Ink and colour on paper

69.5 x 66.5 cm. 27 3/8 x 26 1/8 in.

Signed in Chinese with an artist's seal on bottom left

LITERATURE
1999, Lin Fengmian – Leader of Chinese Modernism Art, Canada Asia Pacific International Art Consultants Ltd, Taipei, p.102
PROVENANCE
Important Private Collection, Asia

A Decade that Transformed Chinese Painting
Three Revolutionary Masterpieces of Lin Fengmian

Leafing through the history of modern Chinese painting over the past 100 years, Lin Fengmian was undoubtedly the first to achieve significant international success. Throughout his life, he kept drawing inspirations from his true feelings for human beings and nature, and devoted himself to creating modern Chinese paintings adapted to the times. He has carried forward the achievements of Chinese traditional art, bringing back the vibrant spirit and artistic conception of Chinese calligraphy and painting.

Returning from Paris in 1927, Lin was invited by Cai Yuanpei to take the post of the principle of the National Hangzhou Fine Art School. He established the teaching aim as blending Eastern and Western artistic traditions, which laid the aesthetic foundation of the development of Chinese modernist painting, and the artistic creation throughout his life, taking the Chinese painting practice to an unprecedented era where the east meets the west.

A Golden Decade: The Fruits of Innovation that Survived
This autumn, Guardian Hong Kong is looking back to the master's golden years, presenting three masterpieces from the 40s to the early 50s which survived the Cultural Revolution: Lady in Blue (1947) (Lot 83) from the Hangzhou period, Lemon and Flower in Vase (1956) (Lot 85) and Village Scenery (1952) (Lot 84) during his stay in Shanghai. The three pieces respectively reflect Lin's innovations on the expression approaches of three classic painting subjects: female figures, still life and landscape, witnessing the golden decade of Lin's art practice.

The Re-arranged Ink and Color. The Groundbreaking Innovation.
Lady in Blue - an outstanding example of modernist aesthetics
In the middle and late 1940s, Lin Fengmian achieved an essential breakthrough in blending the Eastern and Western painting techniques of color and ink, lines and space, which was most evident in his female figure paintings. Since around 1937, Lin turned to the more modern square canvas. By 1947, he has introduced color fields in the background of the painting, separating the space by lines and blocks to create an impression of space. This technique turned out to be a significant transformation in his artistic creation, establishing a composition principle of his female figure painting.

The work, Lady in Blue, is created in this critical year, rarely seen in the market. The artist painted the left side of the canvas with a thick brush and divided the background into two parts. The fluidity of ink brings the color fields a subtle variation of brightness which results in a feeling of spaciousness, while the smudges of ink blur the boundaries of strokes, weakening the distance relations of the space and creating a serene and mysterious atmosphere. The evenly spaced crimson lines are interlaced with the longitudinal ink fields, building an outwardly extending visual effect, and establishing a harmonious frame structure.

The Dignified Posture and Graceful Demeanor:
The Charming Female Figure in the 1940s
In the depiction of the female's facial features, Lin Fengmian combined the traditional Chinese painting principles of “unity of form and spirit” from the mural in the Northern Wei Dynasty to Bada Shanren in the Qing Dynasty, with modern Western aesthetics. He pioneered the technique of simplifying the nose contour with two curves shaping the three-dimensional facial structure, which continued in his female figure portraits and became one of his most distinctive artistic features. The depicted woman gazes into the distance, with her eyes dark yet clear, her rosy lips plump, her face bright, bringing out the vitality of the figure. In the 1940s, the objects of Lin's paintings were mostly real persons. Therefore, the facial expressions and hairstyles of the depicted women vary from each other, keeping a record of the unique characteristics of modern Chinese women of the time.

In the meantime, Lin Fengmian went beyond the tradition of five shades of the ink. He employed ink as color and introduced intense colors to capture the variations of light and shadow. In Lady in Blue, the woman is dressed in an indigo dress and sits sideways. The ink of her outline is superimposed on the indigo color, emphasizing the shape of the folds and making the female figure stand out against the plain background. The artist delicately outlined the Western-styled ruffles along the neckline and cuffs with elegant curves and adorned the dress with yellow, orange and green colors which overlay each other and stretch into the background, forming a dreamy halo that surrounds the lady and refracts light and shadow. The unintentional blank space between the figure's contour and the background illuminates the sitting lady, giving her a graceful and regal bearing. As the gouache permeates the rice paper, the richness of western colors becomes softened and transformed into the lingering charm of ink painting. In this work, Lin has reconciled the self-confidence of a modern woman and the elegance of a traditional Chinese lady, setting a representative example of his modern beauty.

The Ingenious and Distinctive Method:
Lemon and Flower in Vase – An Oriental Expression of Cubism
Since the 1950s, Lin Fengmian has applied Western cubism in theatrical figures to still life paintings, of which the achievement is evident in Lemon and Flowers in Vase, a work created in 1956. In this painting, he divided the canvas into three parts with ochre, white and dark blue fields from left to right, and painted the field in the middle with white powder to build a visual light source. With the round table placed on the front of the light source, a classic composition which is consistent in his creation of various themes appears.

Apart from color, lines are also an important compositional element of Lin's still life paintings. In this work, the artist not only outlined the object with white strokes but also depicted the containers, the tablecloth and the curtain with interlaced white lines, creating the visual effect of constant light refraction in the space. The multiple light sources placed in the same image disrupted the order of light and shadow of the real world, developing an imagination out of the picture, and constructing a beautiful and harmonious context that spans time and space.

The World Beyond Image. The Life Within a Painting.
Village Scenery – A classic example of Lin's innovation in landscape painting

In 1952, in a letter to his student Pan Qiliu, Lin Fengmian wrote that “appreciating the joy of nature is the best way to cultivate one's perception.” The work, Village Scenery, was accomplished in that year.

He departed from the vertical axis layout of traditional landscape painting, and instead composed horizontally on the square canvas. The four sections of the sky, the distant mountain, the woods, and the farmland replaced the Z-shaped traditional landscape composition to highlight the subject and transformed the pictorial width to the depth of field typical in western landscape painting. Furthermore, in Chinese painting, blank-leaving is highly valued and suggests the limitless space and artistic conception, while Lin painted the whole canvas. He employed rich colors and overlaid ink on top, resulting in a texture of richness and fluidity.

Taking the impressionist perception of color and light refraction for reference, Lin Fengmian captured every detail of the variable scenery, such as the thin layer of golden light over the stream in the foreground suggesting the dynamics of the water. In between the distant and serene mountains, the dark yellow leaves shine as brilliant as the ripe wheat at the harvest time, just like Lin Fengmian, who was alone in Shanghai and separated from his family at that time, immersed in the peacefulness of painting yet looking forward to the harvest ahead.

Price estimate:
HKD: 1,600,000 – 2,600,000
USD: 204,000 – 331,500

Auction Result:
HKD: 1,888,000