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Dong Xiwen
The oil painter Dong Xiwen (1914-1973) was a native of Shaoxing, Zhejiang,[178] who came from an educated and moderately prosperous household. His father, an enthusiast of Chinese antiquities, often took his son with him to view works of art. Dong Xiwen studied for a year at the private Suzhou Art Academy after completing high school. In 1934, at the age of twenty, he transferred to the National Hangzhou Arts Academy. By the time he graduated, the Japanese had invaded China's coast and the academy had set up temporary facilities in the western city of Kunming. After graduation he spent six months at the Hanoi Art Academy, on a government scholarship, absorbing French colonial culture. Upon his return, which was prompted by insufficient funds, he supported himself through various editing and writing jobs in Guizhou and Chongqing. Dong was fascinated with an exhibition of hand-painted copies of ancient murals he had seen in Chongqing. In 1943, he and his wife joined four other pairs of artists from the Hangzhou academy in an expedition to Dunhuang, the Buddhist cave temple site in remote Gansu province. The Dunhuang caves are famous for well-preserved murals painted between the fourth and thirteenth centuries. The young artists devoted the next two and a half years to studying and copying the ancient religious murals. Dong became interested in the aesthetic possibilities for modern artists that the ancient murals suggested, and particularly in the decorative and self-expressive potential of the elongated Northern Wei figure styles (fig. 33).
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Chinese figure painting is generally considered to have reached its height of naturalism during the Tang and Song periods. Instead of such models, however, Dong chose more ancient forms that might be described as primitive. His compositions of the late 1940s are characterized by a decorative and gentle abstraction of the human figure; his colors tended toward lyrical pastels. His Kazak Herdswoman of 1948 (fig. 34), with its limited palette of pale colors, simplification of human forms, and stylized draperies, adapts ancient Chinese conventions to modern expressive purposes.
There is a striking parallel between Picasso's study of African sculpture, which inspired his abstractions of the female form, and Dong's enthusiasm for prenaturalistic Chinese art, from which emerged his new style. Cross-cultural influence has been a significant component of modern art in the West. The unnaturalistic aspects of non-European art, be it African sculpture or Japanese prints, appealed to European artists seeking freedom from the Renaissance pictorial conventions on which European academic art was based. As a graduate of the Hangzhou academy, with its many French instructors, Dong was undoubtedly familiar with the aesthetic foundations of modern European art, even if not up-to-date on its latest developments.[179] Dong managed to find the artistic stimulation of unfamiliar aesthetic standards within the enormous geographical and temporal span of Chinese art.[180]
Dong Xiwen was one of the young instructors recruited to the National Beiping Arts College by Xu Beihong after the war. Once his conceptual breakthrough occurred during his trip to Dunhuang, his primary aesthetic goals became the creation of a distinctly Chinese style of oil painting. Theoretically, his art made a symmetrical pair with Xu Beihong's late work: Xu painted Westernizing styles with Chinese tools; Dong tried to Sinicize oil painting. Both sought a synthesis of Eastern and Western art.
Many students who entered the academy at which Dong Xiwen taught in 1948 expected to complete a five-year curriculum. The two-year fundamental course exposed students to all media but concentrated most heavily on drawing;[181] only after completion of this basic curriculum was the student allowed to select a major. Xu Beihong participated in some of the beginning classes, for he attached great importance to drawing skills as an indicator of artistic potential. Thus, even students intending to concentrate on traditional painting were still subjected to the Western-style academic drawing requirement. Dong Xiwen was responsible for a significant part of the fundamental drawing curriculum. He, like the best-trained of his fellow academic artists, went on to become an important member of the post-1949 teaching staff at CAFA.
In late 1948, Dong began making art in support of the Communist cause. Hou Yimin, in his role as underground CCP organizer at the Beiping college, had solicited pro-Communist poster designs from sympathetic faculty before
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Figure 33
Cave 249, Mogao Caves, Dunhuang,
Gansu, Western Wei period, polychromatic
mural (detail).
the city's liberation. Dong, along with Li Hua and others, participated in making such flyers. He also prepared portraits of Mao Zedong and Zhu De for the auditorium where the first National Congress of Literary and Arts Workers was held. He witnessed Mao's proclamation of the new People's Republic of China and, on December 8, 1949, joined the Communist party.
On the occasion of the First National Art Exhibition, Dong Xiwen demonstrated both his technical virtuosity and his interest in brightly colored folk art. His Liberation of Beijing (fig. 13), one of the liveliest of the works exhibited, makes use of broad, flat areas of bright color to strengthen and simplify a complex crowd scene. Tanks, military trucks, and cannons pass under Beijing's city gates, welcomed by the banner-waving populace. In the distance, construction cranes tower over the ancient architecture, suggesting the dawning of a new era.
The stark contrasts of flat colors, the black outlines, and the anecdotal quality of the picture evoke, no doubt intentionally, folk prints. As we have seen, such sources were avidly studied by Communist artists, who rejected upper-class art forms for political reasons. Dong's interest in the Dunhuang
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Figure 34
Dong Xiwen, Kazak Herdswoman, 1948,
oil on canvas, 163 cm