Major Retrospective Exhibition of Chinese Modern at Metropolitan Museum

For Immediate Release

Major Retrospective Exhibition of Chinese Modern Artist
Fu Baoshi Goes on View at Metropolitan Museum on January 21

Exhibition dates:  January 21 - April 15, 2012
Location:              Galleries for Chinese Painting and Calligraphy
Press preview:      Friday, January 20, 10 a.m.-noon

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present a retrospective of works by Fu Baoshi, one of the most renowned modern artists in China, beginning January 21, 2012. Drawn primarily from the preeminent holdings of China’s Nanjing Museum,Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965) will showcase the artist’s 40-year career with some 70 paintings and 20 seals that have never been shown outside Asia.  These works will chronicle Fu’s stylistic evolution from his student days in China and Japan to his life in the wartime capital in Sichuan, and through his career as one of the favorite artists of Chairman Mao.  The exhibition, augmented by superb works from a private New York collection, offers the most comprehensive treatment of the artist’s oeuvre ever presented in the West.  A notable highlight will be the inclusion of a draft of Fu’s most famous commission—the vast landscape panorama he created in 1959 for the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China.

The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art with the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Nanjing Museum.

About the Artist
Perhaps the most original figure painter and landscapist of China’s modern period, Fu Baoshi created indelible imagescelebrating his homeland’s cultural heritage while living through one of the most devastating periods in Chinese history. He was eight years old in 1912 when China’s last imperial dynasty was overthrown and the Chinese Republic was established. He subsequently witnessed the divisive warlord era and Communist rebellion of the 1920s, the Japanese invasion and occupation of eastern China from 1937 to 1945, and the Communist Revolution and establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.  Over the last 15 years of his life, his art reflected China’s political transformation under Mao Zedong.  Throughout his career, however, Fu remained one of China’s great individualist masters.
      
Fu’s Painting Styles
Trained in both China and Japan at a time when arts education stressed the need for the modernization of indigenoustraditions through the study of Western methods, Fu developed a new style incorporating foreign styles and techniques, and began creating boldly individualistic and strongly nationalistic work.  Noting that Chinese painting had evolved toward too [Back to Press Releases Main]