Artist: Xu Beihong (1895-1953)

Date: Modern

Material: Ink on paper

Gift of Yu Yunjie

• Object Type：
  • CALLIGRAPHY
• Location：
  • The Painting and Calligraphy of Shanghai Gallery
• Tag：
  • comment running script album leaf xu beihong modern ink paper

This letter is Xu Beihong's critique of his student Yu Yunjie's figure painting. Xu, deeply influenced in his early years by the Western painting tradition of Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, later advocated for reforming Chinese painting through figurative depictions. He established a realist figure painting system that combined Chinese and Western approaches, which profoundly shaped the Chinese painting education in art academies. Yu Yunjie (1918-1992), a native of Changzhou in Jiangsu, was a realist oil painter who also excelled in Chinese painting. He taught at Shanghai Academy of Arts and served as a painter at the Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute, nurturing a generation of outstanding artists. The two leaves were written in 1948 and 1950 respectively.