Wu Guanzhong

Wu Guanzhong
Born	August 29, 1919(1919-08-29) Yixing, Jiangsu, China
Died	June 25, 2010(2010-06-25) (aged 90) Beijing, China
Nationality	Chinese
Field	Painter

Wu Guanzhong (simplified Chinese: 吴冠中; traditional Chinese: 吳冠中; August 29, 1919 – June 25, 2010) was a contemporary Chinese painter widely recognized as the father of modern Chinese painting. Wu had painted various aspects of China, including much of its architecture, plants, animals, people, as well as many of its landscapes and waterscapes in a style reminiscent of the impressionist painters of the early 1900s. He was also a writer on contemporary Chinese art.

Life

Wu was born in Yixing, Jiangsu, in 1919. In 1935, Wu passed the entrance exam and studied engineering at Zhejiang Industrial School (浙江公立工业专门学校, a technical school of Zhejiang University) in Hangzhou. In 1936 he transferred to the National Arts Academy of Hangzhou, studying both Chinese and Western painting under Pan Tianshou (1897–1971) and Lin Fengmian (1900–1991). In 1942 he graduated from National Arts Academy, Hangzhou and in 1947 traveled to Paris to study at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts on a government scholarship.

Wu introduced aspects of Western art to his students at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, where he taught from 1950 to 1953. The Academy was known to have been dominated by social realism and Wu was called "a fortress of bourgeois formalism". Between 1953 and 1964 he taught at Tsinghua University, Beijing and then Beijing Fine Arts Normal College. He was appointed a Professor at the Central Institute of Arts and Crafts, Beijing in 1964.

In August 1966, at the outset of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, Wu was prohibited from painting and writing about art^{[citation needed]}, and many of his early works were destroyed^{[citation needed]}. In 1970, at the age of 51, he and his wife were separated and assigned to two years of hard labor in the countryside as part of the Communist Party's vast re-education program. Following that period, he was only allowed to paint on Sundays (his day off from the fields) or on holidays^{[citation needed]}. Finally in 1973, he was allowed to return to Beijing to paint hotel murals and decorations. It was not until after Mao's death in 1976 that Wu, like many of his peers, was able to return to his art-making.

He had his first solo exhibition in 1979, and his career took off in the 1980s.

In 1991 Wu was made an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.

Early in his career Guanzhong adopted the pen name Tu, which he used to sign his work.

Wu died at the age of 90 on June 25, 2010 during night time in Beijing.

Exhibitions

Wu Guangzhong has had solo exhibitions in major art galleries and museums around the world, including China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Taipei, Korea, England and the USA.^{[citation needed]} His paintings were exhibited at the British Museum in 1992; Wu was the first living Chinese artist to have an exhibition there. One of his paintings, Seascape at Beidaihe (1977), was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of an exhibition of paintings from the collection of art dealer Robert H. Ellsworth [1]. His work may also be seen in the collection of the Hong Kong Museum of Art.

In 2008, Wu donated 113 works to the Singapore Art Museum (SAM). This donation is the largest Wu Guanzhong donation to a public museum. In 2010, Wu donated works to the Hong Kong Art Museum.

External links

• Wu Guanzhong and his Painting Gallery at China Online Museum
• Wu Guanzhong on artnet
• David Barbosa, Once denounced, painter has China's eye, The New York Times, October 6, 2005.