Xu Beihong

Name in Chinese
徐悲鴻
Name in Wade-Giles
Hsü Pei-hung
Related People

Biography in English

Hsü Pei-hung (19 July 1895-26 September 1953), artist, was best known for his mastery of both Chinese and Western painting techniques and for his powerful studies of galloping horses. A native of the Ihsing district of Kiangsu, Hsü Pei-hung was the eldest of six children; he had two brothers and three sisters. His father, Hsü Ta-chang, was a village schoolmaster and craftsman who also taught painting. Hsü Pei-hung began learning to paint at an early age. By the time he was 17, he was helping to support his family by teaching art at several schools in his native district. After his father died in 1914, the young artist went to Shanghai. At first he led a hand-to-mouth existence, and at one point he was forced to return home. But he soon went back to the city and managed to sell a few paintings. By 1916 his work had begun to attract some notice. About this time, he began to study French.

In 1917 Hsü spent nine months studying in Japan. He then secured a post in the newly organized art department at Peking Normal College. In the spring of 1919, through the recommendation of Ts'ai Yuan-p'ei (q.v.), the chancellor of Peking University, the ministry of education awarded him a scholarship for study in France. He went to Paris and studied for a time at the Academie Julien. He then enrolled at L'Ecole des Beaux Arts, which was under the direction of Paul Albert Besnard.

Hsü received much encouragement and advice from Pascal Adolphe-Jean Dagnan- Bouveret, a fashionable portrait painter of the period. During his first two years in Paris, Hsü exhibited his work at the Salon des Artistes Fran^ais and the Societe National des Beaux Arts. However, he" sold only one painting, for which he received F. 1,000. His financial situation became difficult wherr the Chinese government, because of political complications, defaulted in its pa^TTient of scholarship money to Chinese students abroad.

Hsü went to Berlin in 1921 and remained there until 1923. He then went back to Paris. In the winter of 1925 he returned to China, visiting Malaya on the way. He made a second trip to Europe in 1926 and finally returned to Shanghai in the autumn of 1927.

Hsü Pei-hung was appointed professor in the newly opened art department of National Central University at Nanking in 1927. He also became head of the art section of Nan-kuo Academy of Fine Arts at Shanghai, which had been founded by T'ien Han (q.v.) to promote a new Western-style drama. That institution was a center of the bohemianism then fashionable in Shanghai, and Hsü Pei-hung affected the long hair, flowing tie, and Parisian mannerisms of the Quartier Latin. In 1929 he was appointed head of the department of fine arts at Peking University, but he resigned in the autumn and resumed direction of the department at Nanking. He soon abandoned European dress for the Chinese gown, an outward change which coincided with a new, and essentially Chinese, development in his painting. He laid aside his palette and oils and took up the Chinese brush again. His painting now combined the free style of the Chinese brush and ink with a Western knowledge of anatomy and academic form. With Hsü Pei-hung as its presiding spirit, Nanking became a flourishing center of the new art in China.

In 1931 a highly successful exhibition of Hsü Pei-hung's paintings was held at Brussels; it was the first showing of modern Chinese art in that city. In May 1933 Hsü was invited to Paris as his country's representative to an exhibition of modern Chinese paintings held in the Musee Nationale des Ecoles Etrangeres. In November, the Berlin Artists' Association invited him to show his own work. He accompanied the modern Chinese painting exhibition to [135] Hsü Pei-hung Frankfurt, Brussels, and Milan. Early in 1934 he was invited to take it to Moscow and Leningrad. He returned to China that summer. In 1935 Hsu went to Kweilin to organize the Kwangsi Provincial College of Art, which later was headed by his student Chang An-chih. In 1937 Hsü's work was exhibited at Canton, Hong Kong, and Changsha. After the Sino- Japanese war broke out, his department at Nanking moved with the university to Chungking, the wartime capital. In 1938 he made a tour of Indonesia and Malaya, where an exhibition of his work was held in Singapore. The proceeds were donated to famine relief in China. In 1939 he went to India at the invitation of Rabindranath Tagore, and in 1940 he exhibited his paintings in Santiniketan and Calcutta. The following year, he held exhibitions in Kuala Lumpur and Penang, and on both occasions the sales proceeds were given to Chinese famine relief Hsü Pei-hung returned to Chungking in 1942, where he became director of the National Art Research Institute founded by the Academia Sinica. In 1944 he became seriously ill; he never regained his health completely. He returned to Peking in 1946 as director of the Academy of Fine Arts. He refused to be evacuated when the Nationalist authorities fled south in the winter of 1948 and retained his Peking post until his death in 1953. He had to conform to the Communist pattern in the arts, but his work was easily reconciled with the new tenets. In addition to his direction of the freshly named Central Institute of Fine Arts at Peking, he was elected chairman of the China Artists' Association and a delegate to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. But Hsü Pei-hung was by then a sick man, and in 1 95 1 he suffered a stroke which virtually put an end to his working life. After his death, he was extolled as one of the great artists of modern China, and his house was turned into a memorial museum.

Hsü married three times. The first two unions were dissolved. He had four children, two by his second wife and two by his third wife. Hsü Pei-hung was an artist who could adapt his impeccable technique to any medium and who painted a wide variety of subjects in several styles. His many works included portraits and landscapes in the Western academic manner, figure drawings, animal studies, and large narrative compositions, as well as a series of flower, tree, and bird studies in traditional Chinese style. He mastered the realistic technique of European oil painting and draftmanship to a degree attained by no other Chinese artist of the period. That mastery was typified by two of the large compositions with almost lifesize figures which Hsü painted at Nanking between 1930 and 19J3. One of them, "The Five Hundred Retainers of T'ien Heng," depicts a group of more than 20 people listening in sorrow to the news of a messenger who has just dismounted from his horse. The central figure in the group is a self-portrait of the artist. The arrangement is in the best academic tradition; the drawing is sound; and the anatomy is impeccable. However, to the Western observer there is little to set it apart from hundreds of narrative canvases painted in the art schools of Europe during the early years of this century. The same may be said of "Waiting for Our Liberator," which shows a group of country people in a landscape with trees and a grazing buffalo. The scene epitomizes the studied grouping of the life classes, and the fact that the figures are Chinese seems only to emphasize the contrived effect. An extension of this method may be seen in a much later composition entitled "Yu Kung Moves the Mountain," a mythological work of 1940. In this painting, the artist has again experimented by attempting to combine large-scale Western narrative style with Chinese method and subject, a constant preoccupation throughout his career.

Hsü Pei-hung"s exhaustive exploration of W'estern academism had deep influence on the traditional Chinese-style paintings which were his most important contribution to the art of his time. Among both Chinese and Western art lovers, Hsü's name is most readily associated wdth his pow^erful studies of galloping horses. Hsü Pei-hung's horses are wholly Chinese in conception, but reflect the strong influence of Western visual naturalism. The group of chalk and wash life drawings of horses he made in 1939 demonstrates how much his Chinese paintings owed to his entirely Western grasp of form and anatomy. Horses also appear in many of his earlier narrative compositions in the Western style. In the purely Chinese studies, the sheer vere of Hsü Pei-hung's handling of this traditional medium transmutes the Western realism of the prancing and snorting animals.

Trees and birds also were among Hsü's favorite subjects. The indirect effect of Western naturalism may also be seen in these paintings, although many of them are completely Oriental. His "Black Pig" of 1935 and his "Eagle" of 1940 show Hsü's direct descent from the masters of the past, but in a number of his compositions of animals, birds, and trees he used a new approach to pictorial design, combining a fresh element of representation with the bold simplicity of the old literati painters. Some of his most successful works were portrait drawings. A pencil drawing of Gandhi done about 1940, chalk drawings of a woman's head done in 1942, and two sensitive brush drawings of his wife done in 1943 all bear eloquent testimony to his skill in portraiture.

Collections of Hsü's paintings include: Hsil Pei-hung hua-fan [model paintings by Hsü Peihung], Shanghai, 1939; Hsü Pei-hung hua hsuanchi [selected paintings of Hsü Pei-hung], Peking, 1954; Hsü Pei-hung ti ts'ai-mo hua [Hsü Peihung's watercolor paintings], Peking, 1956; and Hsü Pei-hung yu-hua [oil paintings by Hsü Pei-hung], Peking, 1960.

Biography in Chinese

徐悲鸿
徐悲鸿(1895.7.19—1953.9.26),艺术家,以精通中西画法,和对奔马的细致观察而享有盛名。
徐悲鸿,江苏宜兴人,兄弟姊妹六人,他居长,有二弟三妹。他父亲徐达章,是一位乡村教师,又是一名教画的匠人。徐悲鸿幼年就学画,十七岁时,他在本县几所学校教绘画,以其收入补给家用。1914年,他父亲去世,这位青年艺术家去上海。起初过着勉强糊口的生活,一度曾不得不重回家乡,不久又回上海设法出售他的绘画。1916年,他的作品稍受重视,就在这时,他开始学习法语。
1917年,他在日本学习了九个月,后在北京师范学院新设的美术系获得了一个职位。1919年,经北京大学校长蔡元培推荐,教育部给公费去法国留学。他先在巴黎儒利安学院,后来进入贝斯纳主持的美术学院。
徐悲鸿得到法国当代肖像画名家波佛莱很大鼓励和指导。他在巴黎的最初两年,曾在法国美术家画廊和国立美术学会展出他的个人作品,但只售出了一幅画,得到一千法郎,当时国内局势混乱,政府拖欠拨给国外留学生的公费,徐悲鸿的经济情况拮据困难。
1921年他去柏林,在那里住了两年,到1923年又回到巴黎。1925年回国,归国途中曾去马来亚。1926年第二次去欧洲,1927年秋回上海。
1927年,徐悲鸿在南京中央大学新设美术系当教授,又在田汉为提倡欧化新戏剧而成立的南国美术学院艺术系担任主任。这所学院具有当时上海流行的艺术家派头,徐总是留着长发、打着大花领带、仿效巴黎拉丁区的打扮。1929年任北京大学美术系主任,秋天,辞去此职又去南京任系主任。不久他不再穿西服而改穿中式长衫,这种外表的变化,和他在绘画上向新的、主要是中国风格的发展是一致的。他不用调色板和油彩而使用中国毛笔。他的绘画将中国毛笔水墨画的无拘束风格和西方的人体解剖知识和学院体融合到一起。由于徐悲鸿的带领,南京成为中国新美术发扬光大的中心。
1931年,徐悲鸿的作品在布鲁塞尔举行了一次极为成功的展出,现代中国美术作品第一次在该城市展出。1933年5月,他以中国代表的身份,应邀参加在巴黎国立外国流派博物馆举行的近代中国画展。11月,柏林美术家协会请他去展出他的作品。他带着现代中国绘画去法兰克福特、布鲁塞尔、米兰等地。1934年初,他应邀携带作品去莫斯科、列宁格勒。当年夏天回国。
1935年,徐悲鸿去桂林筹办广西省立美术学院,后来由他的学生张安智(音)任校长。1937年,徐悲鸿的作品在广州、香港、长沙展出。中日战争发生后,中央大学美术系迁往战时首都重庆。1938年,徐悲鸿去印尼、马来亚旅行,并在新加坡展出他的作品,展览会收入用作救灾捐款。1939年,他应泰戈尔邀请去印度,1940年他的作品在桑恰却坦和加尔各答展出。翌年,又在吉隆坡、槟榔屿展出,卖画所得均用于国内灾款。
1942年,徐悲鸿回到重庆,任中央研究院美术研究所所长。1944年患重病,此后他的身体健康始终未能复元。1946年回北平,任艺术专科学校校长。1948年冬,国民党当局逃往南方,他拒未同行,仍任该校校长直到1953年去世。他不得不在美术上符合共产主义的形式,而且,他的作品符合新的标准是并不难的。他仍任原校校长,但已改名为中央美术学院,同时任全国美术家协会主席,政协代表。那时徐悲鸿已是一个病人,1951年中风结束了他的艺术生命。他死后被誉为近代中国伟大艺术家之一,他的寓所改为纪念馆。
徐悲鸿结过三次婚,前两次都离婚。他有四个孩子,两个由第二位夫人所生,另两个是他第三位夫人所生。
徐悲鸿能以高超的技术运用各种工具,用多种风格绘画广泛的题材。他的作品,包括有用严格的西洋学院派手法的肖像画和风景画、人物、动物习作、大幅故事题材画,以及以传统中国画风格画的花鸟习作。他对欧洲油画和绘法写实技巧的掌握,当时其他中国画家没有能及得上他。这种技巧的掌握,最有代表性的是1930—1933年在南京创作的人物原大绘画。其中之一是:《田横五百壮士》,刻绘了二十几个人物悲痛地谛听着一位刚下马的使者所宣布的消息。这一群听众中的中心人物就是作者的自画像。这幅画的布局是最好的学院派传统,素描是扎实的,透视解剖是无懈可击的。但是对欧洲赏鉴者来说,这与本世纪初欧洲各艺术学校中所画的成千上百幅故事油画没有多大区别。另一幅画《等候我们的解放者》也是如此,画的是一头水牛在林间吃草的风景中的一群乡民。这幅画集中表现了人体课上所设计的配合,画的是中国人,似乎只是为了突出所要取得的效果。这种方法的进一步运用还可以在一幅时间晚得多名为《愚公移山》的1940年的神话作品中看出。在这幅画中,作者再次试图将西方巨幅故事画和中国画法和题材结合起来,这是徐悲鸿毕生努力以求的。
徐悲鸿对西方学院体不遗余力的探讨,对他那一代的美术有最重大贡献的国画影响甚深。中外美术界中,常常把徐悲鸿的名字和他所画的很有气势的奔马联想在一起。徐悲鸿画的马在概念上完全是中国式的,但反映出西方生动自然主义的强烈影响。他在1939年所作的一组淡彩写生的马说明了他的中国画是熟练的掌握了欧洲绘画的透视和解剖原理。马的形象,在他早期西洋故事画中也常出现。在这种完整的中国风格的作品中,徐悲鸿用中国绘画工具,把欧洲现实主义派可画的傲步而行式引颈狂啸的动物,刻画出了细腻的神韵。
树木花鸟也是徐悲鸿喜爱的题材。虽然这些画许多都是完全东方式的,但还是可以看出西方自然主义对它们的间接影响。1935年他画的《黑猪》、1940年所画的《鹰》显示出徐直接继承了过去一些大师的手法,但在他的一些树木鸟兽作品中,他使用了一种崭新的构图方法,将一种新的表现因素与传统的文人画家的不羁的朴实相结合。他的一些最成功的作品是肖像画,如1940年所作的《甘地》的铅笔肖像,1942年的妇女头像粉笔画,1943年作的两幅他的夫人的工笔画像,这些画都有力地证明了他在肖像画方面的技巧。
徐悲鸿的画集有:《徐悲鸿画范》,1939年上海出版;《徐悲鸿画选集》,1954年北京出版;《徐悲鸿的彩墨画》,1956年北京出版;《徐悲鸿油画》,1960年北京出版。

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