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Forbidden art revealed

The National Gallery shows its masterful, massive Chinese collection

By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
July 9th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Updating the traditions: Lin Fengmian, above, and Qi Baishi, below.
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The National Gallery’s collection of 20th-century Chinese art is large — so large that the exhibition “Masters of 20th-Century Chinese Brush Painting” is being shown in two parts. (That’s also due to the works’ sensitivity to light.) Part one will be closing at the end of July; the second part opens Aug. 1 and runs until Nov. 2.
In the interwar period, Vojtěch Chytil, an artist and active collector at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Beijing, amassed a vast assortment of art, especially by artists from the so-called Beijing Circle. After Chytil died in 1936, the National Gallery purchased most of these works, including 260 scrolls and paintings from the early 20th century. Most of them are on display in this show.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Chinese art was very popular in Europe — Chytil showed his collection in Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam and Budapest. His acquisitive efforts, however, represent only half of the National Gallery’s collection of 20th-century Chinese art.
After Mao came to power in 1949, it became virtually impossible for any country other than the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc to have access to China. That meant Czechs who were already friends of Chinese artists (due to the efforts of Chytil and others from the First Republic) had unique access to the artists and their studios.
Thus, throughout the 1950s, Czechs had an unprecedented opportunity to collect Chinese art, from the engineers who obtained more than 400 Chinese classics to cultural diplomats and others who collected the works of the masters, with a focus on “forbidden” contemporary art — the Kandinskys and Monets of China. As a result, the National Gallery’s collection of 20th-century Chinese art is among the best in the world, and certainly the best in Europe.
The exhibition begins with one work representing the Shanghai School of Painting. Shanghai was the bustling commercial center of China in the early 20th century, and its art market was more active than that of any other city in the country. A painting by Wu Changshi (1844–1927) best represents the tastes of that period: It is done in vivid colors and bold brush strokes inspired by Chinese calligraphy.
The next section features works in a more traditional style, with subjects like mountains, water, buildings and people. These reflect the effort some artists began making in the late 1920s to find new ways to revive Chinese art, though still based on traditional literati painting from the country’s own traditions.
One artist from Beijing, Qi Baishi (1864–1957), is featured prominently in the exhibit, taking up well over one-third of the space. Chytil was convinced that Baishi was the most important Chinese artist of his time, and the National Gallery’s collection includes more than 100 of his works (the largest group in Europe). His special humor and humility is evident in a late piece titled Crabs (1956), on which he writes in calligraphy along the side of the painting, “At last, at age 90, I have finally painted them with a measure of vitality.” Overall, approximately 50 works by Baishi are being exhibited in this first part; the remaining half will be shown in part two.
The show also includes more traditionalist painters, but the most memorable artists are the ones who broke out into their own styles. Fu Baoshi (1904–1965) was influenced by his studies in Japan and by the Song monumental landscape paintings; his landscape and figural paintings are highly original, such as Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum, a shining temple in the center of a thick black forest, and Diamond Hill in Dongchuan (1940–45), a murky landscape smeared in black waves that is fully Modernist in spirit.
The final section features pieces from art academies and artists who were influenced by Western painting. While earlier artists had been influenced by their travels abroad, those in this group were the most vocal and obvious in their appreciation of progressive Western art movements. Many of them were professors (and even rectors) at Chinese art academies in the late 1920s.
After 1949, Socialist Realism was established as the official art of China, so some art from this section was considered “forbidden” up until the 1980s. That makes the collection of 20th-century Chinese art held by the National Gallery in Prague even more important. And it’s telling that the Chinese Embassy is not supporting this exhibit (being shown, not by coincidence, during the Summer Olympics in Beijing).
China’s most important artists of the 20th century are still little-known in their homeland. Their most important works are only found in museums in Taiwan — and Prague.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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