Exhibition illuminates Chinese artists who lived in Paris in 20th century
Hong Kong-bound exhibition highlights Chinese artists who lived in Paris in the 20th century, writes Fionnuala McHugh
On May 10, 1933, an exhibition of contemporary Chinese painting opened at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris. It was organised by painter Xu Beihong, then a professor in Nanjing who had spent much of the 1920s travelling in Europe. More than 80 artists took part. French poet Paul Valéry (who was married to a niece of Impressionist Berthe Morisot) wrote a piece for the catalogue in which he mused that modern Chinese artists were influenced by two pasts: "theirs and ours".
You could argue that 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, was when everyone's past divided. Nationalism was on the rise: the countries that Xu took the show to after Paris (Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Soviet Union) were already accelerating towards the second conflagration of the 20th century. But the Jeu de Paume exhibition marked a coming-together and a cultural turning-point. Chinese artists had spent years gazing at the works in French museums; then the museums began to scrutinise modern Chinese artists.
"In the 1930s, the Chinese artists came to Paris to learn. By the 1950s, many of the Western artists wanted to learn from them
"It was at that time that the French museums made their first large acquisitions of Chinese painters," says Eric Lefebvre, curator of the Chinese painting collection at the Musée Guimet in Paris. Until last year, Lefebvre was curator of the Chinese collections at the Musée Cernuschi and, in that role, he organised the major 2011 exhibition "Chinese Artists in Paris", which showcased painters who lived in the French capital between the 1920s and 1950s.
Works from that show, as well as from the Musée Guimet, the Jeu de Paume and other French institutions, are coming to Hong Kong's Museum of Art later this month for an exhibition that's part of Le French May: "Paris • Chinese Painting - Legacy of the 20th Century Chinese Masters".
"The story of Chinese artists in Paris would take a very large museum to tell," says Lefebvre. "In Hong Kong, it's the first and second chapters."
These pioneers had crossed half the globe like camels with the deliberate purpose of soaking up the modern West in order to carry it back as sustenance for arid, post-imperial China. On their return to the motherland, having seen the scale (large), the texture (oils not ink), the subject matter (domestic, often unclothed) of Western art, they inspired a second wave of artists to start travelling. Lin, for instance, founded China's first Academy of Art in Hangzhou where Wu Guanzhong (who went to Paris in 1947), Zao Wou-ki (who arrived in 1948) and Chu Teh-chun (in 1955) were all students.
