PROVENANCE:
Given directly by the artist to Stanley William Hayter (famous British painter, 1901-1988)
Private collection, France

ILLUSTRATED:
Rita Wong, Sanyu – Index of Drawings (L'inventaire des dessins) , The Li-Ching Cultural and Educational Foundation, Taipei, 2014, no. D-0415, p. 38 (USB flash drive)

This drawing is to be sold with a certificate of authenticity issued by Liching Foundation, on the 9th of January 2013 and a certificate of authenticity issued and signed by the wife of Stanley William Hayter.

Looking towards progress and taking the road to modernity: that was exactly Sanyu’ s objective in all his artistic pursuits, ever since he started out as a calligrapher and then proceeded to sketching and drawing. Sanyu is best known for his nudes painted with a brush in a style reminiscent of traditional literati painting, so much so that critic Antoine Chen dubbed them “ink wash nudes.” The artist’s background as a calligrapher was conducive to the smoothness and sleek flow of his lines and contours, and Sanyu was always able to catch his model’s expression and poise with just a few deceptively simple strokes, a method he took so far that many of these works already border on the expressionist mode. It was Albert Dahan, a former journalist with France Soir and a friend of the artist for almost 20 years, who first described Sanyu as “the Chinese Matisse,” a term that stuck and has currency to this day. Dahan was particularly impressed by Sanyu’s ability to outline the contours of his female nudes in one quick succession of subtly connected brushstrokes, repeatedly praising his sure hand and quick instinct.

In this lot, the model is the legendary Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin, 1901-1953). Kiki was one of the defining figures of the 1920s art and culture of Paris. She frequently worked as a paid model for artists of the École de Paris, but was also a nightclub singer and a painter in her own right. In her memoirs she mentions that at one point she had been considering to learn Chinese, and it is very likely that she often ran into Sanyu in one of the many cafés of Montparnasse, or at the Académie de Grande Chaumière. Kiki sat model for Sanyu on at least one occasion, for there is one sketched painting of her among the artist's works.

This Sanyu drawing was ever owned by Stanley William Hayter, an English famous painter printmaker who found the legendary Atelier 17 studio in Paris in 1927. Among the artists who frequenting the atelier were Miró, Picasso and Kandinsky. In 1930, Sanyu produced 3 etching prints for a French edition of the poems of Tao Yuanming. It’s very likely they knew each other in late 1920s. During this period, Hayter acquired this drawing directly from the artist.