Lot 5004
  • 5004

Sanyu

Estimate
100,000 - 200,000 HKD
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Description

  • Sanyu
  • Nu allongé aux jambes croisées
  • signed in Pinyin and Chinese 
  • ink on paper 
  • executed in 1920/30s

Provenance

Hôtel Drouot Auction, Paris, September 1966
Collection of Jacques Nieszawer

Literature

Sanyu: Catalogue Raisonné Drawings and Watercolors, The Li Ching Cultural and Educational Foundation, Taipei, 2014, plate D0249, electronic index p. 26, illustrated in colour

Condition

Overall, this work shall belong to its original condition during the artist's creation. There is a vertical paper fold across the middle of the paper and a horizontal paper fold near the top border. There is a slight wrinkle in the top right corner and near the middle of the bottom border. There is a minor repair/tape mark near the middle of the left border. There is a slight tear/pinhole near the middle of the top border. Otherwise, the ink reveals good condition.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Catalogue Note

Ineffable Beauty: Sanyu’s Figure Drawings

 

‘The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.’

Albert Einstein

Sanyu’s figure drawings are an embodiment of the artist’s creativity and imagination. These works opened the door of modern art to new vistas, and propelled the artist to the ranks of the great masters. The men and women portrayed under Sanyu’s brush are taken from the settings of the everyday, but under the artist’s unique facilities of observation and imagination, they are endowed with a new aesthetics. Using soft and dynamic lines, the artist captures transient flashes of inspiration. When one reviews the literature from both China and the West in the 1920s and 30s, Sanyu’s stunning depictions of human figures clearly emerge as a common topic of study and discourse in the international art world. In 2004, the Musée Guimet in Paris held an exhibition titled, Sanyu: l’écruiture du corps, the artist’s first solo exhibition at a French museum. Not only did the exhibition emphasized the artist’s position as a member of the School of Paris, the papers published also established the artist’s figure drawings as his main subject, alongside his works depicting flowers and animals.

Sanyu was unconventional, a maverick of an artist. Although prolific, he eschewed self-promotion, and his works were not widely disseminated during his lifetime. His most publically recognizable works are largely from the September 1966 Hôtel Drouot auction in Paris, an important source of the artist’s early works. It was in August of that year that the artist had passed away unexpectedly in his home. Because he had no relatives, in accordance with French law, the entirety of his works was put up for auction by the Drouot Company. In fact, almost all of the earliest collectors of Sanyu acquired their works from this auction.

It has been half a century since the auction at the Hôtel Drouot, and special auctions of Sanyu’s works from a single owner collection have occurred only twice since. The two owners had been acquainted with the artist while he was still alive. One was the October 15, 1995 Sotheby’s sale of The Johan Franco Collection of Works by Sanyu, and the other was the October 19, 1997, also at Sotheby’s: Robert Frank’s Sanyu. Both auctions garnered much attention from collectors and academics alike. Now, twenty years later, Sotheby’s is honored to be hosting the third sale of Sanyu’s works from a single owner collection, one that features the largest number of Sanyu’s works on paper in auction history.

The twenty-two pieces of Sanyu’s works on paper on offer at this auction include ink, charcoal, and watercolor, and belong to a single European private collection. Initially active in Paris antique markets, this family possesses a deep understanding of the School of Paris, and regards Sanyu as one of the School’s important members. Since acquiring Sanyu’s pieces at the Drouot auction in 1966, they have held onto them until today. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Sanyu’s death, these pieces are making their debut on the public stage. Of exquisite quality and unquestionable providence, these works represent a rare opportunity to acquire Sanyu’s works.

During early years of modern Chinese art, the attitudes toward nudity in art were harsh and it was difficult to make progression. For example, from 1917 to 1927, the exhibition of figure paintings and the use of nude models at the Shanghai School of Fine Arts caused artist Liu Haisu to be publically denounced as ‘the scum of academia’, a ‘demon of the arts’, among other demonised titles. The school was shut down, and the artist was sought by the government for arrest. Eventually, Liu fled to Japan for refuge. Later, expatriate artists Xu Beihong and Lin Fengmian returned to China and promoted nudity in art, and they, too, became subjects of similar backlash. On the contrary, Sanyu, who at the time was living in France, was able to freely use nude as his main subject. Pang Xunqing, in the essay This is How We Made It to Here, recalled his personal experience from the 1920s at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière:

‘After the illness, I often came with Sanyu. He made drawings with calligraphy brush. A lot of people knew him, and as soon as he came, many people would surround him, sitting next to him. If a model’s pose were pleasing, he would paint the model. He often painted people around him. He specialized in the full female figure, which he could complete in ten minutes. The most interesting thing was that everyone around him, whether man or woman, young or old, was painting nude female figure. Nobody protested, and instead, it was widely encouraged. I think those dozen years in Paris were kind to him.’

Compared to the other artist who had studied and stayed in Paris, although Xu Beihong and Lin Fengmian created no small number of nude figure paintings after returning to China, they could not separate those creations from the Western tradition, and leaned against it as an anchor. Sanyu’s nude paintings, on the other hand, arose from a more natural instinct; they embody the free, virtuosic spirit of xieyi and are full of humor and fragments of everyday life. Sanyu was not shouldered with preaching. Especially in his works on paper, through capturing the human body from various perspectives and angles, his presentation (rather than ‘representation’) showcases the confidence of his swift and steady brush, which paved the foundation for his later human figure oil paintings.

Sanyu’s nudes are not only an expansion of the subjects of Chinese painting, more importantly, they represent a true intersection of the East and West, of the traditional and the modern, of xieyi and xieshi, of the fashionable and the classical, of the individual and the times. When he was creating them, his works were already eliciting reverberations from both the East and West. In China, the celebrated poet Xu Zhimo was the artist’s most loyal and well-known supporter. Their friendships began in 1925, when Xu took a short trip to Paris. In his essay Tidbits from Paris, a chapter is titled Sir, Have You Yet Encountered Bright, Gorgeous Flesh?, in which the poet, using first person, describes himself frequently visiting an artist friend while in Paris. Without any gestures toward embarrassment or modesty, he speaks of the jealousy he feels toward this artist friend who can spend all of his hours admiring the beauty of the nudes, and spend his life using painting to develop the beauty of the flesh. Although the painter isn’t named, it is clear that this figure is based on Sanyu. After returning home, Xu remained fascinated by his friend, and between 1929 and 1931, in nineteen letters to Liu Haisu, the poet mentions his friendship with the painter and his wife. Xu held Sanyu’s art in the highest regard, and the painter once created a sketch portrait of the poet. On February 9, 1931, Xu writes in a letter to Liu Haisu: ‘Where is Sanyu now? Chen Xuebing brought back a drawing of the thighs of the universe. I just had the opportunity to see the rare marvel of a piece.’ And thus, the phrase ‘thighs of the universe’ was coined, and became a common name for Sanyu’s nude pieces, in particular his sketches on paper.

In addition to Xu, poet Shao Xunmei, who was Sanyu’s fellow member in the artistic brotherhood the Heavenly Dog Society, also praised Sanyu’s portrayals of human figures. Shao had studied abroad at Cambridge and was also a member of the Crescent Moon School, along with Xu, and was highly influential in the Chinese publishing and translation worlds. Shao was responsible for translating the English version of Mao Zedong’s On Protracted War, as well as rendering the Chinese translations of the poetry of Byron and Tagore. The coverage of Sanyu’s work in China during the 20s and 30s could often be found in the pages of Shao’s journals, including Golden House Monthly, Sphinx, and New Moon. In March of 1929, Shao published a piece in Shanghai in Golden House Monthly titled, The Darling of the Contemporary Art World, in which he wrote, ‘After seeing [Sanyu’s nude figure sketches], we were visited by a surge of warmth, an understanding that what they contained was life, and power; they were a living version of Rodin’s sculptures.’ This was one of the earliest public critiques of Sanyu’s works. Another acclaimed journalist Ge Gongzhen wrote numerous articles about Sanyu in the Picture Times and Shanghai Pictorial, two publications for which he was chief editor. It was clear that Sanyu, in faraway Paris, was already arousing the attention of the Chinese art world.

As one of the few Chinese members of the School of Paris, Sanyu became a representative figure for Eastern culture. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the French writer Henri-Pierre Roché and Dutch composer Johan Franco served as Sanyu’s artistic managers, respectively. The records from that time reveal that the marketing materials designed for the artist most highly celebrated his nude figure pieces. Between 1932 and 1933, Dutch publications Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant and De Groene Amsterdammer both dedicated long pieces to reports on Sanyu, mainly discussing his nude figure renderings and his works on papers, in particular his use of deformation. The pieces also discussed his marriage of Eastern ink-wash techniques and Western sketching. Sanyu’s style of quick sketching emerged as distinct and unusual.

Like the Chinese collectors and connoisseurs, the Western world’s attention and interest in Sanyu were often directed to Sanyu’s techniques of exaggeration and deformation in his sketch renderings of human figures, his work often dissected through the lens of culture. Sanyu’s close friend Johan Franco stated in 1933, ‘Sanyu’s depiction of the human body has undoubtedly undergone strong Western influence, but sometimes we are still struck by his Chinese spirit.’ With his keen musical sensitivity, Franco discovered that Sanyu’s human figures often contained the exquisite elements of both Eastern and Western elements. The acclaimed art historian Jean-Paul Desroches went into even further depth in pointing out the relationship between Sanyu’s nude female figures and Western art: ‘[Sanyu’s] solid, static, vibrant nudes are linked to an almost universal theme whether it concerns Greek or Roman gods, Renoir, Maillol, Matisse, and Picasso.’[1] The history of the West’s artistic treatment of nude figures extends into the far past of the Greek and Roman sculptures, where the subjects were mythical gods, and the figures were idealized manifestations of perfection. This turn toward the mythical in the renderings of nude figures was awakened again during the Renaissance, and became a part of tradition. Only at the dawn of Modernism did the mythical quality of nude art begin to recede, with realism emerging in its place. Manet, one of the pioneers of Impressionism, for example, in his painting Olympia, despite its mythical name, depicted a naked female prostitute, in an act of clear rebellion against tradition. Modernists have even more thoroughly shed the cloak of the mythical, depicting nude figures with realism, and with bold and daring style. Sanyu’s nude sketches indeed belong to the spirit of this movement.

Sanyu’s nude sketches are not only imbued with a feeling of the everyday, they are also rich with erotic meaning and imagination. This quality emerged during the intersection of the 19th and 20th centuries, from the Parisian neighborhoods of Montmartre in the north and Montparnasse in the south. Artists like Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) and Lucien-Henri Weiluc (1873-1947) began favoring the dancers at the cabaret, like the Moulin Rouge, as their most prized subjects. The dancers’ flamboyant charm, their suggestive poses and eroticism, gave these artists an entirely new perspective unto the human figure. The figures captured by Sanyu’s brush are often portrayed from the bottom up, suggesting the voyeur’s lusting gaze, yet this eroticism does not descend into vulgarity. Instead, the mood is one of amusement and delight, a stark contrast from the erotic chungong paintings of ancient China.   Among the contemporary masters is Egon Schiele (1890-1918), also known for his sketches of nude figures. The quality of toughness in the outlines of his figures contain notes of an Eastern aesthetic. The lust portrayed under his brush often verge toward the violent, as a kind of catharsis of the artist’s fury toward life. These characters, next to Sanyu’s soft lines which convey strength, his subtle humor toward the erotic, are set into an interesting interplay. Schiele’s extraordinary talent was cut short when the artist passed away at a young age, and he and Sanyu never were able to meet. But from the similar natures of their works from that period, the two artists most certainly were peers, held in equal regard.

The majority of Sanyu’s nude figures are thick and voluptuous, and although the artist is radically minimalist in his use of lines to define a silhouette, the figures nonetheless exude a sense of volume that is highly emphasized in Western art. The techniques of exaggeration and deformation are not only a challenge to Western tradition, but also names Sanyu as one of the earliest modernist masters to interrogate the relationship between volume and form. The sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) and Sanyu were not only born in the same year, they were neighbors beginning in the 1940s in Montparnasse. Giacometti’s thin, elongated sculptures of humans were seemingly in dialogue with Sanyu’s vivid sketches. The slightly younger Colombian master Fernando Botero (born in 1932) also famously rendered figures with an exaggerated voluptuousness; Wu Guanzhong, in his later years, also reinvented the way he created human figures. In the five paintings of the artist’s A Fu, A Foreigner series, Wu features the same plump lady as his subject. Later, the artist used this series in an essay, investigating the issue of volume in the visual arts. Sanyu was already experimenting with this idea in the 1920s, a clear testament to his artistic prescience.

Despite the clear Western influence, Sanyu’s art is also deeply rooted in Eastern elements. His nude figure works primarily feature women as his subjects, exquisitely demonstrating the physical form and life of the woman. This is no less than a modernization of the traditional Chinese painting of beautiful ladies: Since the earliest days, the Chinese paintings of human figures created by artists (not including those who painted as a artisan), including Gu Kaizhi’s Admonitions of the Court Instructess and Nymph of the Luo River, were rendered on long vertical scrolls, fully capturing the various moods and ways of the feminine spirit. Since the time of Gu Kaizhi, whether in depictions of actual palace ladies or of mythical fairy maidens, women have remained a dominant subject of Chinese traditional paintings. If we place Sanyu’s works within this lineage, his Femme à la robe violette (Lot 5018), Lectrice à la blouse jaune (Lot 5019), and Femme à la jupe violette (Lot 5022) are no less than modern day embodiments of the palace women captured in ancient Chinese paintings. To compare these three watercolors with the classical renderings of palace ladies, it is not difficult to discern that beyond the differences in dress and embellishments, the paintings are identical in their depiction of feminine elegance and grace as well as the portrayal of a kind of intellectual beauty.

To highlight the subdued grace of the woman, ancient painters of palace women commonly used slender yet vigorous lines to create human figures. This philosophy in the treatment of form was still part of the tradition of Chinese art that contemporary Chinese artists were practicing during Sanyu’s time. Sanyu’s old friend artist Xu Beihong, for example, chose the Tang dynasty ink drawing The Eightyseven Immortals, at the time housed in Hong Kong, to be the subject of study and admiration. Sanyu’s sketches of human figures are primarily done with the calligraphy brush, applied with fine gossamer strokes, as well as both calligraphic and xieyi elements. Sanyu brought the tools of traditional mediums to the arena of contemporary art. His paintings Nu assis (Lot 5001), Nu assis (Lot 5002), Nu debout de dos (Lot 5003), Nu allongé aux jambes croisées (Lot 5004), and Nu debout de dos (Lot 5005), were at the time considered a new manifestation of the spirit of Chinese art. At the same time, in order to pull away from tradition, Sanyu also simultaneously used the calligraphy brush as well as charcoal in the same work, as though combining Chinese ink sketches with Western sketching, creating a never-before-achieved effect. In Nu aux jambes croisées (Lot 5006), Nu assis de dos (Lot 5007), Nu assis (Lot 5010), Nu assis aux jambes pliées (Lot 5012) , Nu assis (Lot 5014), and Nu assis (Lot 5015) the bodies of the models are not positioned in a spread-out manner, but rather, they are bent and overlapping, and within the outline of the silhouettes, there is a vivid sense of texture and muscle, giving solid form to the figures, an effect achieved with the Western techniques of charcoal. In this way, Chinese and Western art are intersecting and elevated, each transmuting the other.

Sanyu’s sketches of human figures deliver a strong visual impact through its deformation and warping, an unprecedented technique in both Eastern or Western art, which at the time received a thunderously positive response. The women portrayed under Sanyu’s brush, whether nude or not, are almost always depicted with a smaller head and upper body, and far more full-bodied hips and legs. To search for an explanation behind this choice, one needs to look no further than the development of technology. As Dutch art critic Kasper Niehaus said in May 1933 in the journal Chinese-European Art, ‘A few [of Sanyu’s] shortened nudes with gigantic feet [are] like [those] in bad photographs,’ a deformation that is closely linked to the development of photographic technology at the time.

The history of painting includes a long period during which humans relied on the naked eye in observing their subjects. With the development of technology, however, artists gradually began adding in the aid of tools. 17th century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, for example, used the technology of camera obscura to observe a scene. During the 19th century, with the invention of the camera, humans could begin to view the world through the lens of machines. In 1925, the lightweight Leica I made its debut on the market, and became the first portable photographic device. The functionality of the lens and shutter had been drastically improved, the exposure time shrunk. In this way, photography, originally a purely technological invention, became a convenient medium in the act of creativity. And thus, the art of photography was born, the careers of the great photographic masters Man Ray and André Kertész both rising in the 1920s. Through the lens of the camera, the distance between the focal point and the object is different from that observed by the naked eye, with a large sense of compression. The earliest photographic art was thus an experiment in deformation. Sanyu was one of the earliest artists of the School of Paris to own a camera, his sketches of deformed figures closely tied to the era’s photographic experiments. Nu assis de dos (Lot 5007), for example, can be considered alongside Man Ray’s photographs. Or the even more exaggerated deformations of Nu assis (Lot 5001), Nu assis (Lot 5002), Nu allongé aux jambes croisées (Lot 5004), Nu allongé (Lot 5008), Nu assis (Lot 5010), and Nu assis (Lot 5015), among others, even more clearly exhibit the heavy influence of Dadaism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and Freudian theory, depicting the goal of artistic creation to be undergoing a gradual yet critical transition from reality, to the subconscious, to the inner spiritual world, to dreams, to fantasy, and even to nihilism.

There is a particularly special series on offer at this auction, composed of five pieces: Nu allongé (Lot 5017), Femme à la robe violette (Lot 5018) , Nu assis (Lot 5020), Nu debout (Lot 5021), and Femme à la jupe violette (Lot 5022). The hairstyle and facial features of the female among the five paintings is very similar, and very likely to be the same person. Comparing this set of paintings with others from the School of Paris, it becomes apparent that this distinctive, unique model is most likely the woman who during the two world wars, was a fixture in the Montparnasse social scene: Alice Prin, more popularly known as Kiki de Montparnasse. Kiki was born in 1901, the same year as Sanyu, and began working as a model for artists by the time she was 14. At the same time, she was also a talented singer, actress, painter, and writer. By the 1920s, Kiki had become the most sought after model among the Parisian painters, earning hear the nickname la reine de Montparnasse. Countless celebrated artists of the time, like Chaïm Soutine, Léonard Foujita, Moïse Kisling, Alexander Calder, Francis Picabia, and Fernand Léger, all left behind trademark paintings featuring the charming and talented model. Not only did she provide inspiration for these artists, but also injected into their lives the thrill of passion and romance. The master of photography Man Ray, for example, was Kiki’s main lover during the 1920s.

Kiki became the icon for the bohemian spirit. Her name quickly growing popular because of the Parisian artists, yet at the same time, she was also the reason for their success. In her diaries, she once mentions the idea that she ought ‘quickly learn Chinese,’ which makes one wonder about her relationship with Sanyu. At the time, Sanyu was right in the midst of a wandering, lustful period, and Kiki was a wildly sought after professional model. For her to appear in Sanyu’s paintings is only to be expected. In these five paintings, Kiki appears both in dresses and in the nude. In Femme à la robe violette (Lot 5018) and Femme à la jupe violette (Lot 5022), whether she is reading or writing, the paintings convey a sense of a free, leisurely life. When she appears in the nude, the tension in body language is all the more apparent. In Nu allongé (Lot 5017), for example, although she is serene, situated in a lying down position, the raised left arm bent behind her body is full of power and force, like a violin string stretched taut, releasing its distinct energy and dynamism. In the two watercolor pieces, Nu assis (Lot 5020) and Nu debout (Lot 5021), Kiki’s makeup is heavy and provocative, a pair of bewitching, phoenix eyes casting a sideways look of disdain, while her body language, though reserved, nevertheless signals a flirtatiousness. The artist has used watercolor to emphasize the model’s hair, her eyes and the blush on her cheekbones, while using a pink color to suggest in her flesh the promise of a rose just on the verge of blossoming, pushing the display of his admiration and desire to its highest limits.

[1] From the Nude to Landscape: Wandering or Journeying?, Sanyu: l’ecriture du corps, published by ARAA, 2004, p.27