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| Buddha Amida (from Meguro area, Tokyo) |
“The works of Zao Wou-ki as well as the ceramics and
Chinese bronzes from his collection joined the collections of the Musée
Cernuschi at the beginning of 2016, according to the wishes of Mrs Françoise
Marquet-Zao.
Seventy years earlier, in 1946, the visitors of the
first post-war exhibition of contemporary Chinese paintings discovered the work
of Zao Wou-ki at the Musée Cernuschi. The works of this 26-years-old painter
whose name at the time meant little to anyone where featured among those of Qi
Baishi (1864-1957), Zhang Daqian (1899-1983), or Lin Fengmian (1900-1991), who
represented the prevailing trends of the time. The link between Zao Wou-ki and
the Musée Cernuschi was Vadime Elisseeff, a young curator of the museum who had
met Zao Wou-ki in China
during the war. Straightaway he intuitively recognized the painter’s immense
talent to the point that he had a whole room devoted to his work in the 1946
exhibition. A young unknown artist was welcomed as a master, and Parisian
critics were surprised by his work – sometimes comparing it to Dufy’s --, which
seemed to be firmly establishing itself on the French scene. Zao Wou-ki was
still in China,
but his work had already made its way to the Parisian public. He would travel
to Paris and settle in Montparnasse
two years later.
The donation is comprised of four distinct and
significant groups of works, allowing us to understand the specific links
between Zao Wou-ki and Paris, even before he embarked for France, but
also the importance of his Chinese roots, which expressed themselves in his
work and re-emerged at several pivotal moments of his career.
The early works of Zao Wou-ki – portraits reminiscent
of Matisse, delicate nudes, ephemeral landscapes, profiles of animals seemingly
escaped from a Han tombstone – were created at the end of the 1940s between China and France. They evoke the key moment
when Zao Wou-ki’s abstract work was still in gestation.
The second group consists of abstract works in ink
created from the 1970s. In actual fact, Zao Wou-ki had to overcome his own
resistance before he allowed himself to return to Indian ink, which would
occupy a significant place in his work up to his death. The donated works
enable us to follow the path of the ink decade by decade and to assess Zao
Wou-ki’s constant innovations in this field.
The ceramic works are undoubtedly perfect embodiments
of this taste for experimentation that characterized this artist until his
final years. From the pieces of the 1950s, whose glaze effects and patterns
inspired by archaic writings evoke his contemporary oil paintings, to the
larger works of the 2000s, we can implicitly perceive the risks taken by Zao
Wou-ki when he ventured on the borders of his own territory.
The last group consists of the bronzes and celadons
collected by Zao Wou-ki. These works, evoking several millennia of Chinese
history, fit perfectly into the collections of the Musée Cernuschi, which
embrace both antiquity and modernity. They allow us to perceive the secret
relationship that unites the works of Zao Wou-ki with these objects originating
from the highest antiquity.” By the Musée Cernuschi.
Photos / Copyright Catherine Pulleiro
