Foreword to James Cahill article

First is the lasting importance of the topics it engages: the relationship in Chinese painting history between literati and professional artistic styles, their conventions and their audiences' expectations of them; the encounter between collector choices and random survivals, which artificially shape (expand or limit, focus or diffuse) our opportunity to see and understand the distant history of this medium; the scholarly engagement, unusual in our field, with ''second-class paintings'' (the author's own term for those discussed here) in order to reconstuct a history of common practice, rather than the more typical engagement with exclusive ''masterpieces,'' which creates what we ought properly to recognize as a history of exceptionalism. [...]a third reason for Archives, in particular, to welcome this essay is that it serves to complement an earlier, outstanding article published here by Professor Cahill, ''Continuations of Ch'an Ink Painting,'' similarly concerned with the complex and subtle modes of transmission and transformation of earlier conventions into the art of later times.3 JEROME SILBERGELD Princeton, February 2012 Notes 1. Kathlyn Liscomb, ''Shen Zhou's Collection of Early Ming Paintings and the Origins of the Wu School's Eclectic Revivalism,'' Artibus Asiae 52 no. 3/4 (1992): 215-254, directly concerned with some of the same paintings as here; and indirectly, Hou-mei Sung, Decoded Messages: The Symbolic Language of Chinese Animal Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press; Cincinnati: Cincinnati Art Museum, 2009).