Painter Fu Baoshi had to balance modernist instincts with Chinese art traditions -- and stay in the Communist Party's good graces

Preview

Cleveland Museum of Art

What: The exhibition "Fu Baoshi: Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution."

When: Through Sunday, Jan. 8.

Where: 11150 East Blvd., Cleveland.

Admission: $8 general admission. Go to clevelandart.org or call 216-421-7340.

Leading North American art museums have engaged over the last dozen years in a thorough re-examination of the explosive avant-garde movements of the mid-20th century, especially Abstract Expressionism, which enabled New York to replace Paris as the global capital of art.

The Cleveland Museum of Art, which collected AbEx with only faint enthusiasm a half-century ago, has been absent from this art-historical conversation and shows no sign of changing course now. Instead, it wants to change the topic entirely.

Rather than focus on American art from 50 years ago, the CMA's big fall exhibition reaches halfway around the world to examine the exact same period from the viewpoint of China under Mao Zedong.

The show is part of a suite on Asian topics, including "The Lure of Painted Poetry," which focused earlier this year on literary themes in Japanese and Korean art, and an exhibition on Indian Kalighat paintings in the museum's permanent collection.

The artistic protagonist of the new show is Fu Baoshi (1904-65), a 20th-century Chinese artist who is virtually unknown in the United States except to experts. Fu, as the exhibition makes clear, was a brilliant artist and a genius with brush and ink on paper, the traditional Chinese painting media. Even if you know absolutely nothing about Chinese art, it is easy to see that Fu did with his deceptively simple tools what Paderewski did with a piano.

Brush-and-ink painting is a high-wire act, exposed to disaster at every moment. One slip and you're ruined, because erasure is not possible. Yet Fu painted with crisp, fluid, unfaltering, unhesitating brilliance in every touch. He's like a writer whose every word tells or a musician who wrings the last drop of emotion out of every note.

The real shock of the show, however, is that it's a deeply absorbing journey into artistic terra incognita. Nearly four decades after Nixon opened China, it paints a vivid portrait of a brilliant Chinese artist who fought quietly to reconcile global impulses of modernism with centuries-old traditions of Chinese brush-and-ink painting and the Big Brother rules and regulations imposed on artists by the Great Helmsman and his apparatchiks.

Filled with images of landscapes, ancient poets and even Mao swimming across a river, the show explodes the cliche that Chinese art under Mao consisted entirely of Soviet-style Socialist Realism, with images of smiling, rosy-cheeked workers in military-style unisex clothing.

Paintings turned

into performances Moreover, the exhibition reveals, uncannily, that Fu's art was in some ways moving in parallel modernist steps right along with the Abstract Expressionists in New York.

Like Jackson Pollock, who hurled and poured paint on canvases laid on the floor of his celebrated barn in Springs, N.Y., Fu celebrated the fluidity of his medium. Like Franz Kline or Adolph Gottlieb or Clyfford Still, Fu celebrated the individual calligraphic gesture of the brush stroke as the basic building block of his art.

Like all of the Abstract Expressionists, he turned his paintings into performances. And, also like the Abstract Expressionists, Fu equated the large, muscular scale of his painterly gestures with a progressive, modernizing impulse.

What makes Fu brilliant is his ability to corral his forward-looking tendencies to serve his mission of reviving uniquely Chinese visual traditions and to preserve his artistic integrity without running afoul of the Communist authorities after the revolution of 1949.

In paintings such as "Whispering Rain at Dusk" (1945), Fu creates a scene of a lone scholar or priest, garbed in a red robe, as he climbs a mountain trail in a downpour. He's dwarfed by the mountains, painted with strokes that magically transform blots, splashes and rough patches of semidried ink into a completely convincing image of a misty downpour.

The same combination of traditional Chinese imagery and stunning brushwork characterizes "Painting Our Rivers and Mountains with Meticulous Care," a work from the 1960s, in which Fu depicted Mount Hua in Shaanxi Province after a Communist Party-sponsored "sketching tour" around the country.

Viewed up close, large areas of the painting look completely abstract. Step away a few feet, and Fu's gestural brushwork resolves into a stirring portrait of a mountain blanketed with pine trees and shrouded at the summit with a veil of mist.

Lest anyone roll his eyes at the East-West comparisons aroused by Fu's work, it should be remembered that Chinese and Japanese calligraphy were key inspirational sources for some of the Abstract Expressionists.

Anita Chung, the museum's Chinese curator, who organized the exhibition, also acknowledged that from the Chinese perspective, Shanghai and other coastal cities were drenched in Western influences in the first half of the 20th century, producing Chinese artists current with Cubism, Art Deco or the colorful art of Henri Matisse.

Navigating the waters

of Chinese politics Fu, however, opted not to draw on Western sources directly and obviously. Born in 1904 in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi Province, about 375 miles southwest of Shanghai, Fu was recognized early as a precocious talent with huge potential. He also developed a knack for navigating the turbulent currents of Chinese politics, allying himself on and off in the 1920s and '30s with the Guomintang (Nationalist Party) of Chiang Kai-shek.

With the help of supporters in the Guomintang, Fu used a government grant to study abroad in Tokyo, rather than Paris, which was also an option. Working both as an artist and as an art historian, in two trips to Japan between 1932 and 1935, Fu steeped himself in the history of Japanese art -- and the influences it derived from China.

The Cleveland museum show opens with a series of four vertical scroll paintings of landscapes, in which he reinterpreted brushwork from revered masters in both China and Japan, while searching for his own mature style.

Returning to China, Fu established himself in a teaching position in Nanjing, about 270 miles west of Shanghai. Japanese aggression soon exploded into a full-scale war. Fu presciently left Nanjing in August 1937, four months ahead of the city's brutal occupation by the Japanese army.

As Chiang's Guomintang and Mao's Communists joined forces to fight the Japanese in 1937, Fu joined a military-affairs unit to produce patriotic propaganda. He settled far inland with his growing family near Chongqing in Sichuan Province. After the war, Fu resumed his university teaching post in Nanjing. He opted not to flee with the Nationalists to Taiwan in 1949 when the Communists took over.

Ominously, the new authorities canceled the classes Fu had prepared to teach on art history, seal carving and traditional brush-and-ink painting. The party's art commissars initially viewed brush-and-ink painting as a vestige of the feudal past. After a period of mandatory "re-education," Fu, working as a midlevel cultural official himself, helped establish policies in which artists could use traditional methods to portray new social and political realities.

Fu himself used Mao's poetry for inspiration and painted the chairman swimming in the Yangtze River. He painted a stirring scene of soldiers traversing a snowy mountain range during the Communists' Long March into the far western regions of China in 1934. And he led a party-sponsored trip for five artists to Romania and Czechoslovakia in 1957, producing astonishing images of Prague Castle and scenes of smoky factory towns behind the Iron Curtain.

These and other paintings open a world unseen by Americans during the long alienation between the United States and China. Organized in collaboration with the Nanjing Museum, which contributed 90 works to the project, the exhibition offers a revelatory glimpse at the other side of the Cold War.

A brilliant artist,

but not a saint First, last and always, however, the exhibition offers a comprehensive look at a brilliant artist. But while the show emphasizes Fu's prowess, it doesn't paint him as a saint. As several wall labels point out, Fu stamped more than a few images with seals he used to indicate how he loved to paint while under the influence of alcohol.

By focusing on Fu, the Cleveland museum has provided a larger context for a rare series of paintings by the artist in its own collection, a portfolio of wistful, fan-shaped images created late in the artist's life as he suffered from ill health. At the time, Fu struggled to preserve his vision amid the Great Leap Forward, a failed attempt by Mao to accelerate industrialization, which caused a famine that claimed more than 20 million lives.

Fu's death in 1965 preceded by one year the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao enjoined the young Red Guards and the People's Liberation Army to shake up the party establishment. During the upheaval, universities closed and intellectuals were forced to do farm work. Fu almost certainly would have been persecuted, had he lived.

Chung said that Fu's family hid his paintings and later arranged for their safekeeping at the Nanjing Museum, to which they later donated the works. Today, the market for Fu's paintings is growing hotter and hotter, as recognition of his accomplishments spread.

By organizing the exhibition and publishing the first major catalog on Fu in English, the Cleveland Museum of Art has opened a fresh perspective on the 20th century. Someday, it may also host or organize exhibitions that educate Clevelanders more fully about art in the West during the same period.

For now, though, the Fu exhibition offers something entirely new. It's also a point of honor that the museum has achieved such an original collaboration with a museum in China and that the show will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in January.

Viewers unaccustomed to the subtleties of Chinese painting may find the show at first to be a challenge. But make no mistake: Fu was a giant. His paintings have the power to open new worlds of understanding. And they might just change global perspectives on art in the 20th century.

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