Lin Fengmian (1900-1991) 1970s

In 1919, Lin Fengmian began his studies in France at Dijon Art College and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. For six years, he studied the European paintings of Matisse, Picasso, Georges Rouault, and Amedeo Modigliani. During the 1930s, Lin began to experiment with ink and color paintings. During the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, Lin was persecuted and imprisoned for more than four years, yet the subject matters he focused on were never political. In Shanghai, Lin lived in seclusion while overcoming many obstacles in an effort to resist Socialist Realism and forged a new style of landscape paintings.  He sought to integrate the Impressionists'  techniques of working with light together with the traditional Chinese 'ink-and-wash' in order to depict an imaginative landscape.  His aim was to "[use] the beauty and power of art" "as solace for the vicissitudes of life."  During the tumultuous years, Lin was forced to destroy about 2,000 of his paintings.  Most of the works we see from the 1970s were painted after 1977, when Lin immigrated to Hong Kong where he lived for the rest of his life, painting in near isolation.

Created during the 1970s, this painting depicts the powerful, solemn and serene landscape of central western China (Huangshan region near the Xin'an Jiang in Anhui Province) with dark-colored mountains and floating fishing boats.  As Lang Shaojun points out in "Traditional Chinese Painting in the Twentieth Century" from Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting, loneliness, timelessness, and isolation are often associated with Lin's paintings. The long years of hardship and the feelings Lin engendered resulted in his individual aesthetic expression in his landscape paintings.  His style of poetic loneliness is unique in twentieth-century Chinese painting.  Unlike Western painters, he did not paint landscapes directly from nature, rather, he created his landscape in the traditional Chinese manner, based on memory and imagination.