PAN YULIANG | Nude

Private Asian Collection
Christie's, Hong Kong, 28 November, 2010, Lot 1066
Acquired directly from the above by the present important private Asian collector

Taipei, National Museum of History, The Exhibition of Sanyu and Pan Yuliang, 14 October – 26 November 1995

The Art of Pan Yu-Lin, National Museum of History, Taipei, 1995, plate 104, p. 117

The work is overall in very good condition. Conservation report is available upon request.
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“Mine has been a life of loving and thinking about Chinese women, and fighting for women’s self-confidence.”
Pan Yuliang As a member of the first generation of Chinese artists to live in France in the early twentieth century, Pan Yuliang spent her life advocating for "the assimilation of East and West". She was also part of the first generation of female Chinese artists, and in her artistic career, she persevered through many setbacks. Pan Yuliang's artwork often features female themes, and the female nude is one of the main bodies of her work that established her in international art circles. In 1954, the French film Les Monparnos documented the lives of the various famous artists of the Montparnasse area. The film’s subjects included the artistic life of Pan Yuliang, who was at the time the only famous Asian woman artist. Later, the renowned Asian actresses Gong Li and Michelle Reis also interpreted Pan's legendary life in film and television. Pan Yuliang's nudes not only broke through barriers in China's conservative society at the time, but also made a rich contribution to Chinese modern art.

During Pan Yuliang's early years in France, her painting style was profoundly influenced by Impressionism and Fauvism. After being nourished by Western artistic traditions, she combined them with Chinese ink painting techniques. In the 1950s and 60s, she began painting the human figure in ink. This was the artist's period of greatest individuality and mature style. Nude (Lot 1018), painted in 1952, stylistically blends East and West. This is an ink and colour work from the artist's mature period. The lines and brushstrokes, rich in Chinese character, outline the body of a nude woman, and the composition and use of colour interweave post-Impressionism with Chinese ink painting technique. Baigneuse (Lot 1019), painted circa 1958, is an oil painting by Pan Yuliang – a rare find on the market. A colour-ink painting of bathing women with the same title, Baigneuse, is in the collection of the Anhui Provincial Museum. In 1977, Pan Yuliang expressed the desire for her paintings to be returned to China before her death. The vast majority of these paintings were collected by the Anhui Provincial Museum, and today, fewer than one hundred of her valuable works in oil and ink are held by private collectors. In 1995, to mark the hundredth anniversary of Pan Yuliang's death, the Anhui Art Museum contributed one hundred of her finest works to be shown alongside another ten canvases from private Taiwanese collections for a seminal exhibition at the Taiwan National Museum of History: The Art of Pan Yuliang and Sanyu. The colour-ink version of Baigneuse was part of the Anhui Art Museum's contribution to the exhibition, and Nude was one of the ten featured paintings from private collections, making its return to the market today a rare opportunity indeed.

The Challenges of Painting Modes and Traditional Chinese Morality

In 1918, Pan Yuliang enrolled at Shanghai Academy of Arts, where she studied under Wang Jiyuan and Zhu Qizhan. Shanghai Academy of Arts was the first Chinese art school to use nude models to teach students to draw the human figure. Thus did Pan Yuliang's nude painting journey begin. During the closed-off years of the early Republican Era, it was hard to find nude models, so Pan often painted her own naked body while sitting in front of a mirror. Due to the prevailing conservative social attitudes of the time, nude paintings and Pan Yuliang's personal background made her an object of extreme controversy and criticism. The nude figures created by Pan's brush not only embodied female beauty but also represented the emancipation of women's rights in the twentieth century.

Pan Yuliang's Nude features a posture that diverges from previous nude paintings. The woman in the painting does not directly face the audience or make eye contact, nor is she a patriarchal symbol of lust and weakness. Instead, Pan presents the woman as the epitome of the repression and solitude of that era, using her brush to reflect her own circumstances: an extremely talented but poverty-stricken artist living in a conservative and traditional society. Though she came from a poor background, Pan Yuliang, who lived the second half of her life in Paris, lived according to three principles: "do not switch to foreign citizenship, do not fall in love, and do not sign contracts with galleries". She expressed this sense of pride in ink and colour, creating an extremely moving image of both unparalleled beauty and solitary self-indulgence.

For Nude, Pan Yuliang applied a bold, Western-style use of colour to Chinese xuan paper, and she combined Eastern and Western compositional techniques. The black brushstrokes of Nude outline the body with gentle, curving lines, expressing the graceful rhythms and qualities of beauty that are particular to the Eastern female form. The artist's simple and elegant lines express the structure and feel of the human body. For the background, Pan uses dots and short, interlocking lines of colour to create a layered texture. The position of the floral cloth beneath the woman enhances the vivid effect of the uncomplicated composition of the tableau. In the unfilled space (liubai), Pan combines traditional Chinese xuanran technique with Impressionistic pointillism. The result is an elegant, inspired, substantive, and vigorous tableau. As former Director of the Anhui Art Museum Hu Xinmin once said: "Pan Yuliang successfully and ingeniously combined the spirit of Chinese brushwork with the three-dimensionality of Western painting in order to create a distinctively personal aesthetic that is elegant, inspired, substantive, and vigorous. In terms of composition, she retains the liubai concept from Chinese art, but fills the remaining space with dots and interlocking lines in a skilful merging of Eastern and Western techniques."

Five Bathing Beauties

Pan Yuliang's Baigneuse is reminiscent of the works of Impressionist masters such as Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Both were fond of portraying groups of nude bathers, a theme that received much attention from painters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Artists applied various techniques and approaches to this theme, and in Paris, Pan Yuliang was subject to the influence of her peers. In terms of composition, three bathers form a group in the foreground while two more swim behind them in the middle-distance. The willow tree on the banks and the rocky waterfall farther in the background are undoubtedly expressions of Chinese landscape painting that harmoniously frame the vitality of the bathers within a beautiful natural setting. Pan Yuliang broke completely from the restrictions of traditional Chinese morality. Spatially, her nude subjects are not lounging in the bedding of a cloistered boudoir; instead, they are enjoying an open, outdoor space. They are presented in profile or with their backs to the viewer, and although the theme was daring and bold for its times, the bathers seem to possess the typical gentleness and subtlety of Eastern women. Each of the three bathers in the foreground grooms her own body without interfering with the others. Unlike most nudes painted by male artists, the women under Pan Yuliang's brush are not preening for the male gaze. Instead, they express a graceful and comfortable bearing of women within nature.

Nudes were an important creative subject in Pan Yuliang's artistic career, but she painted no more than ten oil paintings of outdoor nudes. Of these, Song of Spring is currently in the collection of the Anhui Provincial Museum, and Baigneuse is the painting of its type with the most number of bathing subjects to be currently circulating on the market. Moreover, this painting has a clear provenance: in 1973, Pan Yuliang gave it as a wedding present to a dear friend of hers who was also a Chinese expatriate living in France. The artwork was subsequently auctioned by Sotheby's in 2004, when it was the subject of enthusiastic bidding. Its reappearance on the market after fourteen years is a special opportunity for collectors seeking to add valuable paintings to their collections.