Zhao Wuji (Zao Wou-Ki)

Private Collection, Geneva, Switzerland

This work is in generally very good condition overall. The canvas appears to be very slightly wavy and can benefit from restretching. The work is framed and was not examined out of frame nor under UV light.
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A seminal bridge between Eastern and Western pictorial forms in the period immediately following World War II, Zao Wou-ki moved to Paris at the age of 27 in 1947.  Zao had previously studied with Lin Fengmian at the National Academy of Arts in Hangzhou and was therefore already well-versed in the tasks confronting Chinese contemporary art in the international context.  Lin himself was among the first Chinese modern artists schooled in the European capital of the visual arts and was an early exponent of the stylistic hybridity that has come to characterize much international contemporary art today.  While the fusion of revered Chinese painting traditions with the latest developments of the Western avant-garde was a principal goal of both artists, it was Zao Wou-ki who embraced most fully the language of his adopted home and became a central figure in School of Paris abstraction in the 1950s.

Sotheby's is pleased to offer two works by Zao Wou-ki from his early Parisian years, which brilliantly embody the artist's development at this pivotal moment.  The Untitled (Paysage Rouge) (Lot 49) was painted in February 1950 and shows Zao's imagination fired by a simple landscape scene.  Spindly, barren trees of winter stand just beyond a decrepit fence that runs along the bottom of the picture, its central gate barely cracked open, as though beckoning to the viewer towards the quickly-rendered architectural folly beyond the fence at lower right.  Cool atmospheric conditions, fleshed out in baby blues and pale teals, compliment a brilliant red background from which the scene emerges.  A bright copper-colored sun illuminates the setting and provides the dominant element of the vibrant composition.  Characteristic of the artist's best work of the period, the delicate representational character of the painting is all but overwhelmed by the fantastical abstract tendencies.

The more somber Untitled (1951, Lot 50) pushes further towards abstraction, although the back of the picture records an initial completion on Christmas day 1949, less than two weeks before the French painter Henri Michaux brought to Zao's atelier the dealer Pierre Loeb, who would represent the artist until 1957.  In this fertile period of development, Zao recorded his reworkings of previous pictures, in this case marking through the previous date with a bold orange stripe to finalize the composition in November of 1951, and one sees his artistic progress in the final image. 

Compositionally, Untitled (1951) is built of rectilinear sectors in a diverse range of green tones, which compliment but are not wedded to the architectural referents that seem almost etched within the surface.  Etching was one of Zao's interests at the time, and one sees its impact in the delicacy of Zao's design.  One also sees here and in the previous Lot reference to the compositional strategies and playful pictorial symbolism of Paul Klee.  Klee's work was then widely exhibited in Europe, including an exhibition at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris in 1948, but exhibitions of Zao's work in Berne and Geneva in 1951 had brought Zao into more intimate contact with the Swiss master, whose sensibilities Zao clearly shared. 

Zao's color language, however, in the Untitled work of 1951, seems drawn from the patina of ancient Chinese bronzes.  And the almost pictographic mark-making to render what seems a Parisian cityscape (with rooftops at upper right), also resembles the oracle bone inscriptions that would soon influence the artist's watershed move to complete abstraction in 1953.  Among works of this period, Untitled (1951) is therefore a harbinger of transformations to come, embodying "the contest between forms and surrounding spaces" that the artist has used to characterize his work.

Zao has always viewed the relationship between traditional Chinese painting - the rendering of nature and the calligraphic image with ink and brush - and Western abstraction as complimentary, essentially in pursuit of similar goals.  As such, the young Zao was able to absorb lessons from his own cultural heritage as well as from Modern Western masters to ultimately forge a powerful pictorial language uniquely his own.  Fifty years later, we see the seasoned artist pursuing a similar dialogue between nature and abstraction in a work such as 31.08.2001-09.09.2002 (Lot 51).  Beyond a serene expanse of light color gradations, in the painterly drama of mountainous forms, we see the masterful fusion of landscape traditions both Eastern and Western, expressed in the fluency of Zao Wou-ki's late abstraction.