Lin Fengmian's paintings exude a strong sense of blended Chinese and Western cultural traditions. The artist also put his unique background to good use as an innovator of art education in his home country. Importing Western ideas and techniques, he worked both as a teacher and a painter, his works always permeated with Western-style lighting and palette, as well as modern compositional structures, all of which he successfully integrated into Chinese painting. His special style and individual artistic language are very much on display in the various paintings depicting "Chinese Opera Figures," a motif that Lin first became interested in during the early 1950s under the influence of his friend and colleague Guan Liang in Shanghai. At the time, Lin Fengmian turned into a regular traditional opera buff, watching everything from Beijing to Kun Opera and Shaoxing Opera, but also a wide variety of movies.
He once said, "I love to watch movies and all kinds of plays and operas. It doesn't matter if the performance is good or bad, what really interests me are the images and expressions, the gestures and movements—as long as there is enough variety in these, I'll be enthralled." In other words, Lin was not fascinated by intricate plotlines or stories per se; rather, he would study the "action" for its own sake, scrutinize the motions and emotions in order to capture them on canvas. The ultimate point was to explore the vacillating nature of bodies in movement, not to reproduce the aesthetic brilliance of the events on screen or on stage.
From 1951 onwards, Lin embarked on a series of paintings showing Beijing opera characters. His daring explorations of this new subject not only marked a watershed in his career, but also significantly enriched his artistic language and made him one of the most avant-garde painters in China, an artist in the vanguard of the country's movement to thoroughly reform traditional painting styles. True, Lin had already tried his hand at painting opera figures in the 1940s, but those early attempts were rather conservative in their approach, featuring freehand brushwork and impressionistic representations in the classical Chinese style. A decade later, Lin's style had matured considerably, and his works from this period harmoniously blend elements from traditional Oriental art, such as the silhouettes of Chinese shadow plays, with essential features of modern Western art, in particular the geometrical shapes typical of Cubist painting. It is a mixture reminiscent of the young Picasso, and works such as his Les demoiselles d'Avignon.
During the early 20th century, Picasso moved from Spain to France with the goal of shedding the shackles of tradition and blazing new trails. Taking, among others, Cézanne and his new conception of painting as a model, and also deriving inspiration from traditional African tribal masks, he helped to create the prototype of Cubist art. In a similar way, the Lin Fengmian of the 1950s was striving to reach a higher plane of artistic expression by taking his cue from the Cubists and merging their approach with the visual aesthetics of Chinese shadow play, thereby adding both variety and depth to his creations.
In a 1951 letter to one of his students, Lin Fengmian wrote, "When showing us objects, Picasso would sometimes simply embed them in the two-dimensional space of the canvas. What I'm trying to do is a bit different. After watching a traditional play, I want to enfold various layers of action into my composition, thus allowing a series of flat figures or images to show the progression of the play, and to convey a sense of continuous motion. This is much more important than a realistic representation of the individual characters or objects, and this is the direction for my future work." The objective here described by Lin is exactly the paramount goal of Cubist art: the manifestation of motion, or extension in time, within the painting's limited space. When discussing with his students the artistic aspects of traditional opera, Lin Fengmian would usually make the connection to Western art, since for him the two had become closely intertwined phenomena, two crucial ingredients for the enrichment and sublimation of his visual art.
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution put an abrupt end to Lin's avant-garde painting activities, and under the stifling reign of the "Smash the Four Olds" ideology, hardly any more pictures of opera figures emerged. It was not before 1977 and his emigration to Hong Kong that Lin, now in his autumn years, returned to his beloved subject. This exquisite lot, Chinese Opera Figures: Romance of the Western Chamber, stems from this Hong Kong period and was completed sometime in the late seventies or early eighties.
Unlike the Cubist-influenced experiments of his Shanghai period, Lin's Hong Kong paintings are brimming with the artist's life experience, full of emotion and spiritual depth. While the Cubist-inspired geometric patterns have by no means entirely disappeared, his work at this point is now also infused with new ingredients from China's folk arts, including, in addition to shadow play, paper cutting and linear elements from tradition painting and calligraphy. The composition is kept fairly flat, and the paint evenly applied with regular brushstrokes. The overall effect is quite decorative: both characters from the Romance of the Western Chamber are made up of several partly overlapping triangular shapes, their attire with simple decorations outlined with plain strokes, yet the whole painting is truly brought to life by the lively colors, which succinctly convey the play's romantic and aesthetically refined atmosphere. The terse composition subtly hints at the two figures' distinct characters and roles in the play, mostly through the cleverly communicated interaction between the drama's heroine, Cui Yingying, and her maid, Hong Niang. The two women's facial features show all the trademark signs of Lin Fengmian's portrait style, rooted in a long tradition of Chinese paintings of beautiful women.
Provenance: Sanhuai House private collection; the lot was previously mentioned in a number of specialist art books, including Modern Artists Theory, Work, Biography: Lin Fengmian, ed. Zhu Pu, Xue Lin Publishing. Although a small format work, Chinese Opera Figures: Romance of the Western Chamber is yet an important representative "opera figures" piece from the artist's Hong Kong period.
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