The Three Perfections: Chinese Painting, Poetry, and Calligraphy
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
The Three Perfections: Chinese Painting, Poetry, and Calligraphy Details
About the Author Michael Sullivan, Emeritus Fellow of St. Catherine's College, Oxford, is the author of The Arts of China, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art, and Art and Artists of Twentieth Century China. Read more
Reviews
Michael Sullivan's "The Three Perfections: Chinese Painting, Poetry, and Calligraphy" (Rev. Ed., 1999) is, in short, a beautiful book. It is not a comprehensive examination of the history of Chinese painting; rather, Sullivan starts with what seems a fairly trivial question (i.e., "What, and why, do the Chinese write on their paintings?") and uses that question as a stepping stone into an essay that is both lucid and thoughtful. The color plates, as printed in this edition published by George Braziller, are lovingly presented on high-quality paper. Particularly worth seeing are Ma Yuan's "On a Mountain Path in Spring" and Shen Zhou's "The Poet on a Cliff Top". (I would like to include the plate of my favorite Chinese painting, Fan Kuan's "Traveling Amid Mountains and Streams", in this listing, but such a large painting -- it is more than two meters high -- deserves a page larger than it would admittedly be practical to print.) Overall, though, an excellent volume, and one that will always have a place on my bookshelf.