Bai Xueshi belongs to the camp of adhering to the tradition of Chinese painting in the 20th century, and his art of landscape painting is a "wonderland" created by the combination of various opportunities in Chinese culture. Bai Xueshi's path of learning Chinese painting did not take the path of college education, but a typical teacher-apprentice teaching: he studied Zhao Mengzhu and Liang Shunian in the early days, and at the same time had the opportunity to contact and copy the Tibetan paintings of the Forbidden City, relying on his own diligence and hard work to study ancient methods, the channel of painting nourishment surpassed the Ming and Qing dynasties and traced back to the Song and Yuan Dynasties; in addition, Bai Xueshi also joined the Chinese Painting Research Association earlier, traveled to the painting world, and was committed to promoting the national essence. These experiences have enabled the art of baixueshi to lay a solid foundation after a long period of immersion in traditional nutrients, and has also become a new capital for its future transformation. The "last glory" of Baixueshi art is in the context of literature and art in the new era, in conjunction with the theme of the times of praising the great rivers and mountains of the motherland, taking the landscape of Guilin as a breakthrough, pioneering and innovating regional themes and achieving major achievements. Bai Xueshi's Lijiang Landscape has conquered countless viewers with its fresh and bright artistic conception and distinctive characteristics of the era style, and played a strong sound of landscape painting art.
Snow white stone
Bai Xueshi's artistic roots are deeply rooted in tradition, and he has finally borne fruit by virtue of his profound traditional connotation and extraordinary personal talent, through arduous exploration and mastery. How to inherit and carry forward the tradition, how to accept the sketching method, and how to express the style of the times are all involved in the artistic exploration of Bai Xueshi in these aspects. His treatment of tradition and the principle of trade-offs between the times shows us some laws about the development of Chinese painting.
I. Accumulation and exploration in the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China
In the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China, Bai Xueshi's works revealed a solid traditional foundation and extraordinary pen and ink temperament, which was manifested in the landscape figure painting "Spring" created by him in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in works such as "Annunciation" with the older generation of traditionalist painters Such as Hu Peiheng. Bai Xueshi is an all-round artist who is good at figures, landscapes, flowers and birds, and his figure paintings and flowers and birds have a tendency to work with brushwork, especially for the meticulous depiction of flowers and plants, with clear layers and rigorous grammar, which has become an indispensable potential for the innovation of his landscape painting. However, in the ever-changing political atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s, although Bai Xueshi's thematic works had profound traditional skills, the performance of the subject matter was shallow, ordinary, and not so intense, which was also difficult to overcome as a traditionalist painter. Traditional Chinese painting emphasizes the artistic conception rather than the theme idea, which may be the reason why Bai Xueshi's art was not chosen by the "Red Age". At the same time, although Bai Xueshi already has artistic potential, he has not yet formed a clear style tendency and theme positioning, nor has he created a thematic work that has an important impact, and that era has not yet provided a historical opportunity for the "birth" of everyone, so he is only occasionally emerging in this period. From the late end of the "Cultural Revolution" in the 1970s to the end, in the years when thematic works gradually withdrew from the mainstream of the art world, Bai Xueshi created influential works such as "The Morning of Dongzhai" and "Happiness Canal at the Foot of the Great Wall", but the thematic creation in this period has entered a low tide. Fortunately, these works are only the "transit station" for the exploration of Bai Xueshi art, and the era that belongs to him in the new era has really arrived, and the aesthetic character revealed in these works has also become a sign that Bai Xueshi art has opened up a new realm.
In the 1970s, as China's diplomatic work opened up a new situation, taking Nixon's visit to China as an opportunity, Premier Zhou instructed Chairman Mao's quotations and revolutionary exhibition paintings hanging in foreign-related hotels to be replaced with traditional landscape paintings with diluted political colors. By the end of the Cultural Revolution, the arrangement from Chairman Mao's Memorial Hall to other important halls of the country was changed to traditional Chinese paintings, which meant that the aesthetic tastes of the whole society turned, and as an opportunity, the whole society ushered in a major change in aesthetic standards. Traditional Chinese painting and its aesthetic conception began to recover, and Chinese painting faced the second transformation after the founding of New China: from the basis of political ideology to aesthetic taste. In the 1980s, the country's thematic requirements for artistic creation were relaxed, the subject matter content of paintings tended to be diversified, and traditional culture returned. In the context of such an era, Chinese painting with aesthetic conception as the core began to revive, the Chinese painting world became active, Li Keyan, Qian Songxiao, Song Wenzhi and other artists who led the way in the previous stage entered the new period while continuing to create and seeking transformation, in addition, there are also a group of Chinese painters who have been in a low-key state in the early stage began to enter the mainstream art history vision. Snow White Stone is one of them.
Author: Snow White Stone
Title: "Nothing to Do when you meet"
Collection of Qingweilou Fine Arts Museum
Landscape painting in the new period after stepping out of the forbidden area of theme and subject matter, the artistic conception as the theme, form is the content, aesthetic as the purpose, has become a period of Chinese painting art trend, to express the beauty of the motherland's rivers and mountains of the famous mountains and water has become the fashion of taking materials at this time, Lushan relics, Jinggangshan new appearance and other revolutionary holy places, Huangshan Yunhai, Jiangnan smoke and rain and other traditional scenic spots have become the focus of this period, showing the unique landscape of different regions has become the trend of this period. Bai Xueshi's success lies in the fact that he pushes this "characteristic presentation" to a new state. Bai Xueshi has been involved in the lijiang landscape since the early 1970s, but most of them are small sketches, and only later gradually positioned and focused, and began to create large-scale works. Entering the 1980s, his new style became clearer and more mature, eventually coming out of nowhere, creating a unique realm that had never been seen before. Therefore, Bai Xueshi's art has encountered the theme of Guilin landscape and caught up with the historical opportunity of the transformation of Chinese painting again, and has been fully sublimated, and its years of accumulation, spiritual thinking and kung fu have found a breakthrough, and successfully developed a new style of landscape painting from a scenic spot. Before Bai Xueshi, many ancients and modern painting masters, such as Qi Baishi and Li Keyan, had painted Guilin landscapes, and Bai Xueshi continued their artistic exploration, using the traditions they learned to face real life, excavating a set of vocabulary suitable for expressing the unique geomorphological characteristics of Guilin landscapes, creating a new artistic conception of landscape painting in a new period. This is completely different from the occasional involvement of masters such as Qi Baishi and Li Keyan, and even more different from the concept of the ancients of a thousand mountains and a thousand valleys, but an aesthetic character that has never been seen in ancient times.
Second, the exploration of the characteristics of Guilin's landscape and water landscape
It is not easy to express the landscape of Guilin with traditional Chinese landscape painting methods. Because most of the Lingnan mountains and rivers in Guangxi are lava landforms, the mountains are mostly lonely peaks and steep peaks, with horizontal and continuous contours but lack of longitudinal coherent veins, while the mountains in traditional Chinese paintings are mostly based on mountains with veins in the north (the northern landform is convenient for vertical composition and structural rules), but the traditional painting method is not easy to deal with for the Guilin mountains, and the painting will be messy and disorderly. Bai Xueshi, on the other hand, took advantage of the situation to treat the horizontal stretch of the mountains into the basic skeleton of the structural landscape, and turned it into a horizontal structure with the trend, converting the traditional vertical pattern into a banner. In the longitudinal direction, the parallel horizontal columns before and after are added, interspersed with cover, and the exaggerated air perspective is used to increase the contrast between virtual and real, which makes the layers of mountains open up different far-reaching spaces up and down. Further use of the performance of reflection in the water strengthens the ethereal and transparent picture, which greatly strengthens the spatial level of the landscape, thus forming a horizontal and deep perspective of the expression method. This kind of composition is suitable for the performance of Lijiang Landscape, and it can be said that the artistic treatment of Bai Xueshi has made the flat expression of Guilin's landscape successfully "appear". This compositional layout of the white snow stone is an important representation of the transformation of traditional landscape painting into contemporary times. Because modern buildings to the high-rise development, the single body is relatively low, not suitable for hanging vertical landscape paintings, especially the furnishings of some public event venues need huge horizontal paintings, so the demand for banner composition increases, Bai Xueshi at the invitation of the relevant state departments to draw display paintings are mostly banners. This has changed the basic pattern of traditional landscape painting, and the banner composition has become a form division of landscape painting to contemporary times, and Guilin landscape is just suitable for the opportunity of the transformation of the social function of Chinese painting.
Name: Autumn Colors
Because of the lack of emphasis on field sketching, ancient Chinese paintings do not show strongly special geomorphological features, and the expression of mountain and stone structure veins is relatively weak, most of which are flat and lack a sense of volume. Landscape painters in the 20th century tried to solve this problem, and among them, traditional painters were difficult to do, while most contemporary artists trained in Western painting did it, and Bai Xueshi not only solved this problem, but also more challengingly successfully expressed the characteristics of Guilin's mountains and rivers. The mountain and stone structure of Guilin is not as morphological as the northern mountains and rivers, and it is often a clump structure of mixed earth and stone. The northern mountains belong to the convex mountain stone, while the Guilin mountain stone belongs to the convex and concave type, which is covered with holes, so it is more difficult to express. However, the white snow stone can still grasp the large structural trend in a chaotic form, and process the mountain stone into an image that is both changeable in form and structural context, randomly assigned shape, flexible and changeable, so that the lone peak is self-contained, has a unique structural vein, and has a complete volume image. This requires a more holistic approach and depiction, as well as a painter with greater generalization and modeling skills. Bai Xueshi developed the method of chaotic hemp and axe splitting and the combination of "dragging mud and water" style of sketching, drawing many irregular shapes of fist stones and stones, buried soil and stones, trees and stones, all changes in neatness, tangible and invisible swallowing, natural but not messy. This breaks the monotony brought about by too much wholeness, creates a more natural and rich mountain image that is neatly scattered and even handled in place, and expresses the beauty of Zhong Lingyu and the exquisite clarity of Guilin's landscape, which is the second contribution of Bai Xueshi to the performance of Guilin's landscape.
Name: "Li River A Song Thousand Peaks Show"
The stylistic tone of Bai Xueshi landscape painting also shows a tendency to move closer to the traditional fine green landscape painting, which is an aesthetic orientation of that era, Song Wenzhi also blended the fine gongbi painting method and the green landscape painting method in his landscape painting, and the white snow stone is more intense. The plantains, houses, and boats in the foreground of the white snow stone landscape painting are delicately outlined, flat painted, and the houses are almost boundary paintings, which may be the remnants of his early brush painting style of flowers and birds. Another feature of Bai Xueshi's landscape painting is the reference to decorative painting techniques. Because his landscape is aimed at aesthetic aesthetics, he can break through the shackles of pen and ink and objects, boldly borrow the expression techniques of decorative painting, point out leaves with heavy colors, and spray color spots to express flying snow and leaf buds. In addition, Snow White Stone is also involved in the excavation of ink. He uses ink to detach from the pen, uses ink to infiltrate, and uses the unique effect of splashing ink to show the warm characteristics of Guilin's landscape, which transcends the scope of traditional landscape painting and enters the realm of color ink expression, which is a bold reference to emerging artistic techniques. These techniques can undoubtedly be more vivid in expressing the aesthetic characteristics of Lijiang's rivers and mountains, which are like dreams. Most of Bai Xueshi's Guilin landscapes adopt a green tone, and he combines different levels and different shades of green to create an intoxicating environment, which also increases the beautiful temperament of his landscape paintings.
Part of the work
Third, the basic orientation of traditional inheritance and development
Bai Xueshi's reference to decorative painting techniques is appropriate. To a certain extent, he broke through the traditional style, while maintaining the traditional pen and ink tone, and organically integrated the decorative techniques into the deep traditional heritage, using his profound traditional skills to integrate and absorb the decorative painting techniques, so that the works are bright and elegant and do not appear to be floaty and shallow, the style is fresh but there is a heavy and composed atmosphere, but also makes the "work" and "writing" organic combination, the fine depiction and the splash of ink swing reflect each other, each gets its own place, so his landscape paintings are thin and not greasy, colorful and vulgar.
Bai Xueshi's artistic innovation is actually inseparable from his solid basic pen and ink skills, his writing of tree trunks, the general expression of trees and bamboo forests, and the depiction of pine trees and pinetail bamboo are extremely creative, which can be seen in the beauty of pen and ink. His mountain stone structure shows a variety of brushwork, showing the morphological appearance and character characteristics of different trees and stones, creating many artistic images with different styles. The beauty of these artistic images is due to Bai Xueshi's proficiency in traditional painting methods, because the meaning of beauty is contained in the pen and ink structure formula and the grid, in which the virtual and white cloth, interspersed with avoidance are all ways to create beauty. Bai Xueshi has profound basic skills in this regard, so his artistic image is rich in pure and ancient charm and can withstand the test of aesthetics. In the 1980s, the landscape painting textbook written by Bai Xueshi became a model for the study of traditional landscape painting in the new era, from which we can also see the comprehensiveness of its traditional technique cultivation. In his landscape paintings, the beauty of every artistic image and every detail of mountains, stones, clouds, water, trees, etc. has the support and nourishment of tradition, including the Fa Milk obtained from the Early Song and Yuan Dynasties. However, in the work, Bai Xueshi organically integrates these traditional elements with innovative elements without showing traces.
Bai Xueshi's inheritance of tradition is not a superficial skin, but a further understanding of its generalization technique and artistic spirit on top of the traditional grid, after mastering the traditional techniques and procedures, tracing the spirit of brush and ink and expression of traditional landscape painting, and then using this method and spirit to face nature and the new appearance of the rivers and mountains in the new period, so as to realize the creation of artistic expression vocabulary. Bai Xueshi's landscape paintings also benefited from the sketching route advocated by that era, and his artistic creations, including expression techniques and artistic innovations, were the crystallization of his long-term sketching research. Many of Bai Xueshi's research on the geographical and geomorphological characteristics of Guilin's landscape and landscape, as well as the new artistic image in his pen, can be found in his sketches. He taught the Fa, faced nature, studied and pondered, and then created new expressions and vocabulary based on the geomorphological characteristics of the field. He also tried to create different methods according to the mountains of different regions, for example, in addition to the Lijiang Mountains, there are also images such as Taihang Mountain, Yanshan Mountain on the outskirts of Beijing, and Jiangnan Landscape, all of which he strives to express his unique style and make it different. This is also an artistic exploration of traditional landscape painting after experiencing the infiltration of the concept of Western painting realism - to update the deeper methods and brushwork of landscape painting according to the actual mountain and stone landform. The reason why Bai Xueshi's artistic creation is so distinct is because he is deeply involved in these levels, including his overall compositional treatment of Guilin landscape themes and the performance of many specific mountain stone images, and the generalization of bamboo forests, willow leaves and other tree methods, the innovation of these expressions are the results of facing nature, teaching and creating, and researching and speculating through sketching.
As for how to inherit and innovate the tradition of Chinese painting, many artists in the 20th century have explored, different genres have led the way, and diverse propositions have debated with each other. Stubborn persistence is not innovation, and complete abandonment is not the way out. Bai Xueshi's artistic path seems to be more in line with the spirit of tradition, he does not abandon tradition, walks into tradition, and penetrates the outer skin to appreciate its basic spirit. At the same time, he does not reject the creation methods of Western painting, including sketching methods and decorative expressions, regardless of Chinese and Western, but what is more important is not pure academic meditation, nor is it just paper and ink dry rope, but to go out and face nature, first transform the subject matter object, put it straight, re-feel, understand, play with the rope in artistic practice, and condense the specific perceptual level of hair. This new aesthetic feeling is the source of traditional art in the new period, the reflection of the spirit of the times, and the development in the true sense. From less to more, accumulate points into surfaces, and gradually improve and search, it will eventually produce a new artistic conception, which I call the "transformative creation" of traditional Chinese painting. This is the artistic path of Bai Xueshi and the key to the innovation of the entire Chinese culture in the 21st century.
(The author of this article is a researcher of the Beijing Academy of Painting, a famous calligrapher and painter, and an art historian)
Editor: Shi Cong
Review: Yang Xiangxiong
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