The Three Perfections: Chinese Painting, Poetry, and Calligraphy

"The Three Perfections" is a thin little book and takes about an hour to read, but that's an hour very well-spent. Sullivan does a wonderful job of explaining to the western reader in an engagingly erudite manner why Chinese paintings, well, have writing on them. In the process he touches upon the history of this phenomenon and on the different types of inscriptions and their varying significance as well as describing the fully-developed Chinese art theories on the interdependence of painting, poetry, and calligraphy. All along he keeps the discussion concrete with multiple examples, usually with an accompanying illustration--and these alone are well worth the price of the book. By the end of it, someone who has loved East Asian art for a long time such as myself will still come away with a new appreciation of the subject, but Sullivan's friendly, unpretentious, and lucidly clear delivery is ideal for the curious beginner as well. In short, this fine little volume is perfectly enjoyable, informative, and aesthetically pleasing.

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.