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Wu Guanzhong (1919-2010), born in 1919 in Yixing County, Jiangsu Province. He graduated from the National Academy of Arts in 1942, was admitted to the Ministry of Education in 1946 to study at public expense, and in 1947 went to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris to study Western art history with the Suzoõr School. Wu Guanzhong returned to China in the autumn of 1950. He has taught at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the Department of Architecture of Tsinghua University, the Beijing Academy of Arts, and the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts. He was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts of Tsinghua University, an advisor to the China Artists Association, and a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. Winner of the "Highest Order of French Literature and Art" and the "Golden Medal of the City of Paris", one of the representative figures of modern Chinese art in the twentieth century. He devoted his life to the exploration of the nationalization of oil painting and the modernization of Chinese painting, and his original "color ink painting" is unique.
Speaking of Wu Guanzhong, almost everyone can think of Jiangnan in his paintings.
White walls, deva, green willows, stone bridges... Flowing lines, freehand ink, like poetry, like dreams... It is the rebirth of ink and the appearance of youth.
People just revel in his Jiangnan, and even those who imitate his painting style are tolerant, not to distinguish between true and false, because it is difficult to distinguish between true and false, or there is no need to distinguish between true and false.
But he himself never rubbed sand in his eyes, especially in art—at the age of 69, he personally destroyed all the works he felt dissatisfied with; at the age of 73, he still rushed to fight fake painting lawsuits, and regarded the fake as a "maggot", which was simply disgusting; if he saw the gift of paintings that had once been out of friendship in the market, he would scoff and want to break off his friendship with that person.
In his later years, he donated hundreds of millions of works to major art museums, just like a married daughter, because he felt that was the best destination.
In this life, he has experienced poverty and loneliness, and has also tasted many honors, but he has always been a naked child in front of the painting, giving all his sincerity and sincerity to the painting, and never allowing it to be contaminated with the slightest false and utilitarian atmosphere.
Outside of "Gangnam", who is in the crown? Just look at his paintings.
"Water Town"
"Little Bridge People' Home"
If he had not encountered art, Wu Guanzhong would have spent an ordinary life. He was originally a student of the electrical engineering department of Zhejiang University Vocational School, which is already a promising profession for a child from a poor family in the countryside, and it is also a matter of great honor for his parents. The twist of fate came from a fortuitous coincidence. 17-year-old Wu Guanzhong and Zhu Dequn, who are also his lifelong friends, visited the Hangzhou Art College, saw sculptures and paintings that had never been seen before, and suddenly felt as if they had been impacted by a different world, "like a baby opening its eyes for the first time." In the face of the call of beauty, he completely surrendered. He made up his mind that "even if he fights for his life", he will transfer to an art college to study. In the eyes of his parents, the painter has no way out, but no matter how hard he is, he cannot persuade this wild horse to get rid of the reins - the fuse of youth has been ignited by beauty, and he can only meet the fate of burning.
"Easy Master"
At that time, Hangzhou Art College was full of masters, and almost all the professors returned from studying in France, such as President Lin Fengmian, Provost Lin Wenzheng, Professor Wu Dayu, etc. Under their influence, Wu Guanzhong lingered in the color world created by Western masters such as Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso. At the same time, he is also one of the few students in the school who love Chinese painting, following the teacher Pan Tianshou and understanding the aesthetic conception of Shi Tao and Bada Shanren in ignorance. The seeds of China and the West have been sown in the hearts of youth at the same time, but no one has yet predicted what kind of fruit they will bear in the future.
Gangnam House
In 1937, the tranquility of the ivory tower was broken by artillery fire, and Wu Guanzhong began an 8-year drifting career with his alma mater. Like exiled birds, they briefly inhabited Yuanling in Hunan, Guiyang in Guizhou, Anjiang Village in Yunnan, Bishan in Chongqing... Just a paintbrush in his hand, never stopping: he painted in the library where the alarm sounded, on the slopes of the mountain where the cannon was under fire, and in a dilapidated temple... No matter how disturbed the outside world is, the world in the painting is always quiet and clear. At that time, the young man only complained about this helpless reality, but did not realize that the fate of the people had long been secretly merged with his artistic creation.
"Gangnam People's Home"
In 1946, Wu Guanzhong was admitted to one of the only two publicly-funded painting places in France by the Ministry of Education and came to the real ivory tower: the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In Paris, while studying Western painting, he used his spare time to travel to museums and galleries in Paris, and even ran through the museums and churches of famous cities such as Rome, Florence, Milan, and London. Along the way, he often nibbled on shabby bread, but his soul absorbed rich artistic nutrients. Originally, he planned not to return to China, because there was no good creative environment in China at that time. Only abroad, he often felt lonely and dazed. He remembers when he first went to France, he took the fourth-class cabin, and when he disembarked, he saw that the passengers in the first and second-class cabins paid the waiter a tip, and several of them Chinese students also collected 10 yuan to hand over to the American waiter. The other party said that they would not charge you a tip for Chinese in the fourth class. He remembered seeing Venus with a broken arm at the Louvre, and an administrator came over and teased him: "There are no such treasures in your country, right?" He fought back excitedly: this is Greek, it was stolen by robbers, you have not been to China, you go to the Gemmay Museum and see the Chinese treasures stolen by the robbers - that time he spoke French very fluently. He remembered taking a bus ride in London and he had bought a ticket with a coin, but when the conductor tried to find money for the coin to a gentleman, the gentleman was furious and refused to accept it, because it was money from Chinese. ......
Wu Guanzhong in Paris
After the founding of New China, students began to stir: to study in France, or to return to China? This is indeed a problem. Wu Guanzhong also experienced a lot of hesitation and struggle: in foreign countries, he only stayed for 3 years, and his artistic talent and ambitions were not displayed; after returning to China, he was in ruins and did not know where the future was. But he still made up his mind to go back- he terminated the extension application signed by the professor for him, the key reason was that he felt "the emptiness of losing the soil" in artistic creation, "separated from the land and people of the motherland, feelings are like floating ghosts, how was art born?" In a letter to Teacher Wu Dayu, he once wrote: "I do not want my work to be indifferent to the people who live together, the suffering of the motherland, and the haggard faces are all stretched out to my desk!" My parents, friends, neighbors, and thousands of my compatriots are looking at me with their eyes open! "Something has to be forged with our lives." No matter where I am driven to the motherland, I will cherish that humble part, do it step by step sincerely, and will no longer look forward to the painting world of Paris. ”
Whoever uttered a word, he was really driven away in the future, and he was humble, and indeed he moved forward step by step sincerely. More than 30 years later, he returned to Paris several times, when his classmates who remained in Paris had become internationally famous, painting in a spacious and bright studio, while he still lived in a courtyard in Beijing, with only a slightly brighter room in his home. His friend Xiong Bingming asked him: If you hadn't gone back, you would have walked on the road of Wuji and Dequn (Zao Wou-Ki and Zhu Dequn, both painters who are famous overseas), do you regret it today? He shook his head. "But they should envy me, toward the twilight, standing on their own land, embracing their mother, and feeling her body temperature and pulse at all times."
"Childhood"
A fire in the center of Wuguan burns only for painting. Originally, he was partial to painting figures, but he was criticized for being considered formalistic, and in order to continue painting, he had to turn to the creation of landscape painting.
He loved sketching, carried a picture box, and almost walked through most of the rivers and mountains of the motherland. Yulong Mountain in Lijiang, caves in Guizhou, landscapes in Guilin, gardens in Suzhou, pastures in Xinjiang, Laoshan in Qingdao... They all left his footprints in his travels and paintings. Once, when he returned from sketching on Hainan Island, he dragged a large bag of oil paintings that had not dried out on the train. Afraid that the paintings would be pressed, he put them on his seat, and he stood all the way to Beijing, and finally his feet were swollen. But because I saved the painting, I was still very happy.
"Scenery of Liujiaping in JinggangShan"
When he worked in the countryside of Hebei, the conditions were very simple, so he borrowed the dung baskets of his fellow villagers to make easels, bought cheap blackboard brush glue to make drawing boards, painted corn, painted sorghum, and painted cotton. The poverty of life, the misunderstanding of others, the endless labor, he felt nothing, but there were a few years when he could not paint, it was the saddest day he felt, as if his whole life had withered.
Sorghum and Cotton
His sketching, focusing on a "sheng" word, is not pure realism, but to inspire life and draw the vivid momentum of nature. To this end, he often had to climb up and down to move the animation rack, using the techniques of "moving flowers and elderly trees" and "moving mountains and reclaiming the sea" to move the scenery of one place to another place - sometimes even climbing the roots of trees to climb steep peaks. For example, when painting the Leshan Giant Buddha, he ran to the foot of the Big Buddha to paint his upper body, climbed to the middle of the mountain to paint his lower body, and then turned his head to paint the river at the foot of the Big Buddha... Circling like a flying swallow, it is only then that it creates such a shocking Buddha appearance.
Leshan Giant Buddha
When painting outside, Wu Guanzhong often heard praise from others, but what really touched his heartstrings was what an old fisherman in his 90s said, "Chinese is really smart, foreigners can't paint." I guess that innocent patriotic sentiment is consistent with him, right? He said his paintings were only concerned with two spectators, a villager in the village and an old friend of his colleagues in Paris— one representing the masses and one representing the experts. No matter how far the kite flies, the line that connects the motherland and the masses cannot be broken.
Ink painting, oil painting, one in one west, one ancient and one modern, has been alternately moving forward in his artistic career, "I feel that when the oil painting mountain is poor, I change the ink, but the ink is facing the end of the water, so I turn back and climb the slope of oil paint." "He went deep into the door of art because of oil painting, but because of ink painting, he became one of the international masters." Some people once commented that without ink painting, Wu Guanzhong would not go international, but without oil painting, his ink painting would not reach a mature state. It's very accurate.
The Great Wall
Although oil painting and ink painting have their own channels, he often tries to build a bridge between the two, "leading lines into oil paintings, leading blocks into ink". At the same time, he also integrates the artistic conception and emotion of Chinese into oil painting, and integrates Western modern abstract art into ink painting. Therefore, when you look at his paintings, you can always feel the soul of the East, and watch his ink loom with modern bones.
"Lu Xun's Hometown"
The Lion Grove
Jade Dragon Mountain Under the Moon
His ink paintings are best known in the Gangnam series. In the 1980s, he went to Jiangnan several times to sketch, painting those white-walled Dewa that he was familiar with in his childhood, small bridges and flowing water, lakes and ponds... The painter's eyes are attracted by the rows of houses, by the dense black and white blocks. He uses abstract brushwork to capture the beauty of the form with eternal charm, but every place is full of oriental sentiments: he paints "Qiu Jin's Former Residence", a horizontal and vertical black, is awe-inspiring, a few swallows on the wall, as if mourning; he paints "Double Swallows", black tiles, white walls, fresh water, simple, but everywhere is a tight nostalgia.
Qiu Jin's Former Residence
"Double Swallow"
He also painted pines, birches, vines, the Yellow River, the Great Wall with such brushstrokes... As if grasping their souls, above the picture, there is wild grass, tiger roaring, wild dance, and dragon swimming, so that the audience's heart also vibrates together. The fruits of his oriental motherhood also conquered the world: in 1992, the British Museum broke the convention of not hosting exhibitions for living painters and held a solo exhibition for him; in 1999, he was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Arts of the Académie française, becoming the first Asian to receive this award in 200 years.
Jade Dragon Pine
Wisteria
Also oil painting, also ink painting, also The East, also the West, the ten thousand laws are one, in fact, they are all artistic conceptions for the purpose of seeking beauty. He wrote in "Fifty Years of Horizontal Station Career": "I myself feel that I have been standing horizontally between China and west, between ancient and modern, but I have actually stood horizontally for fifty years..." He is indeed standing at the crossroads of ancient and modern and Chinese and Western intersections, and the four forces collide, intertwine, and merge in his creations, and also push Modern Chinese Abstract Painting to a new height and push it to the world.
He painted countless times in his life, and he also destroyed countless paintings. When he was young, he was not satisfied with his paintings, and later his art succeeded, in order to avoid bad works flowing to the market and misleading people who really liked them, he selected them in batches and destroyed them. What is painted on the drawing paper is torn to pieces, what is painted on the cloth is cut into pieces with scissors, and what is painted on the plywood is covered with oil paint... Some of the large-scale paintings he was reluctant to destroy himself, so he asked his daughter-in-law and grandson to help tear them up and burn them. Thinking of this old man standing in front of the window, looking at his former painstaking efforts, his own "sick child"—the works he had spent on but were not satisfied with, he regarded as a "sick child", and he was in the courtyard, and there was probably a lot of sadness in his heart.
Chen Danqing said of him: Throughout his life, Mr. Wu is a literary and artistic youth, and he will not grow old and sophisticated, while the literary and artistic youth of his generation are mostly enthusiastic and hardworking.
Wu Guanzhong said, "In my life, I only value three people: Lu Xun, Van Gogh and my wife. Lu Xun gave me direction and spirit, Van Gogh gave me character and gave me uniqueness, and his wife fulfilled my lifelong dream, ordinary, kind, and beautiful. "He was able to concentrate on his creations all his life, thanks to his wife. He is the character of an artist, often paying no attention to painting, and it is his wife who supports his art with tolerance and love.
"The Man Under the Lamp"
In his later years, he once painted a painting of "Lonely Sandbank Cold", in which two geese, one black and one white, crouched on the sandbank, and closed their eyes slightly, as if they were immersed in a lonely world. By then his wife was already suffering from Alzheimer's disease and could not remember who he was. He told her about the past, and she was just indifferent, as if everything in the world had nothing to do with her. He wrote about his past with his wife in "He and Her", which always read like weeping blood, "He felt infinite loneliness, eternal loneliness, the loneliness of two lovers facing each other, white-haired wives." "
"Lonely Sandbank Cold"
They have been together for more than 60 years, and they are finally going to lose each other. In 2010, at the age of 91, Wu Guanzhong died peacefully in Beijing Hospital, following his last wishes and scattering his ashes to the sea; the following year, his wife also went with him. Like the double swallows in his painting, it flew away, leaving Jiangnan who wanted to talk and rest, which was plain and missed. He said, if you miss me, just go and see my paintings.
Source: People's Literature Publishing House