Autumn Landscape

Description

Born in 1900, Lin Fengmian was contemporary with the 20th century. He went to France in 1919 and later graduated from L'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. In 1926, he returned to China to become the Director of National Beijing Fine Art School and founded The National Academy of Art, which is the predecessor of the China Academy of Art, in Hangzhou in 1928. During the Sino-Japanese War, he went to Chongqing, and after the War, he moved to Shanghai where he lived alone and led a frugal life painting. He spent four years behind bars during the Cultural Revolution for no justified cause, which also saw the destruction of all his paintings. He resettled in Hong Kong during the later years, where he led a reclusive life. But that was also his most prolific years. Lin not only added an important chapter to the history of Chinese art as an artist, but had also cast seminal influence on later great artists like Li Keran, Wu Guanzhong, Zao Wou-ki and Zhu Dequn. He was therefore highly esteemed as an epoch-making master of Chinese painting. By using the square frame for his landscapes, Lin established a new presentation format that was quite different from the Chinese traditional landscape paintings, which had invariably been on scrolls. He also favoured a backlight treatment for his landscapes. In this painting, he first applies a background of black wash. Then he dots on the ochre shades of autumn foliage, and adds a touch of peacock blue and mauve on the undulating line suggesting distant mountains. It is his exploration of improving the values of colour against light in Chinese painting, in another attempt at merging Chinese and Western painting techniques. Autumn landscapes like this were inspired by a trip to Tianpingshan in Suzhou in 1953, after which Lin expressly told his students that he wanted to create "new landscapes", and scenes of autumn featured highly in his oeuvre. This one was done after Lin settled in Hong Kong. In it, we can see although he retains his favourite square frame and the use of perspective for the country homestead amongst autumn woods, the meticulousness of the 1950's up to the 1970's has given way to total abandon expressed in splashes of colours.

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