The World around the Chinese Artist: Aspects of Realism in Chinese Painting (Volume 2)

by Richard Edwards

In this series of lectures on the painters Hsia Kuei (twelfth-thirteenth centuries), Shen Chou (fifteenth-sixteenth centuries), and Shih-t'ao (seventeenth-eighteenth centuries), Richard Edwards explores the special relationship between the self and landscape in Chinese art. These three painters, each important in his own time and deemed a master by later critics, were all concerned with the subjective in the objective world. In Chinese painting there is no clear desire to separate these two realms; rather, there is a constant, conscious play between the physical reality of the world and the subjective vision of the artist. The artist is continually imitating the world--sometimes more, sometimes less--but he never denies its appearance to the point of total abstraction; nor, in the other extreme, does he claim for the physical world an existence independent of his own involvement.

Richard Edwards is Professor Emeritus of East Asian Art and Art History, University of Michigan.

160 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 1989

About the author

Richard Edwards is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the Center for Chinese Studies of the University of Michigan.

A native of Auburn, New York, Professor Edwards received an A.B. degree from Princeton University in 1939 and completed his MA at Harvard University in 1942. During the rest of World War II he served with the American Field Service in North Africa and Italy, and as a member of the Friends Ambulance Unit in China. After the war, he returned graduate study first at Yale University and then back at Harvard University. He received his PhD from Harvard in 1953. He taught at Boston, Brandeis, and Washington Universities before settling at the University of Michigan in 1960. On retirement from the University of Michigan in 1987, Edwards was named as a Professor Emeritus, having previously been named the Henry Russel Lecturer in 1984.

During his career, Edwards traveled and studied extensively in China and the Far East. He was the recipient of three Fulbright Fellowships, two Rackham Faculty Research Grants, and a Rackham Faculty Research Fellowship. He is the author of five books and numerous articles.