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拍品专文
The guiding force behind Wu Guanzhong's creative work was always his intent to 'nationalize oil painting' and to 'modernize Chinese painting.' His lifetime goal, as a huge wave of Western influence swept across China, was to explore the 'East-West road' that could connect modern painting with traditional ink-wash painting. This season Christie's presents two Wu Guanzhong works from 70s and 90s, offering an overview of his creative development.
Wu Guanzhong confronted a turning point in his creative work during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). At the time, Chinese painting had adopted Soviet Socialist Realism as its new standard, making it difficult to employ the European styles he had learned. Faced with so many restrictions, he threw himself into landscape painting, and as a result, set out on a path that would lead toward abstraction. During that period he was involved with rural labor in a region of Hebei, where due to a shortage of materials, he was forced to paint on wooden panels from small blackboards he took apart. As time allowed after work, he took up a basket and became a "manure-basket painter." Based on his past experience producing large volumes of sketches, he reorganized images of various objects into new compositions, displaying beautiful modeling of form and successfully producing a number of masterpieces on themes of rural life. Wu Guanzhong once said, 'Plein air painting is nothing more than spatiality, solid forms and empty spaces, near and far distance, and color, with relatively weak lines.' In A Scene of Beidaihe (Lot 213), Wu takes special care that we view the distant scene through the foreground—through gaps in the straight, upright trees—to create visual interest in this rural village scene. Giving lines this kind of prominence as he managed the dynamic rhythms of his paintings would later become one of the hallmarks of his compositions; the 1970s thus became an important period in the development of his personal style.
A Scene of Yunnan (Lot 212), from 1993, is likely based on impressions and sketches Wu Guanzhong made as he painted from life there in the late '70s. He often painted different versions of such subjects if he found them memorable or worth exploring from a different viewpoint, and in A Scene of Yunnan we see a fine example of his practiced skill and ingenuity at managing a composition. Wu studied under Pan Tainshou in his youth, and he believed that Pan's greatest contributions in the ink medium had to do with the way he managed his compositions, first determining their proportions on paper and augmenting their visual impact to create greater aesthetic beauty. The aesthetic beauty of A Scene of Yunnan derives from the contrast between solid forms and empty spaces on the left and right sides of the painting and its long, extended lines. These in turn derive directly from the ink painting tradition and help create Wu's special, individual style.
Wu Guanzhong was a practitioner of the action school of painting. In his plein air paintings he sought to first understand the natural images he saw, and to gain a feel for the beauty of the mountains and rivers of a natural scene. His inner understanding was then refined and condensed into a kind of crystallized, formalistic beauty, and by combining techniques from both ink and oil painting, he produced lyrical, expressive works with great charm and appeal. On his own personal road to 'nationalizing oil painting' and 'modernizing Chinese painting,' he produced a unique and innovative style of painting deeply rooted in the beauty and flavor of local scenes.
Wu Guanzhong confronted a turning point in his creative work during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). At the time, Chinese painting had adopted Soviet Socialist Realism as its new standard, making it difficult to employ the European styles he had learned. Faced with so many restrictions, he threw himself into landscape painting, and as a result, set out on a path that would lead toward abstraction. During that period he was involved with rural labor in a region of Hebei, where due to a shortage of materials, he was forced to paint on wooden panels from small blackboards he took apart. As time allowed after work, he took up a basket and became a "manure-basket painter." Based on his past experience producing large volumes of sketches, he reorganized images of various objects into new compositions, displaying beautiful modeling of form and successfully producing a number of masterpieces on themes of rural life. Wu Guanzhong once said, 'Plein air painting is nothing more than spatiality, solid forms and empty spaces, near and far distance, and color, with relatively weak lines.' In A Scene of Beidaihe (Lot 213), Wu takes special care that we view the distant scene through the foreground—through gaps in the straight, upright trees—to create visual interest in this rural village scene. Giving lines this kind of prominence as he managed the dynamic rhythms of his paintings would later become one of the hallmarks of his compositions; the 1970s thus became an important period in the development of his personal style.
A Scene of Yunnan (Lot 212), from 1993, is likely based on impressions and sketches Wu Guanzhong made as he painted from life there in the late '70s. He often painted different versions of such subjects if he found them memorable or worth exploring from a different viewpoint, and in A Scene of Yunnan we see a fine example of his practiced skill and ingenuity at managing a composition. Wu studied under Pan Tainshou in his youth, and he believed that Pan's greatest contributions in the ink medium had to do with the way he managed his compositions, first determining their proportions on paper and augmenting their visual impact to create greater aesthetic beauty. The aesthetic beauty of A Scene of Yunnan derives from the contrast between solid forms and empty spaces on the left and right sides of the painting and its long, extended lines. These in turn derive directly from the ink painting tradition and help create Wu's special, individual style.
Wu Guanzhong was a practitioner of the action school of painting. In his plein air paintings he sought to first understand the natural images he saw, and to gain a feel for the beauty of the mountains and rivers of a natural scene. His inner understanding was then refined and condensed into a kind of crystallized, formalistic beauty, and by combining techniques from both ink and oil painting, he produced lyrical, expressive works with great charm and appeal. On his own personal road to 'nationalizing oil painting' and 'modernizing Chinese painting,' he produced a unique and innovative style of painting deeply rooted in the beauty and flavor of local scenes.