L’art classique chinois dans la pensée française et francophone contemporaine

Abstract

Chinese art, in particular literati calligraphy and painting in the Chinese classical period, is an important object of reflection and imagination for contemporary French and Francophone theorists. Focusing on the interpretation of Chinese art among these theorists, this article will first examine how Chinese classical painting and calligraphy entered the French theoretical horizon of the twentieth century; secondly, it will try to make a synthesis of some emblematic theorists concerned (Henri Michaux, Hubert Damisch, Jacques Maritain, Jean-François Billeter, François Jullien, François Cheng) and their theoretical works related to Chinese classical art, in order to draw some main lines and orientations on the history of the approaches of Chinese classical art in the West; finally, it will attempt to propose the perspective, intercultural and intermedia, to analyze the dialogue between the French and Francophone contemporary thought and the Chinese pictorial and calligraphic classical art.

Keywords:

• French and Francophone theory
• Chinese classical art
• interculturality
• intermediality

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Voir Raphaël Petrucci, La philosophie de la nature dans l’art d’Extrême-Orient (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1910); Raphaël Petrucci, Les peintres chinois (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1913).

2 Voir Édouard Chavannes et Raphaël Petrucci, La peinture chinoise au Musée Cernuschi (avril-juin 1912) (Bruxelles et Paris: Librairie Nationale d’Art et d’Histoire, 1914).

3 Voir Gisbert Combaz, La peinture chinoise vue par un peintre occidental. Introduction à l’histoire de la peinture chinoise, collection Mélanges chinois et bouddhiques, volume VI (Bruges: Imprimerie sainte Catherine, 1939).

4 Voir Hubert Damisch, Traité du trait / Tractatus tractus (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1995); Hubert Damisch, Théorie du nuage. Pour une histoire de la peinture. (Paris: Seuil, 1972).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Youth Program of the National Social Science Fund of China [Grant number: 22CWW001].

Notes on contributors

Weiwei Xiang

Weiwei Xiang is a lecturer of French at Shanghai University. She received her Ph.D. in French and Francophone Literature from the University of Strasbourg in 2018. She is the author of a book based on her thesis Interculturality and intermediality among Chinese francophone authors (L’Harmattan, 2021), as well as several articles on Chinese francophone literature and francophone world literature.