Word: literati
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Perhaps because many of its influences came from China, Korean art rarely gets a fair share of attention in the West. Now Paris' Guimet Museum is helping right that imbalance with "The Poetry of Ink: The Literati Tradition in Korea, 1392-1910," a dazzling display of rarely seen Choson-era art from the museum's own treasures as well as private collections. As the exhibition's title suggests, the highlights are calligraphy, painting and poetry...
...Since China's Song dynasty (960-1279), these interconnected arts have been considered the "three perfections," fitting pastimes for scholar-officials, or literati, who for political or personal reasons, often had little else to do. The idea of using simple calligraphic brushstrokes to create lyrical paintings (many of which featured poems along their borders) reached Korea in the early Choson period some 600 years ago. Judging by the Guimet show, which runs until June 6, the technique thrived in the Land of Morning Calm. The museum has turned its exhibition space into a haven of tranquility, with rooms of graceful...
...influences are strong. After all, refugees from the Middle Kingdom's dynastic wars were streaming into Korea as early as the 12th century B.C. For centuries, the Korean ?lite used the Chinese language, much as medieval scholars in Europe depended on Latin. And Korean artists remained true to the literati tradition?and the Confucian ideals that animated it?long after China, under Manchu rule from 1644 to 1911, had moved...
...With so much flora and fauna on display, the show offers relatively few pictures of people. Only one portrait is included: the stern Cho Man-young, with stringy beard and moustache, painted by Yi Han Chul in the 19th century. Still, there are some lovely renderings of the literati themselves: scholars alone in their pavilions admiring nature, or meandering through the countryside on the backs of donkeys, or on a picnic?challenging one another to produce the best picture or most expressive calligraphy. One of the most charming is Yi Song Rin's 1748 Sage and Child Under the Moon...
Whereas Soviet artists produced propaganda that directly supported Stalin’s regime, Italian literati during the 1920s and 1930s adopted a more hands-off, apathetic approach to the rise of Mussolini’s fascism. While many of Italy’s artists and intellectuals were in theory “liberal,” meaning sympathetic to the democratic monarchy, “liberal writers were totally absent from the political scene,” said Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Lino Pertile. “They did not think it was their business to meddle...