 | "Dawn Mood" is one of the landscape paintings created by Chinese artist Mu Xin while in captivity. A collection of these works has been promised to the Yale Art Gallery. |
The Yale University Art Gallery will receive a gift of 33 landscape paintings by contemporary Chinese artist Mu Xin, who created the works secretly while in prison.
The group of paintings -- known as "Tower Within a Tower" -- is from the collection of the Rosenkranz Charitable Foundation, whose president is Robert Rosenkranz '62 B.A., a keen collector of modern Chinese art.
"These works are an invaluable addition to our holdings in Asian art," says Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale Art Gallery, "and we are deeply grateful to Robert Rosenkranz for his thoughtful generosity, as well as for his role in recognizing the outstanding quality and originality of Mr. Xin's work. ... [W]e are honored that the paintings will be in our care for the pleasure and instruction of future generations."
Describing the artist and his works, Rosenkranz says: "In the late 1960s, Mu Xin was placed under house arrest, and created the landscape paintings in the dead of night. They reflect no anger, no political critique, no feelings of victimization. Instead, they turn toward classical Chinese landscape themes which are part of an extraordinary synthesis of elements that reflect the aesthetics and humanist ideals of the high renaissance.
"This impulse to respond to adversity by cultivating one's highest qualities," the alumnus continues, "is especially resonant and inspiring today. In part, because of the extraordinary aesthetic qualities of Mu Xin's art, and in part because of the values it exemplifies, I am proud that these paintings will have a home at Yale."
Born in Shanghai in 1927, Xin fuses Chinese and Western literature and philosophy in his writings and paintings. When he was imprisoned during China's Cultural Revolution, his entire body of works -- over 21 book-length manuscripts and 500 paintings -- were destroyed. The landscapes in the Yale Art Gallery gift are virtually the only surviving images that predate the artist's emigration to the United States in 1982. Xin now resides in New York City.
The 33 paintings are small, each about 13- by 7-inches, which made them easy to hide. They depict both real and imaginary sites, and are rendered in ink and gouache, often rubbed or burnished to create certain effects.
The works were featured in the Yale Art Gallery's acclaimed 2001 exhibition, "The Art of Mu Xin -- Landscape Paintings and Prison Notes," which was organized by Alexandra Monroe, director of the Japan Society Gallery, and Wu Hung, the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History at the University of Chicago.
The show debuted at the Yale gallery and later traveled around the country. The catalogue for that exhibition "is an important contribution to the study of Chinese painting of the second half of the 20th century," according to David A. Sensabaugh, curator of Asian art at the Yale Art Gallery.
The Yale Art Gallery's holdings of Asian art include more than 6,000 objects spanning four millennia, beginning with ceramic vessels from the Neolithic period and ending with contemporary paintings, prints, sculpture and ceramics. While many of these works are from China and Japan, the collection also includes pieces from India and Southeast Asia, as well as ceramics and textiles representative of the Islamic art of the Near East.
T H I S
Artworks created in captivity
donated to Yale Art Gallery
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