Background
Cahill, James Francis was born on August 13, 1926 in Fort Bragg, California, United States. Son of James Francis and Mae (Bond) Cahill.
( The Compelling Image will delight the art-lover who doe...)
The Compelling Image will delight the art-lover who does not yet realize that Chinese painting can be as original and moving as El Greco or Cezanne. With a graceful authority, James Cahill explores the radiant painting of that tumultuous era when the collapse of the Ming Dynasty and the Manchu conquest of China dramatically changed the lives and thinking of artists and intellectuals. The brilliant masters of the seventeenth century were reconsidering their artistic relationship to nature and to the painting of earlier times, while European pictorial arts introduced by Jesuit missionaries were profoundly influencing Chinese techniques. The reader/viewer is presented with a series of crucial distinctions of style and approach in a richly illustrated book that illuminates the whole character of Chinese painting. Cahill begins with a relatively neglected artist, Chang Hung, who moved traditional forms ever closer to literal descriptions of nature, in contrast with the theorist painter Tung Ch'i-ch'ang, who turned the same traditional forms into powerful abstractions. A chapter focused on Wu Pin offers new and controversial ideas about the impact of European art, as well as a related phenomenon: revival of the highly descriptive early Sung styles. Looking especially at Ch'en Hung-shou, the greatest of the late Ming figure painters, Cahill examines a curious mixing of real people and conventionally rendered surroundings in portrait art of the period. He analyzes the expressionist experiments of the masters known as Individualists, and distinguishes these artists from the Orthodox school, concluding with a bold reassessment of the most eloquent of later Chinese painters, Tao-chi. Over 250 illustrations, including twelve color plates, are drawn from collections in the United States, Europe, Japan, and China. This is a book for anyone interested in China, its past, and its art, and for the enthusiast who wishes to broaden the horizons of enjoyment by exposure to a most engaging writer on an exquisite era.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674152816/?tag=2022091-20
高居翰
Cahill, James Francis was born on August 13, 1926 in Fort Bragg, California, United States. Son of James Francis and Mae (Bond) Cahill.
He then studied art history under Max Loehr at the University of Michigan, earning his master"s in 1952 and Doctor of Philosophy in 1958. In 1954 and 1955 Cahill studied at Kyoto University in Japan as a Fulbright Scholar.
He was considered one of the world"s top authorities on Chinese art He became interested in literature and music at the Berkeley High School. In 1943 Cahill entered the University of California, Berkeley, initially to study English, but decided to study Japanese instead because of World World War World War II He was later drafted into the United States Army, and served as a translator in Japan and of Korea from 1946 to 1948.
In Asia he became interested in collecting paintings.
In 1948 he returned to University of California Berkeley and received a bachelor"s degree in Oriental languages in 1950. Cahill worked at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, District of Columbia as curator of Chinese art from 1958 to 1965, when he became a faculty member at University of California Berkeley.
He taught at Berkeley for 30 years, from 1965 until his retirement in 1995, after which he became professor emeritus. From the late 1950s to the 1970s, when the Western society had far less interest in Chinese art than today, Cahill was among a group of art historians who researched and cataloged Chinese paintings.
In 1960 he published Chinese Painting, which became a classic text that was required reading in Chinese art history classes for decades.
In 1973, he was one of the first American art historians to visit China after President Richard Nixon"s historic meeting with Chairman Mao Zedong the year before. At a Chinese art symposium in the 1960s, Cahill proposed the theory that notable Ming dynasty Chinese painters were influenced by Western art His theory was denounced by Chinese academics at the time, but has been widely accepted by experts since then
In the 1990s, financier Oscar Tang purchased The Riverbank, a famous 10th-century Chinese painting attributed to the Southern Tang dynasty master Dong Yuan, and donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City.
In 1999, Cahill set off an explosive debate when he announced that the painting was a fake by the 20th-century master painter and forger Zhang Daqian. In addition to his observation"s on the painting"s style, which he argued could not be that of a Song dynasty painting, he cited the brushwork and seals.
The museum insists the painting is authentic, and the work remains on display at the Metropolitan The dispute remains unresolved.
James Cahill published hundreds of articles on Chinese and Japanese art, as well as more than a dozen books
He built a significant collection of Chinese and Japanese art, and gave much of it to the Berkeley Art Museum.
( The Compelling Image will delight the art-lover who doe...)
(Illustrated History of Chinese Painting is one of the 195...)
(Book by Cahill, James Francis)
Cahill was also active in promoting scuba diving, serving as a member of the founding Board of Directors of the National Association of Underwater Instructors (NAUI) along with Jacques Cousteau. He also served as Chairman of the Massachusetts Governor"s Committee to study scuba diving. Served as a member of the Massachusetts Governors Marine Fisheries Advisory Commission.
And as a member of the Massachusetts Governors Civil Defense Advisory Commission.
Married Dorothy Dunlap, July 15, 1951. Children: Nicholas, Sarah. Married Tsao Hsingyuan, March 28, 1988.
Children: Benedict and Julian (twins).