The Lingnan School

Wednesday 15.02.11: conference «The Lingnan SchoolBy Maël Bellec, Curator at the Cernuschi Museum.

The Lingnan School is an important painting school that develops in the first half of XX^rd century and is still alive today. It is developed in a region located in Guangdong, in Lingnan (south of the five mountain ranges) and is essentially a Cantonese school but differs from the Canton School known for the art of export which is no longer exhibited in museums.
This school is little known, and since the work of Ralph C. CroizierArt and Revolution in Modern China: The Lingnan (Cantonese) School of Painting (1906-1951)»Published in 1988, there was nothing written in the Western world until the catalog of the next Cernuschi museum exhibition. In China, it has only been a few years that we talk about this school which had partly disappeared from historiography for a set of rather complex reasons. This school is however important because it developed between the end of the 1870s and the 1940s. The three Masters of Lingnan, Gao Jianfu (1879-1951), Gao Qifeng (1889-1933), younger brother of the previous one, and Chen Shuren (1884-1948) will be the witnesses of a whole important part of Chinese history: the end of the Qing dynasty, the Chinese republic founded by Sun Yat-sen in 1912, the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, the Long March which sees Mao Zedong become the undisputed leader of the CCP in 1935, the Sino-Japanese conflict of 1937 to 1945 and, in 1949, the proclamation of the People's Republic of China which pushes Tchiang Kai-shek and the forces of the Guomindang to take refuge in Taiwan. They will therefore practice technically traditional Chinese painting, but the end of their life will be contemporary with Soviet realism.

Gao Jianfu (1879-1951)

Gao Qifeng (1889-1933)

Chen Shuren (1884-1948)

The Lingnan School is important because it is at the crossroads of the classic pictorial tradition and the generation of the avant-garde of the 1920 years.

South China, and especially the Canton region, is off-center and somewhat isolated from the rest of China, protected by mountain ranges. Canton will develop its own artistic and cultural sensibility. In the middle of the XIX^rd, Song Guangbao will initiate a regional school of painting "without bone" (without outline) on the theme of flowers and birds but which will represent a flora and fauna endemic to the Cantonese region. In addition, Canton Gardens are very small, dense and contain potted plants. Ju Lian (1828-1904), who was the master of the three founders of the Lingnan School, owned one of these gardens and practiced painting from nature. He will adopt a technique that consists of dropping drops of water or projecting powders of pigments on a still wet paint to create relief effects. Another Cantonese current due to commercial contacts with the West will form a Western-style oil painting school like that practiced by Lam Qua (1801-1860). These works known to Westerners are not much appreciated by educated Chinese.

Ju Lian. A hundred flowers. Ink and colors on silk. © Hong Kong Museum of Art

Lam Qua. The Mouqua merchant Circa 1840. Oil painting on canvas. © Peabody Essex Museum

The artists at Lingnan School are first trained in painting flowers and birds from nature, but Gao Jianfu was certainly trained in Shade and Perspective Mastery at the University of Guangzhou. Very few Chinese artists, before 1913, will be able to study in Europe and the relay to master the Western techniques is Japan. Japan of the Meiji era saw the birth of the current Nihonga who practices the traditional technique of Japanese painting enriched by the Western contribution of the effects of perspective and new themes. Takeuchi Seihô (1864-1942), one of the founding fathers of the current Nihonga, combines the techniques of traditional Japanese schools with Western forms of realism borrowed from Corot and the Barbizon school; among his favorite subjects are the animals he studies from nature in zoos. His influence is major on the artists of the Lingnan school as we can see between his pair of screens "Lions and cliffs" and "Lions on alert at duskFrom Chen Shuren who uses almost the same composition and the same range of twilight colors. In Japan, the artists of Lingnan's school train themselves to paint lions by looking at paintings and not by nature, but they add a symbolism missing from the Japanese model by including important colophons. The lions in the Lingnan School are considered as revolutionary motives and are supposed to represent the men of those troubled times (struggle between the warlords in the 1920 years) and are often represented in dynamic, roaring and threatening positions like in the "Roaring lionFrom Gao Qifeng.

Takeuchi Seihô. Lions and cliffs. 1904. Ink, colors and gold leaf on paper. From a pair of screens. © Toyota Municipal Museum of Art

Chen Shuren. Lions on alert at dusk. Ink and colors on paper.

The Lingnan painters have a very strong ambition, they want to both refound the nation but also fundamentally overhaul Chinese painting. One of the reasons for the eclipse of the Lingnan School is the use, almost a copy, of the Japanese model that is badly perceived in China, this further aggravated by the Sino-Japanese conflict of the 1930 years. Gao Jianfu, however, is a very eclectic artist who will look at things very varied, who will travel and paint landscapes in Burma or views of the Ganges. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the famous Indian poet and philosopher, said of him "that he was able to assimilate the styles of all the paintings in the world but that his painting remained Chinese».

One of the challenges of the Lingnan school is to put art at the service of the people, in particular by distributing various periodicals, such as the Zhenxiang Huabao in Shanghai, which pursue a triple goal: information on what is happening in the world, monitor the republican policy of the government and be a vehicle for the dissemination of the works of its artists. Huang Shaoqiang (1905-1998) who is a second generation artist of the Lingnan school will profoundly modify the painting of characters as in "Watching paintingsWhere characters are watching an exhibition of character paintings. At the time of the Sino-Japanese conflict, exhibitions will present heroic figures to the people and maintain enthusiasm during these difficult times but Gao Jianfu will also represent the disasters caused by the Sino-Japanese conflict. The theme of painting disasters, fires and catastrophes is totally new in Chinese painting.

All the artists of the Lingnan school will have, at the beginning, an important political activity to then move away little by little and devote themselves more exclusively to the painting. At the death of Sun Yat-sen, Gao Qifeng will be responsible for providing paintings to adorn his mausoleum and he will represent a lion, an eagle and a horse probably similar to that of the 1920 years who uses a Japanese model of 1909 but with a Western model and that gives off an impression of sadness. An extremely strong work by Gao Jianfu (ca 1941) takes up the Christian symbolism of the cross that collapses in front of a threatening sky (whereas it is rather Buddhist) to express the loneliness and harshness of times but without representing them directly.

Huang Shaoqiang. Watch paintings. Ink and color on paper. © Guangdong Art Museum

Gao Jianfu. Fire on the Eastern Front. Ink and colors on paper. © Guangzhou Museum of Art

Gao Qifeng. Horse. Middle of the 1920 years. Ink and colors on paper

 The legacy of these artists is very mixed, on the one hand because they experienced a period of oblivion and did not really leave posterity behind them: the artists of later periods, apart from their disciples, made little reference to them because from 1940 on we changed the artistic paradigm. In 1942 Mao Zedong will redefine what should be art in the China of his dreams and, although the idea of ​​art in the service of the people is also the credo of the Lingnan school, he will turn to the model of Soviet painting. From the 1950s, Russian artists will teach oil painting in the style of Soviet realism at the Central Academy of Arts in Beijing. However, there are some disciples, including the seven disciples of the Pavilion of the Celestial Wind of Gao Qifeng as Zhao Shao'ang (1905-1998) or those trained by Gao Jianfu as Guan Shanyue (1912-2000) or Yang Shanshen (1913-2004) ). These artists will in turn train other painters in Hong Kong or Taiwan, but this new generation will disperse and there is even, today, a Canadian branch of the Lingnan school. Thanks to this transmission, the Lingnan school is reappearing and coming back up to date in Hong Kong as well as in Canada or Taiwan. These third-generation artists perpetuate the taste for strong images, for rendering volumes, for the use of Western perspective and a certain taste for ocher tones inherited from Takeuchi Seihô.

Poster on cooperatives. 1954. © Landsberger collection

Zhao Shao'ang. Guilin Landscape. 1945. Ink and colors on paper.

Yang Shanshen. 2004 poster. © Museum of Art.Macao.