Artists › Painters and Calligraphers
Xu Beihong
Painter and art educator trained in drawing and oil painting in Paris, author of Tian Heng and His Five Hundred Retainers and The Foolish Old Man Who Moved the Mountains, and head of the Beiping art academy.
Mural of the event “Renewal of Ink Painting”, which this person took part in.
In the late Qing and early Republic Western painting and modern art schooling reached China, and the debate over whether Chinese painting needed reform grew heated. In 1919 Qi Baishi left Hunan to settle in Beijing, where he sold paintings in Liulichang but at first struggled to make his way. His friend Chen Shizeng urged him not to follow his predecessors; Qi changed his style and created his bold red-flower, ink-leaf manner, and Chen took his work to a joint Chinese-Japanese painting exhibition in Japan, where all of it sold. In 1928 Lin Fengmian founded the National Academy of Art at Luo Garden by West Lake in Hangzhou, and that autumn Xu Beihong, heading the art college in Beiping, engaged Qi as a professor.
Also known as Original name Xu Shoukang
Xu Beihong, born Xu Shoukang in 1895 in Yixing, Jiangsu, learned painting from his father. He went to Japan in 1917 to look at art, travelled to France in 1919 and studied drawing and oil painting at the École nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, returning home in 1927. He taught in the art department of National Central University in Nanjing, later heading it, and in 1946 became president of the National Beiping Art Academy. His best-known works are the oil painting Tian Heng and His Five Hundred Retainers (1928–1930), the ink paintings Jiufang Gao (1931) and The Foolish Old Man Who Moved the Mountains (1940), and many paintings of galloping horses. He died in Beijing in September 1953.
Life and times
Dates 1895–1953
- 1919Renewal of Ink PaintingTook partage 24
- 1928Xu Beihong Hires Qi Baishiage 33