Fu Baoshi
I'm a Fan of Fu Baoshi, I'm a fan of him. This may go back to 16 years old, I copied Fu Baoshi at the age of 16, and also copied Li Kejian, I have experienced Fu Baoshi's paintings and Li Kejian's paintings, I am serious about copying, it can be said that I have done this thing now many undergraduate and doctoral students of the Academy of Fine Arts are not necessarily done, I think copying is very important.
Fan Feng Lin Li Ke dye "Wushan Cloud Map" Ink on paper 67.5×44cm In 1979, I have been studying landscape painting for nearly fifty years, among many landscape painters in modern times, I have always regarded Fu Baoshi as my teacher, and studied his artistic structure, I noticed that Fu Baoshi admired Shi Tao the most, and also specially did Shi Tao's chronology to study. After that, I came to the conclusion that I found that as long as the landscape painters who experienced and studied the Shitao school were at the top level in the field of Chinese painting after that, they were far ahead of other painters of the same era in terms of artistic cognition. In addition to Fu, there are also Zhang Daqian, Huang Binhong, Pan Tianshou, Shi Lu, Lu Yushao, Lai Shaoqi and so on.
Shi Tao proposed: "Pen and ink should be contemporary", so how does Shi Tao do it? In painting "What to draw?" How to draw? These two questions must be answered, and I think Shi Tao answered most about how to draw. In particular, how landscape painters paint is very important, for example, what to paint is a very vague proposition for painting landscape painting. For example, we paint Huashan or paint Taishan, 3,000 years ago it was also Huashan, Taishan, and in 5,000 years it is still Huashan, Taishan, in the end it is such a mountain, the key to the problem is how do you paint this mountain this is the mountain painted by the Tang Dynasty, or the mountain painted by the Qing Dynasty, this is the modern people painted Huashan and Taishan, I think this is called "pen and ink when the times" the know-how and meaning refers to. Shi Tao was studying this thing—how I painted what I saw now. For example, painting people, do you think that the tang dynasty Chinese and today's Chinese are different? There is no difference, the difference is that the era is different, and the cultural atmosphere they are in is different, the clothes worn from the appearance are different, the education is different, the social environment is different, these things can be expressed through clothing and temperament. The difficulty of landscape painting is precisely how to express the spiritual outlook of different eras and people who are attached to landscapes. Then there is why China is called landscape painting, not landscape painting, if according to the Western landscape painting with all realistic methods to dispose of the object, the Tang Dynasty's Huashan and today's Huashan in the image and structure can not be distinguished, what is the difference? The difference is on the level of people's emotions and cognition of nature.
Fu Baoshi's era
Fu Baoshi's era was not only an era in which Chinese painting needed to innovate from traditional culture, but also a revolutionary era of Chinese literature and art. Everyone knows where Chinese culture should go after the "May Fourth Movement". At that time, Chen Duxiu and Wang Guowei originally put forward a lot of questions about traditional thinking, such as "Wen Anti-Eight Shares, Painting Anti-Four Kings", they were in such an era. Chinese painting at that time has to change its fate, it can not be like the ancients lyrical, it has to face the reality, how to serve the times, how to serve the politics, when Fu Baoshi also entered this era, it was at such a stage that Fu Baoshi appeared, he changed from a landscape painting born into a landscape painting that entered the world, to sketch, how to paint in the face of the object, and more importantly, how to put the object into the era in which fu Baoshi lived. After talking about the era of Fu Baoshi, in addition, I will talk about Fu Baoshi again, of course, I have not met Fu Baoshi, according to the data, Mr. Fu Baoshi painted and created at the Shanghai airport, he has always loved wine, he drank wine and then flew back to Ningbo, after returning home, he has been calling for headaches, a few days later, at noon, when he slept in bed in the morning, he suddenly cried unconscious. From the current review, it is definitely a sudden cerebral hemorrhage, and he died after ineffective rescue, and he died prematurely with great regret. Fu Baoshi is a person who is full of his personal characteristics, he is in the sketching scene, from the observation of the object is different from others. When Fu Baoshi sketched in the northeast, he drew a few lines on the sketchbook, there was no specific image structure, and the text was recorded on it: cotton jacket, firewood or strings, etc., that is, to remember some image experience text, Fu Baoshi's sketchbook may not be understood by others, and it is useless to read it, he is not like Li Kejian and the shape of a specific pencil, in fact, he writes feelings. Fu Baoshi is a person who grasps things and likes to grasp feelings and grasp the main points. Guo Moruo's influence on Fu Baoshi was very large, often two people together, he asked Guo Moruo what he should paint, Guo Moruo told him, he wanted him to first find a Chinese story, and then decompose the story, through this story to draw. He painted many poems of Chairman Mao, as well as Qu Yuan's "Ode to Orange" and qu Yuan's poetry. Fu Baoshi was painting in this way, painting what he solved in this way.
Fu Baoshi "Erxiang Tu" Vertical Axis Colored Paper 165×43.5cm 1946* This work appeared in the 2020 Beijing Poly Autumn Auction and sold for a high price of 104 million yuan, becoming the most expensive modern painting and calligraphy auctioned in the season.
The core of Fu Baoshi's work
Below we talk about what Fu Baoshi's works left us, I have such an experience, I am a painter, I use the feeling of a painter, I don't know if you can understand, for example, you copy other people's paintings, he can break up all the structures step by step, it can be spelled. For example, Li Kejian's painting can be spelled, but Fu Baoshi's painting you break it up after you go to try it out, you can't put it together. Fu Baoshi's painting is very difficult to come, he is painting qi without drawing shape, he has no shape, several pictures of the background are formless, no structure, it is difficult to spell, then you must remember its qi, this is the qi rhyme vivid, the typical qi rhyme vivid, because you can't take it away. Even Fu Baoshi's son did not learn well, it was difficult to learn, there was no way to learn, you must take away Fu Baoshi's spirit.
Fu Baoshi ,《To be detailed in the picture of the jiangshan mountains》
One day I was losing sleep at night and I was thinking, what is art history? I suddenly had another interpretation: the so-called space crossing of history is like I crossed from this house to another house, but the carry-on belongings are very limited, and I can only take a few key things to move into that house. The so-called "art history" is nothing more than what things I need to carry when I am about to cross from this era to that era so that I can adapt to that new era. I think Fu Baoshi is very good at sorting out this thing, he knows what kind of things to move to that house, you can look at his painting, can't find a line, the rest is all qi, but inside the qi we can realize that it eats all the things of Chinese culture, there are traditional cultural things, such as the traditional landscape paintings in ancient China with the computer things are separated, a blur, an abstraction is such a thing, what does this mean? Their spirit is the same, including Shi Tao's things, Fu Baoshi can be said to have brought all the breath and all the spirit in all the ancient Chinese landscape paintings into his works, what is reform? If you don't move from this house to that house, don't know what to bring with you, you must not be able to change it, solving this problem is to test the wisdom of contemporary artists, in order to retain what is your own contemporary things, so I think fu baoshi's most successful place is to find Fu Baoshi's contemporary.
(This article is based on Fan Feng's speech at the seminar on "Dahua Shocking High Wind - Fu Baoshi's Works Exhibition")