Exhibit of the week: Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi

last updated 8 January 2015

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Through April 15

Art enthusiasts throughout the West are currently expressing a strong appetite for “all things Chinese,” said Lance Esplund in Bloomberg Businessweek. Answering that hunger, New York’s Metropolitan Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art have collaborated on an exhibit that introduces American audiences to a 20th-century painter revered in China as a homegrown Van Gogh or Monet. Fu Baoshi (1904–65) was certainly an artist working at a cultural crossroads. A passionate advocate of traditional brush-and-ink painting, Fu eventually adapted his aesthetic to suit the tastes of a Maoist regime that favored Soviet-inspired social realism over styles of painting associated with China’s imperial past. The 100-plus works now hanging at the Met prove to be “artistically uneven,” but they also show us an individual artist fighting to keep alive a mode of expression he adored.

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Fu’s skill is evident throughout the show, despite the work’s ups and downs, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. His early ink paintings, featuring ladies at court or monks bent over calligraphy scrolls, are technically impressive though tradition-bound. But by the 1940s, Fu was at the top of his game, working modern techniques into his brushwork. A series of images of rain-swept mountains “pushes the traditional ink medium to new levels of atmospheric abstraction.” Gradually, though, political reality creeps in, as does a viewer’s sense that Fu was often “painting for his life.” The clouds in his paintings begin emerging from smokestacks, signaling industrial progress. Mao himself pops up here and there. “In the final gallery, in images at once beautiful and a bit chilling, tints of red—the Communist Chinese color par excellence—creep into skies, spread across water, and inflame a national monument.”

Still, it’s hard to know if Fu admired the Communist regime or not, said Lee Lawrence in The Wall Street Journal. Heaven and Earth Glow Red (1964), for example, features our planet “washed” in Communist crimson, yet “the composition is so lyrical that we respond primarily to color, line, and form, not message.” Similarly, in The Far Snows of Minshan Make Us Happy (1953), the Long March of the Red Army becomes an ant-like procession past towering mountains. “Just as old masters often depicted sages and poets as tiny figures amid mountains and forests,” Fu apparently saw his moment’s great players “as just one more element in his vast land.” Whatever his motivations, he “comes across as someone we ought to get to know.”