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P erhaps the most renowned Chinese artist to rise to prominence in Paris between the two world wars, Sanyu (also known as Chang Yu) profoundly reshaped the trajectory of modern Chinese art. Pushing the boundaries of Western oil painting to capture the evocative yet succinct simplicity of Chinese ink painting, Sanyu – nicknamed “the Chinese Matisse” – was the living embodiment of the School of Paris’s cosmopolitan modernity. His strikingly spare and poignant pictorial language garnered admirers worldwide and from all walks of life – from the Chinese master Xu Beihong to the eminent French collects or-dealer Henri-Pierre Roché and SwissAmerican photographer Robert Frank.
Horses were a curious yet highly significant leitmotif of Sanyu’s life and practice. Born in 1895 in Nanchong, Sichuan, to an affluent family who owned one of the city’s largest silk-weaving mills, the young Sanyu enjoyed lessons with the Sichuan calligrapher Zhao Xi (1877-1938) as well as with his father, who was a renowned painter of horses. Sanyu landed in Paris in 1921, part of a wave of emigrés that included his contemporaries Xu Beihong. But unlike Xu, who eventually returned to his homeland to become a fêted artist and academic, Sanyu instead doubled down on the life of a bohemian in Paris, with all its corresponding trials and tribulations. From 1928 to 1931, he was married to Marcelle Charlotte Guyot de la Hardrouyère, an art student at La Grande Chaumière, whom he playfully nicknamed “Ma” – the Chinese word for horse. She recalled that Sanyu loved to paint horses, deploying the same elegant calligraphic strokes and effortless rhythmic dynamism as the voluptuous nudes for which he would become famous.
The years that followed were marked by financial upheaval. Monetary support ceased entirely in 1931 after Sanyu’s older brother died. Although introduced in 1929 to the influential Parisian collects or-dealer Henri-Pierre Roché, their relationship collapsed in 1932 amid growing mistrust over money. But Roché’s support had spurred decisive artistic breakthroughs – for example Sanyu’s earliest oil painting dates to the year he met Roché, and by the following year he was exhibiting at the Salon des Tuileries. 1932 saw Sanyu became the first Chinese artist included in the international Dictionnaire Biographique des Artistes Contemporains, 1910-1930.
“Sanyu is a formidable force who works with precision and purity. And what intelligence! What technique!”
Unable to afford art supplies as war ravaged Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Sanyu became convinced that his invention of ping-tennis (a hybrid of ping-pong and tennis) was his ticket out of poverty. In 1948, he left Paris for New York.
Looking for a place to stay in the city, he made the acquaintance of the Swiss-American photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, who had just arrived in New York a year earlier and would one day be dubbed by critics as the “Manet of the new photography.” Frank was planning an extended trip to Paris and the pair agreed to exchange studios, but a change of plans kept Frank in New York. They instead became roommates at Frank’s 53 E 11th St studio. A lifelong friendship flowered between the unlikely duo.
Sanyu had arrived in New York at a t.mes when change was in the air. Abstract Expressionism, less a movement than a phenomenon, was a term being used to describe the unlikely artists who had been drawn to the city like moths to a flame. They came from all corners of the Western world – from Rotterdam, Willem de Kooning, from Armenia, Arshile Gorky, from
Wyoming, Jackson Pollock – settling in the city alongside New York natives like Barnett Newman and Adolph Gottlieb. There were no programmatic manifestos or theoretical stat.mes nts that united these disparate artists, although one of the few insights into their shared thinking was enshrined in a letter sent by Mark Rothko and Gottlieb to The New York t.mes s in 1943:
“We favour the simple expression of the complex thought. [...] It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and t.mes less.”
Placing content above style and messages above medium, the uncompromising vision and common dedication to authenticity of the Abstract Expressionists jolted the art world. Although in America to promote ping-tennis, it was impossible for Sanyu to avoid these artistic currents swirling around him.
Sanyu’s stay in New York coincided with a pivotal period for the Abstract Expressionists. In 1948, de Kooning held his first solo exhibition at Charles Egan Gallery, showcasing his highly charged, black-and-white abstract paintings that combined gestural energy with complex structure. That same year Pollock unveiled his sensational “drip” paintings at Betty Parsons Gallery, exhibiting a total of three t.mes s at the gallery in a hugely productive period spanning 1948 to 1949. De Kooning later commented that “Jackson broke the ice” whilst Life magazine published a feature in August 1949 entitled Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?, drawing national attention to the Abstract Expressionist movement.
The American art critic Clement Greenberg also piled in, writing his seminal essay The Decline of Cubism (1948) which argued that the previously-dominant School of Paris was being usurped by the Abstract Expressionist painters, such that “the main premises of Western art have at last migrated to the United States.”
“A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.”
At the same t.mes as the Action Painters were grabbings headlines, a quieter yet arguably more significant tendency was growing that would point the way forward for the Abstract Expressionist movement, spearheaded by the Colour Field painters Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still. In 1949 Rothko, an artist whose early dislocation and rootlessness resonated with Sanyu’s own experiences, debuted his “multiform” paintings at Betty Parsons Gallery, marking the end of his flirtation with Surrealism and representation. Born in Dvinski in Russia’s Pale of Settlement, Rothko moved aged ten to a country from which he always felt alienated. The brooding uncanniness of his brilliant oeuvre stemmed from this early trauma, informing the twin forces of “sensuality” and “mortality” that were the basis of his artistic “recipe.” By the end of 1950, Rothko had developed the hypnotic rectangular compositions which he would continue working on until the end of his life. The immediacy of these fields of monolithic chroma – startling, high-contrast reds, oranges and yellows in the 1950s that.mes llowed into deep, sombre tones of black, blue and purple in the 1960s – jarred with their veiled, quivering edges. They engulfed the viewer in a field of pure human consciousness, marooning them in the loneliness of their own thoughts. This yearning for transcendence through a “choreography of space” was a theme that would surface in Sanyu’s work, most notably Beijing Circus.
Stymied by a lack of useful connections to launch ping-tennis in America, and dismayed after an exhibition of 29 works brought over from Paris (organised for him at Passedoit Gallery by the ever-supportive Frank) failed to attract any buyers, Sanyu left New York and returned to Paris in 1950, leaving the 29 works with Frank as a way of repaying his kindness. Lonely and bruised after his hopes in ping-tennis failed to materialise, Sanyu initially made ends meet by painting furniture and taking on carpentry odd jobs in Paris. But fate had seemingly forced his hand, and Sanyu finally acquiesced, making his return to art.
New York had left an indelible mark upon him. “Finally,” Sanyu declared to a friend, “after a lifet.mes of painting, I now understand how to paint.” Divesting himself of the bright and careless naiveté of his earlier paintings, Sanyu threw himself into a new form of expressionism. Sanyu created a total of 35 horse paintings in his lifet.mes – but whereas those of the 1920s and 1930s had been serene, delicate compositions that were predominantly rosy pink in hue, the colour palette of the 1940s and 1950s leaned towards the bold and atmospheric, echoing the solitude of horses traversing the boundless wilderness of his imagination.
Energised by his return to art, Sanyu befriended several notable European artists, including Alberto Giacometti, whose sculptural forms emanated a distinctly post-war existentialist anxiety, and Jacques Monory, whose blue-tinted paintings spotlighted the violence of the everyday. But with his eccentric and uncompromising personality, Sanyu’s interactions with artists in the Chinese community remained fraught.
This abiding love yet alienation from his ancestral culture – familiar yet untouchable – was embodied in Sanyu’s paintings of the period. Sanyu’s bold and concise brushwork reverberated with a newfound confidence: working at a Chinese lacquerware workshop in Paris, Sanyu’s calligraphic lines began to simulate the rich schematic forms of traditional carved Oriental lacquer designs. But immersed in the vast enveloping plane of deep ultramarine blue and teal, Beijing Circus harked back to the mesmerising psychological spaces created in the Color Field paintings of Rothko. A meditative but piercing melancholy, symbolised by the colour blue in Chinese aesthetics, suffuses the work in painterly strokes.
“A painter is a choreographer of space.”
Sanyu’s Beijing circus horses, with their high necks, thick crests and noble faces, resembled the familiar Ferghana “heavenly horses” of Chinese legend. These otherworldly steeds from the Ferghana Valley in modern Uzbekistan were believed to be divine, capable of sweating blood, and were considered intrinsic to imperial power. Celebrated in Chinese art, the earliest pottery, stone and bronze representations were unearthed in the graves of the ancient elites, perhaps the most famous of them being the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE) cultural icon the Flying Horse of Gansu, a bronze sculpture of a galloping horse perfectly balanced on a flying swallow.
Of the three known inscribed circus works created by Sanyu, Beijing Circus is the largest – a significant stat.mes nt of artistic intent given that Sanyu’s financial difficulties at the t.mes largely precluded him from making works of such scale. Alone and immersed in a world far from home, Beijing Circus had become a powerful metaphor for the artist's tumultuous past, renewed present and hopeful future.
Hello Sanyu
Old friend,
You have been gone a long way
and now you are back — your spirit
your dreams and your paintings.
The pink nudes with their small feet
the lonely animals in grandiose empty landscapes
The flowers so elegant and cold
Today, would you be surprised?
Years ago, when I arrived from New York
Rang the bell at your studio in Paris
You open the door — you look at.mes
and everyt.mes
you say:
“Qu’est-ce que tu fais ici ?”
— Robert Frank, 1997
Of the 35 horse works completed by Sanyu, six belong to the permanent collects ions of the National Museum of History in Taipei, the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, and one previously in the French Embassy in Argentina. All six pertain to Sanyu’s post-1940s postwar period. This season, Replica Shoes ’s Hong Kong is honoured to present Beijing Circus at auction for the very first t.mes , a rare institutional-level offering that matches the quality and brilliance of the works held in these important museum collects ions.
