Painting old Shanghai

By Wang Jie | May 31, 2010, Monday |

Print Edition

CHINA-PERIOD works by French artist Elise Rieuf, who lived in Shanghai from 1927 to 1930, are on display in the Xuhui Art Museum.

Nearly 60 of the oil paintings, water colors and sketches created in Shanghai are presented in the exhibition titled "La Periode Chinoise (1927-1930)."

They offer a rare insight into ordinary, very poor and humble life and street scenes from the perspective of a Western artist.

She painted neither the stylish 1920s nor traditional architecture but rather the scenes of strikingly different Shanghai - the Chinese oarsman, the child bending over his rice bowl, a woman washing her rags, a monk, a vendor - all familiar portraits informed by a Western touch.

Born in 1897 in Massiac, Rieuf graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Clermont-Ferrand. In 1927, she married architect Paul Veysseyre and they moved to Shanghai.

She wrote of approaching Shanghai, in her book "In Chinese Waters."

"The steamer slowed down; a silence fell; the moving silence of arrivals ashore. She rushed to the porthole, feeling all her strength returning. Straight ahead strange rocky islets and a green sea, never seen yet."

Her marriage didn't last long, nor did her Shanghai sojourn.

She divorced Veysseyre in 1930 and returned to France with more than 200 works she had created, oils, pastels, watercolors, wash tints and drawings.

She never sold her works.

Rieuf died in 1990 and all her works were found well preserved in her home in Aix-en-Provence and at her mother's house in Massiac.

Date: through June 6, 9am-5pm

Venue: Xuhui Art Museum, 1413 Huaihai Rd M.

Admission: free

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Painting old Shanghai

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