"Self-contained Spring Hui Full of Locust"
"Photograph"
Autumn Willow
"The Lady in Black" ◎ Huang Zhe
At a time when the epidemic is escalating, travel is not easy, and it is difficult to stay at home, the commemorative exhibition of Su Tianci's centenary birth held at guardian art center is even more valuable when the artist's pen transmits new ideas and new life, vitality and interest across time and space. If you can watch it, you can also live up to this April day where all things grow, which is exactly the title of this exhibition - the author advises the spring light to live.
The underrated "Dante"
Oil painting in China is only more than 100 years of history, negative overseas, after becoming famous and returning to China to pass on the salary, is recognized as the first generation of Chinese oil painters, Su Tianci's mentor Lin Fengmian is one of them, but also the pioneer of the exploration of oil painting nationalization. Lin Fengmian was also one of the most outstanding art educators of that generation, and Wu Guanzhong, Zao Wou-ki, zhu Dequn, etc. were all his senior disciples.
Born in 1922, Su Tianci was only a year or two younger than the youngest of the second generation in the usual sense, but including Shao Dazhen, an authority on art history, he was "subjugated" to the ranks of the third generation of Chinese oil painters. The reason is that the second generation of oil painters, in addition to being employed by the first generation, has a threshold, which became everyone before 1949. Because of historical reasons, Su Tianci started much later than his peers, and did not have the opportunity to study abroad in his youth, and was widely recognized many years after the founding of New China.
But Su Tianci is by no means as simple as the "door chief" of the third generation of Chinese oil painting, in a sense he is somewhat similar to Dante: Dante, who wrote the Divine Comedy, because of the use of religious themes of the old bottle of national language and ideological trends of the new wine, is known as the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first poet of the Renaissance; Su Tianci, who graduated from the National Art College in 1946 and returned to his alma mater to teach in 1948, is not only the last oil painter in the old Era of China, but also worthy of being the first Chinese oil painter in the new era.
"Portrait of Tina" and "Portrait of the Woman in Blue", the two oldest works in this exhibition were created in 1948, plus the "Portrait of the Woman in Black" created the following year, this group of Su Tianci's early portrait masterpieces, directly among the best oil paintings in the history of Chinese art, and can be called the most powerful declaration of the sinification of oil painting art: Chinese portrait oil painting finally began to have its own appearance and personality after experiencing imitation and digestion of Western teachers.
At that time, Su Tianci, who was a graduate of the National Art College, had just returned to his alma mater as an assistant teacher to Lin Fengmian. The shapes, colors and human proportions in these works have the style of world masters such as Matisse and Modigliani, which shows that this poor student who has never drunk foreign ink has a solid foundation in Western painting. But from the facial features to the shape of the face, the lines are very Chinese, like a lady and like a bodhisattva, especially the flexible and flexible hands, which should only belong to the flying sky on the Han and Tang murals. The female subjects of traditional Chinese painting often only dare to boldly express motherhood or childishness, or use exquisiteness to cover up and weaken the sense of gender, but Su Tianci has shown the vitality, fashion and charm that only belongs to young women as "gentle and generous" and "innocent", and fall generously.
Find the key to open both doors at the same time
It is worth mentioning the models in several works. "Portrait of Tina" is Lin Fengmian's daughter Lin Tina on her 21st birthday, Su Tianci took only an hour to make for the little master sister; the other two heroines are Su's other sister, Ling Huanru, a graduate of the National Art College in 1948, who later became a female sculptor, professor, and Su Tianci's colleague and wife.
"There were two images in front of my eyes, one was this person in life, and the other was this person in front of me. I put both images there, one is a swimming point of view, the other is a fixed point of view, to be manifested at the same time, to grasp God you have to do so. Years later, Su Tianci talked about how he found the key to open two doors at the same time between the "fax" of Western painting and the "transmission of god" of Chinese painting. "It was very interesting for me to look at this painting later, and after a few decades, it was very close to the portrait photos at that time, but at that time, I did not look for photos to compare with her to paint, and my old classmates also thought it was this person when they looked at it." (If the quotations are not otherwise noted, they are from the "Su Tianci Anthology", the same below)
As early as the time of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, when the companions were in the lower grades, other students were busy "calling Greece by words" and strictly studying the method of Western painting ancestors, and Su Tianci was thinking about the question of "how to go in and out between the East and the West, and be able to integrate together". After studying Shi Tao's "Quotations from Paintings" and Rodin's "Treatise on Art" at the same time, Su Tianci "chose to start from the line, from the interdependence of the Western edge and the form to the East to borrow a pen to convey the charm of the gods".
After several portrait paintings, the exploration ideas laid down in the early years ran through Su Tianci's entire artistic career. Since he was a teenager, he has devoted himself to the anti-Japanese literary and artistic movement to save the dead, and after 1949, he actively threw his studies into the torrent of socialist construction. In this exhibition, a series of works represented by "Spring Wind and Willows" and the performance of laborers and labor scenes are eye-catching, because they are so different from those oil painters of the same generation who are familiar with us who "take Su as a teacher" and, to be precise, "take Maximov as a teacher". In the era when the creative atmosphere needs to be tolerated and the general cognition needs to be improved, this has caused unnecessary trouble to the painter, so that the most golden young adult in artistic creation is mostly spent in turbulence and stumbling.
Su Tianci did not complain about the injustice of fate, but realized that "tradition has accumulated the essence of human beings from generation to generation, and has also accumulated prejudices that have been passed down from generation to generation... (Chinese) Treat it as a flood beast, because it is limited to ideas. Art is both related to the lives of ordinary people and has its professional territory, so there are layers", both open-minded and sober. The artistic theories sublimated by these realizations not only feed back on the creation of the painter Su Tianci, but also nourish the world's peach and plum by the teacher Su Tianci. As a product of the adjustment of faculties and departments that year, Nanjing Academy of Art can quickly become an important town of oil painting education in China, and it is inseparable from the acceptance of Su Tianci, the "Immortal".
From the Kingdom of Nature to the Kingdom of Freedom
Unable to drift to zero independently under the big history, Su Tianci never returned to his hometown under Kapok, nor did he stay in his alma mater on the shore of Xizi Lake, and eventually became a Jiangsu native for most of his life. But he made his hometown his hometown, where he found his most beautiful canvas, Taihu Lake. Su Tianci's Taihu Lake and Jiangnan have one thing in common: almost never see the sun.
"If you paint a landscape according to Western standards, you should paint it under the sun, and the more intense it is, the more you can paint the effect, but the beauty of the Jiangnan landscape is not under the sun." So when I painted Jiangnan, I painted more cloudy days and rainy days, only in this way can I especially show its more subtle colors and show its unique mood. "Su Tianci created a series of Chinese and Western masterpieces that are both realistic and freehand, both lyrical and expressive, and the artistic pursuit of MingZhi when he was young, and finally has a stable and mature academic system.
At the end of the 1980s, Su Tianci retired from Nanyi and was appointed by the state to be a visiting scholar in Europe. There, he eagerly soaked in the temples of artistic enlightenment in the mouth of his teacher Lin Fengmian, and while seeking the source and asking, he read the nationalization of the oil paintings in Zizi, which was also elevated to a higher philosophical level: "Western heavy objects, seeking them by mathematical reason, long and short, square and round, large and small, colorful and colorful, return to the visual order; the Eastern Heavy God, the pursuit of the spiritual order, the Chi God universe, the Tuna wind and clouds, life needs to breathe, tension and relaxation, movement and vertical and horizontal, jagged, all change by chance, seeking order without pain." ”
It is no wonder that looking at the still life floral sketches that are highly respected by collectors in the painter's later years, even the leaves seem to feel the personality and express themselves in their own language. As for the three late works around the turn of the millennium, "Autumn Willow", "Winter Lake" and "Morning Dawn", under the special brush of the self-made "not in the middle and not in the ocean", the Chinese painting techniques of dry brush and flying white, in addition to the space more time imagery, are more blank and freehand, and the viewer is brought from the natural kingdom of "time has disappeared but I have not moved" into the free kingdom of doing whatever he wants.
Lin Fengmian and Su Tianci were both masters and apprentices who had grown up in the southern country since childhood, and the natural wind objects in their hometown were their original natural enlightenment teachers. For example, Su Tianci recalled in his later years: "The longest memory stored in my life is the lush green in front of the door of my former residence... Nature pulled the door open, showing her colorful bosom, nourishing my senses until the little bits in my blood, making it increase with life and with the heart. I am glad that this happened from the time I was young, she prompted me to learn to draw, and I derived from it a pure joy, simple and simple enough to make me enjoy it for the rest of my life. ”
Lin Fengmian is from MeiXian County, Guangdong Province, Su Tianci is from Yangjiang, Guangdong, one in eastern Guangdong and one in western Guangdong, all of whom are Hakka. This folk lineage is known for its strong ability to accept and adapt, dare to break through but stubbornly adhere to the Taoist system of "following the sages and opening up learning" in its bones, and at the same time advocating practical simplicity aesthetically. It is not difficult to understand why Su Tianci only became Lin Fengmian's disciple in his senior year, but compared with several more famous and higher-valued brothers, he became a more thorough successor to the mantle of Naishi, and even in the nationalization of oil painting, he went further than Naishi.