PAINTINGS BY SAGES

THE Cleveland Museum of Art last week opened the finest survey of Chinese landscape painting ever assembled in America. Its 137 exhibits, borrowed from collections as far distant as Tokyo and Beirut, ranged from the 4th century to the 19th, and included dozens of masterpieces. Though Europe has produced a host of great landscapists, from Claude Lorrain to Paul Cezanne, the West's best could have learned much from the Chinese.

In Europe, landscape painting did not amount to much until religious art declined. Things were very different in the East, for China's two greatest religious leaders, Confucius and Lao-tse, carefully taught their followers to contemplate landscapes. Wrote Chuang-tse, a disciple of Lao-tse: "The true sage, taking his stand upon the beauty of the universe, pierces the principles of created things."

What Cleveland's show proved to the hilt was that China's greatest artists were also sages, and that their brushes could not only pierce but also lay bare, with a few swift strokes of intuition, the "principles" of nature. Rocks become bones of Earth itself; rivers become her blood, trees her hair, and everything moves in a rhythm deeper than man's scurry.

In a just-published book, Aspects of Chinese Painting (Macmillan; $7.50), Alan Priest, Far Eastern expert of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum, explains: "The Chinese look upon natural things with an eye and feeling more intimate than is common to the West. The scholar seated under the ancient pine looking out upon the lofty hills is not alone; he is part of them, and they of him."

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