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The Lyric Journey: Poetic Painting in China and Japan
Contributor(s): Cahill, James (Author)
ISBN: 0674539702     ISBN-13: 9780674539709
Publisher: Harvard University Press
OUR PRICE:   $221.76  
Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats
Published: August 1996
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Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Annotation: Poetic paintings - works done in response to lyric poems, or else as pictorial equivalents to them - compose a major category of East Asian art. In this beautifully illustrated book James Cahill looks at three exemplary traditions in this genre, works from three very different times and places, bringing new understanding of the paintings and of the relationship between the art and the societies that produced it. Creating paintings with poetic resonances, sometimes with ties to specific lines of poetry, is a practice that began in China in the eleventh century, the Northern Sung period. Cahill vividly surveys its first great flowering among artists working in the Southern Sung capital of Hangchou, probably the largest and certainly the richest city on earth in this era. He shows us the revival of poetic painting by late Ming artists working in the prosperous city of Suchou. And we learn how artists in Edo-period Japan, notably the eighteenth-century Nanga masters and the painter and haiku poet Yosa Buson, transformed the style into a uniquely Japanese vehicle of expression. In all cases, Cahill shows, poetic painting flourished in crowded urban environments, it accompanied an outpouring of poetry celebrating the pastoral, escape from the city, immersion in nature. An ideal of the return to a life close to nature - the "lyric journey" - underlies many of the finest, most moving paintings of China and Japan, and offers a key for understanding them.
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Art | Asian - Chinese
- Art | History - General
- Design | Graphic Arts - Commercial & Corporate
Dewey: 759.951
LCCN: 95023906
Series: Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures
Physical Information: 1.06" H x 8.56" W x 11.04" (2.70 lbs) 276 pages
Themes:
- Ethnic Orientation - Asian
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
Creating paintings with poetic resonances, sometimes with ties to specific lines of poetry, is a practice that began in China in the eleventh century, the Northern Sung period. Cahill vividly surveys its first great flowering among artists working in the Southern Sung capital of Hangchou, probably the largest and certainly the richest city on earth in this era. He shows us the revival of poetic painting by late Ming artists working in the prosperous city of Suchou. And we learn how artists in Edo-period Japan, notably the eighteenth-century Nanga masters and the painter and haiku poet Yosa Buson, transformed the style into a uniquely Japanese vehicle of expression. In all cases, Cahill shows, poetic painting flourished in crowded urban environments; it accompanied an outpouring of poetry celebrating the pastoral, escape from the city, immersion in nature. An ideal of the return to a life close to nature--the lyric journey--underlies many of the finest, most moving paintings of China and Japan, and offers a key for understanding them.

Contributor Bio(s): Cahill, James: - James Cahill is Professor of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley.