.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
THE LYRICAL LINES
Ink drawing requires an assured hand, a spontaneous gesture and a witty eye on the model; all three components Sanyu sharpens at the Grande Chaumière Academy in Paris Montparnasse area every afternoon during open sessions of nude model poses.
Pang Xunqin, Sanyu's friend declares "There are several academies in Montparnasse, the most famous being La Grande Chaumière… where one can go mornings or afternoons. Sanyu and I always went in the afternoons to sketch. (…) Sanyu would sketch with a brush and ink. Everybody knew him and when he arrived, people would gather around him. If the model struck an interesting pose, he would sketch her, otherwise, he would sketch the people around him, particularly the women, completing each sketch in ten minutes. Most interestingly he would sometimes show his fellow sketchers, no matter male or female, young or old, as nude. And nobody seemed to mind. In fact, they all admired him, I imagine this is how he spent his more than ten years in Paris."
THE FEMALE BODY AS AVANT - GARDIST EXPLORATION
Away from China where the nude drawing was strictly censored since a 1917 controversy, and fleeing the dead-end academism of the Parisian Beaux-Arts school, Sanyu found himself at the Grande Chaumière Academy at the very heart of the European Avantgarde movements. His instinctive freedom matched the Post World War I era where artists escaped the establishment and a post-traumatic gloomy reality in seeking new modes of representation.
Sanyu met Man Ray through Kiki de Montparnasse, muse and artists' lover, or through Henri-Pierre Roché, his dealer between 1929 and 1932. As Sanyu takes up the brush Man Ray uses photography and the distortion or exposure of the camera's lens to interpret the female body as abstract forms. Both artists similarly challenge the representation with a poetic eye, exaggerating a waistline, a heavy leg (Seated Nude, Lot 651), underlining a back bend or subtly omitting a leg (Seated Woman, Lot 655).
THE ESSENCE OF SIMPLICITY
By the 1930s Henri Matisse started drawing nudes in "Themes and Variations", exploring the simplification of forms which then ultimately led to his 1950s paper cut-out series. The female silhouette is reduced to minimalistic lines flirting with abstraction. Thus, the drawing moves away from reality and becomes an autonomous sign, like a Chinese character. Matisse qualifying his drawings as "line writing" could as well perfectly apply to Sanyu's calligraphic brushstrokes.
Whereas Sanyu's paintings benefited from a larger exposure, his graphic body of work remained confidential until the first exhibition in Asia organized in 1982 by Antoine Chen at the Printmaker's Gallery in Taipei. Sanyu's drawings, with their pure lines and dexterous preciseness, are today recognized as the quintessential expression of his art, an example of Chinese aesthetic of simplicity and the embrace of the modernist minimalism.
Ink drawing requires an assured hand, a spontaneous gesture and a witty eye on the model; all three components Sanyu sharpens at the Grande Chaumière Academy in Paris Montparnasse area every afternoon during open sessions of nude model poses.
Pang Xunqin, Sanyu's friend declares "There are several academies in Montparnasse, the most famous being La Grande Chaumière… where one can go mornings or afternoons. Sanyu and I always went in the afternoons to sketch. (…) Sanyu would sketch with a brush and ink. Everybody knew him and when he arrived, people would gather around him. If the model struck an interesting pose, he would sketch her, otherwise, he would sketch the people around him, particularly the women, completing each sketch in ten minutes. Most interestingly he would sometimes show his fellow sketchers, no matter male or female, young or old, as nude. And nobody seemed to mind. In fact, they all admired him, I imagine this is how he spent his more than ten years in Paris."
THE FEMALE BODY AS AVANT - GARDIST EXPLORATION
Away from China where the nude drawing was strictly censored since a 1917 controversy, and fleeing the dead-end academism of the Parisian Beaux-Arts school, Sanyu found himself at the Grande Chaumière Academy at the very heart of the European Avantgarde movements. His instinctive freedom matched the Post World War I era where artists escaped the establishment and a post-traumatic gloomy reality in seeking new modes of representation.
Sanyu met Man Ray through Kiki de Montparnasse, muse and artists' lover, or through Henri-Pierre Roché, his dealer between 1929 and 1932. As Sanyu takes up the brush Man Ray uses photography and the distortion or exposure of the camera's lens to interpret the female body as abstract forms. Both artists similarly challenge the representation with a poetic eye, exaggerating a waistline, a heavy leg (Seated Nude, Lot 651), underlining a back bend or subtly omitting a leg (Seated Woman, Lot 655).
THE ESSENCE OF SIMPLICITY
By the 1930s Henri Matisse started drawing nudes in "Themes and Variations", exploring the simplification of forms which then ultimately led to his 1950s paper cut-out series. The female silhouette is reduced to minimalistic lines flirting with abstraction. Thus, the drawing moves away from reality and becomes an autonomous sign, like a Chinese character. Matisse qualifying his drawings as "line writing" could as well perfectly apply to Sanyu's calligraphic brushstrokes.
Whereas Sanyu's paintings benefited from a larger exposure, his graphic body of work remained confidential until the first exhibition in Asia organized in 1982 by Antoine Chen at the Printmaker's Gallery in Taipei. Sanyu's drawings, with their pure lines and dexterous preciseness, are today recognized as the quintessential expression of his art, an example of Chinese aesthetic of simplicity and the embrace of the modernist minimalism.