Retouching in Guo Xi’s Early Spring, or How a Song Painting Comes to Look Ming

Harvard Yenching Institute and the Fairbanks Center presents a lecture by Professor Joan Stanley-Baker on the evolution of aesthetics in Chinese painting.

Over the centuries restorers and re-mounters have been making morphological additions to ancient works, the essence and structure of which had been long since forgotten. Each addition tells a tale of its own time. Dr. Stanley-Baker will explain how different centuries demanded different motifs and aesthetics. Brushwork behavior changes with the centuries along with structure and morphology that together provide the visual environment we have known as zeitgeist.

Joan Stanley-Baker attended primary school in Rome and Chungking, and nurtured her passion for the arts at Bennington and Princeton. Her Oxford MLitt and DPhil culminated in her book Old Masters Repainted Wu Zhen Prime Objects and Accretions (1995). The book identifies genuine specimens with new techniques overturning centuries of misattributions. Aside from excavating genuine autographs, she stresses dating the often more famous forgeries that have since acquired functional authenticity and continue to inform today’s misperception. In 1987 as OUGBC’s Captain of Women, she rowed in the world’s first Seatrials of the Athenian Trireme at Poros.