Renowned Chinese Painter Fu Baoshi Takes on U.S.
Revered Chinese modern painter Fu Baoshi's life was an epic journey -- literally and figuratively -- but only now, with retrospectives in the United States, has his powerfully emotional body of work traveled as far as the West.
New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday opens "Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965)," an exhibition that seeks to put this giant of Chinese culture on the international map.
"He's not a household name over here, but in China everyone knows his name," said Maxwell Hearn, curator of the show. "He's the Van Gogh or Monet of modern China."
Featuring 90 works that had never before been taken outside China, the exhibit, which first showed last year at the Cleveland Museum of Art, is being given red carpet treatment by the Met.
Hearn, accompanied by Gong Liang, director of the Nanjing Museum, which is loaning the works, could not contain his excitement at this "wonderful way to introduce modern Chinese art to New York."
For sure, Fu is a Chinese master. His ink paintings reflect his nation's ancient fascination for the mountains, waterfalls and gorges of the vast land. His early figures depict classical scenes of poets and nobles.
Yet in a short life between 1904 and 1965, Fu enriched this essential Chinese character with layers of unexpected influences.
The first was a formative trip as a youngish man to Japan between 1932 and 1935, then on the cusp of the Japanese invasion of China.
Although the enemy, Japan was also admired by the Chinese for its comparative sophistication and it was there that Fu, virtually unschooled in art, finally immersed himself in Japanese and Western artistic developments.
The startling result of his transformation is illustrated between the first and second rooms of the Met exhibit.
In the first, hang Fu's competent, but two-dimensional landscapes. In the next, post-Japan, his work erupts in dreamy, romantic and soulful paintings unrecognizable as products of the same hand.
Fu remained driven by the spirits of his artistic ancestors. Chief among those was a poet named Qu Yuan who committed suicide in the 3rd century BC and whom Fu seems to have deeply loved.
Among his business endeavors was carving the stone seals that Chinese used to stamp papers in place of signatures, and on one of these, just the size of a few sugar cubes, Fu somehow etched in an amazing 2,765 characters.
The tiny inscriptions are the entire text of Qu Yuan's poem "Li Sao," or "On Encountering Sorrow."
In a startlingly moody painting, Fu also portrayed the poet before he commits suicide by diving into a river clutching heavy stones. Fu adopted the name Baoshi, which means "embracing stones."
Although high-minded, Fu was well grounded when it came to surviving -- and growing artistically -- through his country's next calamity: the communist revolution.
On the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, traditional artists fell out of favor. State ideologists wanted everyone, including painters, to serve the revolution and to reject the country's feudal past.
Fu shifted, while staying true to his roots.
A little more color crept into his paintings, with more than a hint of red, and his subject matter turned to revolutionary themes of soldiers and industry. However, the ethereal, mythical style remained unchanged, creating a unique blend.
He pleased revolutionary leader Mao Zedong by depicting his poems, but there was never a hint of Soviet-style social realism. Even a coal mine landscape or a painting based on a propaganda photograph of Mao swimming across the Yangtze River are filled with Fu's spirit.
Hearn said Fu's ability to compromise was a skill contemporary Chinese artists -- particularly since the revolutions of the Arab Spring -- must also master if they want to work. "They must not transgress some unseen and ever-changing line of what is not acceptable."