Editor's note: Lu Weizhao is a well-known scholar and calligrapher in modern and contemporary times, and also one of the pioneers and founders of higher calligraphy education in New China, and his teaching philosophy and educational ideas have deeply influenced the road of new Chinese calligraphy. In his later years, Lu Weizhao began to boldly adopt flat seals, and successively rewrote couplets for Yue Fei's tomb, and wrote tombstones for Pan Tianshou and his wife. This article is an article by Lu Zhaohui, the son of Lu Weizhao, recalling his father's calligraphy variant.
Lu Weizhao (1899-1980)
"Looking back at the 1950s, my father went from paying attention to the process of subordination of Chinese characters to germinating 'writing seal characters and participating in the subordinate posture', so that finally there was a bold attempt to 'write seal characters, participate in the subordinate posture, and slightly contain grass meaning', and integrate the seal, the subordinate and the grass. Objectively speaking, this is also in line with the late Qing Dynasty calligrapher Mr. Shen Zengzhi' yunyun: "Seal participation is subordinate to the situation and posture is born". His father, Lu Weizhao, was influenced by his grandfather and loved calligraphy and painting since childhood. Recalling his experience in studying books, he said: "Yu Zhixueshu, Mr. Pan Jinfu of Shaoxing, Qi Zhi, learned Yan's "Many Pagodas", which was more than twelve years old. Later, Mr. Lu Baijun of Chongming taught Yu Seal and Li, and he could not forget it for life. He also said: "The Three Ques, the Shi Men Ming, the Heavenly Hair Divine Sayings, and the Ode to the Stone Gate, Yu Shu thought he was able to do so in these four steles. It can be seen that my father worked the seal and the book in his early years.
Lu Weizhao was eighteen years old and came to "Du Bolu"
From 1927 until the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, Matsue Girls' High School was forced to cease operations, and my father worked as a teacher of Chinese language at the school. During this period, he regularly gave calligraphy lectures to female middle school students after class. In 1948, Huaxia Book Publishing Company published his book "Chinese Calligraphy", which comprehensively reflected his understanding and understanding of Chinese calligraphy and the history of calligraphy during this period.
Lu Weizhao Yue Tomb "Qingshan White Iron" Union
After the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in 1945, his father transferred from St. John's University in Shanghai to zhejiang university, and since then he has often visited the antique bookstore in Hangcheng, and one of his goals is to collect inscriptions. He paid special attention to the epitaphs of ordinary people before and after the Two Han Dynasties and the Jin Dynasty, studied the original ecological handwriting of the folk in that period, and paid attention to the process of subordination of Chinese characters. He believes that the change of Chinese characters from seals to subordinates, and the change of writing from lines to strokes, is a major progress, worthy of attention and worthy of study. Especially after being transferred to the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, he was ordered to prepare for the establishment of a calligraphy major, and together with Teacher Liu Jiang, he almost traveled to the old bookstores in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, purchasing inscriptions and materials everywhere. There are more than 1,200 tablets of inscriptions in the family, and some of the covers also have annotations: "Calligraphy has seal meaning, more seals and less seals", "Libi orthography, although impure but can be unified, can be enlightened from the creation of the body", "The Northern Qi characters are more and more in italics, and this is a representative of the less, on the basis of history, it cannot be learned", "This is a representative of more than a few kai, and there are many creative components", and so on.
Shortly after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the magazine "Cultural Relics" supervised by the State Administration of Cultural Relics and sponsored by the Cultural Relics Publishing House, and the magazine "Archaeology" sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and sponsored by the Institute of Archaeology were successively launched. Occasionally, the postman was negligent and missed a issue, and he would definitely go to Shanghai in person and go to the Fuzhou Road Bookstore to buy and make up for it. He paid special attention to the newly unearthed Yiding stele stones and bamboo books, such as the "Changsha Mawangdui Shu", "Juyan Han Jian", "Yunmeng Sleeping Tiger Di Qin Jian", "Wuwei Unearthed Mingjing", etc. Every time they came out, they carefully collected relevant materials, carefully studied, repeatedly compared, and never let go.
In 1958, a Japanese calligraphy delegation headed by Nishikawa Ning visited China for the first time and went to the Xiling Printing Society in Hangzhou, where his father participated in the reception. As a Japanese calligrapher and calligraphy historian, Mr. Nishikawa's doctoral dissertation, "A Study of the History of Ink In the Jin Dynasty", had not yet been published at the time, but his research on the evolution of Chinese character writing during the Two Han Dynasties, the Jin Dynasty, and the Southern and Northern Dynasties coincided with his father's concerns, so the two had a common language. It is not difficult to understand why, in 1962, 1964 and 1965, Mr. Xichuanning would come to China three times in succession, and all of them went to Hangzhou Xiling Printing House to meet with his father. Unfortunately, soon after the "Cultural Revolution" began, cultural exchanges between the two countries had to be interrupted.
Looking back at the 1950s, my father went from paying attention to the process of subordination of Chinese characters to germinating "writing seal characters and participating in the subordinate posture", so that finally there was a bold attempt to "write seal characters, participate in the subordinate posture, and slightly contain grass meaning", integrating seal, subordinate and grass. Objectively speaking, this is also in line with the famous calligrapher Mr. Shen Zengzhi at the end of the Qing Dynasty: "The seal is subordinate to the situation and the posture is born." In this regard, Mr. Sha Menghai once recalled: "At the beginning of the founding of New China, I was once told, is it good to write like this? I said, it's good to change. After a while, it really became famous, that is, the unique new body of Lu Weizhao, who is not sealed and not subordinate, and is also subordinate to lu, which is respected at home and abroad today. Mr. Lu's new body between the seals and the li, he himself called the lishu. I think that although the glyphs are flat, the structure of the calligraphy and paintings follows Xu Shen's old text and does not make up. The two Han seal laws, many of which are presumptuous, and Xu Shen ridiculed 'the horse-headed man is the chief' and 'man holds ten for fighting', and so on, which cannot be investigated. Mr. Lu is very particular about this and refuses to relax. Seal writers have always been patriarchal and advocated long bodies. In the previous jinshi posthumous texts, there were occasional square flats, which were called 'cockroach flats' by the Song and Yuan dynasties, and Xu Xuan and Wu Qiuyan believed that 'non-old pens cannot arrive'. I once praised Mr. Lu as today's expert on cockroaches, he laughed but did not answer, I think he is deserved. (See the preface to "Selected Calligraphy of Lu Weizhao") But my father always insisted that he wrote "flat seals". Indeed, "Sayings" was one of the most frequently read books on his desk that year. Until his later years, the complete set of eighty-nine volumes of "Shuowen Jiezi Zhenlin", he also borrowed six volumes a week, carefully read through, and meticulously studied the seal characters. Later, when we were sorting through his belongings, we also found that in the late fifties, he had tried to write a thousand-character text in the form of a flat seal book on the empty page of an old account book that my brother used for mathematical exercises. As we know, Wang Shu was a famous calligrapher in the early Qing Dynasty, who served as the president of the Seal Museum and was especially proficient in seal writing.
Lu Weizhao, big character seal book "Heart Painting"
At the end of the 1950s, my father once wrote a large-character seal book "Heart Painting", and inscribed: "The ancients had the phrase 'book, heart painting'. It is also about pushing what their hearts are doing. This painting should be his earliest attempt to explore the new body. Indeed, "book, heart painting also", from the writing of the word "heart painting" is obviously different from the general seal book, it is not difficult to speculate that he was eager for change and immersed in exploration. In the early 1960s, my father wrote seal books to some graduates of the Chinese Painting Department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts as a parting commemoration, which is one of the earliest batch of flat seal works that we have seen so far. In fact, at that time, the seal book, the glyphs were still rectangular or square, but horizontal and vertical, with corners, clear strokes, and affiliation. After that, the glyphs gradually tended to be flattened, more like lishu; the turns gradually tended to be round, slightly grassy; the words of the left and right structures were deliberately pulled apart to the sides, resulting in the horizontal arrangement of the entire work, while the vertical lines were sometimes not visible. The flat seal of this period is still being explored and has not yet been finalized. Soon, the literary and art circles studied Comrade Mao Zedong's "Speech at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art" in depth, and once my father asked me privately: "In your opinion, will I be considered 'deliberately making the workers and peasants understand' when I write this way?" Is it a departure from the spirit of 'thick present and thin past'? Especially after the "Cultural Revolution" began, he did not dare to write the flat seal publicly, but the exploration did not stop. In 1974, my father underwent prostatectomy surgery in Zhejiang Hospital, and during his hospitalization, I saw him lying on the hospital bed, his fingers still drawing stroke by stroke on his chest, deliberating on the structure of calligraphy and painting. After the end of the "Cultural Revolution" movement in 1976, the concerns of "retro" and "detachment from the masses of workers and peasants" gradually dissipated, and when he inscribed the plaques and steles, he began to boldly adopt flat seals, such as the couplet "Qingshan has the honor to bury loyal bones; the white iron innocent casts servants"; the plaque inscribed for the Yunqi Pavilion in Hangzhou "Repair the depths of the hedgehog"; and the tombstones written by Mr. and Mrs. Pan Tianshou and so on, he adopted the flat seal font.
Lu Weizhao, "Seven Verses of Mao Zedong's Answer to Friends"
Lu Weizhao,"Lu Xun Sends Masuda to The Return of the King"
Lu Weizhao, "Jia Zhi Sent Li Shiyu to Changzhou"
On the Book of Seals
Lu Weizhao calligraphy
Unfortunately, at this time, my father had entered the twilight years, old and frail, and accepted the task of recruiting the first batch of graduate students majoring in calligraphy and seal engraving in China, and it was difficult to meditate on creation. The flat seal banners "Poems of Mao Zedong and Liu Yazi", "Seven Verses of Mao Zedong Answering Friends", "Lu Xun Sending Zengtian To the King's Return to The Country", "Chen Yi's Gift of Seven Absolutes", "Jia Zhi Sending Li Shiyu to Changzhou", "Zhu Jianqiu's Dream Poems" and "Yue Wumu's Xiaozhongshan Words", as well as couplets such as "Qi Enthusiastically Climbing with The Same Climb" and "Chong Xiao Han Qi Hongtu", are all relatively mature works of his later years. In January 1980, my father went to Hexi, and if the day is over, we believe that his flat seal creation will be more perfect, and his works will be more colorful. Today, although as a tool for recording words, the brush has been replaced by a hard pen and even a computer, we believe that brush calligraphy, as a traditional art of the mainland and as the excellent traditional culture of the Chinese nation, will be passed on from generation to generation and will continue to be carried forward!
In his later years, Lu Weizhao
Sources | surging news
Editor| Fangzhou Hu Xinyun Zhao Yucen Xing Ke Qiu Yun
Review and | Ding Hongqi
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