New Books In Art

Ink landscape painting was distinctive to the Song dynasty, and the Northern Song period was a special time for the medium. By the tenth century, this kind of painting emerged as a “scholars’ category” whose “values were especially worthy of support” in critical scholarly discourse, according to Ping Foong‘s fascinating new book. Bringing together paintings, poems, colophons, texts about painting, and other sources, Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015) looks carefully at the imperial establishment’s efforts “to cultivate the genre of ink landscape painting and its iconography as a dynastic project.” In a story that focuses on Shenzong’s favorite painter: Guo Xi (after 1000-ca. 1090), Part I of The Efficacious Landscape brings readers into the spaces of the Song imperial city and their political connotations, from a careful exploration of the political import of the paintings decorating the walls of the Hanlin Institute, to a re