“The Western Clouds”:
Modernist Art, Intellectual Trends and Encounters
A Poet’s Perspective - Liu Haisu – Yan Wenliang - Modernist Painters - Taiwanese Painters Studying in Japan - Pang Xunqin and the Storm Society - China Independent Art Association - Modern Artistic Ideas - Lin Fengmian - The Decline of Modernism
A Poet’s Perspective
I leave softly, gently,
exactly as I came.
I wave to the cloud in the western sky,
farewelling it so softly, gently.
These lines are from ‘Second farewell to Cambridge’, completed on 6 November 1928 by the poet Xu Zhimo (1896-1931), when he took leave of the university where he had earlier spent six years before his first return to China in 1925. The poem contained the well-turned and highly admired phrases of a liberal intellectual of that time, as well as the depth of refined feeling said to characterize the ‘petty bourgeoisie’. By the time he returned to China, Xu had already benefited from his conversations with Thomas Hardy, Katherine Mansfield, Bertrand Russell, and Roger Fry, and so had naturally come to accept a cosmopolitan world-view.
Indeed, in an article in reply to Xu Beihong, Xu Zhimo very clearly made a case for modernism influencing China. When introducing Western art, Xu Beihong avoided modernism as much as possible because of his personal distaste for it, but Xu Zhimo did not at all eschew the influence of French post-impressionism, even though the degree of this influence was different in places and was understood in different ways:
I have personally heard, and you also most probably also have experience of, how students with less than three weeks of studying painting are flung into heated debates on the relative virtues of classicism and post-impressionism, with Van Gogh’s pears pitched against Correggio’s Madonna, and Cézanne’s apples locked in battle with Botticelli’s Venus. Their facility of argument and the heated spirit in which they can evoke names command my speechless admiration. This is most probably, but I am guessing, brought in from our neighbourhood grocer to the east. Japan follows Germany in everything, and Germany is a forest largely filled with ‘isms’, but away from those gnarled thickets of proliferating ‘isms’, abstract debate about art is virtually impossible. Among the progressive Western European painting schools the most invoked, for some unknown reason, and the most discussed (although the least discussed as theory) happen to be those called the post-impressionist, lord knows why! The first people in China (with the possible exception of Cai Yuanpei) to have discussed Cézanne, Van Gogh and Matisse seem to have never seen these painters’ actual works! I may be a provincial but I dare to claim that I am the layman who first brought sets of prints of Cézanne and Van Gogh back to this country! One of the reasons why this group of artists is so fashionable is also why vers libre, the short story and the one-act play have proven so popular – apparent ease of understanding. I absolutely sympathize with those diligent friends in art schools and colleges who disparage Cézanne for being rated as a first-class painter, in the same way in which I can appreciate how those older scholars trained in classical prose cannot tolerate the poetry written by Hu Shi. You say that he could churn out three paintings in an hour, and that does not fall too far short of the truth. When Van Gogh was suffering dire poverty, he was able to complete three paintings in a day, and sold each for a franc. Three francs kept him in bread, coffee and a plug of tobacco for the day!’[1]
Liu Haisu
Liu Haisu (1896-1994) maintained an extremely close and long-lasting friendship with Xu Zhimo. Born in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, Liu’s original name was Liu Jifang, but in the winter of 1912, when he was in the big world of Shanghai for the first time, he drew on a well known line from the Song Dynasty poet Su Dongpo (‘a grain of millet in the vast ocean’) for his sobriquet ‘Haisu’ (literally, ‘Ocean millet’). In November 1912, Liu had already begun to get involved with Wu Shiguang and other ‘individuals outside art circles’ in the preparations for the establishment of the Shanghai Visual Arts Institute. In 1919, after Wu Shiguang and Zhang Yiguang successively left the school, Liu Haisu took over the position of head of the school which he retained until 1949.
In 1917, when Liu Haisu read Cai Yuanpei’s ‘On Replacing Religion with Aesthetic Education’, he dashed off a letter to Cai in the hope that Cai would possibly teach and assist him. Cai Yuanpei later did provide a series of measures of support for Liu’s school. In 1921, Cai Yuanpei invited Liu Haisu to teach European modern philosophy of art at the Peking University Society for the Study of Painting Methods. Not having been to Europe, Liu Haisu was somewhat uncomfortable with the appointment having only gleaned his knowledge of European modern art through publications, but Cai Yuanpei offered him great encouragement. In 1922, Cai Yuanpei organized the first one-man exhibition for Liu Haisu at the Beijing Normal School, for which with Li Jianxun he co-wrote the ‘Introduction to the artist Liu Haisu’ for the exhibition, which was published in the Peking University Journal on 16 January 1922.
In June 1919 Liu Haisu introduced the impressionists in his article titled ‘Outline History of Western Landscape Painting’, and in September of that year he went to Tokyo together with Chen Shizeng, to investigate Japanese art education. When he returned to China he boldly devoted the first issue of volume 1 of Fine Arts to impressionism, for which he wrote ‘The Art of Cézanne’. Influences of French impressionism are readily discernible in his works Returning Light, The Feeling of the Red Pipes and The Lama Temple completed in 1921 and in Beijing Qianmen completed in the following year, with the thick brush strokes, the strong, simple and bold colors, and the abbreviated objects depicted in the work, even though he would not see original works by Cézanne and Van Gogh until after 1929.
From 1925 to 1926, Liu Haisu became embroiled in an episode that came to be called the ‘Model Incident’ which landed him in trouble for using nude women for his live sketching classes. As early as 1917, an exhibition of practice pieces by students from the Shanghai Visual Arts Institute had shocked one visitor, Yang Baimin, the principal of the Shanghai East City Girls’ School, because of the images of nude models on display, and Yang had declared, ‘Liu Haisu is an art renegade and vermin among educational circles! The open display of nudes is extremely damaging to social morals!’ In August 1919, Liu Haisu and several other painters were again attacked in the press because of nude figural oil paintings in an exhibition held by the Global Students Union in Jing’an Monastery Road, Shanghai. In July 1924, Rao Guiju, a student at the Shanghai Art Academy held an exhibition of nude figural works in Nanchang, which was banned by the Jiangxi Police Department. On hearing the news, Liu Haisu wrote to Huang Fu, the Minister of Education, and Cai Chengxun, the governor of Jiangxi province, calling on them not to bring ‘shame on the nation’ through such ignorant behavior. Following Huang Fu’s intervention, the Jiangxi Police Department lifted their ban.
In 1925, perhaps because of the influence and social power he had built up over many years, Liu Haisu continued to demonstrate a daring and libertarian attitude, and in January of that year, he wrote an article titled ‘The Renegades of Art’, in which he called on people to be ‘art renegades’:
In today’s ugly society and in this age of vileness, what is lacking is this type of art renegade! I hope that my friends do not abandon their courage, and that everybody becomes an art renegade! The successes of certain doctrines have created unreal idols, and so we should not hope to succeed, but rather to destroy and wage a war of resistance, and that will be our greatness! If we can continue to produce renegades, then we will go on creating a new life for humankind.[2]
On 24 August 1925, the Jiangsu provincial educational conference passed a motion banning the use of nude models, but later Liu regarded this as a personal attack, likening himself to Socrates. Liu even wrote to the warlord Sun Chuanfang, maintaining his uncompromising position. Liu Haisu at the end of the letter unsubtly reminded Sun Chuanfang not to be crude and rash in acting willfully. The upshot can be imagined and for whatever complex reasons, Sun Chuanfang proceeded to issue secret warrant for the arrest of Liu Haisu. Yet the final outcome was that Liu Haisu was fined a symbolically trifling 50 yuan for ‘defamation of character and behavior detrimental to public morality’, and the school continued to use nude models as previously.[3] As Fu Lei (1908-1966), Liu Haisu’s friend, commented, the student’s painting of nude models ‘embodied an unprecedented victory of Western thought over eastern thought in the fields of art and ethics, and so it had particular significance’.[4]
Two early trips abroad strengthened Liu Haisu’s understanding of European modernism. From March 1929 when he arrived in Paris until the autumn of 1931when he returned home, Liu Haisu participated in the Paris Autumn Salon of 1929, in which he entered the painting Qianmen. In 1930 he participated in the Tuileries Salon in Paris, and in the Belgian Independence Centennial Exhibition, in which he entered Nine Streams and Eighteen Ravines; and in 1931 he again participated in the Tuileries Salon, submitting three works – Notre Dame de Paris, Cathedral of Louvain and Still Life. In 1931, Liu Haisu gave a lecture at the Chinese Institute in Germany’s Frankfurt University on the Chinese ‘theory of six methods’ of painting and presided over the Chinese Modern Painting Exhibition. His investigations and travel in Europe afforded Liu Haisu many opportunities to observe things, and presented him with the chance to exhibit in 1932 the paintings of Europe he completed during his travels. In 1934, when he returned to Germany to organize a Chinese modern art exhibition in Berlin, he had clearly acquired an international reputation.
After the July Seventh Incident of 1937, classes were suspended at Liu Haisu’s school. Japanese troops quickly occupied Shanghai, and in December that year, Liu Haisu was invited to Jakarta by the Jakarta Chinese Association and so he travelled to Southeast Asia to hold fund-raising exhibitions for the war effort. When passing through Hong Kong, he visited Cai Yuanpei who was there for medical treatment. Cai’s death three months later seemed to become another symbolic turning point in Liu Haisu’s life.
Liu Haisu’s disposition tended towards the post-impressionists, because his taste was shaped by the European artists whom he met during his two trips to Europe, in 1929 and 1933, and who were completely different from Xu Beihong. In Europe, he made a study of the art and thought of Kandinsky and translated some of Roger Fry’s writings. Consequently, although Liu Haisu never stopped using traditional tools, such as the writing brush, rice paper, ink and wash, in his painting practice, his importance in 20th century Chinese art history hinges on his highly individual introduction of early Western modernism. At the same time as Xu Beihong was insisting on realist painting and solid sketching, Liu Haisu was emphasizing expressive freedom and poetic character; when Xu Beihong was using realist techniques to transform the use of the brush in traditional style Chinese painting, Liu Haisu was making constant forays with his students to outdoor locations to paint en plein air and not restricting his students in their understanding of nature and techniques of expression, allowing them to choose the path that best suited them. This insistence on free thinking was the most important component in 20th century art history. Chinese artists, historically, were familiar with norms and ruler, but after they acquired freedom, an ongoing change of artistic values was apparent. Liu Haisu was one of the most important figures who first brought about this significant change in the 20th century.
Yan Wenliang
Yan Wenliang (1893-1988) was born in Suzhou, a southern city with a high concentration of intellectuals and scholar-painters. He was trained in the classical tradition in an old-style private school in his early years and, like most students of painting, copied illustrations from the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, but this background did not steer Yan Wenliang in the direction of traditional calligraphy and painting. Objects in the natural world provide a strong visual stimulus, and when Yan Wenliang saw a lifelike print of a Western still life oil painting of grapes and peaches in a picture framing store, he used all the money he had on him to buy this Western painting which had surprised him. Prior to this, Yan Wenliang only had some general knowledge about ‘watercolors’ (shuicai), but now this young man in Suzhou was beginning to understand the concept of ‘oil painting’ (youhua).
The lifelike effects of oil painting became the focus of Yan Wenliang’s interest, and he began to experiment in creating ‘oil paintings’ on canvas, beginning for example by applying mucilage to watercolor paintings so that they appeared glossier. In order to achieve lifelike results with oil painting, Yan Wenliang began to conduct naïve experiments with various materials. He first blended used vegetable oil with traditional painting pigments, but did not succeed in getting the painting to dry. He then mixed castor oil and various tints, and this combination also failed to dry. He subsequently tried mixing varnish or tung oil with pigment but these attempts also were without success, until he tried mixing fish oil in turpentine and introducing pigment as an experiment, and in this way he succeeded in being able to both work the brush and have the paint eventually dry. Using this mix, Yan Wenliang painted his first oil painting titled Moonlight Threading Stone Lake. Later, he again bought linseed oil and used solvents for his second ‘oil painting’ titled Dirigible. Interestingly, Yan Wenliang obtained a copy of a Western study on ‘perspective’ from the local chief of police Wang Zhongyuan, to whom he sold his painting ‘Dirigible’. In 1916, Yan Wenliang conducted further experiments with materials based on a Japanese work, Methods of Making Painting Materials of Yano Michiya (1876-1946) using methods explained in the book, he made a liquid using potassium dichromate and lead acetate, in which the precipitate was chrome yellow, the pigment made from lead chromate. This experimental material Yan Wenliang then used to cover the surface of his canvases, until he began using genuine oil painting pigments.[5]
Inspired by a bulletin published in winter 1918 about a competitive art exhibition held in conjunction with the world’s fair in San Francisco known as the Panama Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), which celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal, Yan Wenliang consulted with Yang Zuotao of Eastern Wu University about holding a ‘competitive exposition of fine arts and paintings’ (meishuhua saihui). The range of works collected for the exhibition was not to be limited to painters from Suzhou, but to include about two hundred works by Chinese- and Western-style artists working in ‘traditional painting (guocuihua), oil color painting (yousehua), water colors (shuisehua), poster color painting (qisehua), fountain pen drawing (gangbihua), charcoal drawing (tanhua), wax painting (lahua), lacquer painting (qihua), pokerwork [pyrography] (jiaohua), photographic tinting (zhaoxiang-zhaosehua) and embroidered pictures (cixiuhua)’.
In July 1922, Yan Wenliang, together with Hu Cuizhong, Zhu Shijie, Gu Zhonghua, and Cheng Shaochuan organized the Suzhou Fine Arts Summer Vacation School, held in the Haihong district offices of the Suzhou Lawyers Association, and the school attracted a total of more than one hundred students. After completion of the two-month course, Yan Wenliang, encouraged by the hope of many students to continue their studies and assisted by Gong Gengyu, the principal of the Suzhou County Middle School, set up the Suzhou Fine Arts School in September together with a number of friends. In fact, when Xu Beihong visited Suzhou in May 1928 to lecture, the school had already won a fine reputation.
With Xu Beihong’s encouragement and recommendation, Yan Wenliang set sail from Shanghai in September and in October had completed admission procedures for studying at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was to study in the studio of Professor Jean-Paul Laurence. Hoping like Xu Beihong to obtain strict academic training in the main fields of realist art, Yan Wenliang regularly visited museums and art galleries to copy the classics.
In the history of Chinese education in Western painting, Yan Wenliang was one of the early educators systematically teaching Western painting techniques, and he published lectures on the principles related to perspective and painting through the school publications. In 1928, Yan Wenliang wrote for his students An Elementary Discussion of Perspective, in order that they observe nature afresh. Trees are an important element in traditional Chinese landscape painting, and they are expressed with brush strokes that embody outlining (goule), tinting touches (dianran) and texturing (cunca). However, Yan Wenliang used European perspective to eliminate the need for reliance on brushstrokes with which Chinese painters were familiar, and for him the more important thing was requiring his young students to pay attention to scientific methods of observation.
Later, Yan Wenliang also wrote Perspective in Fine Arts, published in 1957. For the person familiar with The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, Yan Wenliang’s new expression of nature might seem alarming, even if he had some elementary knowledge of the principles of Western painting. The change from the observation of a section or a detail of nature and then outlining and highlighting it to the analysis of the overall structure marked a total contrast with ‘the method of free-flowing brush’ (yibi-caocao de fangfa); nature is not created by brush and ink applying traditional pictorial elements but must be first modeled and envisaged in outline on the basis of direct observation relying on the eye.
Yan Wenliang had an innate sensitivity to color. At an early age he appreciated the importance of light and as a result rapidly moved on towards the concrete expression of color. The colors in Yan Wenliang’s oil paintings were not lucid, to a great extent because the painter was limited by the shortage of pigments and a lack of adequate understanding of the original Western works. While studying abroad, his observation of original impressionist works and his always lively academic exercises addressed the veracity he had valued from the beginning, yet he could henceforth express himself fully by reliance on his own temperament and observation of light and color.
Many years later, in 1978, Yan Wenliang published Talking about Color, in which he summarized his experience of color. In this book analyzing color, Yan Wenliang provided a detailed introduction to his painting experience of several decades and we can appreciate his dazzling and rich sensitivity in any of the passages treating the analysis and description of color as though they were his actual paintings:
The colors used for moonlit nights should tend to cool colors (blue-green, blue, purple), but near the moon there can usually be a tendency to light yellow, light red or other warm colors. This is because the moon is the brightest object in the sky at night, the brightest object must be tempered by its distance, and so the warmth should not be excessively red or yellow, otherwise it will be less like moonlight and more like the setting sun.[6]
His knowledge of color was extremely general, but in the period of only rudimentary knowledge of technology, thought and culture, these ideas altered the way in which Chinese observed nature and gradually changed their way of looking at the world. The color theory of Yan Wenliang was his own experience of color, and the painter’s observation and expression of light and color were the result of his close attention to and infatuation with color and light, even his paintings tended towards impressionist expression and were not simply realist in conception.
Yan Wenliang was a 20th century artist with a traditional ethical demeanor but imbued with a passion for new art. While managing to accommodate the spirit of modesty, honesty and resilience he drew from traditional culture within the new system of artistic language he disseminated; he firmly believed in the authenticity and loftiness of man’s feeling for nature, and so did not hesitate to devote his life to the practice, education and transmission of the new art.
Modernist Painters
Resembling Yan Wenliang in their sensitivity to color, there were many painters who were filled with fascination for the characteristics of the language of oil painting and were not burdened by the responsibility of art’s social function, merely hoping that art could fulfill its intrinsic aims. The legendary aura now surrounding Pan Yuliang (1899-1977) is in stark contrast to the disregard that greeted her for such a long time. Pan Yuliang was from Yangzhou, and because she lost her parents in childhood, she was sold into prostitution and endured its humiliations. In 1916, someone paid the ‘ransom’ that released her from servitude. She studied painting in Liu Haisu’s Shanghai Art School, and her talent, fragility and unique experience of life won her general sympathy and offers of assistance and, in 1921 she was admitted to the Lyons Fine Arts School in France. Two years later was admitted to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris. At this time, she shared a teacher with Xu Beihong in Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (1852 – 1929), the popular French artist. Her record as a student overseas was dazzling: in 1925, she won the Prix de Rome, a scholarship awarded by the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts because of her excellent graduation grades; when she was studying painting at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Rome she won the admiration of the dean of sculpture Professor Henry Stuart Jones (1867-1939) and was awarded two years free tuition in sculpture; in 1926, she won the gold medal at the Rome International Art Exhibition. She received an invitation from Liu Haisu, who was visiting in Italy, to return home and take up a teaching position at the Shanghai of Art Academy, where she was a colleague of the eminent Wang Jiyuan and of Pang Xunqin. In 1929, she exhibited more than 80 works at ‘China’s first exhibition of a female artist’. In the subsequent seven years (1929-1936), she had successively five solo exhibitions of paintings in Shanghai and Nanjing and participated in the national art exhibitions of 1929 and 1937, gaining extensive influence. Among the Western-style painters of this period, Pan Yuliang was one of a minority who acutely appreciated the techniques and effects of impressionism, at the same time as she had an innate approval of the flat surfaces of fauvism, as can be seen in two of her works produced in the 1940s – At the Beach and Female Nude by the Window. She seems to have had an instinctive aesthetic sense of the free use of color: and her free-flowing brushwork and intense colors create a variegated play of light and also rendered the canvas self-sufficient. At times Pan Yuliang even left off impressionism and created purely decorative effects, so that her canvases evoke a sense of relaxation and freedom.
Other notable painters of the 1930s include Chang Yu (Sanyu) (1900-1966) who maintained a studio in Paris’ 14th arrondissement, Zhou Bichu (1903-1995) whose painters were close to those of the impressionists, and Wu Dayu (1903-1988), regarded as ‘the lone figure on the quest for self’.
In the 1920s and 1930s, many Western-style painters who studied in Japan felt at ease with impressionism and fauvism but they tended to conduct somewhat blind experiments in the fields, perhaps because they lacked understanding of the logical development of the language system of European modernism, yet given the influence of their Japanese teachers and their familiarity with Chinese traditional painting these young students learned to use the brush in an unrestrained manner. For the majority of Chinese style painters studying with Japanese teachers in the free and easy Japanese educational environment, they tended to keep pace with European experiments in modernism free from strict basic academic training. The works of these painters, including Chen Baoyi, Wang Yachen, Ding Yanyong, Wei Tianlin, Guan Liang, Wang Jiyuan, and Guan Zilan, provide important documentation for understanding this phase of history. These artists were to provide the major impetus in the shift from ‘early realism’ to modernism, this being an age in which young painters were boldly plunging into experimentation. Even though the shadows of war were already approaching and social concerns were constantly emerging, these painters did not think that their works had any relationship to society and the era. This society required new artistic subject matter and, even more, the visual stimulus provided by the unfamiliar.
Chen Baoyi (1893-1945), who in his early years studied with Liu Haisu at Zhou Xiang’s ‘scenery painting school’, was a student of Fujishima Takeji (1867-1943). He went to Japan to study in 1913, but for only one year. In 1916, he returned to Japan studying at the private Kawabata Art Institute and at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. In 1921, Chen returned to China upon graduation. In the winter, because of his family’s solid financial resources, Chen Baoyi ran a private salon called the Jiangwan Studio, also known as the Chen Baoyi Painting Institute. The studio was located near the Shanghai Art Academy in North Sichuan Road. Here, he imitated Fujishima Takeji’s teaching methods, focusing on sketching and oil painting, and he set up an elite salon. He was even involved in movie making with the playwright Tian Han (1898-1968), and they shot the movie To the People in Chen’s studio. The studio continued intermittently until 1932, when it was destroyed in the Japanese bombing of Shanghai, known as the ‘January Twenty-eighth Incident’.
Another of the renowned painters of the 1940s who had studied in Japan was Guan Liang (1900-1986), although most art historians regard Guan Liang’s simple style of succinctly portraying dramatic characters as unique. In 1917, Guan Liang sailed to Japan and passed the entrance examination for the Tokyo Pacific Fine Arts School, where his sketching teacher was Nakamura Fusetsu. Like the majority of artists studying abroad, he embarked on a career teaching Western painting after returning to China in 1922, and until 1925 he successively taught at the Shanghai Shenzhou Nüxue, Shanghai College of Fine Arts, and Shanghai Art University. The list of his friends in Shanghai includes the distinguished traditional Chinese painters Wu Changshuo and Wang Yiting, as well as radicals such as Guo Moruo, Cheng Fangwu and Yu Dafu. From 1925 to 1927, Guan Liang taught in the Guangzhou Fine Arts School and at the time of the Northern Expedition, he accepted Guo Moruo’s invitation to serve as a section chief in charge of military political art. From 1928 to 1945, Guan Liang held posts at many different art schools. Guan Liang was one of the persons who introduced early modernist oil painting, and in most of his own oil paintings we see his thick bold brush work and colors. He very rapidly adopted methods completely different from realism. Guan Liang at an early date was able to see original works by modern artists from Cézanne to Matisse, Magritte / A. Marquet (1875-1947) and Vlaminck, and regardless of how he interpreted them, they pointed out to this Chinese-style painter the implicit importance of a ‘free-flowing brush’ (yibi-caocao). Thus, in Guan Liang’s oil paintings we see the expression of freedom. Guan Liang was familiar with the character of traditional brush and ink, and in his oil paintings his brushwork was also somewhat unconscious and clumsily applied, suggesting children’s painting and also enabling us to understand Guan Liang’s inner purity. In techniques of expression, he was not influenced by cynicism and he distanced himself from the more radical expressionist artists.
Taiwanese Painters Studying in Japan
Painters from Taiwan who studied art in Japan not only took part in the Western painting movement on the mainland, but also laid the foundations for the development of Western painting in Taiwan. In fact, from the time of the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki down to 1945 the art of Taiwan was constantly subject to Japanese influence, and in the process of accepting Western art influences, the art of Taiwan differed from that of the mainland, its essential feature being a lack of any obvious contention in the new art as it rather simply accepted the influence of Japanese understanding of Western art.
In 1907, Ishikawa Kin’ichirō visited Taiwan for the first time, and became a painting teacher at the Taipei Teachers College. This Japanese painter excelled at watercolor painting in the English style and he provided a preliminary understanding of Western painting for Taiwanese students, especially when he himself painted the beauty and folkways of Taiwan which stimulated Taiwanese painters to see Taiwan anew and cherish hopes for the island. As a member of the Meiji Fine Arts Association member and a Christian, Ishikawa had a marked influence on Huang Tushui, Chen Chengbo, Ni Jianghuai, Liao Jichun, Li Meishu and Li Shiqiao. The works of Huang Tushui evoked the realist sculptures of Rodin and they allowed Taiwanese artists to see something totally new. In 1919 he became the first Taiwanese artist to be included in an Imperial Art Exhibition (Teiten) in Japan. During the period of Japanese rule, especially after 1915, at the same time as the original art continued to exist, education in the new painting from a Japanese perspective began in Taiwan and the teachers naturally all came from Japan. By 1922, more than 2,000 Taiwanese had gone to Japan to study, and among them were many students of the fine arts. In 1927, the official Taiwan Exhibition was formally set up in Taipei along the lines of the Teiten (Imperial Exhibitions) in Tokyo. The First Fine Arts Exhibition, viz. the first Taiwan Exhibition, was in October of that year in the auditorium of the Huashan Primary School in Taipei, and following the proposal of the Japanese painters Ishikawa Kin’ichirô, Gôbara Kotô, Kinoshita Seigai and Shiotsuki Tôho, the ‘Taiwan Education Society’ set up the officially organized ‘Fine Arts Exhibition Society’. Henceforth, most young artists in Taiwan began to use participation in the Taiwan Exhibition as the major platform for developing their own art.[7] The first Taiwan Exhibition included works by Chen Jin, Lin Yushan and Guo Xuehu in the Japanese painting division; in the Western painting division there were 19 Taiwanese painters, the most important being Yan Shuilong, Yang Sanlang, Chen Chengbo, Liao Jichun, Chen Zhiqi, Guo Baichuan, Li Meishu and Li Shiqiao; in subsequent exhibitions the works of students returning from Japan made a deep impression.
Indeed, the Western painting of Taiwan during this period was a hybrid Japanese-flavored Western style, but painters were also beginning to shift their gaze towards real life with which they were familiar. In the 1920s, young enthusiasts were forming their own discussion groups and art societies, including the Seven Stars Painting Circle (1924), Taiwan Watercolor Painting Society (1925), Red Island Society (1927), New Sprouts Painting Society (1928) and the Sandalwood Society (1930), and getting involved in activities which boosted their confidence in the new art. Among them, Ni Jianghuai (1894-1943), Chen Chengbo, Chen Yingsheng, Chen Chengpan, Lan Yinding (1903-1979), Chen Zhiqi (1906-1931) and Chen Yin set up the Seven Stars Painting Circle in Taipei, which became one of the earliest Western painting and fine arts organizations in the modern fine arts scene in Taiwan. Ishikawa Kin’ichirô, a Japanese fine arts teacher at Taipei Normal College, lent the group great support. The Seven Stars Painting Circle in its first three years held the annual Tongren New Works Exhibition of watercolor and oil paintings at the Taipei Museum. In the group’s fourth year, Chen Zhiqi, Chen Chengbo and Chen Chengpan all went to study at the Tokyo Fine Arts School, so in 1927 the group disbanded.
In November 1934, Liao Jichun, Yan Shuilong, Chen Chengbo, Chen Qingfen, Li Meishu, Yang Sanlang, and Tateishi Tetsuomi (1905-1980) set up the Taiyang Arts Society, and this organization attempted to ‘proclaim the unique character of the Chinese nation’ as a means of resisting Japanese discrimination and control. The promoters tactically confined their activities to exchanging views about art and conducting artistic research, so that it would be possible to remain active for some time. In 1935, the Taiyang Arts Society held its first exhibition in the Taipei Educational Conference Hall. Unlike other painters who were more influenced by Japan, the painters in this group emphasized the artistic expression of native life in Taiwan and the importance of going among the people and making contact with society. In any case, the Taiyang Arts Society received the unofficial approval of members of official salons, and at the same time people also noticed that the leading members of the Taiyang Arts Society had all been systematically educated in the Japanese art education system, and were major participants in the Taiwan Exhibitions. Nationalists even regarded their participation in the Imperial Exhibitions and the Taiwan Exhibitions as a means of resisting Japanese colonial rule. Until the end of 1944, the Taiyang Arts Society held ten exhibitions and was influential in spreading Western painting in Taiwan.
In the spring of 1938, a group of young painters established the Movement Fine Arts Association, known in French as ‘Cercle MOUVE’. Unlike those painters who had studied in France and then returned to live on native soil, these youths much like members of French modern groups who took inspiration from nothing more than Japanoiserie had no direct contact with Western movements and at the same time faced colonial intervention and control. Zhang Wanchuan, Hong Ruilin and Chen Dewang, who were members of this group had earlier withdrawn from the Taiyang Art Society, because they were dissatisfied by Taiyang’s connections with the official Taiwan Exhibitions, and they were critical of the conservative attitude that the Taiwan Exhibitions gradually revealed in their failure to be vigorous in supporting new talent. The future situation demonstrated that the members of the Taiyang Art Society, after leaving Taiwan and going to Japan, genuinely attempted to dominate the Taiwan Exhibitions.
Chen Chengbo (1895-1947) was a student of Fujishima Takeji at the Tokyo Fine Arts School. Chen Chengbo’s original decision to go to study painting in Japan had been encouraged by his Japanese teacher Ishikawa Kin’ichirō when he was still a student in the general studies teaching department at the Taipei Japanese Language School, the forerunner of the Taipei Normal School. Ishikawa nurtured a strong interest in painting in Chen and so before he went overseas to study, Chen was already teaching and taking his students into the countryside on painting excursions. In 1923 Chen entered the teacher training department of the Tokyo Fine Arts School, and after graduating, he continued his studies as a research student in Western painting. Chen entered a work titled Chia-i Street Scene in the seventh Japan Imperial Exhibition, becoming the first painter from Taiwan to enter an oil painting in that prestigious show. In Japan, Chen Chengbo was accepted as a research student in oil painting at the Western Painting Research Institute under the directorship of Ōkada Saburō (1838-1921)/ Ōkada Saburōsuke (1869-1939), and so his use of color in oil paintings became less keen and the expression found its interest in the delicate relationships between the brushwork and the timbre, while the surface of the work was dense.
In 1929, Chen Chengbo went to Shanghai where he took up teaching and the post of dean of the faculty of painting at Shanghai Xinhua Academy of Art. In Shanghai, he also concurrently taught at the Shanghai Changyi Art College where his colleagues were Wang Jiyuan and Zhu Qizhan. He was even selected in 1930 as one of China’s ‘twelve representative modern oil painters’ at the Shanghai National Policy Training Commemorative Exhibition of the Arts, and he was invited to serve on the Inspection Committee for the Western-style Painting Section of the Shanghai National Fine Arts Exhibition. Perhaps out of homesickness and more especially because of the ‘January 28th Incident’ he returned to Taiwan in 1933, where he took part in the preparatory work for setting up the Taiyang Art Society and began to promote the Western painting movement.
As early as August 1926, Yang Sanlang (1907-1995) held an exhibition of his works in the Taipei Museum. Yang Sanlang came from a wealthy family in Taipei, and in his early years he was attracted and moved by the oil paintings he saw displayed in the window of the Hirobumi Stationery Store on Taipei’s Bo’ai Road and this kindled his hope of becoming a painter. In 1922, Yang Sanlang travelled to Japan without his family’s permission, and enrolled at the Kyoto Fine Arts Polytechnic School. In 1924 he switched to the Western painting department of the Kansei Academy of Fine Arts. where his teachers were Kuroda Jūtarō and Tanaka Zennosuke. From 1927 onwards Yang Sanlang’s work was selected several times for inclusion in the Taiwan Exhibitions, as well as for the Kansei Fine Arts Exhibition and the Spring Sun Exhibition. However, when he failed to be selected for the Fifth Taiwan Exhibition in 1931, Yang went to France where his works were entered in the French Autumn Art Exhibition. In 1933, he returned to Taiwan from France and he became ‘a nominating painter’ for the Taiwan Exhibition. He also held a very large exhibition of works he painted in Europe and earned the accolade of being ‘the earl of painting’ and became a member of Japan’s Spring Sun Society. On 10 November 1934, he established the Taiyang Art Society and this group held a total of ten exhibitions. The third exhibition travelled all over Taiwan, while a Japanese Painting Division was established with the sixth exhibition and a Sculpture Division with the Seventh. The exhibitions stopped in 1944 because of the war.
Guo Baichuan (1900-1974) was born in Tainan and by the age of 21 was already a teacher at Tainan Number Two Public School and had set up the Red Island Society. At the age of 29, he passed the entrance examinations for the Western painting department at the Tokyo Fine Arts School. In 1937, Guo Baichuan travelled extensively throughout China’s Northeastern provinces, then administered by the Japanese as Manchukuo, and finally settled in Beiping, where he separately taught Western painting at the National Art College, Beiping Normal University and at the Jinghua College of Art. In 1948, Guo Baichuan returned to Taiwan.
Two other Taiwanese artists who studied in Japan, Li Meicun (1902-1983) and Liao Jichun (1902-1976), were close to European painters in their understanding of oil painting, but it was very difficult for them to discard the influence of Japanese painters.
Pang Xunqin and the Storm Society
Pang Xunqin (1906-1985) come from a landlord family and, although it had fallen on hard times, this background provided the basis for the tragedies that befell him after 1949. Pang Xunqin revealed sensitivity to color and decorative design at a very early age, and he said that the clothes which his great-aunt designed provided him with his first instruction in design. In August 1925, Pang Xunqin boarded a steamer and travelled to Paris, where was recommended by Jiang Biwei to the Académie Julian. During this time, the ornamental style of the exposition staged in Paris made a deep impression on him. ‘From that time, I often wondered when I would be able to set up an academy in China like the College of Decorative Arts in Paris, which would be so fantastic! It was from that time that I became interested in architecture and all the decorative arts’.[8] During his time studying at the Académie Julian, Pang Xunqin discovered the work of Botticelli and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898), in whom he developed a keen interest and were the reasons he believed he ‘spent a great deal of time studying the decorative arts’.
In the autumn of 1930, Pang Xunqin joined the Taimeng Painting Society, Taimeng being the transliteration of the French ‘deux mondes’, which had been set up by Wang Dilang, Zhou Zhentai, Tu Yi, and Hu Daozhi. It is possible that these artists believed at the time that Chinese artists were a product of the ‘two worlds’ of China and France. In autumn 1931, Pang Xunqin began giving sketching lessons at the Shanghai Art Academy.
On 23 September 1931, Chen Chengbo, Zhou Duo, Zeng Zhiliang, Ni Yide, and Pang Xunqin held the first meeting of their new organization in the Plum Garden Restaurant in Shanghai, at which they adopted the name Storm Society for their group. On 6 January 1932, the Storm Society held its second meeting, by which time members had swelled to include Liang Baibo, Duan Pingyou, Yang Qiuren, Zhou Mi, Deng Quti, and Wang Jiyuan. The meeting selected Pang Xunqin, Wang Jiyuan and Ni Yide to head the group and drew up plans to hold its first exhibition of paintings in mid-April.[9] However, the Japanese invasion of Shanghai meant that they had to postpone their exhibition and it was not until the onset of autumn that people first saw news about the preparations for the exhibition. The exhibition was held 9-16 October in the China Studies and Arts Society in Emile-Eugene Road in the French Concession, and the ‘Manifesto of the Storm Society’ written by Ni Yide readily evoked the Futurist Manifesto:
Where has our ancient creative talent gone? Where is our glorious ancient history? Our entire art world today is reduced to feebleness and sickness.
We can no longer be content with this environment of compromise.
We can no longer linger simply waiting for our deaths.
Let us arise! Let us use our wild passions and let us use our iron reason to create a world in which color, line and shape integrate!
We believe that painting is neither the mere imitation of nature nor the repetition of a lifeless form. We will devote our lives to the naked expression of our fierce spirit.
We do not regard art as the slave of religion nor as the explanation of literature, and we want the freedom to construct a world which is pure creation. We detest all old forms, old colors and mediocre, low-grade skills. We will use new skills and techniques to express the spirit of the new era.
Since the advent of the 20th century, European art suddenly gave rise to a new atmosphere in which the fauvists issued their call, the cubists distorted shapes, the Dadaist displayed their ferocity, and the surrealists extended hope…
The 20th century Chinese art scene should also produce a new atmosphere.
Let us arise! Let us use our wild passions and let us use our iron reason to create a world in which color, line and shape integrate!
Ref: Trimonthly Arts, vol. 1, no. 5
In the eyes of these artists of the Storm Society, the realist method was already history. Pang Xunqin also said on more than one occasion that the photograph had already replaced the function of realist painting. Therefore, regardless of whether these young people had returned from Paris or from Japan, as in the case of Ni Yide, they were all receptive to the latest modernist intellectual trends emanating from Europe. Among the other groups in China at this time who welcomed Western modernist concepts were the Muse Society in Shanghai, China Independent Fine Arts Association in Guangzhou and the Art Movement Society in Hangzhou of several years earlier, of which Lin Fengmian was representative. Pang Xunqin who was able to take classes at Liu Haisu’s Shanghai Art Academy was also involved in the modernist atmosphere at that school. In fact, the leading members of the Storm Society all came from the Shanghai Art Academy and the expressionist and fauvist art tendencies of the Storm Society at this time were also connected with the art of the Left-Wing League of Artists, even though the points of departure for the artists in these groups were different.
Between October 1932 and October 1935 the Storm Society staged four exhibitions. The styles of the works shown readily suggested the influences of Modigliani (Zhou Duo), Picasso (Duan Pingyou), de Chirico (Yang Qiuren, Yang Taiyang), and Matisse (Zhang Xian). Ni Yide has described the sequence in which these stylistic trends in painters’ works evolved. In any case, the exhibitions attracted many young artists, and so the membership of the Storm Society grew to include, apart from Pang Xunqin, Ni Yide, Zhang Xian, Yang Taiyang, Yang Qiuren, Zhou Duo and Duan Pingyou, such artists as Liang Xihong, Li Zhongsheng, Liang Baibo, Qiu Di, Zhou Bichu, Zhou Zhentai, Liu Shi, and Chen Chengbo.
The Storm Society broke up because of the arrival of the war. During the period of national salvation, people remained interested in art but they hoped for art that could be useful in the War of Resistance. In this way, woodcut, cartoons and propaganda posters as well as various propaganda materials that relied on realist methods to express content treating the War of Resistance became the suitable media. Although books and periodicals such as The Good Companion, Times and Trimonthly Arts all introduced the exhibitions of the Storm Society, the artists finally ceased their studies in art language. Pang Xunqin spoke sadly of the society’s fourth exhibition of paintings: ‘During the last two days very few people visited the show and the sky was overcast. The history of the Storm Society seemed to be ending in an atmosphere of gloom’.[10]
In September 1936, Pang Xunqin left Shanghai for Beiping, where he taught at the Beiping Art Academy. In 1937, after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Pang Xunqin 16 July was sent from Beijing to Shanghai. Before long, Pang Xunqin and Wang Linyi were reunited with their students who had been first sent from Beijing to Jiujiang, where classes resumed. At this time the ‘commercial art’ class had become a class in producing anti-Japanese propaganda posters. In November, the school received orders from the Ministry of Education to withdraw via Mount Lushan to Yuanling in western Hunan. Although the scenery in Yuanling was very beautiful, Pang Xunqin had painted few landscape paintings, unlike Xu Beihong who had painted many landscapes of Guilin. Pang Xunqin’s art at this time is interesting in that he still retained the approach in which he had been trained in Paris, and he was unable in a way that approached the effect of photography.
In Yuanling, the Beiping Art Academy amalgamated with the Hangzhou Art Academy, and because of differences among the staff, Chang Shuhong informed Pang Xunqin and Wang Manshuo that he was quitting the school. In Kunming, Pang Xunqin completed a large version of the oil painting titled The Road that he originally painted in Yuanling. This is a further move towards realism and social content.
In Kunming, the city which now housed such relocated universities and research institutes as Tsinghua University, Peking University, Nanjing University, Shandong University and Academia Sinica’s Historical Research Institute, Pang Xunqin found that he had the opportunity to study and research art traditions. Finally, perhaps because of his innate interest and sensitivity to decorative art, Pang Xunqin was deeply attracted to what he saw of ancient ornamentation in the books he now borrowed from friends. At this time, Shen Congwen also encouraged him to engage in research on ornamentation. After Pang’s Collection of Chinese Motifs was read among his circle of friends, he found that he now also got to know such authorities in this field as Liang Sicheng, Lin Huiyin and Liang Siyong. Pang Xunqin began work in the Preparatory Department of the Central Museum, where he commenced research work on the arts of the ethnic minorities of the south-west. He and his colleagues went deep into Miao stockade villages in Guizhou collecting folk art and they were extremely successful in this undertaking. In the mountainous areas, in which there were no written records, During this time, he painted many watercolors and began research on industrial art. In the period from 1940 to 1945 in the post of dean of applied arts in the Sichuan Provincial Academy of Art, Pang Xunqin set up classes in ‘ industrial and commercial art’ and wrote Writings on Industrial Art.
China Independent Art Association
The China Independent Art Association which staged its first exhibition of paintings in 1935 was another early modernist group, and its members included a number of painters who had studied in Japan – Zhao Shou, Liang Xihong, Li Dongping and Zeng Ming. At the outset, in 1934, they set up the China Independent Arts Institute in Tokyo, and in the Tokyo Art Gallery they staged a ten-man exhibition of Chinese artists in Japan, featuring Zhao Shou, Li Zhongsheng, Su Wonong, Huang Langping, Li Dongping, Fang Rending, Yang Yinfang, Zeng Yi, Liang Xihong and Bai Sha. Soon afterwards, these young people returned to China and prepared to stage an exhibition and set up the journal Independent Fine Arts in Guangzhou, for which they wrote articles reflecting the great interest in surrealism and cubism in Japan. At the same time that the October issue of Art Wind carried a report on an exhibition of 1935 which included works by Matisse, Picasso, Braque and Vlaminck, the magazine carried a translation of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 as well as works by Max Ernst, Miró, Dali, de Chirico, Tanguy and Paul Klee. As a result people came to refer to the surrealist style of the China Independent Art Association. Although the wartime atmosphere intensified, these young art lovers still stressed the idea of creative freedom in art: ‘We devote ourselves to creating for a free and independent society and to taking the avant-garde of culture to the general public, at the same time as we remain confident that, regardless of whatever praise or blame we attract, we hopefully continue to advance, remaining true, unswerving and uncompromisingly tolerant in maintaining our grand ideas’. These words from their manifesto expressed clear resistance to realist methods that imitate life. The members of the China Independent Art Association held several exhibitions of varying size in rapid succession during that year. Their first exhibition notably included Ding Yanyong and Guan Liang. Their second exhibition was held in Shanghai in October, and the artists participating in the exhibition insisted on maintaining a modernist position. At this time, all-out war was fast approaching and their sincere love of art and rich intellectual experimentation did not arouse general interest.
Modern Artistic Ideas
The manifesto of the Storm Society was written by Ni Yide (1901-1970) who was simultaneously involved in experiments in literature, art theory, and painting. At the time he was one of a number of young people filled with creative passion. In 1922, he graduated from the Shanghai Art Academy, and having impressed his teacher Li Chaoshi and the head of the college Liu Haisu he stayed on to teach. His teaching career after studying and graduating at the Shanghai Art Academy provided him with the conditions to understand French impressionist and fauvist painting. Ni Yide did not study in France, but in 1927 went to study Japan, during which time he and Wang Daoyuan organized the Fine Arts Research Society of Chinese Students in Japan, which undertook advanced research on Japanese and Western art history and theory. In the following year, because the Japanese invasion of Shandong led to the ‘Jinan massacre’, he returned to China, and successively taught at the Guangzhou Municipal Fine Arts School, the Wuchang Art College and the Shanghai Art Academy. He established the Muse Society and edited Tri-monthly Arts eventually becoming an important member of the Storm Society. After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, Ni Yide became acting head of the fine arts section of the Third Department under the KMT government’s political department under the military commission. Even though headed the Li Chaoshi the Western painting department at the Shanghai Art Academy, he accepted the line of language established by Cézanne, Magritte, Derain and Vlaminck, and he even tried to explain such painting with new theory and terms:
It was structured through their constant pursuit of the essence of pure painting. … Derain attained classicism, but he was not classical – rather a modern explanation of the classical, the essence of which had been modernized. This was simply the result of his study of the unity of painting and of comprehensive canvases.
What on earth did Ni Yide in the 1930s ultimately understand by ‘the essence of pure painting’? We can imagine that for Ni Yide, who was bold in wielding the brush and applying color, it would have been difficult to explain clearly to those calligraphers and artists using traditional materials and to oil painters working in a realist style. In fact, at the same time as he boldly used expressive methods, he also paid attention even in oil painting to expressing a ‘Chinese atmosphere’, but reminding painters that they must ‘at the same time not lose the original meaning and conception of Western painting’. Ni Yide was in this period certainly familiar with the slogan calling for ‘integrating Western and Chinese’ art, and this conception tended to be close to the idea he wanted to express as well as to Lin Fengmian’s thought. During his time at the Shanghai Art Academy, Ni Yide had Lü Cheng as a professor of fine arts history, but perhaps because of his literary talent and passion he was swept up in the whirlwind created by Guo Moruo, Yu Dafu and Cheng Fangwu, and joined the Creation Society.
In 1934, Lin Wenzheng (1903-1990) published ‘Trends in Western European Painting over the Past Thirty Years’ in the 13th issue of Apollo. In this article, Lin Wenzheng did not seem to raise the issue of art serving as a tool because of the political reality and ethnic crisis Chinese artists faced; he contemplated art as an independent discipline, because as he put it ‘science has its realm of pure science and art has its realm of pure art’, and went on to analyze the reasons for and significance of the birth of modernism:
When we talk of modern painting, we invariably trace it back to the four giants of the new art movement of the late 19th century - Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Renoir. At that time, the targets of the revolution launched by these four was to break with the formulae of academism, to search anew for the essence of painting, and to build a new foundation. After several decades of difficult work and struggle, they finally achieved success! This hard-won victory initiated a new era in the history of painting, and their young successors relied on the new fields they had opened up to advance in ever bolder pursuits, giving rise to many unusual groups and whipping up the surge of modern art. In this surge and tumult, we can see much that was genuine and much that was mistaken. …[11]
Lin Wenzheng and Lin Fengmian were from the same clan, village and school, and so the two men formed an especially close friendship which common interests and a shared understanding. During his time studying in Meizhou, Lin Wenzheng was selected to be president of the Tan Li Poetry Society which comprised more than fifty members, with Lin Fengmian serving as vice-president of the society. In the spring of 1922, he was recommended to be president of the Overseas Art Movement Society by a group of Chinese students studying in France, further demonstrating the respect he enjoyed as an organizer. In the summer of 1927, Lin Wenzheng returned to China after graduating from Paris University, and was appointed by the Academy of the Republic of China which was part of the Ministry of Education as a member of the national art committee. In the spring of 1928 the Hangzhou National College of the Arts, later called the Hangzhou National Art College, was established, and Cai Yuanpei appointed Lin Fengmian as president and Lin Wenzheng as dean of studies and concurrently professor of history of Western fine arts. As an early art historian and critic, Lin Wenzheng’s articles form an important documentation of early 20th century Chinese modernist thought. In this very year, Lin Wenzheng wrote ‘The Art Movement’, and by promoting the new Western concept of ‘art’ (yishu) he hoped to transform the Chinese national ‘moral character’ (suzhi). He did not approve of the doctrine that insisted art serve as a tool and he believed that regardless of the period the role of art was essential and irreplaceable. The emphasis of Lin Wenzheng on the special function of art suggests the thought of Kant and Schiller, rather than the utilitarian statements of the French enlightenment movement.
A classmate of Lin Fengmian in France, Li Jinfa (1900-1976) was devoted in the main to studying sculpture. However, like Ni Yide, he had a talent for literature and so in January 1928, together with his French wife, he established the fine arts periodical Aesthetic Education. In the ‘Editorial Comments’ in the first issue, Li Jinfa asserted that ‘we venerate Greek civilization’ and ‘we detest and reject realist society and disputes about economy and politics, as we want to make life simple and return man to closeness with nature’. Li Jinfa was especially sensitive to the written language and he accepted classical aesthetics because he took pleasure in the use of the concepts ‘beauty’ and ‘goodness’ from the ancient West. The soul yearned to soar and the highest form of goodness was invariably realized through beauty; conversely, goodness could promote the expression of beauty. Whether or not Li Jinfa’s research on Western philosophical history was specialized or not is not important. What was important was the attention he paid to the spirit, along with his insistence that people should not be limited by mundane reality and that art should not express some reflection of reality, because physical reality, even the shadow of a shadow, should demonstrate truth directly. Seen from today’s perspective such a view seems to be so much verbal play, but if we really believe in the power of intuition then there should be something in the material world on which we can depend and which we can pursue. Finally, his views seem to be subsumed within those of Cai Yuanpei, with his belief that ‘beauty’ could replace ‘religion’ and rouse man’s sense of morality.
In 1936 when the war was about to break out, Fang Ganmin (1906-1984) at the National Hangzhou Art College, famous for his style of painting similar to that of the cubists, was also championing modernism. In the pages of the academic journal Apollo he published ‘Cézanne: The Father of Modern Art’ to explain that painter’s art and its meaning. He reminded readers that after Cézanne’s death, fauvism, cubism, expressionism, Dada and futurism successively exploded onto the European scene. He seemed to be saying that modernism’s emergence was inevitable and in it Cézanne was truly the artist who played a key role. The premise that the various modernist schools were happily received led to totally different judgments by Fang Ganmin and the realists. Fang Ganmin seems to have deliberately misquoted translations of statements by Cézanne to make his conclusion that Cézanne expressed ‘the truth of architectural shapes’ and ‘the melody of musical color’. In any case, Fang Ganmin wanted to tell people that painting should not be confined to the realistic portrayal of nature’s surface but should, like European art, express a richer world.
Lin Fengmian
Lin Fengmian (1900-1991) was born in 1900, the year in which on 14 August the Eight-Power Expeditionary Force invaded Beijing, a set of events which concluded with the Qing Government’s signing of the treaty termed the Boxer Protocol in the following year. In childhood, his father taught him to copy paintings from The Mustard Seed Garden Manual. On 28 December 1919, he embarked for France in Shanghai with more than one hundred others, including Lin Wenzheng and Li Jinfa, travelling as students as a result of their sponsorship by the Chinese student volunteer labor organization in France organized by Cai Yuanpei, Wu Zhihui, Li Shizeng, and others. These committed young people were all keen to participate in the work-for-study program which had been organized. In France, Lin Fengmian basked in the natural environment of Fontainebleau and Barbizon, and in response changed his given name successively to the sobriquets ‘Fengming’ (meaning ‘call of the bees’) and ‘Fengmian’ (‘sleeping in the breeze’).
In April 1921, Lin Fengmian began to study sketching at l’École des Beaux-arts in Dijon. He was recommended by the head of the school Ovide Yencesse (1869-2947) for study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris, where he entered the studio of Fernand Cormon. On a trip to Paris to visit Lin, Yencesse warned his former Chinese student: ‘You are Chinese, and so you must know that you Chinese have such a precious and outstanding artistic tradition!’[12] This same teacher also advised Lin to ‘step out of the academy’. Lin Fengmian later recalled: “I was overseas and it was under the direction of a foreign teacher that I began to study Chinese traditional art”. [13] In Paris, the ancient Egyptian, Greek and Chinese art in the Ceramics Museum and Oriental Museum profoundly attracted him, and the depiction of landscapes, floral motifs and figures on the Song dynasty porcelain would serve as a latent influence on his future style of painting. In the National Library (Bibliothèque nationale), he and Lin Wenzheng read such Western masterpieces as the Homeric epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, and while reading the works of European philosophers, Lin like Cai Yuanpei was greatly influenced by Kant’s suggestions on ethical questions and aesthetic thought, while Bergson’s ideas on the continuous creation of life aroused his understanding of taking a positive attitude to life. For what were probably reasons of inherent character, Lin Fengmian was infatuated by the spirit of romanticism and symbolism, and he read the writings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé.
In 1923, Lin Fengmian had the opportunity to go to Germany to study. The Bridge Society (Künstlergruppe Brücke) and the works of expressionist painters made a lasting impression on him. In his early work Searching, Lin Fengmian hoped to bring together those European historical personages such as Jesus, Homer, Dante, Goethe and Michelangelo to express his veneration for Western culture.
In 1924, Lin Fengmian joined Liu Jipiao, Wang Daizhi, Wu Dayu, Zeng Yilu and Li Jinfa in establishing the Phoebus Society, also known as the Overseas Art Movement Society, for which Lin Wenzheng was selected as president. ‘Phoebus’ was the German and Latin rendering of the Greek sun god, Apollo or Helios, and the symbolic meaning of the use of this term by these young artists was very clear, as they regarded art as their object of worshipful dedication. They participated in the preparation of the Chinese Fine Arts Exhibition which opened on 21 May of that year in the Rhine Palace in Strasbourg, France. The exhibition included many traditional Chinese art works, paintings, carving and embroidery. Lin Fengmian’s bold expressionist works impressed Cai Yuanpei, who wrote a preface for the exhibition by way of encouraging the young artists:
Most of the Chinese students studying fine arts overseas are in France where they have organized the Phoebus Society and the Fine Arts Public Study Society. Among them are many remarkably talented individuals not content to simply imitate the Europeans but also able to experiment in using blending the Chinese style with the European style. Since the Chinese cultural ‘revival’ (zhongxing) there have been increasingly more examples of Chinese style works including the European fine arts, and today provides many fine examples which suffice to demonstrate the necessity of interchanging the finest elements of Chinese and Western fine arts. European artists have also experimented with including the best elements of Chinese art in the European style, so do Chinese artists not also have the responsibility of including the best elements of European art in the Chinese style?[14]
On 22 May, Cai Yuanpei also delivered a lecture at the exhibition, in which he expressed the view that the ‘many shared elements of the two cultures outnumbered the conflicts’, which undoubtedly provided encouragement and made a deep impression on Lin Fengmian and the other Chinese students. Because the ideas in Lin Fengmian’s exhibited works were influential, Cai Yuanpei made a point of visiting Lin Fengmian in his apartments and this was the beginning of their friendship.
In the spring of 1926, Lin Fengmian returned to Shanghai, where he learned that in his absence that he had been appointed head of the Beijing Fine Arts School, in the wake of the student protests that had closed the school down. After taking up the post, Lin Fengmian carried out a thorough reform at the school. He set up a sculpture department, invited the French painter André Claudot to be professor of oil painting, and invite Qi Baishi to teach at the school, a move that was greeted with suspicion. In the same year, he had his first solo exhibition, which included such works as Searching, Desire for Life, Tranquility, Human History and Returning from Fishing. In October, Lin Fengmian published his article ‘The Future of Eastern and Western art’. Although the subsequent art movement appeared to be a radical trend, in this article we can see clearly that Lin Fengmian had a cool objective understanding of the issues concerning Eastern and Western art. In his treatment of ‘art’ issues, Lin Fengmian did not seek out formulations and concepts of the nature of art in traditional thought, and in his discussions of ‘how art has acquired its structure’ he drew on Darwin and Spencer as he patiently outlined his understanding of the origins of art, and obviously also drew on Cai Yuanpei’s ideas, because he similarly discussed the connections and differences between religion and art. He believed that religions were innately fixed, and all ‘emotional reactions occur within fixed assumptions and beliefs that seek to offer comfort and which give rise to religion’. In any case, Lin Fengmian believed that art related to rational and perceptual mental states and Chinese artists should combine Western rational and objective attitudes with the Chinese spirit of imagination and subjectivity. In this way, the appropriate combination of inflexibly rational Western art and eastern art which lacked form provided art with a future.
In May 1927, Lin Fengmian organized the Beijing Art Congress. To a great extent, the art conference was a social activity and even though the exhibition was the main event, the vigorous atmosphere it engendered went beyond the usual educational activity. Artists’ fervent embrace of the concept of ‘advancing society through art’ meant that the event’s impact went far beyond that of an event limited to art. Lin Fengmian later summarized the nature of the art movement and even complained that the May Fourth movement had lacked the link provided by an art movement, since a cultural or social movement should not have lacked art.
December 1927 saw the successful passage of the ‘Proposal to Establish a National Art University’ and in the spring of 1928, the National Art Institute, a new school designed to replace the Beijing Art School controlled by the warlords, was set up in Hangzhou. At the opening ceremony of the school Cai Yuanpei again proclaimed his educational ideals: ‘The University Board has set up this Institute on the shores of the West Lake to create beauty, so that our successors will reform their superstitions and be committed in their hearts to the love of beauty, and so that people will have truly replace the ideals of religion with aesthetic education’. Lin Fengmian proposed that the Institute’s aims should be introducing Western art, categorizing and classifying Chinese art, blending Chinese and Western art, and creating art for the present era. In October 1929, National Art Institute was renamed the National Hangzhou School of the Arts, and the length of courses was reduced from five to three years. Lin Fengmian’s reform of the teaching system demonstrated his broad understanding of the relationship between Chinese and Western art, by combining Chinese and Western painting in a single department of painting.
In August 1928, Lin Fengmian with Lin Wenzheng and others launched the Art Movement Society, in the hope that their actions would lend strength to a ‘Chinese literary and artistic renaissance’. The Art Movement Society simultaneously established the institute’s journals Apollo and Athena which published articles on new art ideas such as Lin Fengmian’s ‘The Art of Primitive Man’, ‘We Should Pay Attention’, ‘Vain Regrets Will Not Suffice’ and ‘A re-assessment of the Value of Chinese Painting’.
Lin Fengmian maintained a scrupulous attitude towards traditional art. He studied the art of the Tang, Song and earlier dynasties, convinced that ‘from the Qing dynasty onwards’ painting stagnated, and in ‘We Should Pay Attention’ he wrote: ‘Apart from imitating the brush and ink work of others, very few have been able to capture the spirit of the age or create a unique style, and today traditional Chinese painting finds itself in desperate straits and utterly without any means of livelihood!’ This view of Lin Fengmian provided the basic reason why he advocated the study of Western art. However, as a sensitive artist, he was well aware of the chaos prevailing in art circles at that time and how some students of Western painting were content to simply ‘steal a little Western color’. As a consequence, he hoped to strengthen the position of art criticism in society and develop art education, in order to engender serious attitudes on the part of artists and develop more art exhibition organizations. In ‘Vain Regrets Will Not Suffice’ (1928), Lin Fengmian lashed out at ‘vile phenomena like the calendar posters’ that were fashionable and at the artistic phenomenon of ‘clinging to the corpses of our ancestors’. He wanted artists to boldly ‘shoulder the responsibility of the art movement’, the important thing being to create, rather than mistakenly replicate ancient or Western artists. ‘Manifesto of the Art Movement Society’ of 1929 declared: ‘We know that the greatest duty of the artist is to create!’ What merits attention is that by referring to more Western rather than Japanese scholars in ‘A Re-assessment of the Value of Chinese Painting’, Lin Fengmian clearly demonstrated that he drew his influence from the European system of knowledge. In this latter article, in fact, Lin Fengmian’s sensitivity was also embodied in the different ways in which he expounded on Chinese and Western painting materials. Because of the characteristics of art materials, oil painting pigments allowed the painter to repeatedly change his work as he pondered its effects, whereas water color tints (ink and wash) were difficult to change repeatedly. The solidity of oil pigments, in contrast to the fluidity of ink and wash, enabled sequential layering, so that ‘it was easy to depict the undulations of objects’, something that was difficult using the latter. Oil pigments did not readily change color, unlike ink and wash. Oil painting had permanence, while ink and wash ‘faded easily over time’. Lin Fengmian’s analysis drew support from the currently fashionable pragmatism, and against this background, attention was paid to physical ‘volume’, ‘projection’ and ‘concavity’. We know that over a long period the characteristics of traditional materials saw many artists and critics maintain that traditional painting should follow an independent course. In analyzing the difference between Chinese shanshui and Western landscape painting, Lin Fengmian pointed out that the latter expressed nature’s complex colors and the behavior of sunshine. He referred with relish to impressionist landscape painting and noted its shimmering skies and the musicality in nature, lamenting that these were absent from Chinese landscape painting.
In 1931, Lin Fengmian, as chairman of the West Lake Exhibition and Art Museum, invited the Shanghai painters Wang Jiyuan, Zhu Qizhan and Pan Yuliang to take part in an exhibition showing works of the Art Movement Society. Lin Fengmian’s Agony, on show at the exhibition, drew a question from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek: ‘How can there be agony during such bright sunny days?’ This incident together with his involvement with the Communist Party members Hu Yepin (1903-1931) and Ding Ling (1904-1986) led to Lin Fengmian tendering his resignation twice.[15] Lin Fengmian’s motivation for the triptych comprising Humanity (1927), Agony (1929) and Grief (1934) was inspired by European painting, and works on tragic themes such as David’s Death of Marat and Goya’s The Third of May 1808: Execution of the Defenders of Madrid provided major suggestions for Lin Fengmian’s reflection on real problems. Lin’s technical expression readily evokes tendencies to symbolism and expressionism, although he later changed his choice of subject matter and expression. His concern for issues of grief, questions of life and humanistic thought was replaced by a new and a quiescent attitude. He began to recall the knowledge of eastern art that he had gained in France, and he now devoted his art to depicting and expressing traditional motifs such as court ladies and red crowned cranes, giving form to the hope for freedom which he wanted to express.
The Decline of Modernism
The 1920s were a period of construction for China’s Nationalist government. Although for most intellectuals caught up in the modernization drive which followed the national revolution, social fashions and industrial urban construction might have been seriously limited by the extent of old historical problems. Despite the KMT government’s management expertise and by the educational popularization drive, the invasion of Japanese imperialism and the bipartisan armed conflict between the KMT and the CPC meant that modernization still formed only one aspect of people’s lives. Language forms echoing these social changes meant that modernist art had its own social and emotional space. However, on the question of how Western art was to be utilized, artists with different training and influences diverged after returning to China from abroad. Xu Beihong, for example, was so convinced of realist painting’s importance for China that he expressed the hope that modernism would not be discussed for the next thirty years. Wu Zuoren, who was ideologically and educationally favored by Xu Beihong, firmly maintained his teacher’s stance and in a letter he wrote to Chang Shuhong in 1935, Wu expressed his disdain for modernist art, even proclaiming that those who had studied abroad and promoted ‘expression’, ‘cubism’, ‘futurism’ and ‘Dada’ were ‘idiotic dilettantes’ (erbaiwu). He was repelled by flattery for modernism and he said that even if people were thirsty for new knowledge, ‘their pitiable and ineffective arguments just left them swallowing their tongues’. Wu Zuoren regarded the whole phenomenon as ‘just one mistake leading to another’,[16] and he insisted that art should express life and provide sustenance for the nation’s soul, believing that only art which the masses could understand was eternal.
In 1935, following the previous year’s violation of the border of Manchukuo and ‘China Proper’ at Shanhaiguan, the invading Japanese army rapidly advanced across China. In August, the Communist Party of China published ‘Letter to All Compatriots Calling for Resistance to Japan and National Salvation’, which met with a sympathetic response throughout society and it was also under the leadership of the CPC that students in Beiping initiated the December Ninth Movement, staging demonstrations calling for resistance to Japan and national salvation. In the South, Shanghai cultural circles established the National Salvation Society. In 1936, Liu Haisu, who was active in promoting modernism, clearly linked art with the harsh social reality in ‘Prefatory Remarks for the 25th Anniversary of Shanghai School of Fine Arts’, in which he expressed his wish that students and teachers at the school ‘create a noble national personality through art in order to strengthen the nation for the preservation of its existence and for resisting the invaders’.[17] As early as March, Liu Haisu, Wang Jiyuan. Jiang Jianbai, Pan Yuliang, Xie Haiyan, Ni Yide and many other artists who acknowledged modernism and who took part in the Chinese Fine Arts Association expressed the aims of their organization in a special volume commemorating the inaugural meeting of the association:
Given the daily deteriorating national crisis, when the Chinese nation is facing total annexation, the questions of how to save the nation and how to plan for survival are those urgently confronting the entire population. In this extraordinary time in which the entire struggle is to survive, our comrades in art circles should apply their artistic strength to fulfill part of this duty. Only by uniting can we increase our strength and so we organized the Chinese Fine Arts Association. The mission we must embrace is developing art circles, working for the popularization of art among all the nation’s people, publicizing the national culture in the international context and working for national salvation in the face of crisis by promoting the national spirit. We hope even more that our fine arts comrades throughout the country join us on the battle lines. [18]
In November 1937 the Xinhua Art School’s buildings were destroyed by Japanese bombing, the teachers Wang Yachen, Rong Junli, Jiang Danshu, and Zhou Bichu led other teachers and students in to save teaching materials and books, and classes resumed in a new temporary school building. However, all this failed to keep the Japanese from inflicting loss of life through bombardment. Culture and art both faced an unprecedented crisis, and it was really difficult for people to take any discussion of modernism into account.
In 1938, China was already engulfed in the flames of war, and art’s propaganda function was recognized as the common concern by the great majority of people:
In an era of violent transition, the fine arts, like everything which does not meet all the needs of the times and will hence be eliminated imperceptibly and rapidly, must move from the studio into the street in the face of our pressing need.
We need even more to further advance the techniques of the fine arts so they can join in the front line of the nationwide war of resistance, so that the strength of the brush and of color can rouse people.
The aim of artistic creation is not only to satisfy the artist’s personal desire to create, but at the same time hopefully to arouse a sympathetic response in the viewer, the aim of which is to ‘serve life’.
Indeed, the reality of war was the most serious attack on modernism. On 27 March 1938, in the auditorium of the Hankou Chamber of Commerce, a tense and passionate audience listened attentively to the speech of Zhou Enlai, a leader of the Communist Party of China: ‘I was most moved on coming to this hall today to see that the writers and artists of the whole country have stood up united as one in front of the entire people’.
In the face of the national crisis the Kuomintang and the Communists were again entering into a fragile union, and Zhou Enlai, representing the CPC, was participating in this meeting of the political department of the military committee of the KMT government, thereby again providing the CPC with an opportunity for legal development. The CPC, having previously been illegal, was now able to expand its influence in areas ruled by the KMT and promote a war of resistance waged by the whole population, in which the works of writers and artists could serve as powerful weapons. At the inaugural meeting of what was called the All-China Association of Literature and Art Circles Resisting the Enemy, Guo Moruo delivered an emotionally stirring speech as the newly established cultural flag-bearer of the CPC: ‘We want to sacrifice ourselves for the nation’s freedom and for the life of the nation, and we will bend to the task until our dying day and bend to the task into eternity!’[19] Many well-known figures in literary and intellectual circles participated in the clarion call issued at the inaugural meeting of the All-China Association of Literature and Art Circles Resisting the Enemy.
On that day Xinhua Daily had already issued an editorial on the establishment of the All-China Association of Literature and Art Circles Resisting the Enemy, stating that prior to then the problem in literary and art circles was that of ‘scattered strength and uncoordinated steps’. The editorial reminded people:
Writers and artists should no longer be able to confine themselves in ‘the palace of art’, and those who wander about within narrow intellectual circles, regardless of their class, group, world outlook or artistic methods, must inevitably be in touch with the full-blooded realities of life. The only way out for the nation and for literature and art is going deeply into reality.[20]
Such a fierce appeal forms a distinct contrast to Lin Wenzheng’s theory of art. There was suddenly neither the time nor space to discuss the prewar theory that saw art as a scientific system. The throngs of refugees, the roar of enemy air raids and the predicaments every individual faced effectively halted normal academic and experimental activities. The editorial told people that at that crucial juncture for the survival of the nation, literature and art should become tools of propaganda proclaiming resistance to Japan and encouraging the will to fight:
By going to the guerrilla forces, to the field hospitals, to the refugee camps and to the villages of the hinterland, the former ‘artists’ lifestyle’ could no longer be continued.[21]
In March of that year, the National Beiping Art College and the National Hangzhou Art College merged to form the National Art School based in Yuanling, an amalgamation which gave rise to personnel conflicts which Lin Fengmian found unbearable. In June, he resigned his position as head of the school, and Lin Wenzheng also promptly resigned in support. The two men then went their separate ways, never to meet up again. After saying good-bye to Lin Fengmian, Lin Wenzheng with his wife Cai Weilian,[22] joined the mass of refugees and ordinary people in Kunming in the winter of 1938. At the same time as Lin Fengmian went to Hong Kong to visit Cai Yuanpei who was seriously ill, his students Yan Han, Luo Gongliu, Lu Hongji, and Yang Jun also all left the school and went in succession to Yan’an. Artists fled from Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Beijing and other occupied cities, and the artists’ groups, movements and exhibitions disappeared in the smoke of war.[23]
NOTES:
[1] Xu Zhimo, ‘Me and ‘feelings’: A letter to Mr. Xu Beihong’ (Wo yu ‘gan’: Yu Xu Beihong xiansheng shu). See: Wang Zhen and Xu Boyang eds., Anthology of Xu Beihong’s Writings (Xu Beihong wenji), Ningxia People’s Publishing House, 1994, pp.105-106.
[2] Ref: Zhu Boxiong and Chen Ruilin eds., Fifty Years of Western Painting in China: 1848-1949 (Zhongguo xihua wushi nian: 1898-1949), Renmin Meishu Chubanshe, 1989, p.575.
[3] This incident is described in detail in ibid., pp.50-62.
[4] Fu Lei, ‘The panic in modern Chinese art’ (Xiandai Zhongguo yishu zhi konghuang), quoted in: Lang Shaojun and Shui Tianzhong eds., Selected Documents on 20th Century Chinese Art (Ershi shiji Zhongguo meishu wenxuan), vol.1, Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Publishing House, 1999, p.306.
[5] There were very few merchants selling oil painting pigments in the early years, and the main buyers were foreigners who had come to China. Only in May 1958 did the two existing pigment factories in Shanghai amalgamate to become Jincheng Mali Gongyi Chang, and in August of that year it changed its name to the Shanghai Fine Arts Pigments Factory (Shanghai Meishu Yanliao Chang).
[6] Yan Wenliang, Talking about Color (Secai suotan), Shanghai Fine Arts Publishing House, 1978. Ref: Shang Hui, Research on Yan Wenliang (Yan Wenliang yanjiu), Jiangsu Fine Arts Publishing House, 1993, p.10.
[7] These Taiwan Exhibitions were later referred to as the ‘Fuzhan’, with reference to their full title Zongdufu Meishu Zhanlanhui. At first these were organized by the members of the Japanese Black Pot Society, namely Shiotsuki Tōho, Ishikawa Kin’ichirō, Gōhara Kotō, and Kinoshita Seigai. In fact, this was also a result of the ‘cultural rule’ Japan exercised there after 1918.
[8] Pang Xunqin, Jiushi Zheyang Zouguolaide (The Road I Travelled), Beijing: Joint Publishing Company, 2005, p. 43.
[9] Pang Xunqin, ‘A Brief History of the Storm Society’ (Juelan-she xiaoshi), Yishu Xunkan, vol. 1, no. 5, 1935.
[10] Ibid., p. 143.
[11] Zheng Chao, Xihu Lunyi: Lin Fengmian jiqi Tongshi Yishu Wenji (A Discussion of West Lake Art: Collection of Essays on the Art of Lin Fengmian and His Colleagues), Zhongguo Meishuyuan Chubanshe, 1999, pp. 137-138.
[12] Lin Fengmian, ‘Reminiscence and nostalgia’ (Huiyi yu huainian), Xinmin Wanbao, 17 February 1963.
[13] Idem.
[14] Selection of Cai Yuanpei’s Aesthetic Writings (Cai Yuanpei meixue wenxuan), Beijing: Peking University Press, 1983, p.165.
[15] Lin Fengmian recalled in the 1950s: ‘After I painted Agony, the West Lake Art College was almost shut down, because when the painting was displayed at the West Lake Art Fair, Dai Jitao remarked after seeing the work: “This painting by someone at the Hangzhou Art College is a murderous and incendiary work, which leads people through the eighteen levels to the bottom of hell. It is terrifying”. Dai Jitao was speaking at the municipal party headquarters of the Kuomintang, and his remarks were published in the Southeast Daily. After this, the political environment further deteriorated and I gradually devoted myself to running the school’. Ref: Li Shusheng, ‘Notes on an interview with Lin Fengmian’ (Fangwen Lin Fengmian de biji). On the basis of Lin Wenzheng’s reminiscences, Zheng Chao wrote in ‘Lin Fengmian’s early painting’ (Lin Fengmian zaoqi de huihua yishu): ‘Around 1931, the KMT generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek returned with his wife to Fenghua to stay for a time, and passing through Hangzhou made an excursion of the West Lake. Visiting the art college, Mr. Lin acted as his guide. When he stopped before the painting titled Mankind’s Agony and asked the meaning of the work, Lin explained: “It expresses the suffering of mankind’. Chiang asked: ‘How can there be agony during such bright sunny days?”’
[16] Selection of Writings of Wu Zuoren (Wu Zuoren wenxuan), Anhui Fine Arts Publishing House, 1988, pp.6-10.
[17] Originally published in the 23 November 1936 issue of the newspaper Shishi Xinbao (Current affairs news), and later quoted in Zhu Jinlou and Yuan Zhihuang ed., Selection of Liu Haisu’s Writings on Art (Liu Haisu yishu wenxuan), Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 1987.
[18] Shanghai Xinwen Baoshe ed., Xinwen Bao: Fukan, March 1936.
[19] Anthology of Literature Written Behind the Lines during the Anti-Japanese War Period: Volume One Literary Movements (Zhongguo Kangri zhanzheng shiqi dahoufang wenxue shuxi: Diyi pian wenxue yundong), Chongqing Chubanshe, 1989, p. 9.
[20] Ibid., p. 5.
[21] Ibid., pp. 5-6.
[22] Cai Weilian (1904-1939) was Cai Yuanpei’s oldest daughter and she was professor of western painting at the National Hangzhou Art College. On three occasions she travelled with her parents to Europe. During that time, she studied at the Brussels College of the Arts in Belgium and at the Lyons College of Fine Arts in France. In 1928, when the National Hangzhou Art College was founded, she was appointed by Lin Fengmian as professor of western painting. In style she was close to the post-impressionists, but none of her paintings have survived.
[23] In winter 1938, Lin Fengmian went to work for a short time at the design committee of the Third Department in Chongqing, but after the department was disbanded, Lin lost his stable lifestyle. During his seven years in Chongqing, Lin Fengmian’s style went through a transition. In 1944, Pan Tianshou became head of the National Art College, prior to which Teng Gu, Lü Fengzi and Chen Zhifo all served in the post. Pan invited Lin Fengmian to work at the college as a professor. In 1945, Lin took part in the Modern Art Joint Exhibition in Chongqing together with Pang Xunqin, Ni Yide, Zao Wou-ki, Guan Liang, Yu Feng and Fang Ganmin. The work he exhibited was regarded as a highly individual painting of a ‘court lady’. In August 1945, Lin returned to Hangzhou, and this marked the beginning of what has been called his ‘Hangzhou period’. In June 1949, Ni Yide and Liu Wei, as representatives of the army took over the control of the Hangzhou Art Academy. In September of that year, Lin’s former student Liu Kaiqu became head of the college. In 1951, Jiang Feng, as Party secretary, drew up new rules for the school at the time of its name change – ‘Provisional rules for the East China Branch of the Central Academy of Fine Arts’ (Zhongyang Meiyuan Huadong Fenyuan zhanxing guizhang), which announced ‘the implementation of political and ideological education based on Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, and the elimination of the counter-revolutionary thought of the feudal, comprador and fascist classes’. Very soon afterwards, at the beginning of 1952, Lin Fengmian left the school and moved back to Shanghai, where he led an artistic life of virtual seclusion, and this marked the extinction of any idealism he had regarding the ability of art to save society.