82nd & Fifth from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Maxwell K. Hearn

Photography by

Eileen Travell

Cloudy Mountains, Late Yuan (1271–1368)–early Ming (1368–1644) dynasty, second half of 14th century
Fang Congyi (Chinese)
Handscroll; ink and color on paper
Ex coll.: C. C. Wang Family, Purchase, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, by exchange, 1973 (1973.121.4)

Music by Austin Fisher

You hold this painting in your hands. You are leaving
your world behind and entering the world
of the picture. As you unroll
the scroll it unfolds almost
like a movie.
The very first thing you see is a foreground promontory in which we can
make out the roof of a temple surrounded by trees.
From that temple we look into this vast, watery expanse that leads to
distant mountains that are almost
dissolving into the clouds.
We move down to the very tip of this foreground spit of land. We see
individual grass blades.
Looking beyond that foreground into the distance, we see
these mountains that emerge from the mist, we encounter trees that are far
smaller in scale. Even though we’re moving just
a matter of inches, we’ve actually covered an enormous distance.
The mountain peaks all of a sudden
leap into this middle ground space, like some huge dinosaur that rises up almost
to the top edge of the scroll.
The trees at the base of the mountains
become smaller and smaller. The clouds
rise further and further. The mountains seem to diminish in weight, in substance,
until we see just a trail of
faint blue ink that ultimately disappears so that
the end of the scroll is completely blank.
The water, the sky, the clouds merge together into a single,
empty void. There’s not a single human in the scroll.
Only that temple, and the familiar landscape of
trees and rocks in the foreground, anchors us in reality.
We’ve gone from the solid world into this confrontation
with the ultimate emptiness of life.
This painting takes us to a world
that reaches all the way to eternity.
So we’re really confronted with our own mortality.
Life begins out of emptiness and ends in emptiness,
and that brief period in between is what we have to live with.

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82nd & Fifth

EternityMaxwell K. Hearn

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