The Heart of Ma Yuan

Reviewed by: The Heart of Ma Yuan: The Search for a Southern Song Aesthetic by Richard Edwards Elizabeth Kindall Richard Edwards . The Heart of Ma Yuan: The Search for a Southern Song Aesthetic. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011. Pp. xxxiii + 340. $55.00 (hardcover). ISBN 978-9888028658. Richard Edwards examines the tangible painting history of the Southern Song and its relationship to the oeuvre of one of its most famous artists, Ma Yuan 馬遠 (active c. 1194-1224), in The Heart of Ma Yuan: The Search for a Southern Song Aesthetic. Using formal stylistic analysis, iconography and close readings, Edwards seeks this artist through intense scrutiny of specific extant paintings representative of a range of subjects including secular, historical, and religious figures; landscapes; animals; birds in landscape settings; and flowers. The Ma Yuan he finds is a "poet of near and selected things." Ma Yuan focused on a single subject and presented it with a sensitive understanding of the natural 4world that also sought inventive, consciously artistic expression of its painted form. The book is divided into eight chapters and is lavishly illustrated with over three hundred plates and figures. Sixty-seven of these illustrations are in color. Readers unfamiliar with Ma Yuan will find the Introduction, which deals with the family, patrons, and style of the artist most useful. Chapter Eight was of most interest to this reader because it differentiates the work of Ma Yuan from paintings typically accepted as by the master and discusses later transformations of the Ma school style. This book bespeaks a distinguished career of viewing by a consummate art historian. Richard Edwards is Professor Emeritus of Far Eastern Art at the University of Michigan, where he taught from 1960 to 1987. The detailed, rhapsodic descriptions of the paintings under discussion demonstrate that the author has personally examined every painting he discusses, and he brings this practical knowledge to his exegesis of the works. He states in the preface that his goal is to focus on the pictorial aesthetic of Ma Yuan, rather than [End Page 480] contextualize the artist within the social and historical sphere of the Song. Yet he does incorporate research by a vast array of scholars over several decades, most prominently Lee Hui-shu, into his discussions of individual works. It is unfortunate that her most recent book, Empresses, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China, is not included in these discussions, but I assume it was not available to the author prior to publication. Because The Heart of Ma Yuan assumes a basic knowledge of Chinese culture and Song dynasty institutions it will best serve researchers, graduate students, and upper-division undergraduates. In Chapter One Edwards examines the composition, style, and possible symbolism of three Ma Yuan paintings set in the winter months, Thru Snow Mountains at Dawn in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, Fisherman on a Winter River in the Tokyo National Museum, and Egrets in Winter in the National Palace Museum, Taipei. His careful, poetic descriptions of each work emphasize the technical mastery and "selective precision" for which Ma Yuan was known. He then suggests a variety of iconographic readings. Edwards connects signs such as a gourd or pheasant with the emperor and empress and suggests their very close connection with the images created by artists such as Ma Yuan. One example of this in Thru Snow Mountains at Dawn is an examination of the main figure of the painting, a fuel gatherer. Edwards begins by tracing the development of the rendering of the historical Buddha Sakyamuni in works illustrating Sakyamuni Emerging from the Mountains. He finds the composition, figural stance, and facial features of the fuel gatherer to echo this tradition, particularly as interpreted by Liang Kai 梁楷 in his work of the same name in the National Museum, Tokyo. The presence of signs such as the gourd, pheasant, and fuel gatherer in the work of Ma Yuan indicate the Daoist, Confucian, and Buddhist interests of his imperial patrons, who studied all three teachings in the late Song. In Chapter Two, Edwards examines the "naturalistic, traditional, and poetic purposes" of the painting Mandarin Ducks by a Bamboo Stream in the Cleveland Museum of Art. He analyzes

Art · Art history · Chinese history and philosophy · History