Wang Xin
If for Europe, the 19th century was an era of parks. For Shanghai, then, the 20th century was an era of parks. Since 1868, when Shanghai established its first park in the concession, the Bund Park (also known as Huangpu Park), 15 parks have been established in the public concession and the French Concession. Shanghai's residents have a kind of public leisure and entertainment space that originated in the West. The park is a container that carries multiple levels of modern life, but it is also a showcase window that shows a multi-perspective modern landscape. The park attracts artists, including painters, with its "reinvented nature" and "life on display". Among them, the wind has different appearances, such as Wu Hufan's Western Suburbs Park and Liu Haisu and Yan Wenliang's Fuxing Park, and He Tianjian's Xiangyang Park.
French parks with Impressionist painting
In 19th-century France, Britain, and the United States, cities continued to carve out land for outdoor shared spaces for citizens. In 1847, Britain's first publicly financed park opened in Begenheit. Five years later, Napoleon III became Emperor of France and began implementing his first urban plan, establishing a vast network of parks. Baron Haussmann under Napoleon III built more than 30 new parks and community squares in the reconstruction of Paris. In France, for example, the parks open to the public in the 19th century were not only newly built, but also brought great gains by the French Revolution, including the royal gardens and hunting grounds, including the monarchical territory, including the famous Fontainebleau Forest. It has been a royal hunting ground since the 11th century and covers an area of more than 40,000 acres. By the 1830s, the opening of the Forest of Fontainebleau had inspired unprecedented development of the natural landscapes surrounding the city of Paris. Photography had just been invented, and soon after photographers flocked to set up cameras in the forest of Fontainebleau. By the 1860s, the rise of the park eventually led to the birth of Impressionist painting.
Monet, Forest of Fontainebleau, 1865
The park became both the scene of Impressionist painting and the object of Impressionist painting. In one of Monet's paintings intended for the 1866 Salon in France, it is revealed that the Forest of Fontainebleau was already a popular place for picnics, gatherings, and celebrations. The work was inspired by Manet's Lunch on the Grass and pays homage to Manet in the same name. Monet's eponymous work is about four times the size of Manet's Lunch on the Grass. The painter dedicated the enormous sizes usually dedicated to historical or mythological subjects to shining moments in everyday life that took place in the park. In 1868, when the Post-Impressionist painter Rousseau came to Paris, parc Montsouris was still under construction. Rousseau lived not far from the park, which became his favorite and frequent place. He loved the foreign trees and shrubs there. Rousseau visited the Tropical Botanical Garden, where the plants were taller than the jungle he imagined in his surreal paintings. He wrote that "when I enter the greenhouse of the Botanical Garden and see exotic plants, it is like walking into a strange dream". The reality reflected in this "peculiar dream" can be traced back to the geographical discoveries of the 15th century, when European navigators sailed to the New World and brought back many exotic plants. By the 19th century, such voyages had become more frequent, and new plant varieties had been brought back home by traveling explorers on an unprecedented scale. The abundance of plant species promoted the improvement of planting technology, and horticulture became a new industry at that time, and Rousseau was able to enter the "strange dream". The Lamartine park in Arles was inaugurated in 1872. In 1888, Van Gogh moved there. There are more than 100 kinds of trees in Lamartine Park, including sycamores, fir, oleander and so on. Van Gogh painted more than a dozen of Lamartine Parks and gave four of them to his most anticipated visitor, Gauguin. Gauguin did not fail Van Gogh and hung these paintings in his bedroom.
Monet, Lunch on the Grass, 1865
Manet, Lunch on the Grass, 1863
Rousseau, Parque de Montsourry, 1895
Van Gogh, The Entrance to arles Park, 1888
The park not only gave the Impressionist painters a natural space for outward light sketching, but also conveyed the vigorous urban life that unfolded in it to the painter as a new painting material. From the park landscape where people and nature intertwine to the diverse plant samples, the park inspires painters to create and becomes an inexhaustible source of painting.
Shanghai's parks and Chinese painters
A painter who lives around the park
Similar to the Impressionists, the painters in Shanghai had a geopolitical affinity with the park, with many of them living around the park or where they lived always within the regional radius of one or two parks. According to some data, in the 1950s, Wu Hufan lived on Songshan Road, Liu Haisu lived in Chongqing South Road, Fuxing Middle Road, Tao Lengyue was close to Liu Haisu, and also lived in Chongqing South Road, Fuxing Middle Road, and Lin Fengmian lived on Nanchang Road. Their residences are close to Renaissance Park (formerly known as Parque de France). He Tianjian lives on Middle Huaihai Road, Yan Wenliang lives in Xinkang Garden on Middle Huaihai Road, and Jiang Hanting lives on Wuyuan Road, and they live not far from Xiangyang Park. Yuan Songnian lived on Jiujiang Road, Middle Xizang Road, near the then newly completed People's Park. Make a reasonable deduction, and then move forward a few years, many of these painters should have lived there in the 1940s, such as Wu Hufan, Liu Haisu, Tao Lengyue, Yan Wenliang, and so on. The newly built parks in Shanghai from modern times to the 1940s are basically within the concession. That is to say, these painters, both foreign and Chinese painters, were more or less influenced by Shanghai's modern lifestyle, taste and aesthetics, and the modernity of this city was particularly strong in the concession. The manicured "reinvented nature" in the park and the modern leisure activities that people carry out in it are no strangers to the painters. Perhaps the painters once stepped into it, dotted in the beating human scene. On August 7, 1946, the Xinmin Evening News published an article describing French parks, "Oasis in the City": "The dense French plane trees are neatly arranged, in the process of their development and growth." After some artificial modification and cutting, strolling in the shade of the trees in the middle of the road does not seem to attract much beauty. In the evening, the large lawn became an open-air dormitory, with white, flowery, and colorful sheets covering the lawn, the mother holding the sucking baby in her arms, and one or two larger children lying on their backs or making noise to drink water, when the father helplessly scolded on the side. This group of citizens. It seems that only this moment is relatively free, to say the least, a little easier. But sometimes you can still faintly hear a little. Perhaps the wife complained that her husband had drunk too much, or perhaps complained that the wife had lost money for a few days playing mahjong, "If the sound of dialogue is removed, how similar it is to the vivid park scene depicted in Impressionist paintings, a vivid human mime is staged." The symbiosis and co-prosperity of Impressionism and the park have been briefly mentioned in the previous article, and this kind of park as a sketching space and expressive subject has established a new tradition in Western painting, and naturally transplanted into the practice of the Chinese Western painting movement. The park is not only an urban oasis infested by foreign painters, but also a subject that they incorporate into their paintings with their brushes. It can be said that for foreign painters, the practice of modern urban life lingering in the park is consistent with the modern painting practice of using the park as an object. But somehow, such a modern urban landscape and life practice did not widely touch the artistic nerves of Chinese painters, and before the 1950s, we seemed to rarely see The enthusiasm of Haipai painters for park subjects. Perhaps this urban landscape with modernity is not within the expressive genealogy of traditional Chinese painting, and it is impossible to find a docking point for the time being, whether from pen and ink or from the composition form. However, it does not mean that The Painters of the Shanghai School have not thought or tried to make a modern transformation of Chinese painting, and the faint light hidden in their personal creations will illuminate their new subject paintings in the future.
Liu Haisu, "Snow Scene of Fuxing Park", 1978
Yan Wenliang, Fuxing Park, 1963
Of course, the painters' residence and the geographical proximity of the park are only a superficial connection. From a broader geographical perspective, the entire Shanghai park has a psychological affinity with the painter. As the "substitution of creation" and "reconstruction of nature" in the "creation of foreign teachers" emphasized in Chinese painting, the park is the spatial transformation and spatial imagination of Chinese painters to pursue nature in modern cities. In particular, the New Chinese Painting Movement after 1949 called on Chinese painters to go out of the studio, reflect reality, and advocate sketching, and the park became a scene for Chinese painters to go deep into their lives. At the same time, from a spiritual point of view, the park, as an "oasis" and "gap" in the city, is also a peach blossom source for painters to entertain their mood and achieve temporary self-seclusion. The painter Liu Haisu used to go to Fuxing Park in the downturn of the 1960s and 1970s to dispel the haze in his heart. The painter He Tianjian also wrote that during his decade between the ages of 47 and 57, he often "lay on the park square, lying on the ground and looking at the clouds in the sky." "Fly your reverie into the clouds." In the special years, the park has become a real landscape, a substitute for true nature, settling the painter's heart and placing the painter's brush and ink. Once the clouds are lifted, the freedom of spirit and action is obtained, and the true landscape and true nature are still the most willing chinese painters to trek and write.
Go deep into life – go to the park
Shanghai is the birthplace of the "Maritime School". According to the "Maritime Merlin", from the Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, there were more than 700 people gathered in Shanghai. By 1949, Shanghai was still an important city of traditional Chinese painting, regardless of the number of painters, the trade in paintings and calligraphy, and the quality of paintings. After entering 1949, in the eyes of the new government, traditional Chinese painting has long been accustomed to expressing classical figures and landscapes and flowers and birds that "lyrical literati have escaped in their chests". All painting categories, including Chinese painting, must be socialistly transformed. On July 2, 1949, the "All-China Congress of Literary and Art Workers" held in Beijing, at which Mao Zedong's literary and artistic policy in Yan'an officially became the direction of literature and art in New China, and the policy of literature and art serving workers, peasants, and soldiers was determined. At the same time, Beijing and Shanghai respectively established the New Chinese Painting Research Association. The task of the Shanghai New Chinese Painting Research Association is to unite the original Chinese painters in Shanghai, organize them to study Mao Zedong's "Speech at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art" and relevant documents such as the new Chinese literary and art principles and policies, change their thinking, establish new concepts of literature and art, and at the same time go deep into the workers, peasants, and soldiers, understand and become familiar with the workers, peasants, and soldiers, so as to gradually enter the creation of new life, new themes, and new characters that express New China. (60 years of the Artists Association) The Shanghai New Chinese Painting Research Association can be seen as a prelude to the establishment of the Shanghai Chinese Painting Academy, transforming the understanding of painters, organizing them from the past individual creation to collective consciousness creation, and elevating artistic creation from the level of personal "private" to the height of "public" for the country, society and the people. The creation of Chinese painting is not only about this kind of painting, about a certain genre, about the individual painter, but also about the initiative to devote itself to the new national literary and artistic transformation and the huge project of ideological shaping.
In 1956, the Shanghai Academy of Chinese Painting was approved by the central government to prepare for construction. It can be seen from the "Implementation Plan (Draft) of the Shanghai Chinese Painting Academy" preserved by the Shanghai Academy of Chinese Painting that in 1956, the Central Ministry of Culture proposed to establish a "Chinese Painting Academy" in Beijing and Shanghai with the approval of the State Council, and the establishment of the "Chinese Painting Academy" was to inherit and carry forward the fine tradition of national (including folk) painting art, as well as to critically absorb the essence of foreign art, prosper the creation of Chinese painting, and cultivate Chinese painting talents. The draft's description of the purpose of the establishment of the Shanghai Academy of Chinese Painting is not only a metaphysical macro control, but a specific landing point. For the first 69 painters to enter the academy, each of them has an understanding and effort to inherit and carry forward, criticize and absorb based on their own artistic experience. After that, the large-scale creation of Chinese paintings in Shanghai was dominated by this institution. The expectation of the Shanghai Chinese Painting Academy is actually the expectation of the entire Chinese painting community. Some of the directions and guidelines in the draft were written in the early 1960s after several years of repeated washing, which were written into the "Eight Articles of Literature and Art" approved by the Central Propaganda Department.
Going deep into life and advocating sketching is an important way out for Chinese painters to transform themselves. In May 1955, Cai Ruohong, vice chairman of the China Artists Association, made a long speech on Chinese painting at the second enlarged meeting of the first council of the Chinese Artists Association, which had certain guiding significance for the creation of Chinese painting at that time. "The re-promotion of sketching is the first step in asking painters to exit the dead end and embark on the road of realism; the purpose is to expose painters to real life and at the same time develop the ability to express actual objects." ...... This practice is not only not a bad thing, but also a great good thing in inheriting the fine tradition of 'master creation' in ancient China." The leader of the art circle who had studied Western painting at the Shanghai Art College cleverly connected his familiar "sketching", a foreign artistic concept with the semantic docking of the traditional Chinese painting "Shihuahua", reducing the Shihuahua to a physical practice like "sketching", leaving behind the spiritual level of this ancient concept.
As a result, the Shanghai Academy of Chinese Painting organized painters to conduct regular in-depth life during the preparatory period. In the relevant records of the Shanghai China Academy of Painting from 1958 to 1961, it is written that the academy attaches great importance to the in-depth life of the painter, and in the past four years, the painter has been organized to go to 116 places in the city and other places to live in depth. Going to the park to sketch and create is also an important way to do this. "The in-depth life in 1958 was a pioneering work in the Shanghai traditional Chinese painting circle, and it played an extremely effective role in promoting the ideological transformation of the painters." Apparently, the people who made this summary forgot about the distant Beijing, where the New Chinese Painting Movement, which was deeply rooted in life, was also in full swing. From April to June 1959, the Shanghai Academy of Chinese Painting organized painters to create "Shanghai Style". On April 12 of that year, the painters of the Flower and Bird Group, Wang Gewei, Zhang Dazhuang, Jiang Hanting and Lai Chusheng, went to Longhua Nursery and Xijiao Park to live in depth and sketch. On November 4th, Wang Gewei, Zhang Dazhuang, Chen Peiqiu, Zhu Wenhou, Lai Chusheng, Deng Huainong, Ye Luyuan, Hou Biyi, Yu Wenhua and Zhang Shoucheng of the Flower and Bird Group went to the People's Park to sketch. From 1958 to 1959, he frequently went to the park to sketch, and an important reason for making the park part of the "Shanghai style" was to prepare for the theme of the 10th anniversary celebration of the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1959.
A park that serves as a library of painting materials
Judging from the records of the Shanghai Academy of Chinese Painting, it is mainly the painters of the flower and bird group who go to the park to sketch. Flower and bird paintings depict flowers, birds, fish and insects as a local micro-landscape, and the flowers and green plants in the park are the objects that the painters can observe and sketch. If it is said that landscape painting carries a vast natural landscape, then the flowers, branches, water edges, and stones in flower and bird paintings are a subtle natural world. The recreated nature in the park can be used everywhere as a natural picture taken by flower and bird painters, and flowers, birds, fish and insects are all specimens depicted by their sketches. Jiang Hanting, a painter at the Shanghai China Academy of Painting and a famous painter of flowers and birds, created "What You See in Zhongshan Park". The main body of the upper part of the picture is a yellow and blue parrot staying on the winding branches, and the lower part of the picture is mainly an ink-colored Taihu stone, and several blooming magnolia flowers protrude from behind the stone. The rest of the frame is treated as blank space. This is a painting of flowers and birds in the typical Jiang style. If it weren't for the inscription on the top left that reads "Seen in Zhongshan Park", probably no one would have thought about the relationship between this work and the park. A large amount of white space outside the main part of the picture does not have any directivity, which is a kind of withdrawal from the real situation space, which is common in Haipai flower and bird paintings. The spatial indication of the picture is clear entirely through the inscription. It can be seen from this that flower and bird paintings often abstract the specific natural environment to which the main image is attached, so this provides convenience for painters to transform the natural space of the picture, and prompts or indicates through words. Judging from the integrity and sophistication of the picture, this work should be completed in the studio, and the park may be where he gets materials and inspiration. It may also be attached through inscriptions in order to reflect the appearance of the park as required by the organization. Landscape painter He Tianjian also often went to Xiangyang Park near his home, or continued west to Zhongshan Park at the end of Yuyuan Road to sketch flowers and plants. His works such as "Xiangyang Park Nocturnal Flowers", "Xiangyang Park Magnolia", "Magnolia" and "Peony Flowers in Zhongshan Park" are all obvious sketches, which simply and neatly convey the speed of the pen. Outdoor sketching is often a means for painters to collect materials to record observations, from the eyes to the hands, the transmission of information can not be carefully considered, is a kind of rapid state of capture. Unlike Jiang Hanting, although these works of He Tianjian are also blank backgrounds, the rapidity of the pen and even the sloppy brush prompt a sense of presence, which is most likely a sketch that occurs in the park. In the two works "Xiangyang Park Magnolia" and "Magnolia", the painter added a street lamp to the right and left sides of the picture, respectively. The long light poles remain in people's imagination space, and only the lampshades and bulbs probe into the picture. The outline of these street lamps points out the environment of the park. The park was used as a material library for collecting samples of animal and plant images for painting, and the Chinese painter He Tianjian and the Impressionist painter Rousseau reached a consensus here. For the artists of the character group, the park is also a good place to capture the atmosphere of the characters' era. The parks of the new society are full of people of the new era who are leisurely playing, and their clothing and spiritual temperament are all shining with the light of the new era. In the landscape painter Lu Yushao's character sketches, there is an ink sketch of a young woman taking notes on a park bench. The painter accurately outlines the dynamics of the figures with fluid and flexible ink lines, and uses different colors for skin, clothing, and benches. Let's take a look at this young woman, with a butterfly ending in a short ponytail, wearing a doll collar pullover shirt, with a dark hem long skirt, and a pair of horizontal climbing black cloth shoes on her feet, typical of the simple and energetic young people of New China. Man is the most colorful and vibrant landscape in the park, and he is the most important part of the park landscape. Theoretically, in the parks of new China, all the recreated natural scenery and facilities are for the masters of this country. Therefore, in the park landscape, people are indispensable.
Jiang Hanting, "What I Saw in Zhongshan Park", 1958, 139×68
He Tianjian, "Nocturnal Flowers in Xiangyang Park", 1958, 24×31
He Tianjian, "Xiangyang Park Magnolia", 1958, 106.5×50.5
He Tianjian's Magnolia (Part III) is unknown 105.5×54
He Tianjian, "Peony Flowers in Zhongshan Park", 1958, 105×54
A landscape of the park as the subject of the painting
The ambition to capture the overall landscape or main landscape of the park with a bird's-eye view or a wide-angle lens-like perspective and move it into the work suggests that the park has entered the creation of Chinese painters as a theme. Between about 1958 and 1959, the painters of the Shanghai China Academy of Painting created a large number of paintings on the theme of the park, and the consistent feature of these works was the large perspective, and the natural landscape inside the park wall intertwined with the urban landscape and people outside the wall, forming a complex park landscape.
Shanghai's parks, especially those in the concession, have a special colonial undertone. The construction of Huangpu Park (i.e. Bund Park) stemmed from the need for recreation of the expatriates ( mainly British expatriates ) . Renaissance Park (i.e. French Park) was built at the expense of the French Concession Public Administration. Zhongshan Park (i.e. Mega Park) was built by the British. Since its birth, Shanghai's parks have carried the "original sin" of imperialism and colonialism. With the advent of 1949, the new government used "people's mastery" as the key to opening up the colonial park space, allowing the colonists to withdraw and return the park to the people, thus redefining the value of the park. The use of painting to open up for the people and share the urban public leisure space for the people - the park has important political significance. For the creation of celebratory paintings, the park is really a very good subject. It contains many sets of binary opposing value judgments such as "new" and "old", "past" and "present", "criticism" and "praise", "shame" and "glory", etc., and the meaning of expression is relatively simple and clear for the painter's creation. At the same time, the landscape of "recreating nature" in the park provides a landing point for the traditional brush and ink and schema of Chinese painters, compared with the new modern themes such as industrial production and urban scenery, the mixture of natural landscapes and urban landscapes in the park provides a buffer for Chinese painters, allowing them to rely on the traditional techniques and aesthetics of familiarity to slowly think in the creation of park themes, explore the technical improvements and conceptual changes required to express the new style of socialism. This buffer contains their hesitations, confusions, grumblings, and efforts to move toward a new era.
Yuan Songnian,People's Park, 1960, 144×68.5
Yuan Songnian's "People's Park" was composed to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the founding of New China, and was created in 1959. Yuan Songnian came from a western painting background, and later transferred to the study of Chinese painting, and the combination of Chinese and Western backgrounds made him deal with park subjects in a variety of ways, incorporating Western painting techniques into Chinese painting. It is a vertical axis of vertical composition, and the work consists of two parts, the painting of the main body and the inscription poem written at the top of the picture. The painter used the "Pingyuan" in traditional landscape painting to shape the spatial depth of field in the People's Park, introducing the staggered undulations of the mountains in the landscape painting into the picture, and two high-rise buildings stood in a cluster of hills pushing into the sky in the distance, with a clear Western style, one of which was a landmark building in Shanghai, once the tallest building in the Far East - the International Hotel. A variety of trees are planted on the rolling slopes and col, mainly pine trees. Shaded by trees, pavilions and stone bridges are dotted. Anyone who has personally visited People's Park will find the painting both familiar and unfamiliar. Familiar is the far side of the international hotel from the geographical location of the logo this is Nanjing Road, is the location of the People's Park. However, the undulating terrain from close to mid-view, pine trees, and stone bridge pavilions are clearly the natural world in traditional landscape painting. The real People's Park does not have such a spatial depth of field, does not have such a complex terrain undulating, nor does it plant a large number of pine trees. The treatment of these pictures can be seen as the painter's appropriation of traditional landscape painting patterns. In the representation of tall buildings in the distance, the painter uses perspective to accurately depict the volume and structure of the building. The picture generally presents a near-thick and distant color perspective, and the tall buildings in the sky are pink-gray, like mountain peaks covered by clouds, resulting in heterogeneous and homogeneous psychological feelings. Yuan Songnian's work still continues the form of combining poetry, calligraphy and painting in traditional Chinese painting, but the writing of inscription poems exudes a distinct atmosphere of the times. The inscription poem, titled "People's Park Song", reads:
"Ten years of the past is like flowing water, ten years of change is strong and strong, according to the column wandering reverie, the people's park is beautiful, this place used to run horse halls, poison the people and evil, countless outlaws, the concession has been bloody, socialism is thunderous, the haze of the earth is bright, benefiting the people Lai Wu Party, the Chinese prosperous Yellow River Qing, on the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the present, the park flowers and trees are competing for beauty, Tongyin willow bank people are weaving, painting bridges and flowing water scenery is like immortals, ten years of planning fee management, planting flowers and planting trees to build bridge pavilions, dredging rivers and transporting stones to build roads, tushan towering He Zhengrong,
In the past, the capital city is now a promised land, tourists have a lot of past experience, socialist morality and government, six hundred million people pray in unison, in today's imperialism into dust, I come to sketch pens flying, colorful painting notes, thousands of red and purple garden cloth, high and low green yin thick, fish and birds singing and painting pictures, continuous building Nanjing Road, cars for flowing water and horses for dragons, clouds and old things, etc., socialism can see for themselves, do not quit the bald pen to make long songs, Vientiane renewal period reconstruction. ”
The function of this inscription poem seems to be different from that of traditional inscription poems, "to induce (and sometimes even force) the audience to read textual poems, and then to let the patient reader return to the picture and re-appreciate the painting with the artistic conception of poetry" (Chen Zhenghong, "From Inscription Poems to Painted Poems: An Experiment of the Eight Monsters of Yangzhou"). This "People's Park Song" has a new folk song style that was popular around 1958, and the language is straightforward, and there is no elegant poetry. The content is mainly from the racecourse hall to the people's park, the narrative of the transformation of the nature of the space and the transformation of the space, and then the enthusiastic praise is unfolded. This poem is a supplement to the expression of the picture, Chinese painting is not a comic strip, does not pursue a plot narrative, and it is difficult to express the time and space of the transformation, and all the connotations that are difficult to express in the picture are borne by the inscription poem. From the perspective of the whole work, the quiet picture and the passionate poetry of the blood vein produce a dramatic contrast, a conflicting juxtaposition, which is related to each other in narrative and irrelevant in temperament, producing strange effects. In Yuan Songnian's other painting "Morning in Shanghai", which represents the park, the painter uses more Western painting techniques. This is a chinese painting with a horizontal composition, and the picture accurately depicts the spatial structure with focal perspective. The square garden pushed in the close view and the middle view should be Huangpu Park, and the distant view is the Bund International Building Complex. Parks and buildings each make up half of the picture. From the picture, you can see the square flower beds arranged from near and far on the vertical axis, and the main perspective of the painting coincides with the vertical axis through the park, thus having a broad field of view, which can see the park, the architectural background and the Huangpu River view next to it, making the whole painting look like a poster for urban image promotion. The painter depicted Huangpu Park sandwiched between the Huangpu River embankment and zhongshan east road with a bit of the momentum of a French royal garden. Can this all-encompassing, ambitious perspective be understood as the perspective of the master of the country?
Yuan Songnian, "Morning in Shanghai", 1958, 179×94
Zhu Qizhan , Green City, 1959 , 91×51
In 1959, Zhu Qizhan also created "GreenIng the City" with the theme of people's park. The painter depicts this park with the bustling Nanjing Road as the background with freehand brush and ink. In the painting of vertical composition, the painter neither considers the three distances in traditional landscape painting nor the perspective in Western painting, but instead pinches the landscape around the park together with a slightly arbitrary brush and ink, and the childish shape paints the park in the downtown area with a bit of childlike fun and mountain atmosphere. In the close-up, the painter depicts the park green space as if it were shrouded in the humid air of Jiangnan with dripping thick ink, which is smooth and smooth. When representing the international hotel in the background, some perspective is used to shape the volume of the building, and the shape structure is outlined with a dry brush. The painter uses the contrast of dry and wet brushes to express his understanding of the park landscape. The corner of the park in the midst of lush trees is natural, moist and feminine, and the tall buildings standing in the urban sky are tall, strong and cold. Zhu Qizhan studied Western painting in his early years and studied in Japan. Unlike Yuan Songnian, when he deals with the subject matter of urban parks, he basically relies on the traditional Chinese painting language, but the depiction and expression of the park in the close-up scenes also has a bit of expressionist color.
Although "users of urban parks are not looking for vacant lots as the background of buildings, they are going to the park itself, not the set." For them, the park is the foreground and the buildings are the background, not the other way around. (Death and Life in America's Great Cities[ Canada] Jane Jacobs Translation Press, 2006) But it is interesting that in the painters' depictions, the International Hotel on Nanjing Road and the Building of the Nations on the Bund will become an important part of the park landscape, as if the building is the protagonist and the park is the supporting role, which is contrary to the psychological experience and purpose of the tourist. However, it is precisely this kind of interconstruction between the park and the building formed on the picture that makes the People's Park and Huangpu Park have their own characteristics, and the special meaning of these buildings in the city of Shanghai has also become the identity code that distinguishes the two parks from other places. In the eyes and pen of the painter, the corresponding aerial urban landscape of People's Park and Huangpu Park is closely connected with the park itself and is integrated.
Not to be outdone, the veteran painter Shen Maishi also created the park theme painting "The Opening of The Basket Park" in 1959. This is a vertical axis. Judging from the inscription in the upper right of the picture, the Tying Basket Park was newly built after 1949. This park, which was born in New China, is located in a factory area infested by working people. The lower part of the picture is an open lake, there is a pavilion in the middle of the lake, the upper left part of the picture is a stacked hill, behind the hill, at the end of the lake there are several roofs, a few chimneys, a few wisps of smoke, there is the factory area. In the face of the park built for the people, Shen Maishi's mood was excited, and he twice inscribed on the painting.
"The park was newly built in the factory area, chiseled ponds, piled mountains, flowers, planted trees, and opened up a recreation spot for the working people. On the first day of opening on April 22, 1959, the photo of the Jiuqu Bridge in Huxin Pavilion was magnificent. Shen Maishi and remember
Sending out the light and heat of youth, the lake and mountain hand are created for the people, the crowds under the water's edge and the forest are full of emotion, singing the east wind to curb the clouds, and on May 4, it was also titled"
The painter made many figures in the painting, people or resting in the gazebo, or boating in the lake, or walking in the mountains, a new atmosphere of vitality. Small red flags and red scarves all highlight this new era.
Shen Meishi, "The Opening of The Basket Park", 1959
As for the new things that appeared in Chinese painting, as early as 1954, the 8th issue of "Fine Arts" published Wang Xun's article "Some Opinions on the Creation of Current Chinese Paintings". The article reads that "the appearance of some novel details on the screen - telephone poles, trains, realistic houses, figures in cadre uniforms, etc. can also explain the change in aesthetic thinking." But there are also other aspects that must be pointed out that the real effect obtained from the landscape sketching activities is that the painters have a new understanding of brush and ink techniques. In his attitude toward tradition, Wang Xun believes that traditional techniques are "dead methods." His views have caused controversy in the Beijing painting world, and the painter Qiu Shimian believes that simply relying on scientific and realistic methods to carry out "originality" is bound to go on the road of breaking away from tradition, and accepting heritage is by no means an obstacle to sketching. Subsequently, Qin Zhongwen also published an article supporting Qiu's point of view: "I don't know who instructed them to describe the real scene without hesitation, and took the things described in this way as creations." My argument is that such an activity should be a process of learning painting in a new way, rather than and should not be a requirement for the creation of landscape painting. In Shanghai, although the discussion of painters is not so intense, two different understandings of how new Chinese paintings should be created have been seen in the park works of Yuan Songnian and Zhu Qizhan. Yuan Songnian obviously used the kind of scientific method that Wang Xun admired.
From the 1950s to the early 1960s, painters from the Shanghai Academy of Chinese Painting would regularly organize themselves to hold relaxed fairy meetings to discuss the issue of painting creation. At a meeting in 1961 to discuss the issue of tradition and innovation, Zhu Qizhan said: "To inherit tradition, we must have the spirit of 'breaking through', and what I mean by 'breaking through' is not to break in from east to west, aimlessly, but to break in on the basis of inheriting tradition." Yuan Songnian believes: "Now the tradition is not enough, we must be bold and innovative, innovation comes from life." Obviously, Zhu Qizhan believes that the development of new Chinese painting is based on tradition, although he does not clarify how to break in and where to break in, but at least points out that it is not from east to west. Tradition and innovation are indeed a complex issue, not a simple binary opposition, nor a Darwinian evolutionary relationship. Yuan Songnian, on the other hand, looks more radical and simple, believing that the development of Chinese painting is the same as the development of society, and it is Darwinian. However, the urban landscape represented by parks is a new subject for traditional Chinese painters, and it does not belong to the category of traditional landscape painting. The use of traditional brush and ink and techniques to express modern subjects does make painters painstaking. However, some people have cleverly proposed the technical treatment of "building as a mountain", transforming the urban landscape into traditional landscapes, and using the expression of traditional landscape paintings to deal with urban themes. In general, whether it is Zhu Qizhan's breakthrough on the basis of inheriting tradition or Yuan Songnian's bold innovation, these can be understood as actively seeking changes to meet the needs of new themes.
There are also painters who try to adhere to tradition when expressing new themes. For example, Wu Hufan and Li Qiujun. In Wu Hufan's 1958 "Painting Scene in the Western Suburbs Park", the traditional painting patterns and techniques, the composition of Pingyuan, the nearby is deep into the waterfront of the lake, the quaint weeping willows, the ducks and white geese in the water or on the shore seem to come out of the courtyard body painting. On the other side of the river is a forest, the farther away the more stretched, in the shallow color blending contains the boundary between heaven and earth, the ethereal freehand of the distant view contrasts with the rigorous detail of the close-up, if it is not the inscription at the top right of the picture, you will think that this is a traditional landscape painting. The content of the inscription is "Red flag willow dancing spring color, clear water pond warm kingfisher." In the early summer of May 1958, I saw it in the western suburbs park, and I wrote a picture of it, and patched up the scene of the teenager racing to compete for the upper reaches, in order to meet the great leap forward in the construction of socialism that was in full swing and flourishing. Wu Hufan painted and inscribed. This inscription tells some of the mysteries in the painting. The painter did not see the scene of the juvenile racing in the park, but when he returned home to create with his memory, he added the juvenile racing to the picture. Why add this plot? Is it to enrich the picture? No, it is to borrow the spirit of striving to go upstream embodied in the racing to celebrate the fanatical construction passion of the Great Leap Forward in 1958. Although the teenager who raced to the ferry wore a red scarf, he was still dressed in ancient style. Li Qiujun's "Happy Teenager Happy Holiday" is the same as Wu Hufan's "Writing Scenes in the Western Suburbs Park", and it is also a teenager in the classical landscape. When Wu Hufan and Li Qiujun adhered to tradition and maintained the style of classical painting, in order to meet the literary and artistic requirements of the new era, they connected traditional painting with the spirit of the times by means of character point scenes and inscription poems, and found a wisdom that did not lag behind the times in adhering to it.
Wu Hufan, "Writing Scenes in Xijiao Park", 1958, 107×56.5
Li Qiujun, Happy Teenagers Happy Holiday, 1958
The change in the park from being a repository of materials for Chinese painters to entering the paintings of Chinese painters with its own landscape as a theme occurred after 1949. The New Chinese Painting Movement, which began in the early 1950s, prepared the spirit and technology for the creation of park themes. The requirement to shape the landscape of a new nation-state in literary and artistic works has pushed the park into Chinese painting. The colorful presentation of the park landscape in Chinese painting not only shows the differences in the individual style of the painter, the difference in understanding of modern subjects and the difference in active innovation or trying to maintain the traditional position, but also reveals the exploration of modern themes into traditional paintings in terms of techniques and the various adaptations and incongruities between the two. From 1958 to 1959, with the arrival of the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of New China, the theme creation of the park landscape entered a climax. The theme of the park can be seen as a transition between traditional and modern subjects, where Chinese painters can move in and out, exploring the future of Chinese painting in this middle ground where they can turn around calmly.
(This article was originally titled "Park in Painting - Shanghai Park Landscape in Chinese Painting", the author's unit is Shanghai China Painting Academy, the author's original note: Thank you teacher Chen Xiang for his help in writing this article)
Editor-in-Charge: Li Mei
Proofreader: Luan Meng