by Jon Lackman | 27 September 2006 | Asia
Dietrich Seckel is “The Nestor of East Asian art history,” writes I. Schaarschmidt-Richter in the Frankfurter Allgemeine. Seckel has just published the second volume of his study of East Asian portraiture, which concerns typology. He defines two main portrait types: the formal portait, an objective expression of a social type set within the bounds of social convention, and the informal portrait, which came into its own in the 17th and 18th centuries, an age of social churning. The latter portraits – generally of monks, artists and poets — express psychology and atmosphere. (Reviewing the first volume, on the concept of the portrait, Daniel Spanke found Seckel’s idea of the ‘real portrait’ impermissibly idealistic and positivistic.) The third volume will concern functions of the genre, and the fourth volume formal questions.
