Xu Beihong

Xu Beihong the Chinese painter (1895-1953) who transformed modern Chinese art by fusing Western academic training in oil and drawing with the brush traditions of his own country. His fiery oil paintings of historical subjects and above all his ink horses, galloping and rearing in powerful strokes, made him the most influential art teacher of his generation.

Early Life and Study Abroad

Xu Beihong was born on 19 July 1895 in Yixing, in Jiangsu province, into a poor family that painted portraits and made images for popular use. He learned to draw from his father at an early age and supported the family by his brush from the age of about nine, and the hardship of his youth gave him a lifelong seriousness about the moral purpose of art. After his father's death he went to Shanghai and then to Beijing, where he found patrons and began to establish himself.

In 1919 he won a scholarship to study in France, and he spent much of the following decade in Europe, first in Paris at the National School of Fine Arts and later in Germany and other countries. In Europe he received a rigorous academic training in drawing from the figure, in anatomy and in oil technique, and he admired the monumental work of the French academic and romantic painters. He returned to China convinced that Chinese art needed this kind of technical foundation if it were to renew itself.

Oil Painting and the Grand Subjects

Xu Beihong was one of the first Chinese artists to master European oil painting and to use it for large historical compositions. His monumental works take subjects of Chinese history and legend and render them in the dramatic, figure-filled manner of European academic painting. His best-known oil painting, Tian Heng and His Five Hundred Followers, painted in the late 1920s and early 1930s, depicts the loyal retainers of a loyal statesman withdrawing from a corrupt court.

Completed amid the growing threat to China from Japan, it carried an unmistakable message of honour and resistance and became one of the most celebrated history paintings of modern China. Among his other major works are the huge canvas Put Down Your Whip, an allegorical painting of national awakening, and numerous portrait and figure studies. He intended these paintings to serve the nation, and he argued that art should be serious, intelligible and morally elevating rather than merely decorative.

The Ink Horses and Later Style

Xu Beihong is most widely loved for his paintings in ink of horses. In works such as Galloping Horse he used the traditional brush and ink but with a new anatomical accuracy and a thrilling sense of motion, so that the animal seems to leap from the paper. The horse, strong and free, became a symbol of the Chinese spirit. He also painted lions, eagles, the willow and the plum, and portraits of friends and historical figures, in a manner that combined the freedom of the literati brush with the structural knowledge of Western drawing.

His range allowed him to work in oil and in ink with equal authority, and he moved between them throughout his career. He painted horses most often in ink, without background or colour, so that the strength of the animal fills the whole sheet. His style is marked by vigour and clarity. He had little patience for what he considered the effete refinements of late traditional painting, and he sought a direct and powerful expression that could move a wide public and speak of courage and hope in a time of crisis.

Teaching and the Confrontation with Tradition

Xu Beihong was above all a teacher, and his influence on Chinese art education was greater than that of any of his contemporaries. He held senior academic positions after 1949 and headed the art academy in Beijing, and he laid down a curriculum based on drawing from life, on anatomy and on the study of the model, which trained several generations of Chinese painters. His insistence on the primacy of drawing and of Western methods brought him into conflict with those who wished to preserve the traditional scholarly painting.

The most famous dispute was with the painter Liu Haisu and others who favoured a more liberal and modern approach, a controversy that divided the Chinese art world for decades. Yet he was himself deeply learned in the Chinese tradition, and he never proposed the simple replacement of one by the other. His aim was a synthesis in which the strength of Western realism would correct the weakness of a declining native practice, while Chinese feeling and brush would preserve its soul.

Legacy

Xu Beihong died in Beijing on 26 September 1953, at the age of fifty-eight. His death was mourned as a national loss, and a memorial museum was established in his former house with a large collection of his works, which remain among the treasures of Chinese modern art. His teaching shaped the mainstream of Chinese art education for the rest of the century, and the realist approach he championed became the official method of the academy.

Later artists both built upon and reacted against his example, but his central position in modern Chinese art is undisputed. He is remembered as the painter of the galloping horse and as the founder of modern Chinese art education. By bringing together the two great traditions of painting, he gave Chinese artists a wider technical language and a conviction that art could speak to the whole nation.

See also

• Chinese oil painting
• Galloping Horse
• Chinese art education
• Literati painting