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Chinese masterpieces from Paris museum return home for display
Print Edition
The Journey of Ink: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Paintings from the Musée Cernuschi” is showing at the Bund One Art Museum in Shanghai through January 5.
Divided into nine sections, the exhibition features 89 masterpieces by 36 renowned Chinese artists, including Qi Baishi and Zhang Daqian, charting the development of ink painting over the last century.
The narrative arc spans from early modernist experiments at the dawn of the 20th century, through the enthusiasm for study in France during the 1920s and 1930s, to creative adaptations during wartime relocations and the postwar reintegration of Chinese artists into the international art scene. It concludes with a focus on the museum’s recent acquisitions that reflect contemporary ink practices by Chinese artists.
In addition to the masterpieces, the exhibition is enriched with multimedia displays and archival materials, providing dynamic insights into the evolving techniques of ink painting and chronicling the museum’s history of exhibitions and acquisitions.
One of the highlights of the exhibition is the life drawings created by Chinese artists who traveled to Paris following World War I, where they sought to deepen their engagement with authentic Western artistic disciplines. Among the pioneers were Xu Beihong, Pan Yuliang, Sanyu and Lin Fengmian, who immersed themselves in rigorous Western art education.
For example, Sanyu found kinship with the modernists of Montparnasse, captivated by the free-spirited environment of la Grande Chaumière studio. In his life drawings, Sanyu uniquely employed a Chinese brush and ink to delineate human figures, replacing the volumetric effects typically achieved through pencil shading with the fluid linearity characteristic of Chinese ink painting.
Likewise, Pan and sculptor Hua Tianyou were thoroughly trained in the French academic tradition yet revisited the use of ink in the 1940s, creating distinctive figure works that harmoniously blended the precision of Western life drawing with the brushwork of Chinese painting.
This is Musée Cernuschi’s first exhibition in China. The Musée Cernuschi, an Asian art museum in Paris, has a large collection of Chinese art. Since its founding in 1898, the museum has been dedicated to the study and collection of Asian art. The first modern Chinese artwork collected by the Musée Cernuschi was a calligraphic vertical scroll by Kang Youwei, renowned scholar and political reformer of the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).
Some of the artists represented in the museum’s collection also include Fu Baoshi, Xie Zhiliu and Zao Wou-Ki.
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