Lecture: Exile and Redemption鈥擳he Strange Case of the听Poetic Ideas听厂肠谤辞濒濒
Wednesday, October 19 at 5:30pm听to听6:30pm
1157 18th Street, 91福利社, CO 80309
About the lecture:听The听Poetic Ideas听scroll has long posed a mystery. Consisting of two unsigned paintings of a riverside landscape and twin wintry trees, early colophon writers attributed the compositions to two scions of famous families: Sima Huai, descendant of the statesman Sima Guang (1019-1086), and Mi Youren (1074-1151), whose father was the well-known calligrapher and connoisseur Mi Fu (1052-1107). But who painted which? And what are we to make of the choice of poetic lines by the famous Tang dynasty poet Du Fu (712-770) that served as the impetus for the two images? In this presentation, Peter Sturman demonstrates how the paintings were part of a carefully constructed program integrating text and images to comment on the fate of family legacies in the fraught world of late Northern Song politics. Through the听Poetic Ideas听scroll, we gain an important glimpse into the sophisticated world of early literati painting in China.
About:听Peter Sturman (Yale University PhD, 1989) is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in the study of Chinese painting, calligraphy, and text-image relationships during the medieval and early modern periods. His primary focus is on literati culture of the Northern Song and its immediate aftermath, though he has also published on landscape painting of the tenth and eleventh centuries, court art of the late Northern Song, loyalist art of the Song-Yuan transition, and painting and calligraphy of the seventeenth century. Book-length publications include听Mi Fu: Style and the Art of Calligraphy in Northern Song China听(1997) and听The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in 17th-Century China听(2012). His current projects are a book on Northern Song literati painting titled听Form and Shadow: Painting and the Literary Mind in Song-Dynasty China, and a study of the calligraphy of the Ming-dynasty polymath Xu Wei (1520-1593).
