Shanghai is a 21st century megalopolis whose ambitions and achievements dwarf all superlatives. It is also one of the first global cities of the Modern era: in the first decades of the 20th century a whirlpool of revolutionary ideas, conflicting nationalist aspirations, unrestrained commercial expansion and military occupation. A glittering fata morgana, by 1930 the fifth largest city in the world[1], Shanghai seduces and entices the imagination of the time with
the material emblems of advancing modernity: cars …, electric lights and fans, radios, “foreign-style” mansions (yang-fang), sofas, guns…, cigars, perfume, high-heeled shoes, “beauty parlors”…, jai alai courts, “Grafton gauze”, flannel suits, 1930 Parisian summer dresses, Japanese and Swedish matches, silver ashtrays, beer and soda bottles, as well as all forms of entertainment, such as dancing (fox-trot and tango), “roulette, bordellos, greyhound racing, romantic Turkish baths, dancing girls, film stars”.[2]
Neither the Xinxin department store (1926) with its own radio studio in a glass cage and singing stars[3] nor the 19-story Wing On department store (1932) with its fast elevators, central heating and air-conditioning, neither glamorous life-style journals such as The Young Companion (1926-1945) documented in this volume, nor lively intellectual debates in coffee houses can however obscure the inequities of the (semi)colonial[4] condition of Shanghai at this time. The most infamous injustice of all is the regulation which – until 1928 – bars Chinese and dogs from using parks in the Western concessions.
It is in this urban Utopia/Dystopia with its irreconcilable contradictions that intellectuals, writers, painters, printmakers, photographers and filmmakers engage in intense and, at times, virulent debates about the future direction of Chinese culture. Art societies and loosely-organized groups are formed and quickly disbanded. Former friends and colleagues-in-arms become bitter foes. All are however bound by a common desire to find new forms of expression for a modern - and just - society.
The urgent search for new cultural and artistic vocabularies has been precipitated by the May Fourth Movement, the first mass movement in modern Chinese history. Dissatisfaction with the Treaty of Versailles settlement on April 28, 1919 which awarded Japan the former German rights to Jiaozhou, Shandong Province, unleashes nationalist feelings and anti-Japanese sentiments across the country. Thousands of students gather on Tiananmen Square in Beijing to protest, demonstrations and strikes spread to Shanghai and a nationwide boycott of Japanese goods follows. Intellectuals question traditional Chinese culture, calling for new ideologies and cultural models to construct a better future for their nation. Their aspirations have been anticipated and encouraged by the New Cultural Movement[5] which advocates “modern” education, the use of the vernacular and the introduction of western scientific and cultural forms in order to re-vitalize and reform Chinese culture. Among the leaders of the New Cultural Movement is Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940) who is appointed the first Minister of Education of the newly formed Republic of China in 1912. The same year he publishes an essay on the aims of education and its philosophical basis:
If an educator wishes to lead the people from the phenomenal world to the conception of the world of reality, he must adopt aesthetic education.[6]
Cai, who had studied from 1907 to 1911 at the University of Leipzig in Germany, strongly advocates the systematic study of art as an academic discipline in modern China. In 1912, he establishes the Social Education Office and appoints the renowned writer and revolutionary LuXun (1881-1936) as Head of the Section for Art, Culture and Science responsible for museums, libraries, galleries, exhibitions, literature, music, drama, and the survey of antiquities.[7] The introduction of the study of Western art into the curriculum and LuXun’s proclamation of the social function of art in 1912 unleashes a debate which has lasted until the present day regarding the role of xihua (Western-style painting) and guohua (national painting) in the reform and modernisation of Chinese culture.
At the initiative of reformers such as Cai Yuanpei, and with the support of the Chinese government, leading artists and academics are sent abroad to study.[8] Among them are two influential artists, Lin Fengmian (1900-1991) and Xu Beihong (1895-1953), both of whom travel to Europe in 1919 for an extended period. Xu spends most of his time in Paris, at the Académie Julian and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts[9], but also travels widely in Germany in 1923, returning to China in 1927. Lin studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Dijon then at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before travelling to Berlin in 1923 to complete his studies. Here he meets his first wife Elise von Roda, an Austrian chemistry student who, together with Lin’s firstborn, tragically dies shortly thereafter.[10] Among key works produced by Lin Fengmian in 1923 are Berliner Café and a female Nude striking for its vivid colours and black countour lines reminiscent of both Erich Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.[11] Another important work produced in Europe is Groping, 1924, a group portrait of European intellectuals, which is exhibited not only in Europe but also in China.[12]Unfortunately these early masterpieces of western style Chinese oil painting are to be subsequently lost or destroyed.
Lin’s Fengmian’s paintings receive considerable recognition in France: his oil painting Autumn is included in the Salon d’Automne in 1922 and two large oil paintings are accepted for the 1924 Salon d’Automne. In April 1925 Lin is described in the catalogue of the Exposition internationale des Arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris as one of the co-organizers of the Chinese Section...[13] In February 1924, a steering committee is set up by two Chinese student organizations in Paris[14] to prepare an exhibition titled Exhibition of Ancient and Modern Chinese Art, which opens on May 21, 1924 at the Palais du Rhin, a former German imperial palace in Strasbourg. Again Lin Fengmian plays an important role, both as an organizer and as one of the 26 participating artists. . Cai Yuanpei, living in France at this time, is the Honorary Chairman; Chinese artists studying in France, Germany, Belgium, England and Italy[15], among them Xu Beihong and Fang Junbi, are included in the exhibition. Lin exhibits 28 paintings employing traditional Chinese media (water-based ink and natural pigments on paper or silk) and 14 oils, among them the unfinished painting, Groping[16], 1924. One work, Vouloir vivre, 1924, is illustrated.
In his Preface to the catalogue, Cai writes that the exhibition, which consists of more than 1,000 [ or 485] works, is divided into three sections: Traditional fine and applied art from private collections belonging to Chinese living in Europe, Western-style paintings (l’art imité de l’Occident) and “New Art” (l’art nouveau) created by Chinese artists in Europe. He notes that the selection of neither the historical nor the contemporary works in the exhibition is exhaustive. These “fragments, “ he concludes “nevertheless permit one to judge whether Chinese contemporary artists are capable of assimilating European civilization and creating a synthesis of ancient and modern arts”.[17] )
Above all Cai stresses the mutual and long-standing cultural exchange between the West and China:
…depuis la Renaissance et surtout de nos jours, la mode chinoise inspire l’art européen. - Cela prouve que la pénétration des deux arts, l’occidental et l’oriental, est nécessaire..[18] (Need translation into English and German)
There are suggestions, however, that the Strasbourg exhibition is received with a certain indifference by its French audience. The Chinese critic Li Feng, in an article published in a Shanghai periodical in August 1924, writes that Chinese art, compared to Japanese art, is not held in high esteem in Europe: “Chinese crafts are frequently mistaken for Japanese products, and any well dressed Chinese assumed to be Japanese.”[19] As the British scholar Craig Clunas points out, this is ironically at a time when Chinese-derived exoticism is prominent in European art and design:
Thus the lack of receptivity to the contemporary art of China was paralleled by an intense urge to speak for China, to appropriate it, absorb and neutralize it in the classic orientalist manner. (…) Ancient China was a real presence in the cultural life of Europe, but a China striving to speak for itself was nowhere.[20]
The following year the Guide to the Exposition internationale des Arts décoratifs et industriels modernes (Paris Arts Decoratifs 1925), briefly describes the Chinese section and reveals once again European resistance to seeing Chinese art as being capable of reform or modernity :
Alors que la vie politique et sociale de la Chine moderne semble être en pleine effervescence, les splendeurs d’un art hiératique et lointain ne laissant guère de place encore à des formules nouvelles.[21] (Need translation into English)
The founding of the Institut Franco-chinois at the University of Lyon in 1921[22], and in 1925, the establishment of the China-Institut at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt are to be important steps towards the creation of a new understanding of, and appreciation for, Chinese art and culture in Europe.
Modern Art in China
Lin Fengmian returns to China in February 1926. At 25 years of age, he becomes director of the Beijing Institute of Fine Arts and adds the departments of Music and Drama.[23] Only one year later he resigns in a climate of increasing suspicion of “over-radical” professors and intellectuals. He leaves Beijing in 1927 as does LuXun who moves to Shanghai on October 3.[24] Lin Fengmian, in a Letter to China’s Artistic Community, reproduced in this volume, pleas for the “primacy [of art] in the renaissance of China” and for “viable means for furthering the nation’s art education programmes”. In 1928, he becomes director of the newly-created National Academy of Art in Hangzhou[25] which he co-founds with Cai Yuanpei. With 70 students and departments in national painting (guohua), Western-style painting (xihua), sculpture, design, and music, Lin Fengmian makes the radical decision to merge the xihua and guohua departments. This means that all students automatically acquire solid training in both disciplines. In addition he sets up the Art Research Institute and appoints Pan Tianshou (1898-1971) as Professor of national or guohua painting. The goals of the newly formed institution are mirrored in a statement by the National Art Movement Society, an artists’ group founded at this time by Lin Fengmian:
To introduce Western art,
To reform traditional art;
To reconcile Chinese and Western art:
To create contemporary art.[26]
The following year, in 1929, the National Art Movement Society makes public its Manifesto in Yapole (Apollo), one of the magazines published by the Academy:
Artists should not limit their views within national boundaries, nor should different schools attempt to turn competition into a domestic conflict! It is our belief, therefore, that artists of this new era should study the art of all nations with a global perspective. Any art, not limited to the art of Europe, but extending to the art of the Philippines and Australia, deserves our attention as long as we can learn from it.
The Manifesto emphasizes not only the global but also expresses a desire to “advance the emerging art of the Orient”.
Both as students and as teachers, fellow artists Xu Beihong and Liu Haisu (1896-1994) take up the call for a modern, scientific and Pan-Asian art education. As early as 1917, Xu Beihong travels to Japan in order to study western style painting. On his return he becomes a tutor in the Painting Methods Research Society of the Beijing University. At the tender age of 14[27], Liu Haisu studies western painting in Shanghai before, in February 1912[28], founding and directing his own art school, the Shanghai Art Academy. Liu and his colleagues publish a Manifesto declaring their intent:
Firstly, we must develop the indigenous art of the East and study the mysteries of Western art;
Secondly, we want to fulfill our responsibility of promoting art in a society that is callous, apathetic, desiccated, and decaying. We shall work for the rejuvenation of Chinese art, because we believe art can save present-day Chinese society from confusion and arouse the general public from their dreams;
Thirdly, we are far from knowledgeable, yet we are confident of our sincerity to study and promote [art]. [29]
Liu’s controversial introduction of the nude model in life drawing classes in 1914 also leads to conflict in 1925 with Sun Chuanfang, the powerful Warlord of the Five Provinces, who reputedly seeks to arrest Liu. The Academy is closed down, some of the buildings are damaged and the library is destroyed.[30] In 1927-28 Liu travels to Japan for a second time. [31], Here, like Xu Beihong, he personally observes the emergence of a complex, intercultural Modernism resulting from close contacts between the Japanese and European avantgarde.[32] Among the artists he meets are Fujishima Takeji, Ishii Takutei, Fujita Tsuguharu (Léonhard Foujita)[33] and Mitsutani Kunishiro (1874-1936), who had studied at the Académie Julian in Paris[34] and whose work Liu Haisu collects.
If, as Xu Jiang suggests in this volume, “in the ‘mo-deng’ era of Shanghai, the most modern event was the emergence of art education conceived in the modern sense,” then surely the second most modern event is the introduction of the institution of the public art exhibition. In breaking with the tradition of presenting painting within the protected confines of a close circle of friends and initiated guests, art exhibitions in China in the 1920s and 30s thrust artistic and cultural debate into the public arena. Above all they answer the call of the New Cultural Movement to “turn to the masses”.
In 1929, the first official National Art Exhibition is opened by Cai Yuanpei in Shanghai.[35] It includes national painting (guohua), between 500 and 600 Western-style paintings (xihua), sculpture, photography, architecture, design and embroidery. Among the artists represented are Lin Fengmian and Pan Yuliang (? - ?) There is also a section with around 60 canvases by modern Japanese artists such as Wada Eisaku, Wada Sanzo and the renowned Umehara Ryuzaburo[36] who attends personally. The exhibition precipitates a virulent debate between Xu Beihong and the poet Xu Zhimo (1896??-1931). In his text I am puzzled , reproduced in this volume, Xu Beihong congratulates the organizers and notes:
What deserves the highest praise, however, is the exclusion of such shameless works as those [such brazen stuff ??] by Cezanne, Matisse and Bonnard…despite all their inequities, the vulgar Manet, the boorish Renoir, the turgid Cezanne and the inferior Matisse still managed, with help of art dealers’ manipulation and publicity, to become the sensations of their time.
Xu Zhimo replies in a text titled I am puzzled too. As possibly the first person to have brought back original prints of Cezanne and Van Gogh to China, Xu rigorously defends Cezanne. Above all he introduces another controversial aspect into the public debate about Western-style art (xihua) in China – the role of Japan:
Interestingly, however, the various westernized fads we see in China did not come from Europe directly. They were often imported secondhand from Japan. It would appear that these second-hand imitations are not the best for business.
A series of exhibitions in Shanghai, of both European and Western-style Chinese art, follow. One of the first, organized by LuXun, takes place on October 4 and 5, 1930 and consists of 70 graphic works by artists from Germany and Russia from LuXun’s own superb collection.[37] Annual exhibitions by members of the modernist art movement, the Storm Society (juelanshe), also take place between 1932 and 1935. Founded among others by the writer and painter Ni Yide (1901-1970) and artist Pang Xunqin (1906-1985), whose recollections of his time in Europe are published in this volume, the Storm Society disseminates the artistic theories and practices of Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism.[38] All these exhibitions are reviewed in the numerous art and life-style journals which proliferate in Shanghai.
As noted earlier, the “art exhibition” also becomes an important element of foreign cultural policy in the 1920s and 30s. On the initiative of reformers like Cai Yuanpei and artist-educator-curators such as Lin Fengmian, Liu Haisu and Xu Beihong, major exhibitions of ancient and contemporary Chinese art take place throughout Europe during this period.. Europe – whether it is receptive or not - is to experience first hand the cultural changes which have swept China and to glimpse for the first time, contemporary and diverse models of fine and applied art being proposed by artists in Shanghai and other Chinese cities. Artists return to Europe in the late 1920s and 30s or, like Liu Haisu, travel there for the first time, acting as cultural interpreters, teachers and emissaries for a new and better world – not only in China but also in Europe and the United States.
Modern Chinese Art in Europe
It is Thursday, March 19, 1931 and one of Shanghai’s foremost artists and educators, Liu Haisu, is delivering a lecture in Frankfurt, Germany.[39] The occasion is the opening of an Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Painters at the Kunstverein Frankfurt.[40] Liu emphasizes his commitment to promoting Chinese art in Europe and, above all, to executing “exhibition exchange agreements with European nations as long-term commitments”. The emphasis is to be on “Modern works”. The exhibition, which runs from March 19 to April 8, 1931 before travelling to Heidelberg in June[41], contains 100 works of which 23 are from Liu Haisu’s own hand. Four are historical objects on loan. It is probable that two of the works are by one of the masters of Chinese ink painting, Huang Binhong, then in his late sixties.[42] Once again it is at the initiative of Cai Yuanpei that Liu has been in Europe since 1929 travelling constantly in France, Italy, Germany and Belgium.[43]
Organized jointly by the China Institute Frankfurt and the Kunstverein Frankfurt, the exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with an introduction by Curt Gravenkamp and a short text by W.Y. Ting [Ding Wengyuan][44] -- who observes that most of the works belong to the Literati or “literary” school of ink painting. Also included are works of “the Antiquating Style (Archaistic style in Studio, 1935 ???) which, he explains, consciously hold to ancient models, the School of the Middle Way (Approaching Naturalism) which strives to unite Chinese and European styles and the Southern School which seeks ties to the Masters of the early Manchu Dynasty.”[45] On March 15, 1931 Liu Haisu publishes what is most likely the text of his up-coming lecture in Sinica, the journal of the China Institute. He identifies himself as a member of the Literati School and suggests that the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts which he founded, has contributed to the rapid spread of Literati painting and to its dominance within contemporary Chinese art.[46] He refers to the four schools of Chinese painting mentioned by Ding adding that the School of the Middle Way (Approaching Naturalism) “appropriates European perspective and the interplay of light and shade.”[47]
Liu Haisu also suggests that Literati painters have abandoned all colour and, that like sculpture which facilitates artistic expression without an array of colours, Literati painting requires only one single colour, that of water diluted ink.[48] The surprising aspect of Liu Haisu’s statement, and of his curatorial strategy of selecting exclusively monchrome Chinese ink painting for the exhibition in Frankfurt, is that he himself is one of the most important exponents of both “heavy colour” guohua and of Western-style painting - in subject matter, format and materials.
One of Liu Haisu’s earliest Western-style oils is Girl Draped in Fox Fur, 1919, (Plate ?) painted either during an extended stay in Japan or shortly after. It is interesting to compare Liu’s portrait with yoga (Western-style) Japanese paintings of the period[49]. In its frontality and Bildsprache, it is reminiscent of a March 1919 self-portrait by the Japanese artist Kono Michisei (1895-1950) which reflects the artist’s preoccupation with Northern European style portraiture, especially that of Durer.[50] Kono’s self-portrait from 1919 is, however, much more “modern” than Liu’s in its handling; the image is not as frontal and occupies, indeed expands beyond the entire canvas. On the other hand, Liu Haisu’s portrait displays characteristics common to classical Chinese portraiture: even though the background is not empty, it recedes into an all-over pattern,; a fur collar bringing the subject’s character into sharp relief.[51] The main difference between the two works is that Kono Michisei’s brush strokes are bold; his subject, dressed in fur over a blue kimono, is, in its self-stylization, undeniably “modern”.
A boldness in brushstroke and the use of vivid or raw colour distinguish, however, Liu Haisu’s later Western-style paintings. Above all his paintings between 1919 and 1938?? reveal an almost dizzying sampling of styles.[52] The composition of Reclining Woman is vaguely reminiscent of Edouard Manet’s La Dame aux Éventails reclining in front of a background of oriental fans. Liu Haisu’s Dame reclines instead against a curious backdrop of Egyptian style art works and drapes. In colour and brushstroke, Liu’s execution is reminiscent of Kandinsky’s. This and other works of the period are distinguished by what the renowned sinologist Michael Sullivan has called Liu’s solid forms:
his colour hot, crude, and laid on thick – he was never a subtle painter – revealing already a lifelong passion for van Gogh, of whom he said then (although he was not to see an original van Gogh until 1929), “His world is like a sort of raging fire; it is a world of the natural force of inner life.”[53]
This raging fire is also to be found in Liu Haisu’s guohua or Chinese painting, as he himself notes in 1929, only two years before the exhibition in Frankfurt:
In broad strokes, loud red and tragic green, these striking colors soon were being used in all parts of the country following the growth of the art school. This greatly frightened those who tried to restore the old order.[54]
More than 70 years later it is impossible to say definitively if xihua or Western-style oil paintings were included in exhibitions organized by Liu Haisu in Europe. The exhibition catalogues have few illustrations and often provide no information on either material or size of the works. Nevertheless it can be confirmed that in his exhibitions in Germany and the Netherlands no xihua works are illustrated and those contemporary reviews of the exhibitions which have been located refer only to guohua paintings (see William Cohn, Modern Chinese Painting, 1934 in this publication). What is mentioned is the inclusion of works of the Middle Way – those which appropriate European perspective and the interplay of light and shade, fusing Chinese and European painting.[55]
Perhaps one of the reasons for Liu Haisu’s exclusion of Western-style oil paintings in his selection may be found in his following comments:
“In the early spring of 1931, the Japanese held a large exhibition in Berlin, where most of the exhibited works were produced mainly to cater to the European sensibility. These Japanese works convinced the European audience that Oriental art sought to westernize some of its superficial elements without expressing any of its own character.” [56]
This exhibition, Modern Japanese Painting, organized by the Society for East Asian Art and the Prussian Academy of the Arts in Berlin with the support of the Japanese government, is attended by over 25,000 visitors[57] before traveling to Düsseldorf where it opens on exactly same day as Liu Haisu’s exhibition– presumably taking considerable attention away from the Chinese exhibition in Frankfurt. The Japanese exhibition is so extensive that the Kunstverein Rheinlande und Westfalen is not large enough so the Municipal Kunstmuseum has to provide additional space.[58]
Liu Haisu is determined to organize further exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art in Europe in order to counterbalance Japan’s “desperate” and well-financed promotion of its Modernist art. Above all, future exhibitions should dispel a view prevalent in Europe of China as a nation whose cultural achievements belong to the past.[59] Liu’s concerns about an inadequate understanding of, and appreciation for, Modern Chinese culture in Europe are reminiscent of comments, mentioned earlier, following the exhibitions in Strasbourg and Paris: Chinese art and culture are not deemed to offer room for new (modern) possibilities. A 1929 landmark exhibition, Chinese Art, at the Prussian Academy of the Arts in Berlin had presented only historical masterworks.[60] Liu Haisu is insistent that, in the future, such exhibitions include a significant representation of contemporary Chinese art. It would appear, however, that only those works which “express their own [cultural] character” are to be included; any indication of “superficial westernization”, which in his opinion applies to Japanese Modern works, is to be avoided.[61]
Documenting the emergence of pan-Asian modernism in the 20th century, Shu-mei Shih, a scholar of Modernist literature in China, refers to the ambivalent relationship between China and Japan at this time. On the one hand, she suggests, Japan took on the role of the “honorary West” for China, functioning as a (somewhat questionable) mediator for European Modernism and as the sole successful Asian example of Westernization.[62] “The complex relationship between Japan and China, “ she writes, “ not only refracts the China-West binary model of confrontation, but sometimes displaces the role of Western modernism entirely,”[63]
However, to reduce China’s foreign cultural policies in Europe in the 1930s to a “competition with Japan” would be both simplistic and unjust. It is necessary to revise and refine our understanding of the Modern in China, and of the cultural and political conditions for Chinese intellectuals and artists, both in China and abroad, in the 1930s. Shu-mei Shih suggests that the first step is to recognize that Republican era modernity in China was engaged in a two-way exchange with the West which simultaneously co-opted but also challenged metropolitanism or imported Western cultural discourse, modifying it for local needs.[64] “Non-Western modernisms arose from different notions of modernity, nationhood and nationalism.”[65]
The decision of Cai Yuampei and Liu Haisu to present primarily Modern Literati painting, and that of the Middle Way, to European audiences is a conscious refusal of, and a challenge to, European “metropolitan” modernism. Both were careful to point out in their lectures and written texts in Europe in the 1930s that modern Chinese painting was engaged in a two-way exchange with Western culture which dated back to the 16th century when Chinese painting absorbed - and then modulated for its own needs - Western illusionism, perspective and naturalism. In the same manner, 19th century Euro-American art had absorbed Chinese and Japanese Bildsprache and modulated it for its own (local) purposes. In the eyes of Chinese artists, educators and curators active in Europe in the 1930s, their curatorial strategies reflect a common heritage, not a disparate, parallel one.
Paris / Milan / Moscow / Leningrad
The next major exhibition of Chinese art in Europe, Exhibition of Chinese Painting, organized by Xu Beihong and André Dezarrois, Curator at the Musée des Écoles Ètrangeres et Contemporaines à Paris, takes place at the Musée du Jeu de Paume from May to June, 1933. Among the members of the Organizing Committee is Yan Wenliang (1893-1988)[66], a protégé of Xu Beihong and President of the Suzhou Academy of Fine Arts.
Under the patronage of a distinguished Honorary Committee which includes the French artist Maurice Denis and the inimitable Cai Yuanpei, the exhibition consists of 186 modern works and 90 ancient works (12 frescoes and 78 paintings). Among the contemporary artists are leading figures from Shanghai such as Liu Haisu[67] and Lin Fengmian as well as Modern Literati masters Huang Binhong (1865-1955) and Pan Tianshou (1898-1971). Of special interest for those exploring the relationship between the American Modernist Mark Tobey and Teng Baiye (see David Clarke’s essay in this publication) is the fact that Teng Baiye is also included in the exhibition with a work titled Pan[68].
It is clear from the Preface to the catalogue by the distinguished writer Paul Valéry that the Paris exhibition, primarily an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art, intends to transform European attitudes to Chinese culture:
L’Europe fort longtemps se contenta de ne voir dans l’Art des Chinois que curiosités, bizarres inventions, monstruosités, plus ou moins ingénieuses et précieuses.[69] (need translation into English and German)
Valéry eloquently describes the present condition of the contemporary Chinese artist - broken traditions and nouveautés in all domains (imported or imposed), “an environment of ruins and a crisis of innovation”. He writes of the recent exposure of Chinese artists to the “ensemble” of European art and the “possession of two pasts, theirs and ours”. It is, he adds, the resolution of a profound dissonance rather than the result of difference, nothing less than two ways of seeing.[70]
In order to demonstrate that this dissonance is not new and that China and the West also share common and not disparate “pasts”, the curators of the exhibition include four 18th century Chinese prints in European style (Les Conquêtes de l’Empereur K’ien-long from the collection of the Musée Guimet) and reproduce in the catalogue Portrait of the Emperor K’ien Long by the Italian missionary painter Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1768), also in the collection of the Musée Guimet.
In a brief article on Chinese painting in the catalogue, Xu Beihong praises not only the accomplishments of the ancients but also the contribution of contemporary masters such as Huang Binhong.[71] The exhibition, he continues, is an indication of a “ renaissance de l’art national chinois “ (the Renaissance of a Chinese national art).[72] From the 15 illustrations of contemporary works in the catalogue, it would appear that the majority are, again, Chinese ink paintings, primarily within the Literati tradition. The exhibition does include, however, some Middle Way works that experiment with Western perspective and illusion. A number of art works are offered to the French state at the end of the exhibition; today nine of them remain in public collections in Paris.[73]
From December 1933 to January 1934, an expanded version of the Paris exhibition with 329 ancient and modern works travels to the Palazzo Reale in Milan under the title, Exhibition of Chinese Painting. Curated once again by Xu Beihong, and with an identical text by him, the Italian catalogue includes the same contemporary artists with a slight variation in works which might reflect the gift of works to the French government.[74] Cai Yuanpei is not listed in the Honorary Committee and neither Liu Haisu’s Shanghai Academy of Art nor Yan Wenliang’s Suzhou Academy of Fine Arts is mentioned as a participating institution. The number of works by Xu Beihong has increased to 26 and now includes an undated Recollection of Berlin.
In a review of the Milan exhibition published in the English journal Apollo, the author, identified only as Y.M, writes that “the interest in this exhibition has been so great that Professor Ju-Péon [Xu Beihong] has been asked to take the pictures later to Rome and, after, to show them in other towns of Italy.” .[75] Instead, as Xu Beihong describes in this volume, the exhibition travels to Moscow and Leningrad. As Xu’s exhibition in Milan closes, Liu Haisu’s most ambitious exhibition project begins.
Berlin / Hamburg / Amsterdam / ‘s-Gravenhage
Under the auspices of the Government of the Chinese Republic, the Society for East Asian Art and the Prussian Academy of the Arts a major exhibition titled Chinese Contemporary Painting takes place in Berlin from January 20 to March 4, 1934.[76] Among the distinguished members of the Chinese Organising Committee are Cai Yuanpei, Lin Fengmian, Xu Beihong, Liu Haisu and Gao Qifeng (1899-1933) a leading Cantonese artist involved in the organisation of the exhibition, who dies unexpectedly during its preparation.
The Honorary Committee includes the German Ambassador to China, Dr. Oskar P. Trautmann, a collector of Chinese contemporary art, and representatives of major German companies active in China such as Siemens, Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach, Melchers & Co, Hamburg-America Line, Deutsche Bank and I.G.Farben. Adolf Hitler’s year-old regime is represented by Freiherr von Neurath, Reichsminister for Foreign Affairs.[77] The Organising Committee includes Liu Haisu[78] and a number of renowned sinologists – Dr. Otto Kümmel, Deputy Director, and Dr. William Cohn, Curator, of the State Museums Berlin; Dr. Erwin Rousselle, Director, and Ding Wengyuan, Deputy Director, of the China Institute Frankfurt.
The foreword to the catalogue, written by the flamboyant and cosmopolitan Chinese Envoy (Legation??) to Berlin, Liu Chung-chieh,[79] , is revealing in terms of his comments on European culture (architecture, clothing, cuisine, art and music), which he characterizes as standardized and undifferentiated. He writes that foreign influences in China can neither take root nor be comprehended by the people; they will leave no significant trace in light of thousands of years of Chinese history. Japan, which had occupied Manchuria and engaged in military action in the vicinity of Shanghai in 1932, is also mentioned:
Japan is a country which, as is well-known, has been Europeanized during the past 60 years. Its painting, however, has successfully resisted this process although it itself is a product of foreign i.e. Chinese origin.[80]
The main text in the catalogue, written by Liu Haisu, is a re-worked version of the lecture which Liu gave in Frankfurt in 1931. In both the Frankfurt and Berlin texts, in a Dutch version published in Amsterdam in 1934 and in a revised English version which will be published in Studio in 1935 during a London exhibition, Liu expounds the Six Canons of Chinese painting which rank both (spiritual) rhythmic harmony and animate fluidity among its highest virtues.[81]
What “Modern works” are chosen by Liu Haisu and the late Gao Qifeng to represent contemporary Chinese art in Germany in 1934? Perhaps, before answering, we should take a moment to consider the possible contribution of Gao[82]. As Liu Haisu notes in his lecture in Frankfurt in 1931, Gao Qifeng is one of the leading proponents of the Middle Way and a resolute advocate of the integration of Western-style and gouhua painting. Liu stresses to his audience in Frankfurt that such an integration is not new and recalls the influence of the painter missionary Mateo Ricci on the work of the 16th century painter, Wu Li. [83] Gao Qifeng writes of his own work:
I then picked out the finest points of Western art and applied them to my Chinese techniques as to [sic] the masterful strokes of the pen, composition, inking, colouring, inspiring background, poetic romance, etc. In short, I tried to retain what was exquisite in the Chinese art of painting, and at the same time adopt the best methods of composition which the world’s art schools had to offer, thereby blending the East and the West into a harmonious whole.[84]
Gao Qifeng, whose work the late Sun Yat-sen had praised as “carrying the beauty of the new age and representative of the revolution”, is, together with his brother Gao Jianfu, actively engaged in activities to overthrow the Qing dynasty.[85] Gao carries these political values over into his art arguing that the goals of the artist should be altruistic, requiring him to “consider his fellow’s miseries and affliction as his own”. They should lead to “a betterment of man’s nature”’ and to“an improvement of society in general”.[86]
But to return to our question: what Modern Chinese paintings are chosen by Liu Haisu and the late Gao Qifeng for the Berlin exhibition? Of the 296 works[87] in the exhibition there are no Western-style oil paintings, all are guohua , national paintings, which, with few exceptions, are categorized in the catalogue according to various Schools of Chinese painting.[88] The majority of works are Literati paintings, 153 in total. Some of Shanghai’s leading artists are represented: Liu Haisu, Huang Binhong, , Pan Tianshou, and Teng Baiye , one of whose works, Demon Slayer Chung Kuei, 1933, is illustrated.[89] By comparison, only 28 works belong to the Middle Way - “blending the East and the West into a harmonious whole”, as Gao Qifeng expressed it.[90] If Liu Haisu’s first exhibition in Frankfurt had emphasized monochrome ink painting, this exhibition contains striking examples of works with colour on silk and paper and even some “heavy colour” paintings. [91]
The Berlin exhibition, in a slightly altered form reflecting presumably the sale of works[92] ,travels to the Kunstverein in Hamburg from March 24 to April 22, 1934 where it is opened by the Mayor of Hamburg, C.V.Krogmann, in the presence of distinguished guests including Liu Haisu who also speaks. According to the Ostasiatische Rundschau the exhibition includes
hervorragende und erlesene Werke und bezeugt eine rege und lebendige Entwicklung der neueren chinesischen Malerei… Trotz ihrer uns Europäern fremden Darbietungsart ist diese Kunst jedem, der sich ihr unmittelbar hingibt, durchaus verständlich, da ihre geistigen und seelischen Grundlagen universeller Natur sind.[93] (need translation into English)
A new catalogue, with the same cover image and texts, includes an altered List of works and different Honorary and Organizing Committees.[94] A total of 261 paintings are presented, among them 120 Literati works and only 18 naturalistic paintings of the Middle Way. [95]
Only a few days after the closing of the Hamburg exhibition, 80 of the paintings are presented in the rooms of the recently founded Museum of Asiatic Art in Amsterdam - housed at that time in the Stedelijk Museum – and in the Gemeente-Museum in ‘s Gravenhage.[96] The exhibition, Modern Chinese Painting is presented from May 5 to June 27, 1934 under the auspices of the Chinese government, the Society of Friends of Asiatic Art and the Netherlands China Society. The Chinese Organizing Committee has been reduced to only 5 members, among them Cai Yuanpei and Liu Haisu. Neither Lin Fengmian nor Xu Beihong are mentioned. A smaller catalogue, without illustrations and with a different cover, includes Dutch translations of the texts published in the Berlin and Hamburg catalogues.[97]
The response of the Dutch press and public is, once again, enthusiastic. One reviewer, identified only as “MV”, describes “de groote schilderingin, smaakvol geschikt, de lichtgetinte wanden vullen”.[98] Liu Haisu and the Literati movement are especially praised as is the work of the “naturalisten” of the Middle Way, above all Gao Qifeng and his work Peacock. The reviewer concludes:
De tentoonstelling, met zooveel smaak en inzicht samengebracht, biedt den bezoeker gelegenheid om kennis te maken met het gereedschap van de virtuozen van het penseel, die de schilderende Chineezen zijn. (need translation English)[99]
While one critic notes the “strengheid van compositie, gebondenheid van vormenspraak, fijne kracht” yet another refers to a “Kunst, die von Europeesche elementen gebruik maakt zonder haar karakteristieke eigenaardigheden prtjs te geven“.[100]
It is also in Amsterdam, in 1935 and 1937, that the extraordinary Shanghai Literati photographer Lang Jingshan (1892-1995) , known in the West as Chin-San Long, exhibits his works The Raft, 1930, Majestic Solitude, 1934 and Processional, 1931 (for which he receives the Bronze Medal).[101] Lang’s “composite photographs” utilize photomontage to combine Western photographic techniques with the principles of the Six Canons of Chinese painting. In some works he paints directly on to the photographic negative, in others he utilizes plants and insects, powder or cotton wool on photographic paper and negatives to create the desired effects. As of 1931 Lang, founder of the Photography Society of China, participates in International Salons all over the world, including countries such as the US, Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Austria, Yugoslavia, Canada, Australia and South Africa. In the Netherlands, in 1937, critics observe that Lang’s “photography in monochrome” combines, as with Literati painting, Western and Chinese forms of representation. The Raft, a critic writes in the journal Focus, “verbindt op geode wijze de sterke composite van het platte vlak, op Oostersche manier, met een boeiende schildering van licht en schaduw op Westersche manier”. [102]
One might assume from the from the writings of artist colleagues (and friends) Lang Jingshan and Liu Haisu, and from the Foreword of the Chinese Envoy Liu Chung-chieh in the Berlin catalogue, that an emphasis in the 1930s in European exhibitions and photographic salons on “national” Chinese painting traditions stems from the Chinese organizers. In fact, Cai Yuanpei’s short introduction in the Berlin and Hamburg catalogues makes clear that
From the German side the wish was expressed to see pure Chinese works and indeed especially those which express that which is characteristic of Chinese painting.[103]
Does this desire on the part of the German organizers to see “pure Chinese work” reflect a genuine appreciation for the specific qualities of Chinese art? Is it instead a mechanism of cultural containment and control, a desire to absorb and neutralize in the classic Orientalist manner? Or does it mirror a new and increasingly dangerous political situation in Germany in which all forms of Modernity are being brutally suppressed and debates about art are imbued with the ideology of racial purity?
Chinese Contemporary Art and Nazi Germany
Liu Haisu’s Berlin exhibition is a resounding success. Thirteen thousand visitors attend, more than 50 works are sold and, as William Cohn notes, the event is “hailed with almost unanimous approval by the German press”. A permanent installation of modern Chinese painting in the East Asian Department of the State Museums of Berlin is established with the gift of works from the touring exhibition by the Chinese government.[104] These works are later to be seized by Russian troops in 1945 and taken to Russia as war booty; among them paintings by Huang Binhong, Pan Tianshou, and Gao Qifeng.[105]
There is no doubt that the enthusiastic reception of early 20th century Chinese art in France, Italy, Russia, Germany, The Netherlands and Britain during an intense but brief period in the late 1920s and 30s is due to the individual efforts and determination of Chinese artist-educators such as Lin Fengmian, Liu Haisu, Xu Beihong and Cai Yuanpei as well as dedicated European advocates such as Otto Kümmel and William Cohn from the East Asian Department, Berlin State Museums, and Richard Wilhelm and Erwin Rousselle[106] from the China Institute Frankfurt, both former Professors at the University of Beijing and H.K. Westendorp, Chairman of the Society of Friends of Asiatic Art in Amsterdam. A remarkable aspect of this short-lived love affair is that it takes place at a time of great political uncertainty and in the face of ever increasing danger and instability in both China and Europe. Many of the key figures we meet in this book are to suffer terribly in the years to follow. Teng Baiye is virtually unable to work as an artist after World War II. Lin Fengmian remains a tragic figure -- he is denounced and imprisoned, many of his works are destroyed.[107] Western oriented Modernists such as Pang Xunqin are also denounced, his wife Qui Ti dies in a state of fear and distress. The filmmaker Tian Han is imprisoned. Some members of the woodcut movement are to fall or be murdered in the civil war. Pan Tianshou is denounced; Liu Haisu is also imprisoned.[108]
Key supporters in Germany of a cultural exchange with China fare not much better. Erwin Rousselle, Director of the China Institute Frankfurt after 1930, who leads it through its most productive years and is responsible for the establishment of a valuable collection of Chinese art, is forced by the Nazi government in 1940 to resign his post as a Professor of Sinology, possibly due to his religious-scientific views resulting from his research into Chinese Taoism. In 1942 he is obliged to step down from his position at the China Institute. In 1943 he is given a Redeverbot and is no longer allowed to lecture or publish. An Allied bomb is dropped on the building in which the China Institute is housed in 1944, completely destroying its invaluable library and a large part of the art collection.[109]
In 1937, while an exhibition of contemporary Chinese painting from the collection of the German Ambassador to China, Dr. Oskar P. Trautmann, is being celebrated in Berlin by officials of both the Chinese and the German government, a special two-volume issue of the China Institute’s magazine Sinica is being published without important contributions by authors who were deemed by the Nazi government to be non-Aryan or communist.[110] One of the key figures active in the promotion of Chinese historical and contemporary culture in Germany, William Cohn, (see his essay and that of Shelagh Vainker in this volume), is dismissed from his post in the Department of East Asian Art, Berlin State Museums and forced to flee Germany. This loss for sinological research in Germany is Britain’s gain. Cohn establishes the first Department of Eastern Art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and goes on to a distinguished career in this capacity.
The treatment of sinologists by the Nazi government in the late 1930s and 40s directly contrasts with the intense military and economic ties between the two countries up until the outbreak of the Chinese Japanese war in 1937. Shui Tianzhong points out in this volume that the cultural and psychological contexts in which exchanges between Germany and China take place are unique. He poses an important question: would a German audience respond as their Chinese counterparts had done? Would they appreciate Chinese art, even without a complete understanding, and seek to discern that which binds the two cultures? Is cultural exchange between China and Germany in the 1930s a one-sided, unrequited love affair?
In a 1934 review of the Berlin exhibition re-published in this volume, William Cohn quotes a letter from a visitor. Chinese modern art, the unnamed gentleman writes, is profoundly moving:
it is much less unfamiliar (…) than most futuristic, distorted and sick works of big-city German art, that offend a natural (rather than naturalistic) sensibility. (…) I wish I were able to go to China and learn from people who feel this kind of all-embracing harmony and, with the most subtle means, are capable of communicating it to someone not speaking their language! (…) as a European, one is really put to shame by this exhibition, because we have become the executioners of the fine mind, of the beautiful world in general, and have shown other people how to throw bombs on ten-thousand-year-old civilizations and to thoroughly eradicate sacred, venerated life.
Cohn notes that this response is typical for visitors to the Berlin exhibition and adds, “It is most of all this dissociation from the present, this immersion in the eternal beauty of nature, that lends this art such a powerful appeal for many Westerners”.
One cannot help feeling uncomfortable in the face of both our visitor’s comments and those of Cohn. Our visitor’s enthusiasm for Chinese contemporary painting, and that of his companions (despite their aversity to everything foreign), is encouraging. Cohn’s assertion, however, that the works in the Berlin exhibition are “dissociated” from the present and, above all, our visitor’s comparison of Chinese paintings with “futuristic, distorted and sick works of big-city German art”are disturbing. Whether, in fact Modern Literati and guohua painting of the Middle Way are indeed “dissociated” from the present will be addressed later. I would like to pause for a moment to consider the fate of “big-city” artists in Germany – especially those whose work is being exhibited, published and collected by LuXun in Shanghai as eminent examples of a Critical Modernism expressing the distress, anxiety and alienation of an unmitigated present.
George Grosz (1893-1959) is one of the first German artists to be stripped of his citizenship on March 10, 1933. Immediately after Hitler takes power on January 30, 1933 storm troopers search his house and atelier but to no avail; Grosz had already fled Germany. On March 25, 1933 Grosz writes from New York to his Jewish friend and dealer, Alfred Flechtheimk:
Denn die Geschichte Europas ist nunmal mit Blut geschrieben und wird weiter mit Blut geschrieben werden. Welche Zeiten für uns Maler ... man versteht kaum, dass da noch Maler in den Städten und auf dem Lande sitzen (...) und Idyllen und Formenkram malen.“[111] (need translation into English)
On March 17, 1933 storm troopers search the house of Lyonel Feininger and the Cathedral of Magdeburg requests the removal of an “Ehrenmal” by Ernst Barlach. A few days later, on March 31, a Jewish curator is removed from his position at the municipal Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf. One month later the Modern department of the renowned Hamburg Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe is closed.[112] In April Otto Dix is fired from the Art Academy in Dresden and on May 14 the Municipal Museum in Chemnitz opens an exhibition titled, Art that doesn’t come from our Soul, which later travels to the Kunstverein in Munich. Adolf Hitler, in a speech on the occasion of a Conference on Culture in Nürnberg on September 1, 1933 describes the “kubistisch-dadaistischen Primitivitätskult” as “kulturelle Lebensäußerung des kulturlosen Bodensatzes der Nationen.”[113] (need translation in English ) The increasing assault on the Modern escalates in September 1933 with the first exhibition of Degenerate Art. Two hundred and seven works works are displayed in the Dresden Town Hall before travelling to at least 12 cities in Germany until 1937 when the infamous exhibition of the same name opens in Munich.
While German Modernists are being defamed in the Dresden exhibition in September 1933, LuXun presents in Shanghai an exhibition of foreign (predominantly European) woodcuts, Modern Artists’ Woodcuts, of which 26 are from Germany. The exhibited works are most likely from his own exemplary collection of modern European graphics which he uses as a teaching aid for artists of the Woodcut Movement and for the purposes of public exhibitions. Although it is well known that LuXun published books of European graphics between 1929 and 1936, his personal collection of European art has, to date, never been published and its extent is known only to a handful of scholars.
Research in recent years by the Beijing LuXun Museum into this collection, which is in their possession, will result in a publication in the near future. To view these works in the depot of the museum, many still in their original wrapping, is an astonishing and sobering experience. Above all the prescience of the selection, the profound understanding of the key critical debates of the time in Europe, and the superb quality of the work is remarkable to say the least. Certainly some of the credit for the quality and nature of the selection must belong to the scholar ??? Xu Shi Quan ???? (DATES) who was studying in Germany in the late 1920s??. Although a student of literature (??), Xu Shi Quan takes classes on Modern art in order to refine his understanding of Western art and apparently establishes superb contacts in Germany in order to acquire these works on behalf of LuXun. The researchers at the Beijing LuXun Museum asked Xu Shi Quan ??? in the late 1990s to identify the art works in the collection. He did so in painstaking detail for two years ?? prior to his death in 2002 – unfortunately only months before we began our own research into LuXun’s collection. There are so many questions he could have answered, including explaining his own contribution to the selection of works.
One of the most unexpected aspects of LuXun’s collection of European prints is its extraordinary range and the inclusion of artists whose work would not necessarily be associated with the Woodcut Movement. Archipenko, Feininger (whose work hung in LuXun’s house)[114], Gleizes, Kubin, Léger and Schlichter are as much at home in LuXun’s collection as those artists whose work our visitor to the Berlin exhibition would describe as “futuristic, distorted and sick works of big-city German art” (Barlach, Grosz, Heckel, Müller, Masereel, Pechstein, Rohlfs and Schmidt-Rottluff). The artist whom LuXun most admires, and whose work is to have a profound influence on coming generations of artists in China, is Käthe Kollwitz. LuXun writes:
Die Werke der Käthe Kollwitz zeigen jedoch, daß es Unterdrückte und Entrechtete, unsere natürlichen Freunde, an vielen Orten der Erde gibt und – dass unter ihnen Künstler leben, die trauern, protestieren und für sie kämpfen. (Translate into English)
On Saurday, May 13, 1933, only one day before the exhibition in Chemnitz defames German Modernists with accusations of “psychopathische Anfälle” and “krankhafter unverschuldeter Infantilismus”, (translation) the Executive Committee of the China League for Civil Rights [Vorstand der chinesischen Liga für Menschenrechte] - Song Qingling (the widow of the founder of the Republic of China, Dr. Sun Yat Sen and Chairperson of the League), Cai Yuanpei (in his capacity as Deputy Chairman), LuXun, Yang Quan (Vice President of the Academia Sinica), the renowned writer Lin Yutang, authoress and former correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung in China, Agnes Smedley, and the editor of China Forum, Harold Isaacs - deliver a formal protest to the German legation in Shanghai against the treatment of academics, writers and artists in Nazi Germany[115] and “den Terror, der das soziale, intellektuelle und kulturelle Leben Deutschlands verkrüppelt“.[116] (translation) This moment has been preserved in a woodblock print by the artist Zhao Yannian (?) which hangs today in the office of the present German General Consul to Shanghai, Dr. … Röhr.
The Protest, signed by Song Qingling and Cai Yuanpei, unleashes a heated public debate in Shanghai about the treatment of artists and intellectuals in Germany, as documents in the Archives of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs show. On June 7, 1933, the same Oskar P. Trautmann, German Ambassador to China, collector of Chinese contemporary art and supporter of Liu Haisu’s Berlin, Hamburg and Amsterdam exhibitions, reports the incident to Hitler’s government:
Ich habe das Schreiben der chinesischen Liga für Menschenrechte an Frau Sun Yat-sen zurückgeschickt und in meinem Begleitschreiben ausgeführt, dass die in dem Protest erwähnten Meldungen entweder unbeglaubigte Propaganda oder masslos übertrieben seien und keinerlei Glauben verdienten. Die wenigen vorgefallenen Uebergriffe seien seitens der zuständigen Stellen auf das Schärfste missbilligt worden, und die Behörden hätten sofort Abhilfe geschaffen. (need English translation) [117]
The Letter of Protest, which is published either in full, or in exerpts, in the Shanghai press (Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury, Shên Pao, Shih Shih Hsin Pao), notes that
The greatest scientists, like Dr. Albert Einstein, Magnus Hirschfeld, and thousands of others, are persecuted and driven into exile. Others, like Leon Feuchtwanger, and the Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, have been forced to leave their country … Great artists like Max Liebermann and Kaethe Kollwitz, and great composers or directors like Bruno Walter, are deprived of any opportunity to work, are molested, and their works smashed and burned. (…) We protest against this fearful Terror…
A meeting of the German Chamber of Commerce, representatives of the German community and both the China and Shanghai chapters of the Nazi Party on May 18, 1933 results in a joint declaration which is sent to the Chinese and foreign press. As the German General Consultate in Shanghai observes in a report to the Chinese Embassy in Beijing on May 22, while most newspapers publish the declaration, they are careful to note that it had been “submitted”.
LuXun’s tireless literary and artistic campaign for the rights of the oppressed and disenfranchised now moves to Europe. On March 14, 1934, only days before Liu Haisu’s exhibition of Chinese national painting opens in Hamburg, an exhibition titled Painters and Printmakers of Revolutionary China, organized and curated by LuXun and Song Qingling, opens in a private gallery in Paris, Galerie Billiet – Pierre Vorms. LuXun establishes contact with Vorms through A.E.A.R. (Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists) which claims Le Corbusier, Léger, Lipchitz, Masereel, Louis Aragon, André Malraux among its members and Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Editor-in-chief of Humanité as its Chairman. Among the 78 works exhibited are approximately 14 oil paintings (including, according to Vorms, a large wall painting), some small drawings and 58 graphic works. mainly woodcuts.[118] According to LuXun’s diary, Paul Vaillant-Couturier had visited him in Shanghai six months earlier, on September 5, 1933. In December, a friend of Vaillant-Couturier, the American journalist Ida Treat, visits LuXun and requests works for an exhibition to be shown in Paris and later in Russia.[119]
In recollections published many years later,[120] Pierre Vorms refers to a comment by the artist Chen Yanqiao (1911-1970) that the exhibition, after Paris, is also shown in Berlin and Moscow. Vorms doubts that in 1934, under Facism, an exhibition of revolutionary art could have been shown in Berlin. Although we located no mention of LuXun’s exhibition, I am hesitant to preclude the possibility. The superb contacts which LuXun enjoyed in Germany may well have allowed him to present his exhibition within a safe environment. It is, however, unlikely that information about such an exhibition would find its way into the public arena. The situation for revolutionary artists at this time is simply too dangerous. In 1934, the China Institute in Frankfurt is already experiencing the first effects of Nazification. An article, „ The Philosophical Content of National Socialism” by Ernst Krieck, one of Hitler’s chief ideologues, is published in the Chinesisch-Deutscher Almanach 1934. The article, based on a lecture held at the China Institute on October 10, 1933 on the occasion of China’s national day, can only be described as a bizarre, ideological tirade. Krieck writes:
Unser gemeinsames Lebensgesetz aber lautet – um mich chinesisch auszudrücken -: Einfügen in das Tao unserer Rasse, unseres Volkes, unseres Schicksals, unserer Welt, unseres Weltbildes! Der chinesische Mensch des Ostens und der Europäer haben nur eine Möglichkeit der Regeneration, nämlich Regeneration aus ihrem eigentümlichen rassisch-völkischen Lebensgrund. (...) wir bilden den deutschen Idealismus in einen völkisch-politischen Realismus um.“[121] (translate into English)
After 1934, there are apparently no further exhibitions of contemporary art organized by Chinese artists and curators in Germany and the Netherlands. (An exhibition, described by Shelagh Vainker in this volume, takes place, however, in the New Burlington Galleries London in February 1935.)[122] Despite an expansion of the German Institute in Beijing, with the support of Cai Yuanpei as a member of its Kuratorium, and despite all official declarations of lasting friendship between both nations, relations between China and Germany are becoming increasingly strained. Complaints about anti-German propaganda and defamation of the Third Reich in the Far East as a result of international Jewish and Marxist conspiracies are published in the Ostasiatische Rundschau in 1934.[123] At the same time, in Shanghai, Nazi groups and even the Hitler Youth are active while a new anti-Nazi, German language daily newspaper appears.[124]
One of the last important cultural exchanges organized by the Chinese government prior to the World War II takes place in May ?1935? when China’s “Movie Queen”, Hu Die (Butterfly Wu), together with one of China’s greatest stage performers, the legendary Beijing opera star Mei Lanfang (1898-1961), travels to Europe..[125] Hu Die’s film, Kung Gu Lan, is presented in Berlin; in London she is photographed with Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Godard. In all European capitals the stars are feted by the press and the film community. Mei Lanfang, who counts Maxim Gorky, Sergei Eisenstein, Galina Ulanova, Bertolt Brecht and RabindrathTagore among his friends and admirers, reputedly on this journey, introduces Beijing opera to Russia, performing at the personal invitation of Eisenstein.[126]
Within two years China will be engaged in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-1945). When Cai Yuanpei retires from public life and falls ill in 1936, one of the most important supporters of cultural exchange with the West is lost. It is hard to imagine Cai’s innermost thoughts in Berlin in 1934, as he attends the opening of the painting exhibition at the Prussian Academy of the Arts only 6 months after delivering the Protest Letter to the German General Consulate in Shanghai with Song Qingling and LuXun. A last exhibition graced by official representation from both China and Germany takes place May to June, 1937 in Berlin, only one month before Japan’s sudden attack on China. Under the auspices of the Society for East Asian Art and the National Gallery and the patronage of the Chinese Ambassador to Germany, Dr.T. F. Chêng, the exhibition presents 67 contemporary Chinese paintings belonging to the German Ambassador to China, Dr. Oskar P. Trautmann, who is described by Leopold Reidemeister[127] in his foreword as a “an advocate of Chinese art”:
The closeness of his relationship to Chinese painting is demonstrated not only by the number of paintings but also by the fact that the artists of China have dedicated numerous works to him.
Among the artists represented in the exhibition are Lin Fengmian, Liu Haisu, Gao Qifeng, Gao Jingfu, Xu Beihong and Teng Baiye (with a surprising six works one of which - a new, undated finger painting of The Demon Slayer Chung Kuei - is illustrated,) .
How does one reconcile Trautmann’s unquestioning support in 1933 for the Hitler regime and its war against German intellectuals and artists with his genuine support of Chinese painters like Liu Haisu, Lin Fengmian and Teng Baiye?[128] How does one reconcile our visitor’s tirade against the German Modern in 1934 with his enthusiastic support of Chinese painting? Once again we return to the uncomfortable question as to the relevance and even Modernity of Modern Literati and guohua painting during a period of violent dictatorship in Europe and civil war and occupation in China.
National Chinese Painting
One of the key debates in China in the first half of the 20th century is whether the aesthetic heritage of classical China is a viable resource for those artists and intellectuals who wish to enter the modern and simultaneously resist cultural invasion and domination. Ironically – or perhaps understandably - it is sometimes those artists and intellectuals who are most familiar with and most disullisoned by the West who are sceptical as to the ability of the West to provide suitable models for cultural and artistic reform in China. One of the most influential of such figures is Liang Qichao (1873-1929) whose ideas had influenced Huang Binhong as early as 1895[129] and who, together with Cai Yuanpei, is on the Board of Liu Haisu’s Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts.[130] Liang, who had travelled extensively in Europe in 1919 and 1920, believes China should not blindly follow the West.[131]
Two key artists who seek to re-vitalize and reform Chinese national painting traditions are Huang Binhong and Pan Tianshou. Huang, who wrote numerous tracts on the Study of Ancient Painting, the theory and practice of brushwork, and on the History of Western Art, has no desire to counter the “aggression” of foreign art.[132] His remarkable skill and what has been termed “strategic use of brush and ink” results in startling and brilliant innovations in classical Chinese painting. The terms in which Huang Binhong’s paintings are described by the Chinese scholar Lang Shaojun are instructive: “His strokes [are] free and bold but never imprudent or rugged, elaborate but never feeble or weak.”[133] In a period of political turmoil and aggression against China, during nearly ten years of house-arrest after 1937, Huang Binhong creates models of resistance or Gegenbilder (images of opposition) – within the realm of the ideal and within China’s national painting tradition. In this regard his strategy is not unlike that of the European avantgardist, Piet Mondriaan, who similarly creates ideal and abstract images of freedom, perhaps the only possible images of freedom, at a time of dictatorship and war.[134] Huang Binhong’s bold and free strokes have lost none of their power today and his paintings constitute some of the most important contributions to 20th-century Modernism.[135]
Pan Tianshou makes a similar contribution through brilliant, ambitious and uncompromising works, many of them finger paintings. In this regard, as Zheng Shengtian pointed out to me, his artistic style is not unlike Western “action” painting. The body is indivisible from the image. However, Pan who believes that Chinese and Western art have different values, and that their individual traditions should not be combined, works actively against the Westernization of Chinese painting. Once again, Lang Shaojun provides an insightful analysis of Pan’s work:
His goal [is] to delineate forms that could evoke feelings of being in danger, of going to extremes, of being surprised, of having power, and of thrilling at the sight of something marvellous or even grotesque.[136]
The bold paintings of Huang Binhong and Pan Tianshou continuously surprise with elevated perspective or unexpected forms and structural composition. They are cautionary tales for those who would seek to oppress: China, and they, are invincible. Their paths, however, are hard. “Treading along all by myself, I have felt lonely for so long,” writes Huang Binhong to a friend.[137]
From the perspective of the 21st century, one can only confirm that the insistence of Cai Yuanpei and Liu Haisu on presenting national painting traditions – in their various states of reform and experimentation - in the European capitals of Western painting (Paris, Milan, Moscow, Berlin, Amsterdam, London) is correct. LuXun’s efforts to present politically engaged, revolutionary Chinese art in Europe at a time of growing dictatorship is similarly astute. Chinese national painting tradition, as it had already done in previous centuries, is about to transform Western Modern painting, this time through the close intellectual, artistic and personal friendship of two men, the American Mark Tobey and the Shanghai Literati painter Teng Baiye.
Mark Tobey and Teng Baiye
In 1934, the same year that Liu Haisu is touring his exhibitions throughout Germany and the Netherlands and LuXun’s exhibition opens in Paris, the Seattle artist Mark Tobey is in Shanghai visiting his friend and fellow artist Teng Baiye. Teng, who had taught Tobey calligraphy in Seattle, is to have a strong influence not only on the development of Tobey’s distinctive technique but – through Tobey - on a whole generation of American abstract artists as described by David Clarke in this volume. Teng, whose knowledge of the West is both intimate and extensive, has strong reservations about Western culture. “I fear the coming of a ‘monkey’ civilization since I have not enough confidence in either,” he writes in “Art in Modern China”, 1933. [138]
It is April 1934 when Tobey arrives in Shanghai. In his journal he describes Teng’s family with much affection and mentions visiting exhibitions of Chinese painting and calligraphy as well as modern Belgian art. Tobey immerses himself in the “aristrocratic democracy” and charged atmosphere of Shanghai with its “rising, jagged sky-line”. One feels, he writes, that “China is sky climbing”.[139] On May 4, 1934 Tobey experiences Peking Opera for the first time – and a brilliant performance by Mei Lanfang:
Saturday night Kuei [Teng Baiye] and I took rickshaws and went thru’ the rain-dripping streets to see Mei Lang Fan. The show was well on when we arrived. Someone had told me that he didn’t appear until 11:15 and to dress warmly as the theatre had never been heated. When we arrived he was already on stage altho’ it was only 10:20 and the full house was anything but cold. (…)
The singing of Mei Lang Fan in his high, forced Mandarin tones aroused the audience to applause many times. His hands in their beauty and movement reminded me of the Buddhist hand language of Indian sculpture and painting. (…) Since Mei Lang Fan has been in America he has his orchestra concealed in the pit.
A week later, on May 12, Tobey returns to the theater for another performance by Mei Lanfang:
Mei Lang Fan grows more and more remarkable the more one sees him, the stylized movements, the gesture of emotion allowing for imagination on the part of the spectator. The lack of realism is seen as a higher expression of emotion.
Tobey travels to Hangzhou with Teng, studies calligraphy and meets with members of the Bahai society before leaving Shanghai by ship for Kyoto on June 8, 1934. The following year he is to complete one of his most important works, Broadway Norm, 1935 which clearly displays, as David Clarke points out, his indebtedness to Chinese painting and calligraphic traditions. Tragically this masterwork, which had remained in private hands, was recently destroyed in a fire. Once again, as has happened so often in the past 80 years, the physical, tangible object which emerges from a profound and brilliant exchange between Chinese artistic traditions and the West has been lost to us.
The last known contact between Tobey and Teng Baiye is a letter dated 1938, preserved today at the University of Washington, Seattle. Teng is involved with refugee relief work, Tobey is at Dartington House in England where, to this day, his calligraphy from the 1930s has been preserved in their collection. The paths of both men were never to cross again. Teng is to fall into oblivion until late in life when he is awarded an honorary appointment at the Shanghai Institute for Culture and History. Tobey’s career brings him fame and recognition throughout the West. Among Tobey’s most treasured possessions, which he retains until the end of his life, are a number of Chinese art works today in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum. Among them is a landscape painting by Fu Baoshi (1904-1965) whom Lang Shaojun describes as often employing “adverse strokes (…) which became known as ‘Baoshi’s texture shading brushstroke’”.[140] He is well known for his depiction of great distance.
Conclusion
Exactly 70 years after Liu Haisu’s exhibition of contemporary Chinese painting in Berlin Hamburg and Amsterdam, LuXun’s exhibition of revolutionary art in Paris, Mark Tobey’s visit to Shanghai and Mei Lanfang’s visit to Russia (??), we look back at a great distance. “The heart of a painting,” wrote Fu Baoshi, “lies at the center; that space, if relatively full, will create a magnificent effect.”[141] The painting Shanghai Modern creates a magnificent effect, full and vibrant at its centre, peopled with extraordinary and brilliant characters who move us deeply in their passions and inspire us with their idealism.
Shanghai is once again an important centre of contemporary art. Its artists, educators, planners, galleries and curators are teaching us new ways of looking at ourselves. A zone of urgency, as the Paris-based Chinese curator Ho Hanru would name it, Shanghai serves at the beginning of the 21st century once again as a crucible for new and conflicting national and cosmopolitan visions of Modernity – its own and ours – armed with the knowledge of our common, not disparate pasts.
[1] H. J. Lethbridge, introduction to All about Shanghai. A Standard Guidebook (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1983), x.
[2] Paraphrase from Mao Dun, Midnight (Ziye):A Romance of China in 1930 by Leo Ou-Fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a new urban Culture in China 1930-1945 (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1999),4-5.
[3] Ibid, 15.
[4] Theoreticians argue that Republician Shanghai and China experienced “semicolonialism”, a formulation invented by Mao Zhedong, with its own set of cultural politics and practices different from formal colonialism. See Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Jürgen Osterhammel suggests that the term originated with Lenin and was developed by Chinese Marxists as integral to a “comprehensive theory of China’s semi-feudal semi-colonial society”: “Semi-colonialism and informal empire in Twentieth-Century China: Towards a Framework of Analysis” in Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, ed. Jürgen Osterhammel and Wolfgang j. Mommsen (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 276
[5] Led by Chen Duxiu (1879-1942), Hu Shih (1891-1962) and Cai Yuanpei in the period following the Republican revolution in October 1911..
[6] Mayching Kao, „Reforms in Education and the Beginning of the Western-Style Painting Movement in China“ in Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China (New York: Guggenheim Museum,1998),153.
[7] Ibid, 154. In the summer of 1912, LuXun holds a series of lectures on aesthetics and publishes Recommendation for Dissemination of the Arts, February 1913: Egbert Baqué and Heinz Spreitz, LuXun: Zeitgenosse (Berlin, Leibniz-Gesellschaft für kulturellen Austausch, 1979),53.
[8] As early as 1872 the Qing government sent students to the United States, as of 1875 to Europe and in 1896 to Japan (12, 909 in 1906 alone), Mayching Kao 1998, op.cit., 155.
[9] According to Xu Beihong’s Report on Promoting Chinese Art in Europe, reproduced on pages… of this volume, the Chinese diplomat Xie Shoukang ?? organized an exhibition of works by Xu Beihong in Brussels in 1920 ???. This may have been the first exhibition of contemporary Chinese art outside of China.
[10] According to family sources, Lin’s wife died two weeks after childbirth, the baby 3 months later in Paris. In 1925 he married Alice Vautier, a French art student, who returned with him to China until the 1970s when she moved to Brazil. Interview with the author, March 14, 2004.
[11] See Ursula Toyka-Fuong, „Nach dem Pinselkrieg“, Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch , Ausgabe 4 (Stuttgart: Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, 1998).
[12] David Clarke, Modern Chinese Art (Hong Kong:Oxford University Press,2000), 26.
[13] Exposition international des Arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, Paris, April – October 1925 « Section chinoise. Commissaire Général : Tchao-Itao / Consul Général de la République de Chine. / Stand (1er étage du Grand-Palais). / Orné par la Société chinoise des Arts Décoratifs, 17, rue de l’Amiral-Mouchez, Paris. / Collaborateurs: Lion (Cl.1), architecte ; Tseng, secrétaire ; Ling-Fong-Ming, Ling, Deaitche-Wang». .
[14] According to the exhibition catalogue the organizers are the Association des artistes chinois en France and the Société chinoise des Arts décoratifs á Paris. For a detailed description of the exhibition and its organisation see Craig Clunas’ article, “Chinese Art and Chinese Artists in France 1924-1925”, Arts Asiatiques, XVIV,1989, 100-106 and Mayching Kao [Kao Mei-ch’ing or Gao Meiqing], China’s Response to the West in Art. 1898-1937, (Ph.D. diss.,Stanford University, 1972),105-106.
[15] Mayching Kao 1972, 105 and Kwok Kian Chow, Chinese Artists in Singapore before 1945: The Influence of the May Fourth Movement, website University Scholars Programme Project, University of Singapore. In the preface to the catalogue of the exhibition (p.7) Cai Yuanpei is described as the Former Minister of Education and Fine Arts, Rector of the National University of Peking, Commander of the Legion of Honour and Honorary Doctor, University of New York.
[16] Groping (Tâtonnement) is the first work listed in the catalogue.
[17] “Ces deux dernières categories, oeuvres des artistes chinois, ne peuvent prétendre à présenter l’ensemble du mouvement artistique moderne en Chine. Mais ces fragments permettent de juger si les artistes chinois sont capables d’assimiler la civilisation européenne et assez habiles pour réaliser la synthèse d’arts anciens et modernes » : catalogue, 9.
[18] Catalogue, .8.
[19] Craig Clunas, op.cit., 104. See also Li Feng, Dongfang zazhi (The Eastern Miscellany) cited on page 101.
[20] Ibid, 105.
[21] Paris Arts Decoratifs 1925, 308.
[22] Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-London China (,Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 40.
[23] The Beijing National Institute of Fine Arts was founded in 1918 by Cai Yuanpei.
[24] Kakichi Uchiyama, LuXun und der Neue Holzschnitt (Rojin to atarashi chugoku-hanga), reprinted in Egbert Baqué and Heinz Spreitz, op.cit.,194.
[25] The art academy subsequently changes its name in 1929 to the Hangzhou National College of Art, in 1950 to the East-China Campus of Central Academy of Fine Arts, in 1958 to the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts and in 1993 to its present name - the China Academy of Art.
[26] Michael Sullivan, op.cit., 49.
[27] At the Ecole de Peinture de Shanghai directed by Zhou Xiang. This school originally provided training for painters of scenic backgrounds for portrait photographers before a department of guohua painting was added. Chen Baoyi (see pp ?? of this volume) and Pan Yuliang also studied and later taught here: Michael Sullivan op.cit., 30-31, 38 and 72.
[28] Liu Haisu’s Shanghai Art Academy is often incorrectly credited with being the first art school in China. For a detailed description of the most influential art schools of the period see Mayching Kao 1998, op.cit., 148-157 and Michael Sullivan, op.cit, 30,44,46-48.
[29] Mayching Kao 1998, op.cit., 158.
[30] Michael Sullivan, op.cit.., 46.
[31] The first time Liu Haisu is in Japan is from 1918 to 1919 when he is present for the opening of the Imperial Fine Arts Academy in Tokyo: Michael Sullivan op.cit., 37 and 72.
[32] In 1914 an exhibition of “Sturm” artists was presented in Tokyo. This was followed by close contacts with the Bauhaus. See Avantgarde im Dialog: Bauhaus, Dada und Expressionismus in Japan, (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 2000), 9-10 and Gennifer Weisenfeld, Mavo: Japanese Arts and the Avant-garde 1905-1931, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2002).
[33] REFERENCE from Sheng
[34] Mitsutani had studied at the Academie Julian under J.P.Laurens (1874-1936) in 1912. According to Michael Sullivan Fujishima Takeji had also been in France and Italy from 1905-1911: op.cit., 73.
[35] Michael Sullivan, op.cit., 58.
[36] Mayching Kao 1972, op.cit., 131. See Gennifer Weisenfeld, op.cit., 22-23 regarding the preponderence of self-portraits by Ryuzaburo.
[37] According to Kakichi Uchiyama, the exhibition attracted primarily Japanese and only a few Chinese visitors: Kakichi Uchiyama, op.cit.,194.
[38] Although this movement is commonly known as the Storm Society, Shu-mei Shih refers to it as the Stormy Billows Society. She suggests that in the writings of Ni Yide prior to 1927, ”decadence was articulated as a form of visual lyricism” (Shu-mei Shih, op.cit., 124).
[39] Ostasiatische Zeitschrift. 7, no. 2 ( 1931): 100. “Am Abend hielt der chinesische Maler Liu Hai-su, der selbst in der Ausstellung mit einer Reihe Gemälde vertreten ist, einen Vortrag über die moderne Malerei in China.” Liu Hai Su’s lecture is reproduced in Sinica 6, no. 2 (March 31, 1931): 49-55.
[40] „Ausstellung chinesischer Maler der Jetztzeit“, organized by the China-Institut and the Frankfurter Kunstverein. This is not the first exhibition to include contemporary art from China in Germany. In Sinica 6, no.1-VI(1931): 46-47, an author identified only as “Hm.” reviews an exhibition of “Moderne Maler aus China und Japan” which takes place at the Berlin Sezession in September and October, 1930. The exhibition is primarily of the work of Chinese artists, among them Qi Baishi (1863-1957). The author refers to “merkwürdige” strange works, including tempera on glass, reminiscent of the French painter Rousseau. As an “Anhang” addition, a number of Japanese artists are also presented. According to the Ostasiatische Zeitschrift 7, no. 2 (March-April, 1931):100 the exhibition, curated by Prof. A Chytill, was also shown in Kassel, Wien and in the Mannheim Kunstverein.
[41] Liu Hai Su, Promoting Chinese Art, see this volume pages ??
[42] It is probable that the artist listed as Huang Bin Kiang is indeed Huang Binhong.
[43] Michael Sullivan op.cit., 73.
[44] Curt Gravenkamp (1893- ?) was the Director of the Kunstverein Frankfurt from 1930 to at least 1955 according to information kindly provided by the Kunstverein Frankfurt. W.Y. Ting [Ding Wengyuan] is identified in Sinica 8, no. 5-6 (1933), as a Lecturer in Chinese language at the Johann-Wolfgang University of Frankfurt during the Winter Semester of 1933-34. Ding is also referred to by Xu Beihong in “My Trip to Promote Chinese Fine Art across Europe” reproduced in this volume. Although Xu Beihong might well have been present for the opening ceremonies as indicated in his text, there is no indication that his work was included in the exhibition and he is not mentioned in any reviews or commentaries on the exhibition and its opening. According to Ostasiatische Zeitschrift 7, no.2 (1931): 100-101, the opening was attended “by a number of Chinese living in Europe, among them diplomats and students. The guests were welcomed by Councillor Dr. Michel in the name of the City of Frankfurt and by the Chinese delegate to the League of Nations, Dr. Wu Kai-sung, representing the Chinese government”.
„im Beisein einer Anzahl in Europa weilender Chinesen, darunter Vetreter von Gesandtschaften sowie Studierende…Im Namen der Stadt Frankfurt begrüßte Stadtrat Dr. Michel die Gäste. Im Auftrage der chinesischen Regierung, … sprach der chinesische Delegierte beim Völkerbund, Dr. Wu Kai-sung,”
, TRANSLATION TO BE CHECKED!
[45] „Die antikisierende Richtung, die sich bewusst an alte Vorbilder hält, die Richtung des mittleren Wegs, die chinesische und europäische Art zu vereinigen strebt und zum Naturalismus neigt, und die Südrichtung, die an Meister der frühen Mandschu-Dynastie anzuknüpfen sucht“.
[46] Liu Hai Su, “Die Richtungen in der modernen chinesischen Malerei”, Sinica, 6, no. 2 (1931):.52. „Der Verfasser, dem diese Richtung besonders nahe steht, hat sich sehr bemüht, ihre Verbreitung zu fördern. Er hat zu diesem Zweck eine Kunstschule in Schanghai gegründet. Jährlich gehen Hunderte durch diese Schule. Infolgedessen ist diese sonst so aristokratische Richtung innerhalb ziemlich kurzer Zeit in ganz China durchgedrungen, und man kann sagen, dass in der neuen Strömung der chinesischen Malerei gerade diese Richtung die maßgebende geworden ist.“ In fact the Academy, with Cai Yuanpei as Chairman of the Board and both Russian and Spanish teachers, taught classes not only in guohua but also xihua (Western-style painting), three years of Normal School training and two years of art, music, and handicrafts. Sullivan, op.cit., 45.
[47] Ibid, 50. Sie „nahmen ... die europäische Perspektive auf und den Wechsel von Licht und Schatten, und deswegen wurde ihre Richtung der Mittelweg genannt, weil sie die chinesische und die europäische Kunst in sich zu vereinigen sucht.“
[48] Ibid, 53. „Die literarische Schule hat sämtliche Farben verlassen, und wie die Plastik, die ihre Kunst ebenfalls ohne Hilfe dieser Buntheit zum Ausdruck bringt, braucht sie nur eine einzige Farbe. Es ist in ihrem Fall die mit Wasser verdünnte Tusche.“
[49] See Gennifer Weisenfeld, op.cit., 22-23 especially regarding the preponderence of self-portraits in Japanese yoga painting.
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[50] Japan und Europa 1543-1929 (Berlin: Berliner Festspiele, 1993), 555-556.
[51] For discussion on the assimilation of Chinese and European styles of portraiture see Yang Xin, “The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644)” in Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting,(New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1997), 243-246. For portraits painted jointly by European and Chinese artists between 1736 and 1795 at the behest of Emperor Qianlong see Bilder für die Halle des Purpur Glanzes, (Berlin: State Museums of Berlin, Museum for East Asian Art, 2003).
[52] David Clarke refers to traces of Paul Gauguin, Monet and Van Gogh in Modern Chinese Art (Hong Kong: University of Oxford Press China Ltd., 2000), 20-21
[53] Sullivan, op.cit., 73.
[54] Chen Xiaodie, “The Modern Chinese Painting as Observed in an Art Exhibitoin,” in Meizhan buikan (Collected writings of the art exhibition) (April 1929), cited by Lang Shaojun, „Traditional Chinese Painting in the Twentieth Century“ in Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting, op.cit., 317. Lang Shaojun describes Liu Haisu’s later guohua works as follows: “He executed these works in dots, hooks, chops, and spashes of color. His lines – mineral blue and green, brilliant red – are strong and terse. The sharply contrasting colors highlight the powerful and sturdy character of his work.”.
[55] A landscape, Mount Blanchard: Switzerland, by Liu Haisu is illustrated in a review of the Exhibition of Modern Chinese Painting exhibition in Apollo in April 1935; a Times review, however, notes “the single format of the hanging scroll” in the exhibition. In other words, even this work with its European subject matter employed neither Western materials such as oil nor the classical Western-style painting format. See Shelagh Vainker’s text in this volume.
[56] Liu Hai Su, „Promoting Chinese Art“ reproduced in this volume
[57] The exhibition, which was first presented in Tokyo in August 1930, is shown in Berlin in January /February 1931 before closing on March 1. The catalogue, with illustrations of all 157 works, rapidly sells out. See Ostasiastische Zeitschrift 6, no.3 &4 (1930): 223 and 7, no. 2,(1931):93 and 8, no.3 (1932):166.
,
[58] Ostasiatische Zeitschrift 7, no. 2 (1931): 100. On June 20, 1930 an exhibition of Chinese and Japanese painting opened at the Museum of Ethnology, Munich with loans from the Departments of East Asian Art in Berlin and Cologne, the Musée Guimet, Paris and private lenders. Ostasiatische Zeitschrift 16, no. 3 & 4 (1930): 230. The very active programme of the Munich Friends of Asiatic Art and Culture situated at the Museum of Ethnology is recorded in Ostasiatische Zeitschrift 9, no. 1 & 2 (1933): 58-63.,
[59] See Liu Haisu, „Promoting Chinese Art“reproduced in this volume.
[60] The exhibition, which had been financed by the East Asiatic Art Society (?) Gesellschaft für Ostasiatische Kunst had, despite its popularity, left a deficit of over RM 60,000. For his support of the exhibition, the painter Max Liebermann, President of the Academy, is named an honorary member of the Society. Ostasiatische Zeitschrift 15, no. 3 (1929): 131,
[61] Liu Haisu nevertheless collected yoga (Western-style) Japanese art. See Reclining Nude by Mitsutani Kunishiro illustrated on page ?.
[62] Shu-mei Shih, op.cit., ix, 4 and 18. “More than a model Japan was the medium and the shortcut to Westernization.”
[63] ibid.,4.
[64] Ibid, 14. Shu-mei Shih distinguishes between the imperialist presence of the West in China (the ‘colonial’ West) and the Western cultural discourse being imported (the ‘metropolitan ‘ West).
[65] Ibid, 3.
[66] Yan Wenliang is identified in the catalogue as Yen Ven-Lian, Xu Beihong as Ju Péon.
[67] Liu Haisu later states that he played a key role in negotiating this exhibition. The catalogue to the exhibition confirms that indeed the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts is one of 7 organizations under whose auspices the exhibition takes place.The other institutions are the International Institute for Science and the Arts, Shanghai ; the National Central University, Nanking ; the National Academy, Beijing ; The French–Chinese Institute, Beijing ; the School of Fine Arts, Suzhou and the French–Chinese Mission University , France. Liu Haisu, however, is represented in the exhibition by only one work while his colleague and rival Xu Beihong, now Professor at the National Central University, Nanking, is represented by fifteen works and is the author of an introductory text in the catalogue.
[68] As there is neither an illustration of this undated work nor a description of material or dimensions therefore no indication if, indeed, this work refers to the Greek god Pan. More than likely it refers to a Chinese subject matter which has been assigned a European name.
[69] Paul Valéry, « Quelques mots au sujet de l’exposition des peintres chinois « , Exposition de la peinture chinoise, (Paris : Musée du Jeu de Paume,1933).
[70] « Dans tous les domaines, que de nouveautés là-bas brusquement ou brutalement importées ou imposées ..Que de traditions rompues…
Cependant, au milieu de ces ruines et de cette crise d’innovation …En peu d’années, les jeunes artistes chinois ont eu connaissance de l’ensemble des œuvres européennes. Ils sont, en quelque sorte, en possession de deux passés, le leur et le nôtre…il s’agit, en effet, de la résolution d’une dissonnance plus profonde que celles qui résultent d’une dissonnance plus profonde que celles qui résultent d’une différence de culture ou d’habitudes our d’expérience ou de goût…Deux manières de voir, prodigieusement différentes, se proposent à l’artiste. »
[71] Xu Beihong, “La Peinture Chinoise dans les Temps Modernes”, Exposition de la peinture Chinoise, (Paris : Musée du Jeu de Paume-Paris, Mai-Juin, 1933),16. “Enfin le vieux peintre Houan Pin Hon [Huang Binhong] par sa haute vertu, sa critique savante et sa documentation inépuisable de l’histoire de la peinture chinoise est hautement estimé aujourd’hui. Quelques œuvres de ces maîtres se trouvent à notre exposition.
[72] ibid, 17.
[73] Shelagh Vainker, „Exhibitions of Modern Chinese Painting in Europe, 1933-1935“ in Cao Yiqiang and Fan Jingzhong, Chinese Painting in the Twentieth Century: Creativity in the Aftermath of Tradition (1997), 555 and Note 2,.560. According to Vainker either 12 or 15 works were originally acquired but today only 9 works by the following artists remain in the collection of the Musée National des Arts Asiatiques – Guimet, Paris: Wang Yazhen, Zhang Daqian, Zhang Yuguang, Jing Hengyi, Zhang Shuqi, Gao Qifeng, Xu Beihong, Fang Ruo and Chen Shuren.
[74] One of Pan Tianshou’s works is no longer in the exhibtion; another particularly fine work incorrectly titled corvi (crows or ravens) and most likely the work Cormorants is illustrated in the catalogue.
[75] Apollo 19, no. 109 (January 1934).
[76] Chinesische Malerei der Gegenwart, (Berlin:Würfelverlag, 1934), 9. (Für Übersetzung: “Regierung der Chinesischen Republik, Gesellschaft für Ostasiatische Kunst, Preußische Akademie der Künste Berlin“) Shortly before an exhibition titled Chinesische Malerei (Chinese Painting), organized by Dr. Werner Speiser, took place in the Kestner-Gesellschaft Hanover from November 21, 1933 to January 21, 1934. Of the 106 works from private and public collections in Germany and Sweden, only eight are from the 20th century including one by Liu Haisu, Landschaft, 1927 owned by Dr. E. Rouselle, Director of the China-Institute Frankfurt. The exhibition, in an expanded form, is also shown in Königsberg, Kunstverein Dresden and Köln from January to April 1934.
[77] It is during Neurath’s (1873-1956) term as Reichsminister for Foreign Affairs, in November 1936, that the so-called Antikominternpakt with Japan is signed. This agreement is the beginning of an alliance between Germany and Japan against “common” enemies.
[78] According to a report in the Ostasiastische Zeitschrift 19, no. 6 (1933):238, Liu Haisu arrived on December 11, 1933 in Berlin with his wife and six crates with 300 works. In the same issue it is mentioned that Xu Beihong will be having a solo exhibition at the Verein Berliner Künstler zu Berlin.
[79] Bonnie Sycip, daughter of Liu Chung-chieh, who was 12 -13 years old at the time of Liu Haisu’s visit to Berlin, recalls receptions which Liu organized for his distinguished visitors among them Liu Haisu, Xu Beihong, Hu Die and Mei Lanfang, Liu, who had previously served in Japan and spoke Japanese and Spanish fluently, was a keen photographer. Unfortunately all his photographs from his stay in Berlin from 1934 to 1937 were lost during the Cultural Revolution (conversation with the author March 14, 2004 generously facilitated by Ms. Feng Yeh, goddaughter of Lin Fengmian).
[80] Catalogue, 9.
[81] Ibid, 30... Huang Binhong is mentioned briefly as an exponent of the Literati movement known for his landscape paintings. Liu concludes by noting that “describing the various schools of Chinese painting is, in fact, not something I particularly enjoy doing. It is indeed daring of me to attempt it here, since a strict systematic classification is virtually impossible”
[82] Originally from Canton, Gao studies in Japan in 1907. He returns to Shanghai in 1912 where, together with his brother Gao Jianfu, he publishes one of the first journals to promote Western art, The True Record, remaining in Shanghai teaching art until 1918 when he returns to Canton.
[83] Wu Li (1632-1718). Both these references in Liu’s lecture are deleted from the written 1934 text.
[84] Cited in Michael Sullivan, op.cit., 53.
[85] Lang Shaojun, op.cit., 305.
[86] Michael Sullivan, op.cit., 53.
[87] In the literature to date on this exhibition the number of works is given as 274 – the number listed in the catalogue. There was, however, a printed Nachtrag or Addendum to the catalogue which lists an additional 22 paintings, all by Liu Haisu, which were also exhibited. Many of these additional works are exhibited in the Hamburg exhibition.
[88] Seven works are not categorized. Thirty-seven belong to the Academic School, five to the Suzhou School, 27 to the Southern School and 37 to the Antiquating Style (Archaistic??). ZAHL STIMMT NICHT- muss überprüft werden!
[89] Teng Baiye is often known in the West as Teng Kuei (a transliteration of his birthname Teng Gui).
.
[90] ). All of Gao Qifeng’s 3 works are illustrated in the catalogue
[91] One work by Gao Qifeng, Lion, 1927, is described as an ink painting with “heavy colour” (“kräftige Farben”) as are two by Liu Haisu, Die Pfirsiche des ewigen Lebens (Peaches of Eternal Life), n.d. and Hahnenkamm (Cockscomb), 1931.
[92] The gift of works to the Department of East Asian Art, State Berlin Museums (Ostasiastische Abteiling) must have taken place after the exhibitions in Hamburg and Amsterdam as some of the gifted works are included in both exhibitions.
[93] Ostasiatische Rundschau 15, no.7 (April 1, 1934): 168.
[94] Foreword, texts, and the Chinese Organizing Committee remain the same. Liu Haisu is mentioned only in the Chinese Organizing and Honorary Committees .
[95] 26 illustrations in the Berlin catalogue have been deleted from the Hamburg catalogue; a number of works have new titles and both Gao Qifeng’s Löwe [Lion] and Teng Baiye’s Teufelbezwinger [Demon Slayer Chung Kuei] are no longer in the show.
[96] The Museum was opened by the Mayor of Amsterdam, Mr. W. De Vlugt, and the Chairman of the Society of Friends of Asiatic Art, H.K. Westendorp on April 16, 1932 in the presence of a large number of guests from the Netherlands and abroad, among them Otto Kümmel (Ostasiatische Zeitschrift 8, no 3 (1932): 101-103 and 172). The first curator of the Museum was H.F.E. Visser. In July 1952 the Museum and its collection moved to the Rijksmuseum where it is presently on long-term loan today.
[97] According to I-feng, 3:4 (April 1935):106-107 cited by Mayching Kao 1942, op.cit.148 and 265, the exhibition also travelled to Czechoslovakia nd Poland following London.
[98] „Hedendaagsche Chineesche Schilderkunst“, Algemeen Handelsblad (May 13, 1934). I am indebted to Mr. ,,, , Librarian, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam for locating copies of reviews of the exhibition from the archives of the Museum.
[99] Ibid.
[100] Unidentified and undated review clippings in the archive of the Stedelijk Museum.
[101] I am indebted to the family of Lang Jingshan, especially Eve Long and Edward Long, for providing me with access to the writings of their father and for their detailed recollections on his photographic practice. The student of Lang Jingshan, …. , and the scholar…. also generously provided extensive, additional information.
[102] Focus, Vol. 24, 1937. Cited in the publication ???……
[103] Chinesische Malerei der Gegenwart, op.cit.,12.. In the Dutch catalogue the text has been modified from „German side“ to „one“.
[104] „Eine Auswahl von Bildern dieser Ausstellung fand als Geschenk der Chinesischen Regierung eine bleibende Stätte in der Ostasiatischen Kunstabteilung der Staatlichen Museen“: Leopold Reidemeister, Foreword, Chinesische Malerei der Gegenwart: Aus der Sammlung des Botschafters Dr. Oskar P.Trautmann, Nanking, (Berlin: National Galerie and Gesellschaft für Ostasiatische Kunst, May-June 1937).
[105] We are indebted to Dr. Uta Rahmen-Steinert, Curator, Museum for East Asian Art, Berlin, for the following information. Fifteen works by the following artists from the Berlin exhibition are presently to be found in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg: Lui Haisu, Flaschenkürbisse, n.d.,( Nr. 138), Landschaft (Die rote Wand),1933, No.141 and Adler, 1933; Chang Ta-ch’ien [Zhang Daqian ??], Lotus,n.d. Nr. 12; Ch’en Shu-jên [Chen Shuren ??], Glyzine u.Sperling, 1932, Nr. 32; Huang Pin-hung [Huang Binhong], Landschaft im Omi Shan, n.d. Nr. 104; Jên Pai-nien [Ren Bonian ??], Angler, 1890, Nr. 248; Kao Ch’i-feng [Gao Qifeng] , Brücken im Regen, 1932, no. 119; Kao chien-fu [Gao Jianfu] , Stürmische Mondnacht, n.d., No. 121; Liang Kung-yüeh[Liang Gongyue] , Stilleben, 1926, No.257;, P’an T’ien–shou [Pan Tianshou], Roter Lotus, n.d.,No.148; P’u Ju [Pu Ru], Bergtempel im Schnee, 1933,Nr. 153; Sung Mêng-lu [Sun Menglu], Lotus, 1933, No. 160;Wang Ch’i-chih [Wang Geyi ??], Melone und Wasserkastanien, n.d., No. 185; Wang I-ting [Wang Yiting], Rabe und Weide, 1933, No.189; Wu Ch’ang-shih [Wu Cangshi], Glyzine, 1919 (No.267). See Willibald Veit, “Ein erster Besuch: Die Sammlung des Museums für Ostasiatische Kunst Berlin in der Eremitage in St. Petersburg“, TITEL DATUM
[106] Richard Wilhelm (1873-1930) was an important sinologist and translator of classic Chinese texts who went to Qingdao (Tsingtao) as a missionary in 1899. He founded a German-Chinese school there and from 1922 to 1924 worked as a research officer to the German Envoy in China and as Professor of Western Philosophy at the Beijing University. He published numerous books including one on Chinese business psychology as well as his diaries. In 1924 he was appointed to the University of Frankfurt, in 1925 founded the China Institute Frankfurt and in 1926 co-founded the Gesellschaft für Ostasiatische Kunst. Following his death in 1930, Erwin Rousselle (1890-1949), Professor of German Philosophy at the University of Beijing as of 1925, was appointed his successor. “Sinologie in Frankfurt: Geschichte“, website of the University of Frankfurt, July 2003
[107] Michael Sullivan, op.cit., 77 and 154.
[108] Ibid, 154.
[109] „Sinologie in Frankfurt: Geschichte“, website for the University of Frankfurt, July 2003.
[110] Ibid.
[111] In Briefe aus dem 20. Jahrhundert, (..., Suhrkamp Verlag, 2004), ... translation
[112] Paul Klee 1933, (Munich : Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus , 2003), 282-93.
[113] Ibid, 291
[114] Adolf Hoffmeister, „Mu-Ke, der chinesische Holzschnitt“ in Guo Hua oder die chinesische Malerei, (Prague, 1957), 88 f. cited by Hans-Jürgen Cwik in „Flut des Zorns“, Holzschnitt im neuen China: Zeitgenössische Graphik aus der Volksrepublik China (Berlin: Gesellschaft für Verständigung und Freundschaft mit China e.V., 1976), 79. „Die kunstlose, kleinbürgerliche Wohnung schmücken einige Bilder. Holzschnitte von Lionel Feininger, Akte von Augustin Becher, Bilder von Käthe Kollwitz.“ translation
[115] I am indebted to Consul General Dr. …Röhr for facilitating contact with the Political Archive [Politisches Archiv] of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs [Auswärtiges Amt] and for the most generous assistance of Dr. … Grupp TITLE for providing us with access to correspondence and documents regarding this event. See also Anna Wang, „Erinnerung an LuXun“ in LuXun Zeitgenosse, ed. Egbert Baqué and Heinz Spreitz, op.cit.,212.
[116] LuXun’s protest demonstrates how extraordinarily well-informed Chinese artists and intellectuals are regarding cultural-political developments in Europe. Their counterparts in Europe are equally well-informed and politically engaged. As early as 1925 Käthe Kollwitz, Lion Feuchtwanger, Erwin Piscator and the German painter Heinrich Vogeler protest against foreign intervention in China. Anna Wang, “Die Kulturen austauschen” in Holzschnitt im neuen China: Zeitgenössische Graphik aus der Volksrepublik China (Berlin: Gesellschaft für Verständigung und Freundschaft mit China,1976),13.
[117] An accompanying report by Acting Consul General R.C.W. Behrend in Shanghai, who agreed to accept and pass on the Letter of Protest out of respect for Cai Yuanpei and Song Qingling, explains that the League had handed over the Protest in Shanghai, rather than in Beijing or Nanking, due to the impossibility of their travelling to Beijing at that time
[118] Exhibition catalogue. See also Pierre Vorms, „LuXun und Frans Masereel“ in LuXun Zeitgenosse, op.cit., 204. The catalogue contains a short introduction most likely written by Paul Vaillant-Couturier, a foreword by Andrée Viollis, the Manifesto of the League of Revolutionary Artists of China, reproductions of four woodcuts, the list of works and an appeal for donations to finance a tour of the exhibition to other European cities.
[119] Ibid, 206
[120] Ibid, 207.
[121] Published by the China-Institut Frankfurt in collaboration with the Vereinigung der Freunde Ostasiatischer Kunst Köln. The copy in the collection of the Museum Villa Stuck contains a personal dedication for Prof. Fritz Jäeger by Erwin Rousselle in January 1934. The speech of the Prussian Minister for Wissenschaft, Kunst und Volksbildung at the opening of Liu Haisu’s exhibition in Berlin expresses similar sentiments (see Ostasiastische Rundschau 15, no. 3( February 1, 1934):66.
[122] According to I-feng, 3:4 (April, 1935), 106-107 cited by Mayching Kao 1972, op.cit., 148 and 265, the exhibition also travelled to Czechoslovakia and Poland following its London showing. The author was unable to locate documention on these exhibitions.
[123] H. Rocholt, „Die Mittlerrolle des Auslandsdeutschtums in Ostasien“, Ostasiatische Rundschau. 15, no. 12(June 16, 1934).
[124] „Brief aus Shanghai“, Ostasiatische Rundschau 15, no. 14(July 16, 1934).
[125] According to Bonnie Sycip, op.cit., Mei Lanfang was a close family friend of the Chinese Envoy to Berlin, Liu Chung-chieh. She recalls the visit of both Mei Lanfang and Hu Die (who stayed in Berlin for approx. 2 months). The reception at the Envoy’s home was attended by numerous famous German film stars, directors and opera stars. Liu took a large number of photographs of guests and receptions during his term in Berlin but all were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Ms Sycip can recall viewing Hu Die’s film Two Sisters in Berlin at this time(see Zheng Dongtian’s article in this volume).
[126] Zheng Peikai (Cheng Pei-kai), “The Cultural Impact of Mei Lanfang on World Theater”, Con-Temporary (Dangdai), 103 (November 1994): 43 n. Cited by Shu-mei Shih, op.cit., 11, n.30. .
[127] Leopold Reidemeister is appointed curator at the State Museums of Berlin in 1932 according to Ostasiatische Zeitschrift 18, no. 3(May-June 1932): 172.
[128] On July 23, 1950, not long before his death from tuberculosis, Trautmann wrote to Hilla von Rebay, founding director of the Museum of Non-Objective Art (later Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York): “Wie tragisch mag manches geendet haben. Wieviele sind gestorben und verdoreben[sic]. (…) Und mir selbst ist vielleicht nur noch ein kurzer Aufenthalt auf dieser schönen Erde beschienen. (…) Was ist es denn, was unsere Zeit nach dem göttlichen Heilsplan verwirklichen soll? oder haben wir uns alle den Teufel ergeben?“
[129] Lang Shaojun, op.cit., 313.
[130] Michael Sullivan, op.cit., 46.
[131] Shih Shou-Chien, op.cit., 160.
[132] Lang Shaojun, op.cit., 316.
[133] Ibid, 315.
[134] “Art is the aesthetic establishment of complete life – unity and equilibrium - free from all oppression. For this reason it can reveal the evil of oppression and show the way to combat it”:Piet Mondrian, “Liberation from Oppression in Art and Life”, 1939-1940 in Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James, The New Art- The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, London, 1987, 323..
[135] There are tantalizing hints that Chinese Literati painting may have had more impact on European painting at the beginning of the 20th century than has previously been realized. As early as 1928, William Cohen compares “Moderne Fühlen” in Literati painting of the 17th century with European art. “Man denkt an Corinth und Cézanne und erwägt, wo wohl die Unterschiede liegen William Cohn, „Neuerwerbungen chinesischer Kunst“, Kunst und Künstler 26,(1928): 300. In his forward to the exhibition Chinesische Malerei in the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover in 1933-34, curator Dr. Werner Speiser writes of the „Bedeutung, die die chinesische Malerei für uns und unsere Kunst bisher gewonnen hat und weiterwirkend ausübt. Man darf diese Bedeutung nicht gering einschätzen, haben doch Künstler wie Slevogt und Orkik, Gaul und Hodler, um nur einige zu nennen, vor vielen der hier gezeigten Bilder mit Begeisterung gestanden undl ebendige Anregungen aus ihnen geschöpft“ (Vorwort, 1.)
[136] Lang Shaojun, op.cit., 331.
[137] Huang Binhong, Binhong shujian (Correspondence of Huang Binhong), ed.Wang Jiwen (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1988), 35. Cited by Lang Shaojun, op.cit., 316.
[138] See David Clarke in this volume, pp and pp... , footnote 7,
[139] Mark Tobey, Diary Notes, May 12, 1934, copy in Wesley Wehr papers, Manuscripts, Special Collection, University Archives, University of Washington Libraries, Seattle.
[140] Lang Shaojun, op.cit., 336.
[141] Ibid.