The publication of Chinese Art and Culture should be welcomed by anyone who has an interest in Chinese art, whether or not one also teaches it. Both of the scholars who wrote this book are old enough to have each devoted more than three decades to thinking and practicing in their respective areas (early Chinese art through the Tang dynasty for Robert Thorp, later Chinese art from Song to the present for Richard Vinograd), but are young enough to have spent the bulk of their careers engaging many of the general issues that have helped redefine the field of art history during the past twenty years. Thus, their book gives unprecedented attention, for a textbook survey of this subject, to such topics as popular religious art; women “as patrons, practitioners, and consumers of art”(15); the prominence of craft traditions; and political and socioeconomic functions underlying art making and material culture. These topics are not brought forward as simple gestures in the direction of art-historical fashionableness, but partake in an approach that places art within the larger cultural forces that inform it and are informed by it. The authors write, “Even the traditionally elite arts patronized by rulers and educated gentlemen, which remain the majority of those discussed, stand out in greater clarity and complexity by contrast with the kinds of art, tastes, and values they rejected” (15). The “culture” of the book’s title, then, would seem to refer to multiple and disparate things, as Vinograd suggests when he writes, “Technology, economics, and tastes associated with social position could all be considered part of Song culture, broadly conceived, but other kinds of more specifically cultural environments were equally important. Culture in this connection can mean either anthropologically distinct cultures, high literary culture, or subcultures such as those based on social position, gender, or religious preference” (251).

In view of their revisionist interests, the authors are to be applauded for not ignoring the second kind of culture mentioned above—"high literary culture"—a phrase that approximates the seminal Chinese term wen and has claimed disproportionate attention in most earlier Chinese or Western histories of Chinese art. Thorp in particular is deferential to the traditional historical record and to the continuing project of contemporary Chinese archaeologists to reconcile recently excavated materials with that record, even as he presents archaeological discoveries that undermine the very existence of a culturally unified early China. Mythological culture-heroes of high antiquity, such as Shen Nong, who is said to have introduced humankind to agriculture, are as culturally important as the excavation of yet another neolithic culture (we are given the option to believe), if we consider that the latter was unknown through the succeeding millennia. Vinograd displays a different but comparable breadth of approach when he moves from an anthropologically tinted analysis of the “Cultures of Art” (see final two sentences in the above paragraph) to an insightful summary of critical concerns among Song scholar-officials who wrote about painting. In “Varieties of Poetic Painting” (261–68), he offers perspective on the new equivalence of poetry and painting by telling us: “In the Northern and Southern Dynasties, we might say painting aspired to the status of music, in seeking qualities of resonance and wordless, responsive communication. In the Tang, some kinds of painting aspired to the status of sculpture, in its vividness, tangibility, and expressive power” (265). Much of this comes right out of premodern Chinese art criticism. As an art-historical account that seeks to be both sympathetic to and critical of the traditions, Chinese Art and Culture has a multilayered complexity that sometimes calls into question the jacket blurb’s claim of “reader-friendliness,” but nonetheless has produced a rich and rewarding book.

The book begins with a helpful, if slightly cluttered, introduction, “Introducing Chinese Art and Culture,” in which the authors lay out the rationales underlying their choice of material; warn us against “essentialism,” “even while…asking what remains of cultural distinctiveness” (what remain are “Productivity and Technical Accomplishment in Craft Arts,” “Ancestral Veneration and Associated Arts,” and “The Authority of the Written Word”); describe the “Geographical Setting”; discuss “Chinese Languages,” including the different dialects, written characters, and general differences between the two most common systems of Romanization (this book uses Pinyin); and present various issues that all have to do with “Chronology” (including the relationship between Chinese history, prehistory, and a grey area in between regarded here as “protohistory”; the relationship between received traditional history and archaeologically documented history; conventions used in recording imperial history; and chronological divisions used in the present text). Ten chapters follow. Chapters 1–6, by Thorp, are “Prehistoric Roots: Late Neolithic Cultures,” “The Early Bronze Age: Shang and Western Zhou,” “The Late Bronze Age: Eastern Zhou,” “The First Empires: Qin and Han,” “The Age of the Dharma: The Period of Division,” and “A New Imperial State: Sui and Tang.” In Chapter 1, Thorp does a heroic job of summarizing and intelligently discussing large, partially digested masses of information regarding the important late Neolithic settlements and cultures unearthed so far, some of which were discovered only recently. His method of arranging the subsequent five chapters more or less follows the general dynastic divisions of Chinese history, except that both the Xia (to the extent that Thorp allows for its possible future vindication from what is now termed “Erlitou Culture,” 2000–1500 B.C.) and Western Zhou dynasties are subsumed under the early Bronze Age; the Eastern or second half of the Zhou is deemed enough of a watershed in cultural history to merit its own chapter; and both the Qin-Han and Sui-Tang periods are treated as single entities, with minimal attention to sequential development or artistic evolution between their beginning and end.

Chapter 7, “Technologies and Cultures of the Song,” which also gives due attention to certain regional courts of the preceding Five Dynasties, is the only chapter by Vinograd among the next four that defines both its beginning and end by dynastic change. Chapters 8 through 10 derive their chronological boundaries largely from “socioeconomic changes and cultural shifts rather than…fixed dynastic divisions” (15). “Official, Personal, and Urban Arts of the Yuan to Middle Ming” carries us from the beginning of the Mongol Yuan dynasty to around 1550; this cut-off date was chosen because it marks the end of a period that saw “a slowdown in urbanization and commerce in comparison with the Song” (280). “Art Systems and Circulations: Late Ming to Middle Qing” covers ca. 1550 to ca. 1800. Here Vinograd’s definition of the period’s boundaries diverges starkly from a traditional emphasis on the Ming-Qing rupture of 1644 as the most significant dividing point. But this was, “first and foremost, a period of great prosperity and population growth, during which China again became a major world economic and political power” (318). Flourishing commerce and increased economic regionalism also played their part. Finally, “Identity and Community in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Chinese Art” relates many of the issues faced by modern Chinese artists to disruptions rooted in the nineteenth century, such as demoralization in the face of Western military and industrial ascendance, internal dissolution, a discrediting of the traditional imperial system, and long-term political and cultural chaos. Art is seen as crucial in establishing new ways of asserting identities and alliances for both individuals and groups.

While this slightly revised definition of periods may strike some as disorienting, it does have its advantages. Implied in the traditional dynastic approach to Chinese art history is a privileging of the fate of the royal house and of the mostly elite members of society connected with it. Yet especially in the later periods, for which material and documentation are more complete, many artistic developments were more immediately affected by such factors as economic prosperity, widened literacy, the commercialization of art, shifts in social status among different groups, increased traveling and the rise of a tourist industry, overseas trade, and the like. Vinograd’s concern with such social and economic phenomena is apparent everywhere, and artworks are often discussed in the context of such concerns. A work will also indicate a larger condition or mood of the society. Wu Bin’s painting Lantern Festival (a leaf from his album A Record of Yearly Observances, ca. 1600), for example, is introduced in a paragraph that begins: “The slippage we observe in late Ming pictures between the real and the artificial or dreamed, or between coherence and chance, seems symptomatic of a period when free-floating desire disrupts the stability of boundaries” (327). We are here being given entrance not just into social and economic history, but into a larger, more organic sociointellectual and cultural matrix as the basic matter out of which individual artifacts emerge and become understandable. But while such emphases might suggest that a more traditional concept of art history has completely gone by the wayside (if that concept assumes an internal, largely self-generating evolution of art genres and styles), it should be noted that another advantage of Vinograd’s unorthodox classification is that it enables the reader to observe single traditions in longer developments than the dynastic constraints would allow. An example is his treatment of late Ming literati painting. After introducing this as “another area in which issues of memory and systematic approach merged in late Ming art” (322), he relates it to and also differentiates it from its Song and Yuan precedents before focusing on the painting and theory of Dong Qichang. This is followed immediately by a discussion of Dong’s followers in the early Qing orthodox school (mainly Wang Yuanqi), and of “the fate of literati painting,” so that by section’s end we have been given in a few terse pages an astute summary of this major body of later Chinese painting. Thorp’s chapters, partly due to the more contingent nature of our knowledge about earlier times, constitute less of a twist from the traditional account by adhering largely to the dynastic approach and in their less holistically analytical nature. But Thorp also presents artifacts in contexts that are far more specific and informative than has been the case with any other introductory survey of Chinese art.

In considering this volume as a teaching tool, however, one encounters a few reservations. There is a certain opacity to the writing style of both authors, in different ways, but perhaps to comparable effect in view of the book’s primary function as an introductory textbook. The text often reads as though the authors imagine themselves to be writing for an audience that, already possessing a high level of understanding and sophistication about issues in Western art history, is now ready and eager to turn its attention to the Chinese case. While the amount of information and level of discussion are certainly flattering to the student, and preferable to textbooks that go too far in the opposite direction, the complexity becomes counterproductive at times. The book’s glossary and index are inadequate, and ideally should be revised for the second edition.