Words about pictures

Abstract

The value of the six books reviewed here is twofold, at least. First, what they represent in terms of conservatorship alone is one mark of their combined importance. The ravages of modern Chinese history and the downright meanness and stupidity of individuals both within and outside the Chinese government have been so intense that we ought to be grateful to have so many artworks to study as are illustrated in these books (more than twelve hundred, about half of them created since 1949, and half of that number created in the post-Maoist period). It is not unusual to find statements such as Michael Sullivan's about the works of the Storm Society that all are “either lost or so badly reproduced that I cannot illustrate them,” or to learn that half of a work like Jiang Zhaohe's Scroll of Refugees, his “finest work,” “was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution.”