The British understanding of Chinese painting owed much to Laurence Binyon (1869-1943) who enriched the British Museum’s collections of Oriental painting, and for almost forty years, published widely and delivered lectures in Britain and abroad. Binyon’s legacy is to be found in several archival resources scattered in Britain, America, Japan and China. This dissertation is a study of the reception of Chinese painting in early twentieth century Britain, and examines Binyon’s contribution to its appreciation and criticism in the West. By examining the William Anderson collection of Japanese and Chinese paintings (1881), I illuminate Anderson’s way of seeing Chinese pictorial art and his influence on Binyon’s early study of Oriental painting. I argue that the early scroll, The Admonitions of the Court Instructress, which Binyon encountered in 1903, ignited his interest in the study of traditional Chinese painting, yet his conception of Chinese pictorial art was influenced by Japanese and Western expertise. To reveal the British taste and growing interest in Chinese painting around 1910, Binyon’s involvements in major acquisitions and exhibitions of Chinese paintings at the British Museum, including the Sir Aurel Stein collection (1909) and the Frau Olga-Julia Wegener collection (1910), as well as his visits to Western collections of Chinese art in America and Germany, will be investigated. In order to understand the relevance and values of Chinese painting for the development of early twentieth-century British art, I also scrutinize how the principle of “rhythmic vitality” or qiyun shengdong, as well as the Daoist-and Zen-inspired aesthetic ideas were assiduously promoted in Binyon’s writings on Chinese painting, and how Chinese art and thought kindled British modernists to fuse art with life in order to re-vitalize the spirit of modern European art with non-scientific conceptions.

La relation entre les peintures chinoise et occidentale apparait comme une rencontre entre l’eau et l’huile. Mélanger les deux étant impossible, comment, dès lors, un artiste entre deux cultures, peut-il faciliter leur dialogue et devenir un passeur ? Cette recherche tente d’associer la technique des matériaux occidentaux avec l’expression du pinceau et de l’encre liés au concept du plein et du vide afin d’explorer des oppositions complémentaires, en créant une réalité diluée dans un contraste harmonisé. La réflexion s’est concrétisée par des peintures en trois formats : la série, le rouleau et l’album, intitulées Musée en peinture. Formats qui permettent d’aborder aussi bien les questions de l’écoulement du temps, de la circulation du regard, de la dynamique spatiale, que celles de l’extension et de la suggestion. Ces peintures interrogent le phénomène du musée en portant un regard ironique, critique et empathique sur les spectateurs et leurs travers. Elles témoignent aussi de la conversation avec les maîtres anciens et d’un cheminement dans les musées. La réalisation de ce musée des musées consiste en un processus de transfert de la photographie vers la composition photographique, puis vers la peinture. Ce processus se rapproche de la structure cinématographique, à partir du montage filmique d’Eisenstein, et de la notion de continuité et de discontinuité de Raoul Ruiz. Avec la boîte de Poussin numérique, on joue à la fois le rôle de peintre, de metteur en scène et de documentariste. Exploré, le passé se mue en espace, en reconstituant le passage du monde réel au monde virtuel, du ça-a-été de Roland Barthes à la notion du ça n’a pas été. / The relationship between Chinese and Western painting appears as a meeting of water and oil. Mixing the two seems impossible, so how can an artist create a dialogue between two cultures and media, effectively becoming a cultural conduit ? This research attempts to combine the techniques of Western materials with the expression of Chinese brush and ink, which is linked to the concept of fullness and tangible versus emptiness and abstract. From here, we explore the complementary opposition, create a “diluted reality” in a harmonized contrast. This reflection, entitled Museum in Painting, is represented in three different formats: the series, the scroll, and the album. These formats allow us to explore ideas of the flow of time, the circulation of the gaze, the spatial dynamics, as well as the topic of Extension and Suggestion. From the satirical, critical, and empathic point of views, we investigate the audience and their quirks, questioning the phenomenon of museum. These works exhibit my intellectual journey through the museum, and the conversation with the old masters. The realization of this museum of museums is a transfer process from photography to digital composition, and then to the painting. It takes the concepts of Eisenstein's film montage and Raoul Ruiz’s continuity and discontinuity to explore its relevance to the cinematographic composition and structure. With the “Digitized Box of Poussin”, we played the role of painter, director and documentary filmmaker to explore the idea of past events becoming a space to re-create a pathway from the real world to the virtual world, from Roland Barthes’ concept of “what happened” to the concept that is put forward that “it didn’t happen”.