10.1515_9780804775878-008

Conclusion
At the end of the nineteenth century, China was understood to become

ever more alienated from the conditions that made it visible to British eyes.
Realignments among the global powers changed the place of China in the
British imagination. Japan and, later, Africa took up China’s role in the
minds of many modern critics as the preeminent visual and geographical
counterpoints to Euro-American visual and literary modernism. Yet even as
those influences now seem to outweigh China’s, they could not have done
so without the foundational structure that China provided.
This book has followed both British celebrations and British repu-
diations of China’s familiar exotic across the nineteenth century with the
simple contention that such receptions mattered greatly in the history of
British visuality. They mattered as opposing examples that helped define by
antithesis the capacities of the British visual and narrative real—definitions
that have been the subject of this book. They continued to matter, albeit
largely implicitly, when the revolutions of modernism revised visual real-
ism and claimed supposedly foreign and antithetical aesthetic terms as their
own founding conditions. And they matter still. A sense that the Chinese
somehow see differently, and that certain differences in visual representa-
tion can therefore be identified specifically as Chinese, makes unspoken
substance for current rhetorical formations that describe relative differences
between China and the West in essentialized terms. Although differences in
modes of perception are now the terrain of cognitive neurologists as well
as writers and artists, this broadening of inquiry has not altered the initial
parameters of the questioning.1
180 Conclusion
When I say that such receptions mattered, I mean that very literally. Ma-
terial objects, physical spaces, and the narrative evocations of that material-
ity and spatiality explained Chinese visual difference to British observers
through all the permutations of visual engagement: looking, being looked
at, seeing others looking, and directing others how to look in turn. These
engagements change with changing economic conditions; production and
trade make objects available to view, but they also make subjects capable of
seeing them in meaningful ways. When Lord Macartney entered the Qing
emperor’s pleasure grounds to partake of their “rural vicissitudes,” he did
so under very different circumstances than his secretary, John Barrow, who
was reduced to peeking over the edge of the garden wall. The political au-
thority that granted Macartney a clearer perspective on the garden’s views,
however, expired with the failure of his mission; the narrative authority
that Barrow gained as author of the widely read Travels in China continued
onward throughout the century. Thus while the gap between Barrow and
Wordsworth is broad—and the gulf between Barrow and Whistler (to take
one of many possible examples) nearly unbridgeable—it is their shared in-
terest in China’s representational (rather than direct) effects that justify this
study’s connections.
A precondition of this study has been the sense that these arguments
can be generalized beyond the Chinese example; by thinking about how
racial difference is imagined to make certain differing kinds of perception
possible, we can also understand how other categories—class, gender, sexu-
ality, and more—can be imagined to do the same thing. But I want to in-
sist upon the specific value of China as an example. Economic histories of
the past decades have shown China’s role in the globalization of the world
economy to occur both earlier and more significantly than was previously
believed. Even as Britons were following the story of China’s resounding
defeat in the First and Second Opium wars, they were filling their lives
with the material effects of China’s economic significance. Though some
of China’s emblematic products—tea, porcelain, and even opium—were by
the end of the century produced domestically or in British colonies, they
retained their symbolic status as pieces of China.
Whistler’s painting Purple and Rose: Lange Leizen of the Six Marks, dis-
cussed in Chapter 2, makes a useful point to return to here in considering
how we ought to understand China’s place in Victorian creative conscious-
ness. Critical reception of Whistler’s painting can be compared with the far
more famous and more controversial scene of modeling of foreign influence
Conclusion 181
demonstrated in a later artwork: Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon

(1907). In Picasso’s Cubist masterpiece, two of the five nude prostitutes
depicted wear faces deeply evocative of African tribal masks. How to talk
about Picasso’s use of these artifacts, which may be based on objects he saw
during a memorable visit to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in
1907, is a problem that has consumed art critics for many decades. On the
other hand, questions about what the Chinese objects in Purple and Rose
mean to Whistler are only beginning to be asked by postcolonial scholars.
Yet much of the inquiry that scholars have directed to Picasso’s master-
work, in particular Simon Gikandi’s recent probing study, can be aimed at
Whistler’s work as well.2
In both pieces, and indeed in the larger careers of both artists, non-Eu-
ropean aesthetics have been highlighted as influences and then simultane-
ously dismissed as mere fetishes or decorative effects. Gikandi proposes that
such efforts to at first acknowledge and then immediately remove the pres-
ence of the Other from works of high modernism must be understood as
a necessary component of the practice of modernism itself: “How else,” he
wonders, “can we explain the paradox that runs throughout the history of
modernism, the fact that almost without exception the Other is considered
to be part of the narrative of modern art yet not central enough to be con-
sidered constitutive?”3 It is in part the argument of this book that these ef-
forts of modernism to assert its essential cultural relevance both within and
beyond its external influences root backward into the nineteenth century,
well before the moment when Picasso began painting Les Demoiselles or
Virginia Woolf wrote of Lily Briscoe’s Chinese eyes in To the Lighthouse.4
Picasso, indeed, drew specific comparison between his connection to
Africa and the Impressionists’ ties to Asia in his much-cited interview with
André Malraux: “Everyone always talks about the influence of the Negroes
on me. What can I do? We all loved fetishes. Van Gogh said: ‘Japanese art,
we all had that in common.’ For us it was the Negroes.”5 In his introduction
to the catalogue of the controversial 1984 Museum of Modern Art exhibi-
tion “‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the
Modern,” MoMA director of painting and sculpture William Rubin repeats
Picasso’s comment that “[t]he African sculptures that hang around . . . my
studios are more witnesses than models” in order to argue a similar point.6
Rubin explains that the African works “more bore witness to [Picasso’s]
enterprise than served as starting points for his imagery. Like the Japanese
prints that fascinated Manet and Degas, Primitive objects had less to do
182 Conclusion
with redirecting the history of modern painting than with reinforcing and
sanctioning developments already underway.”7 Most of the many critiques
launched at the MoMA after the opening of this exhibition took issue with
the genealogy of influence asserted here.8 As the exhibition’s subtitle im-
plies, the efforts of the curators went not only toward providing histori-
cal evidence of specific material encounters between artists and primitive
objects—at what moment, in what studio, an African mask was first ob-
served—but also toward evoking a more general sense of “affinity” that
connected modernist paintings with visually similar tribal objects from
around the globe.
Anthropologist James Clifford in particular criticized the exhibition’s
emphasis on this looser global relationship of visual influence for its im-
position of an “allegory of kinship.”9 This allegory inevitably places the
tribal in a subsidiary and elemental relationship to the modern even as it
insists on the depth of that relationship as a founding condition. Given
the history of interchanges of Chinese aesthetics that I have reviewed in
this book, we can begin to put similar pressure on Picasso’s and Rubin’s
invocation of the relationship between Japanese prints and Impressionist
art. This must occur both when we are thinking about this relationship
as a model for the later development of modernism’s global influence and
also when we are focusing only on the Impressionist movement itself. For
of course what is troubling in these relationships between European artists
and foreign art objects is that the definitional emphasis is placed neither on
the work’s medium—be it wood-block print or wooden sculpture—nor
on its representational content. Rather, the foregrounded term is always
the country of origin, to best emphasize the distance that must be main-
tained between two formally affinitive works. As Gikandi, Clifford, and
others have pointed out, this distance is necessary in order for European
art communities, whether modernist or Impressionist, to maintain their
paradoxical histories of self-constitution despite broad evidence of global
influence.
China, I contend, plays an unremarked but formative place in this prob-
lematic history. As we have seen, modernism’s story of its own origins uses
the template of Impressionism’s self-discovery to tell a history that both
confirms and denies the effects of imagined foreign visual regimes. Picasso
authorizes his connection to the tribal object by invoking Van Gogh’s
Japanese precedent. So too does Impressionism’s story of its own trans-
formation invoke the art objects it means to supersede. The anecdote of
Conclusion 183
how the French artist Félix Bracquemond in 1856 “discovered a volume of

Hokusai prints in a crate of porcelain . . . and carried it around with him in
his pocket until his death,” introducing his friends Whistler, Manet, Degas,
and others to these ukiyo-e for the first time, is often told in older histories
of Impressionism as acknowledgement of Japan’s influence.10 But it is an
anecdote less often told today, for the clear reason that it rehearses the same
difficult “allegory of kinship” that troubles the history of Les Demoiselles. In
art histories from any period, however, the crated porcelain that the prints
were meant to protect goes largely unnoticed. And with the effacement
of that porcelain, the rich and long-standing history of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Chinese visual and material influence is removed from
the genealogy of modern artistic genius. China’s familiar exotic, which as I
have shown in this book permeated the lives of a range of British subjects
through landscapes, texts, and objects, became replaced by first a Japanese
exotic and subsequently a tribal primitivism; with each replacement the
routes of visual influence became ever more striated in time and space.
Whistler’s painting shows one way to repudiate that critical removal.
In the abstracted gaze of Jo Hiffernan beholding the painted porcelain in
Purple and Rose, we also see a possibility for dynamic and contemporary
exchange not yet reified into the binary of past/primitive and present/
modern that so troubles Picasso scholars. Both Hiffernan and the vase can
be considered to be both witnesses and models, in Picasso’s sense of the
terms, as both register and reflect the other’s artistic transformation. Thus
Whistler’s performative engagement with his blue china, stagy and stylized
as it is, demonstrates a functional repudiation of the “allegory of kinship”
model by foregrounding the ongoing aesthetic influence of such objects
rather than subsuming their originary influence entirely, as modernists like
Picasso and T. S. Eliot would later do. This was true more generally as
well. Even as writers like Charles Lamb and John Thomson emphasized the
long-standing presence of Chinese aesthetic objects in their visual memo-
ries, they also very much admitted—happily or unhappily—the influence of
these objects as a present effect. Our current critical understanding of the
nineteenth century’s relationship to China as a relationship of connoisseur-
ship therefore makes a crucial misunderstanding. It takes the nineteenth-
century fiction of China’s temporally-distanced difference from Britain—a
story that Charles Dickens, in particular, told with great effectiveness—and
substitutes it for the constitutive evidence of China’s contemporary con-
nections to Britain. It must be recognized that modern criticism, even as
184 Conclusion
it distances itself knowingly from the conception of China’s stasis, has also
trafficked in such usefully static terms.
This is not to deny that nineteenth-century authors and artists constantly
wrote about and represented China as an empire both static and temporally
removed. The context in which they did so, however, was a cultural field
teeming with the effects of Chinese visual influence. Studies of the nine-
teenth century that do not attend to these visual effects thus only get at part
of what energized Britons to speak, write, and think about China as a way
of speaking, writing, and thinking about themselves. Thus, in making the
case for a different, visually dynamic history of relations between Britain
and China in the nineteenth century, I have sought to fill out the invis-
ible connection formed between the female subject of Whistler’s Purple and
Rose and the Chinese art object that she holds. It is here, in the space of a
gaze that was contemporarily understood to be reciprocal, that we begin to
understand how objects can be capable of making people as much as people
are capable of making objects. The objects and spaces that I describe there-
fore speak out for China in a way that is not realistic but is important for
understanding what the real can be. In making plain the bounds of realism
through negative example, Chinese objects and spaces in the British nine-
teenth century act as both witnesses and models, and yet something more.
They are understood to be active visual agents, capable of changing eyes,
tastes, forms of narrations, and even the shapes of nations.
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Conclusion

At the end of the nineteenth century, China was understood to become

demonstrated in a later artwork: Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon

how the French artist Félix Bracquemond in 1856 “discovered a volume of

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