Xu Beihong
Xu Beihong 徐悲鸿 (1895-1953), a painter and fine
art educator in modern China, was famous for his work of figure, animals and
plants. He praised highly of realism, and promoted the integration of western
style skills into traditional Chinese painting. Xu Beihong put great emphasize
on light, composition, and modeling. For figure painting, he was expert at
depicting the precise skeleton structure and at enriching his work’s
ideological content, which exerted significant influence on the china’s fine
art industry at that time.
Born in poverty, Xu Beihong learned classic Chinese works
and calligraphy from his father who was a teacher good at poem and painting.
The hard life enriched Xu Beihong’s social experiences and broadened his art view.
Thanks to his outstanding performance in art, Xu Beihong was then funded to
study abroad in Japan, France and German, thus able to incorporate the essence of
both eastern and western painting into his own style. At the end of his trip in
Europe, he also visited Belgium, Italy and Swiss, and was deeply inspired by
the famous European artists.
At the age of 32, Xu Beihong went back to China and started
his fine art education career. His work of oil painting and Chinese ink was highly
appreciated at that time, due to his perfect integration of Chinese brush and
ink techniques with Western perspective and methods of composition. Lots of his
most famous work reflected the changing society of China.
The Self Portrait
(1922) has a full composition, with a loosely rendered white horse in the
background, which reflected Chinese freehand ink brush painting. Xu Beihong
arranged light and shade by utilizing active western crosshatching. The sharp details
and highlighted areas of selectively aplite white chalk well depicted his
facial features. From my point of view, this self-portrait is very realistic
although with bold sketching, since his eye sight seemed to direct at the
viewer.
The Six Galloping
Horses (1942) is one of Xu
Beihong’s most famous works. In this large Chinese brush painting of six
galloping horses, the artist’s expertise and incredible imagination were
illustrated by the creative compositional arrangement and the control of ink.
Resource cited:
Xu Beihong: Pioneer of Modern Chinese Painting
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