Artists › Painters and Calligraphers
Lin Fengmian
Painter and art educator who, back from France, headed the Beijing art school and in 1928 founded the National Academy of Art in Hangzhou, championing a blend of Chinese and Western painting.
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 Lin Fengming
Lin Fengmian, born Lin Fengming in 1900 in Meixian, Guangdong, went to France on the work-study programme in 1919 and entered the École nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1921; around 1923 he spent a year in Germany, where he painted Berlin Café. Invited home by Cai Yuanpei in the winter of 1925, he became head of the Beijing art school, and in 1928 he founded the National Academy of Art in Hangzhou and became its president, arguing for a synthesis of Chinese and Western painting. His early large oils include Humanity and Suffering; his later colour-and-ink paintings of women, still lifes and landscapes, typically on square formats, are his best known. He moved to Hong Kong in 1977 and died there in August 1991.
Life and times
Dates 1900–1991
- 1919Renewal of Ink PaintingTook partage 19
- 1928National Academy of Art Foundedage 28