Awards

2007 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art

James Cahill

James Cahill

James Cahill is the 2007 recipient of the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art. Cahill, a longtime professor at the University of California, Berkeley (now emeritus), is the acknowledged leader of his discipline: the history of painting in China. Though scholarship on this vast subject has a long and distinguished past, Cahill has spent his career remaking the study of Chinese painting for new generations of students. He is widely praised for his sensitive incorporation of innovative methodologies from European art history, many derived from distinguished colleagues at Berkeley, which he sensitively modifies and translates for use in their appropriate context for China.

The combination of a curator’s eye and an academic’s methodological range has continued to inform Cahill’s scholarship from his earliest Skira volume, Chinese Painting (1960; still in print) and his Asia House exhibition of Southern Sung painting (1961) to his participation in later exhibitions and the compilation of An Index of Early Chinese Painters and Paintings: T’ang, Sung, Yüan (1980). Like most scholars in his field, he has had to span the full range of Chinese cultural history—witness his participation in the anthology Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting (1997; ed. by Richard M. Barnhart)—but he was also a pioneer in opening a dialogue with the art and the scholars of the People’s Republic of China as early as a 1983 exhibition on contemporary Chinese painting.

A mark of his distinction has been the numerous invitations he has received to present major lecture series, including the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures and the Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures at Harvard University and the Franklin D. Murphy Lectures at the University of Kansas. Testing his innovative ideas in these public fora, Cahill has produced some of his most provocative and daring interpretations of Chinese art: The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting (1982), Three Alternate Histories of Chinese Painting (1988), and The Lyric Journey: Poetic Painting in China and Japan (1996). He is perhaps best remembered by students in his field for his magisterial three-volume survey of major artists from the Yüan to Ming dynasties: Hills beyond a River: Chinese Painting of the Yüan Dynasty, 1279–1368 (1976), Parting at the Shore: Chinese Painting of the Early and Middle Ming Dynasty, 1368–1580 (1978), and Distant Mountains: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming Dynasty, 1570–1644 (1982)—handsome and lasting volumes whose very names are redolent of Chinese painting subjects and whose sensitive readings of individual artists and pictures set new standards for informed clarity. His gemlike book, The Painter’s Practice: How Artists Lived and Worked in Traditional China (1994), now offers standard reading on a topic only dimly addressed by earlier scholars.

The CAA Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art should be given to someone whose leadership goes beyond his or her own field to speak to the discipline as a whole. Cahill exemplifies this productive dialogue across periods and geographical regions. All art historians have benefited and continue to benefit from his insights into Chinese art and from his sensitivity to the general problems of studying artists, artworks, and cultural questions.

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