Author: Zhu Shaojie Tang Sheng
For a generation of artistic giants Qi Baishi, the long journey of "five outs and five returns" in middle age is crucial, he once recalled: "This is the most memorable thing in my life, and it is still very interesting to think about it." During the long trip, Qi Baishi visited Lingnan four times, including three visits to Guangzhou, and also spent the Spring Festival in Guangzhou in 1909. On New Year's Day last year, the exhibition "Beauty and Italy Prolonging the Year - Qi Baishi's Art World" was exhibited at the Guangzhou Museum of Art, and the "156-year-old" Baishi old man once again "celebrated the Spring Festival" in Guangzhou, which attracted great attention.
Many visits to Lingnan, Guangzhou, Qinzhou, Hong Kong and other places, which had a great impact on Qi Baishi's artistic life. In terms of theme alone, he created the Lingnan Jiaguo series represented by lychees. "The garden fruit is unparalleled, yu was once a visitor to the Tianya Pavilion, so I know that this fruit is excellent." Qi Baishi praised the unique charm of lychees in a lychee painting in the 1940s.
Lychees, sunflower trees, plantains, shrimp... The wind objects in the painting pinned on the most simple and authentic prayers of the old man of Baishi for life, carrying his love and attachment to lingnan style and humanities, and also related to the karma of a generation of masters in the painting world and Lingnan.
Travel and progress
The exhibits in the exhibition "Qi Baishi's Art World" cover calligraphy, paintings, seal carvings, manuscripts, etc., mainly from the Beijing Painting Academy and the Guangzhou Art Museum, which have the richest collection of Qi Baishi. Organizers said that one of the origins of the exhibition was the Spring Festival that Qi Baishi spent in Guangzhou 111 years ago. But when it comes to Qi Baishi's fate with Guangzhou, it didn't just happen in 1909.
In 1902, the 40-year-old Qi Baishi received a letter from his friend Guo Baosheng, in which he wrote: "Whether you are composing poetry or writing, or painting and engraving, you must seek entry in the journey, and painting should especially travel more, and field investigation can get the true meaning of it." The advice of his friend led to the transformation of Qi Baishi's art. According to the "Autobiography of the Old Man of Baishi" (hereinafter referred to as the "Autobiography") dictated by Qi Baishi and recorded by Zhang Cixi, Qi Baishi passed through Guangdong four times before and after, all of which occurred in the process of "five outs and five returns" that had an important impact on Qi Baishi's artistic creation.
According to the available materials, looking at Qi Baishi's four visits to Guangdong, since his fame had not yet reached prominence, his travels were more of an act between individuals and friends, and did not cause widespread effects in the wider art and public spheres. But in any case, the experience of four visits to Guangdong is destined to become an important footprint in Qi Baishi's artistic life of "walking thousands of miles", which has had a non-negligible impact on his painting and poetry creation. Of this experience, he said: "This is the most memorable thing in my life, and it is still very interesting when I think about it. ”
In 1906, on his third trip, Qi Baishi received a letter from his father in Guilin, asking him to rush to Guangdong to pursue his family in the army, so he took Wuzhou and came to Yangcheng, which was his first visit to Guangzhou. After arriving in Guangzhou this time, Qi Baishi did not stay too long, but hurried to Qinzhou to find his family. After arriving in Qinzhou, Qi Baishi was left behind by Guo Baosheng, who was then the Qinlian Soldier, who not only taught his wife to paint, but also painted for Guo Baosheng, earning some money.
This was Qi Baishi's first visit to Guangdong (Qinzhou was then Guangdong, now Guangxi), and his biggest gain on this trip was to see the authentic works of Bada Shanren, Xu Wei, Jin Dongxin and many other famous artists from Guo Baosheng and copy them.
Lychee into the painting
Many visits to Lingnan have had a great impact on Baishi's artistic life. In terms of creative themes alone, he has formed the Lingnan Jiaguo series represented by lychees. Qi Baishi concluded that his lychee paintings began with a trip to Qinzhou, and he once inscribed on a painting "Lychee Dragon Boat" that "Qi Baishi, the old man who sent Ping Ping, began to paint lychees after returning from Qinzhou".
Lingnan Jiaguo lychee into Qi Baishi painting (Photo / Courtesy of Guangzhou Museum of Art)
Qinzhou was under the jurisdiction of Guangdong during the Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, and after the founding of New China, it was changed to Guangxi, and was rich in lychees. In 1907, Qi Baishi left for Qinzhou again, which was his second trip to Lingnan, and he had already formed a deep relationship with Lychee. This time, Qi Baishi also accompanied Guo Baosheng to Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province, visiting Dinghu Mountain and Guanfei Quantan; and then to Gaoyao County, Youduanxi and Gurudwara Ancestral Hall. The unique natural and cultural landscape of Lingnan makes Qi Baishi dazzling.
After Qi Baishi and his party returned to Qinzhou, it was the time when lychees were on the market. Because he saw lychees full of trees along the road, Qi Baishi also included lychees in the painting from then on. "Someone once brought a lot of lychees and changed them to my paintings." Qi Baishi couldn't help but sigh in his "Autobiography": "This can be regarded as an elegant thing. Qi Baishi also once held a singer's field, she often peeled lychee meat for him to eat. Qi Baishi also made a chronicle poem: "The old dream of Qinzhou in Keli, the rain on the Nanmen River." In this life, there should be no points, and the slim hand teaches Nong to peel the lychee. ”
So, how many lychee paintings did Qi Baishi paint in total, and how many were passed down? According to an article in the Fine Arts Newspaper, according to the statistics of the works included in the Complete Works of Qi Baishi (Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 1996 edition), there are 42 paintings on the subject of lychee; in the Complete Collection of Qi Baishi collected by the Beijing Academy of Painting (Culture and Art Publishing House, September 2010 edition), there are 3 lychee paintings, and there are no duplicates of the works included in the Complete Collection of Qi Baishi. These two collections basically cover the stock of Qi Baishi lychee paintings, with a total of 45 works.
Some researchers have analyzed that the peak of Qi Baishi's lychee paintings was in the 1940s, and there were as many as 23 paintings, accounting for most of his entire career in lychee paintings. His last lychee painting was created in 1955, two years before his death. Qi Baishi's lychee paintings are of different shapes, different sizes, and diverse picture structures, and his love for lychees and the good will to pin down through lychees are consistent, and he likes to use inscriptions such as "Daji Dali", "Ping An Duoli", "Taiping Geeli", "Auspicious Wannian", "Da Li", "Da Li" and so on.
In addition to the Lingnan Jiaguo series, Qi Baishi's Lingnan trip also opened the creation of southern customs such as sunflower trees and plantains. On the journey from the early spring to the end of winter in 1907, Qi Baishi accompanied the army to the border city of Dongxing. In his "Autobiography", he mentioned: "This Dongxing is on the north bank of the Beilun River, opposite the Vietnamese Mong Cai, crossed the Iron Bridge, and went to the south bank of the Beilun River to explore the Vietnamese landscape. There are hundreds of wild bananas, and the sky is full of blue. I drew a "Green Sky Passerby Map" and included it in the borrowed mountain map volume. The landscape over there, on the other hand, has another kind of scenery. ”
Known as Qi Baishi's "First Axis of Landscape and Water", "Basho Book House Map" (Photo/ Courtesy of Guangzhou Museum of Art)
In the "Basho Book House Map", which is known as Qi Baishi's "first axis of landscape and water", Qi Baishi's inscription is consistent with his account: "Mangsho unforgettable Annan Province, for the love of basho non-learning books." The mountain ridge hesitates to recognize the passers-by, and the half-spring people live in the painting. Yu once traveled to Annam, crossing the iron bridge from Dongxing, and there were tens of thousands of bananas around his house next to the road. "Lang Shaojun, an expert on Qi Baishi, believes that the idea of "Basho Bookhouse" was completely derived from the old man's short trip to Vietnam." The plantains that reflected the blue color of the sky and the buildings hidden in them were deeply engraved in his mind, making him form the impulse to portray the "banana house".
Participate in the revolution
Guangdong is picturesque, and Cantonese people are Qi Baishi's artistic confidants. In 1908, Qi Baishi received an invitation from Luo Xingwu, who was serving as an envoy in Guangdong, and went to Guangzhou in February of that year, where he lived and made a living selling paintings and engravings.
This time, the "Autobiography" recorded: "At that time, the people of Guangzhou looked at paintings, and they liked the 'Four Kings' school, and they didn't know much about my painting methods, and very few people asked me to paint." Only the engraving, they praised my knife skills very much. My runge hung out, and the people who begged me to engrave the mark always had a dozen or so every day. Therefore, the selling career is not lonely. "Qi Baishi made his first trip to Xi'an in 1902, and when he arrived in Xi'an, he took the initiative to carve several seals for the famous scholar Fan Zengxiang (then an envoy to Shaanxi), which was very much appreciated by Fan. Fan Zengxiang not only gave Qi Baishi fifty taels of silver as a run capital, but also specially ordered an engraved runge for Qi Baishi and wrote it to him by hand. Presumably, when Qi Baishi was in Guangzhou, he still used the runge formulated by Fan Zengxiang, and there were more than ten times a day, and his income was quite considerable.
In addition to selling art, Qi Baishi was more directly involved in revolutionary work in Guangdong. At that time, Luo Xingwu, who was also one of the "Seven Sons of the Longshan Poetry Society", joined the League Led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen and did secret revolutionary work in Guangzhou. This time in Guangzhou, Luo Xingwu hoped that Qi Baishi would help them do something and pass on documents for them.
Qi Baishi recalled in his "Autobiography" that he felt that this was not a difficult thing to do, and he only needed to be alert and not to show flaws, and he would agree to it at the moment. From then on, the revolutionaries' secret documents needed to be passed on, and Luo Xingwu was handed over to Qi Baishi to handle. Qi Baishi, on the other hand, under the guise of selling paintings, mixed loose-leaf pages into the paintings, passed them very safely, and never showed his feet.
Confidant of Xiangjiang
In the autumn of 1908, Qi Baishi's father wrote to him to return to his hometown. But he did not live at home for long, and then he was ordered by his father to go to Qinzhou, and the fourth trip to Southern Guangdong officially began. He first spent the Spring Festival in Guangzhou in 1909, arrived in Qinzhou in the first month, stayed in Guo Baoshengbang for the summer, and then took his relatives to Hong Kong via Guangzhou, changed to a sea ship, and went directly to Shanghai.
This time, Qi Baishi stayed in Hong Kong for eight days. It can be seen from the "Diary of a Garden" that during his stay in Hong Kong, he stayed at the Tai An Hotel in Central, and his main activities were in the central and sheung wan areas on the north coast of Hong Kong Island. Qi Baishi successively watched Cantonese opera at the Taiping Theater, visited the Hong Kong Museum, went to the cinema to watch Japanese silent films, hiked to the Taiping Mountain (but gave up halfway due to fatigue), and watched wild animals in the "Bingtou Garden"... Before leaving, I did not forget to buy a pound of fresh peppers as a way to continue my sea journey.
Szeto Yuen-kit, director of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, believes that although Qi Baishi's transit trip to Hong Kong is short, it has a direct or indirect role in promoting the painter's travels and future exhibitions and selling paintings. Situ Yuanjie's review of the records found that there were many people who were known to have engaged in the brokerage of Qi Baishi's works in Hong Kong earlier, including Shuai Mingchu, Zhao Shaoang, Zheng Zizhan and others. It is worth mentioning that during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Qi Baishi lived in the fallen Peiping, with a "stop selling paintings" hanging high in front of his door to resist the Japanese traitors; while several Hong Kong agents thousands of miles away have been in contact with Qi Baishi to give him support and sponsorship.
Situ Yuanjie introduced that the relationship between Qi Baishi and several Hong Kong agents was directly witnessed in the "mail receipt" post book made by Qi Baishi before his death in the Beijing Painting Academy. The book contains some of Qi Baishi's receipts for mailing between 1938 and 1945, and writes down the dates and reasons in his own handwriting, which can give him a glimpse of the artistic communication at that time: the reasons he recorded were mostly related to the sending of paintings, and the Hong Kong addresses were Shuai Mingchu's office, Zhao Shaoang's home, and zheng zizhan of the Zhonghua Bookstore.
After 1949, Hong Kong further enjoyed favorable development conditions facing the mainland of the motherland and facing the world, and art and cultural relics also used this as a gathering and exchange center. At that time, a large number of calligraphy and paintings were exported from China, mainly through gallery agents in Hong Kong, the most important of which was the "Jigu Zhai", which opened in 1958, and once operated many Qi Baishi works. In the 1970s and 1980s, Hong Kong became the most important market for international auctions of modern and contemporary Chinese paintings, and directly produced many unique and high-quality private collections, including collectors who focused on Qi Baishi's calligraphy and paintings. The chinese painting master's works have been very active in Hong Kong and have become popular for decades.
【Interview】
Zhu Wanzhang (Research Librarian, National Museum of China)
The Guangdong imprint is deeply rooted in the art of White Stone
Yangcheng Evening News: How to evaluate the impact of "five out and five returns" on Baishi's artistic life?
Zhu Wanzhang: What really determined the pattern and direction of the painter Qi Baishi was the process of his "decay and change method" after settling in Beijing and gradually entering the mainstream art circle and being accepted by the Beijing painting circle, which finally achieved his position in the history of twentieth-century painting.
The "five outs and five returns" in the early years was the most important link in Qi Baishi's artistic career, nourishing him. Qi Baishi has traveled to Guangdong, Hong Kong and other places, and these travels have greatly enriched his early artistic experience, helped him lay the foundation, and played a certain role in the promotion and dissemination of later art. This all happened in the stage of artistic generation in his life experience.
Yangcheng Evening News: Qi Baishi has set foot in Guangdong four times, what kind of fate does the land of southern Guangdong have with him?
Zhu Wanzhang: Due to the convenience of geography, Qi Baishi has set foot in Guangdong many times, and the customs and customs of Lingnan have left an indelible mark on his paintings. For example, Qi Baishi has loved painting lychees all his life, and he also likes to paint some flowers, fruits and objects with southern national conditions, which are inseparable from his experience of traveling to Guangdong. His works are appreciated elegantly and customarily, and most of them have auspicious meanings, which is also in line with the aesthetic tastes of the Guangdong public.
Yangcheng Evening News: What are the new findings in the study of Qibaishi in recent years?
Zhu Wanzhang: In recent years, qi baishi research has come out on top in the study of painters in the same period. Its main manifestation is that new materials have been excavated, and letters, diaries and a large number of calligraphy and paintings have been publicly displayed and published, which has greatly enriched the research horizon. In the past ten years, the academic group led by the Qi Baishi International Research Center of the Beijing Academy of Painting has carried out research on Qibaishi landscape painting, figure painting, flower and bird painting, social travel and its position in the history of twentieth-century painting, with fruitful results, and a large number of treatises have been published and published. The research team also shows a tendency to be diversified and younger. This is relatively rare in the study of other painters.
Yangcheng Evening News: Today, looking back at the art of the old man of Baishi, what kind of enlightenment will it bring us?
Zhu Wanzhang: The success of Qi Baishi has brought many beneficial enlightenments to future generations, such as the works should respond to the trend of the times and have a certain number of audience groups; aesthetic aspects should be appreciated by the common customs and the themes should be diverse; in terms of promotion, they should be widely recognized by the mainstream art circles, political circles, and business circles; to have a certain cultural inheritance, they need to have a certain amount of disciples to inherit and promote their art; their works must have a certain "quantity" under the premise of emphasizing "quality"; they must be versatile; of course, painters must live a long life... These factors constitute the necessary conditions for Qi Baishi to become everyone.
Some of these conditions can be obtained through one's own efforts, and some require heaven, place, people and blessings. Therefore, it can also be said that the success of Qi Baishi is not replicable.
【Extension】
Huang Binhong: Another person who has met Lingnan
Another Chinese painting artist with deep ties to Lingnan is Huang Binhong. In the summer of 1928, Huang Binhong went to Guangxi to give a lecture, passing through Guangzhou on the way home. On September 9, the Guangdong Chinese Painting Research Association held a grand welcome party for Huang Binhong, and he also visited Gao Jianfu and other local celebrities.
Liangguang and Lingnan are important objects of Huang Binhong's artistic creation. If the trip to Jianghuai is the first decade of Huang Binhong's art tour, then the guilin tour is the watershed that will start its next decade. In 1928 and 1935, he went to Guilin to sketch, and also depicted customs and objects in Huizhou, Zhaoqing and other places in Guangdong, which contributed to the turning point of his art.
Huang Binhong was in line with Huang Jie, Deng Shi and other Cantonese in Shanghai, and later had contacts with Huang Banruoduo, leaving many correspondence letters, poems and paintings. His artistic ideas are closely related to the Guangdong people, and the turning point of his artistic practice occurred in Lingnan. Huang Binhong's absorption and practice of the aesthetic ideas of the Guopu School is inseparable from his contacts with Guangdong scholars and the painting world.
At the same time, Cantonese people are also Huang Binhong's lifelong confidants. The earliest collectors of Huang Binhong's works came from Guangdong, and many of his works also flowed to Guangdong and Hong Kong. Huang Binhong's circle of friends has seen a large number of Cantonese figures, in addition to painters, there are poets, publishers, and patrons. Art historians believe that without the patronage of Cantonese, there would be no Huang Binhong.
Source: Yangcheng Evening News