese culture tolerates emulation, appropriation and imitation in the arts to a degree unacceptable in the West; 3. It is unacknowledged that most Chicona is indebted to 20th-century Western art (Duchamp, Kaprow, Cage, Paik, Acconci, Beuys, Nauman); 4. Some major Chinese artists are burnt out and copy themselves to meet market demand; 5. Chicona (by artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Zhu Yu, Liu Jin) incorporating human fetal corpses and cruelty to animals does not demonstrate freedom of expression in China but rather a barbaric and unscrupulous legal system; 6. China’s arts infrastructure remains immature, arbitrary, bureaucratic, venal; 7. Much of Chicona is 21st-century chinoiserie, valued by buyer and seller alike as an “exotic” Asian culture imitating a “higher” Western civilization. These critical issues, skirted entirely in 7 Things and highly diluted somewhere in the prolixity of [Karen Smith’s] Nine Lives, are discussed in Richard Vine’s New China, New Art, a superb, controlled, survey of a vast, writhing subject … the finest introduction to Chinese avant-garde art since the 1970s.

Stuart Cary Welch was undoubtedly the most important expert in the field of Moghul painting; he was also an old wicked, whose vanity and greed for works of art were almost insatiable. He inspired several generations of scholars and collectors through his teaching … He curated marvellous, eye-opening shows and, if he preferred to borrow from his own collections, hidden under pet family names, well, at least the owner was willing to lend … He was not so much a scholar-gypsy as a scholar-pirate … [Once] I was about to bid [at auction] when one of Cary’s large, pink hands held my right hand down. I was so shocked that I could not use my left hand. Naturally, he bought the painting … He was a great teacher, as I said, but not one to enjoy others’ successes. “Whenever I hear that one of my pupils has published something,” he told me, “I feel that one of my limbs has been cut off.” He could be very generous, however, as several museums can attest … Privately, too, he longed to share his enjoyment of art … [Once he] opened a leather travelling case that had been made to fit an Iznik plate and gave it to me to hold. It was one of the very best in terms of design, drawing, and colour. He had an amazing eye. We shall not see his like again.