Lin Fengmian: The Quiet Father of Modern Chinese Painting

Lin Fengmian is the most influential Chinese painter most non-Chinese collectors have never heard of. He taught Wu Guanzhong, Zhao Wuji, and a generation of post-war modernists; he was the founding director of the Hangzhou National Art School at the age of twenty-eight; and he produced, across sixty years, one of the quietest and most rewarding bodies of twentieth-century Chinese painting.

Paris, 1919

Lin (1900–1991) went to France in 1919 on a work-study programme with a generation of Chinese students who would later define the country's art and politics. He stayed for six years, studied at Dijon and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and absorbed Cubism and Fauvism at first hand. He returned to China in 1925 and was almost immediately put in charge of building a national art school.

That trajectory is unusual. Most of Lin's contemporaries were either pure traditionalists or full converts to Western oil painting. Lin tried — successfully — to find a third path: Chinese subjects rendered with European structural sensibility, brushed onto rice paper but composed like a small Cézanne.

The square format and what it does

Lin's signature is the square format. Almost all his mature works are about 70cm square — a deliberate choice that runs counter to the vertical hanging-scroll tradition of classical Chinese painting. The square locks in compositional balance and allows him to work the way a European modernist might: figures positioned at golden-section pressure points, negative space treated as positive shape.

Look at any Lin painting of an opera figure or a seated woman: the figure occupies the centre, the background is divided into geometric blocks of muted colour, the composition would not be out of place in 1920s Paris. Then notice the brushwork — calligraphic, dry-brush, recognisably Chinese ink. The two systems are integrated, not collaged.

Subjects: opera, women, herons

Lin's three great recurring subjects are operatic figures (especially from Peking opera), seated or contemplative women, and water birds — herons and egrets. These are not classical subjects. The opera figures are theatrical, almost cartoon-like in outline, sometimes verging on caricature. The women are interior portraits, almost European in their composure. The herons are pure compositional studies — a body, a leg, a beak, distributed across a square.

None of these subjects had a strong tradition before Lin. By the 1980s they were so identified with him that any imitator was instantly visible as an imitator.

The Cultural Revolution years

Lin spent the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) in Shanghai, accused of being a Western intellectual and a counter-revolutionary. He destroyed nearly all his pre-1966 work himself — soaking paintings and flushing them down the toilet — to protect his family. He was imprisoned for four years.

Most of the Lin Fengmian works that survive from before 1966 are paintings he gifted to friends abroad before the revolution started. After 1976 he was rehabilitated, moved to Hong Kong in 1977, and painted prolifically until his death in 1991. The post-1977 works are softer, more lyrical, often brighter; the pre-1966 works that survive are harder-edged and rarer.

Why Lin is undervalued

Lin Fengmian sells for less, at auction, than Qi Baishi or Xu Beihong, despite being almost certainly more historically important to the development of modern Chinese painting. His works are quieter, harder to read in a single glance, and — partly because of the destruction — there is a smaller surviving corpus to anchor a market on.

For a collector building a serious twentieth-century Chinese collection, Lin is among the highest-leverage names. His prints in the Kiln & Ink collection are hand-numbered giclée reproductions on archival rice paper, faithful to the square-format, lyrical-line tradition that made him the painter every younger painter wanted to study with.