FLAMBOYANT & FLUENT

Peering from their high critical bowers, historians maintain that Chinese art has been on the decline ever since 1368, when the Ming dynasty was founded. They describe the art which the Mings favored for almost 300 years as gaudy, flamboyant and imitative. To prove that "exuberance" and "respect for a classical past" are better words for the period, the Detroit Institute of Arts has staged a loan show of some 400 Ming items.

Contemporary with the European Renaissance in art, the Ming (or "Radiant") era was one in which craftsmanship and art were synonymous. It produced a dazzling array of boldly colored and designed textiles, in addition to the fine lacquer work, painting and ceramics for which the period is best known.

Painters of the period stayed carefully within the rules formulated by Hsieh Ho some seven centuries before. Hsieh Ho's six standards, by which Chinese painting was judged: 1) rhythmic vitality, 2) anatomical structure, 3) conformity with nature, 4) suitability of coloring, 5) artistic grouping, 6) copying of classical masterpieces. In striving to meet these requirements, even the greatest of Ming painters seldom departed from familiar themes; but they achieved such happy variations as scholarly Shen Chou's pink study of spring (see cut), and they more than made up in refinement what they lacked in fire.

Ming ceramics, both plain white and bright-colored, were more distinctive products of the age. Of the two shown here, the underworld god at left has a clenched intensity seldom equaled in Western sculpture; the Oriental Apollo at right, riding a rooster into the dawn light, is no less intense in his calmness. Both ceramics share the one quality that Chinese artists have always considered of first importance: a linear fluency like that of clouds driven before a gale.

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