SANYU AND THE « ECOLE DE PARIS »
Sophie Krebs
Translated by Iain Watson

André Warnod, in his defining book on the Ecole de Paris 1 , defines the role or the roles played by foreign artists. « They create, if nothing else, a very useful climate. No resting or one’s laurels ; in addition, among them they are great creative artists who give more than they take. They pay for the rest, the followers, the pasticheurs, the junk merchants whereas others are happy to keep their place and come to France in order to study before going home to put to use what they have acquired and loyally, to spread thought the world the primacy of French Art ». If Warnod in a very « colonialist » discourse, condescends to agree that they were important foreigners equal to the French and allows them a creative role, he distinguishes them from the rowdy groups of student artists who are on the make and who meet in Montparnasse and are merely « at the school » of French Art, a gold mine to be exploited. 2

Sanyu might have been like them. He arrived in Paris in 1918 with a student grant to learn the techniques of Western art 3 . It is not even certain that he was motivated by the desire of learning about our outstanding French artists. The same Warnod in reference to Americans emphasises their preference for academic art : « (...) As for the Americans normally they restrict themselves to French artists » 4 . The Japanese are already treated as copyists. 5 So it was not at all obvious or easy for foreign artists -not just the Americans- to opt for modernity and « independent » art ; rue Bonaparte also has its followers. But from the outset, Sanyu took an independent stance in contrast to his fellow countrymen. Rather than go to an atelier which prepared the entrance examination to the Beaux-Arts, 6 he chose the Academy de la Grande Chaumière 7 and resolutely turned to an art which was alive and contemporary 8 . He studied there in 1920 and later in 1925 9 . For the majority of his fellow students, their stay in Paris and their studies lasted seven or eight years. Then they left with their borrowings : a new technique - oil painting - and new subjects which they then adapted to Chinese taste 10 .

Other factors for specific reasons pushed Sanyu into belonging to the Ecole de Paris which is reality was a group of various nationalities with no leading figure or common aesthetic : he lived in Montparnasse, went to artists’ cafes like the Coupole, exhibited in the Salon d’Automne 11 in 1925 and 1928 12 , a group resolutely modern, and in that of the Tuileries en 1930 and in the Salon des Indépendants in 1931. He met Kiki as a model 13 . At the end of the 20’s, he met the very atypical dealer, Henri-Pierre Roché 14 who gave him a contract. It is important to realize that Sanyu entered the art market at a very critical and difficult time. Nevertheless, he was reasonably lucky. Everything pointed to a quickly established reputation but he did not grasp the opportunity and stayed on the sidelines at the time when the major members of the Ecole de Paris either had died or left Paris 15 . There was little support for artists during a period of national isolationism and disinterest in the arts. Cosmopolitan Paris had become a refuge for exiles. For Sanyu the 30’s constituted a difficult and solitary period in his life but very stimulating as began to master the western technique of oil painting, water-colour as well as finding new subjects.

To stay in Paris was to take a risk. His style is often linked to Matisse or compared with Foujita. Yet he follows in the steps of other Oriental painters who had seduced Paris, especially Foujita who arrived there in 1910 and was the most famous. On several levels, Foujita and Sanyu seem very alike for naïf critics who make no distinctions between Chinese and Japanese art and who have no idea of the aesthetic revolution begun in China at the end of the XIXth century 16 and later in China 17 . These painters came to Europe with a certain culture determined to renovate theses traditions and even to inject something of the Far East into a vibrant art so open to outside influences. But Paris had an incredible amount to offer : urban landscapes, museums, famous artists, cafes and freedom - easy to get lost, to go over board, to despair... It is very heavy-handed to label Sanyu as the « Chinese Matisse » just as the critics a few years before had called Foujita « Matisse’s Ape ». For the necessary and widespread ethnocentrism, arabesque draughtsmanship belonged to Matisse and not to the Far East and in so doing emphasised his vital influence on contemporary art. Sanyu finds inspiration in his culture but adapts it to new imperatives : he had looked at Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, as well as Brancusi and other painters.

If Foujita exploits the full iconography : nudes, still lifes, landscapes, scenes of everyday life, portraits, Sanyu concentrates on a few themes repeated over and over again, nudes 18 , still lifes and a few landscapes with animals.

His nudes : preparatory drawings are in ink, a sinuous graphism which circumscribes the form in multiple curves. Faces vanish and turn into signs. Feet are flipper -like and hands like combs. Sanyu deforms the body in a monstrous way as if it suffered from elephantiasis : thighs sprawls apart in a series of arabesques (White Nude, 1930). At moment, the brush thickens the outline, at others it fades away for lack of ink, the contour remains. White nudes outlines in black sketch out over ill defined backgrounds : off-white, pink or on the contrary on materials decorated with traditional motifs : cranes, birds on a branch, tigers, horses, fish (Nude on a carpet). If theses nudes remind us vaguely of Matisse (Blue nude of Biskra), Sanyu had also looked at Brancusi, who also was very friendly with Roché : it is not simply a question for using arabesques but also of making a synthesis of shape in order to obtain a sign (Geometric Nude, 1930). All his paintings are based on the interaction of depicting a shape, a body and confining it in a space by simplifying it in the most economical fashion ; black/white or any other colour but always with strong contrasts : outline or patches of colour.

Like Foujita, he was not interested at all in perspective : it was enough to super-impose on neutral backgrounds. To achieve those biomorphic shapes, he used the rubbing technique of « estompe » along the contours ratter like the nudes of Foujita. But the Japanese painter was only interested in the precision of his drawing 19 and limited the colours on his palette and ignored any idea of volume (Nu à la toile de Jouy, 1922). Foujita’s back-grounds are milky, matter-of-pearl, and totally flat which allowed him to employ the finest of drawings, faint but supple and not far from Ingres. While Foujita is in competition with major artists 20 (Manet, Ingres), Sanyu looks elsewhere. Where the Japanese painter sketches forms in a minute and scrupulous fashion, Sanyu uses calligraphy for his nudes ; the former elongates forms and gives volume to them with an overdose of shading and a network of strokes, the latter uses layers of patches of colour, and frames and structures the space like a window.

The flower paintings show the same contrasting technique : harsh, dry slabs of colour and supple and gracile arabesques emphasising the vitality and fragility of the floral world. These flower paintings are not at all in the Western tradition, equilibrium/disequilibrium of the stalks, importance given of curves or broken lines, contrast between the shape of the vase/and the nature of the flowers, between the branch and the blossom...

Sometimes on a vase or table cloth, he adds ideograms or Chinese emblems which correspond to flower petals, other signs. He does the same with a fish bowl. Perhaps he was thinking of Matisse’s gold fish 21 , but it is not only the transparent quality which interested him but the juxtaposition of those small finned fish weaving through the water in every direction with ideograms or symbols on the table cloth on which the fish bowl is placed. Like the female body, the fish and flowers become signs of novel way of writing.

By trying to adapt so much, the Chinese element faded away : as in the water-colours « So Parisian style » which bring to mind Pascin’s drawings where eye and brush stroke mingle. It is identically the same with the nudes of the thirties. But what about the flower arrangements, the landscapes, the animals so alien to Western traditions ? How can are define his personal approach to colour and drawing ? Sanyu in truly a painter who belongs to the Ecole de Paris and it is not clear « what he borrowed from Paris and what Paris borrowed from him » 22 . Did he become, like Foujita, a hybrid, that mixture who was « a Frenchified painter for the Japanese and an unadulterated Japanese for Western eyes » 23 .

Footnotes:

1. André Warnod, L'école de Paris, Comoedia, 27th January 1925 [back]
   
   
2. It is in this fertile soil that antisemitic and xenophobic criticism will take root. See Camille Mauclair, Les Métèques contre l'art français, Paris, La nouvelle critique française, 1930 [back]
   
   
3. Before 1911, China had little contact with Western art except via the Japanese version of it as Japan had already begun its modernisation. After the 1911 revolution, the republican government encouraged students to visit the West. The First World War delayed their arrival which took place en 1919. See the catalogue Paris-China, 1988, Fine Arts Museum of Taipei [back]
   
   
4. Les Américains de Montparnasse, Comoedia, 18th November, 1924. Warnod refers to the academism which dominated the Salon des Artistes Français in opposition to which the name Ecole de Paris was invented in 1925. [back]
   
   
5. André Warnod, Expositions Foujita et Kiyoshi Hasegawa, 22nd November, 1925. " We criticise the majority of Japanese painters who come to study in France for mistaking the letter for the spirit and giving a more or less happy echo of the style of a few teachers, instead of trying to enrich their own temperaments with what they see and learn from us ". [back]
   
   
6. The prix de Rome could sat for by foreigners from 1906 awards, but only exceptionally. Raphael Colin, professor at the Beaux-Arts, was the most sought after first by then Japanese the by the Chinese. [back]
   
   
7. At 14 rue de la Grande Chaumière. Teachers included the Spanish sculptor, Claudio Castellucho, the Swiss and Balt painters, Steller and Danenberg. Bourdelle was a teacher from 1909 to 1926, Freisz in 1926, Léger in 1931. Like all free academies, students had access to models for very modest fee. [back]
   
   
8. He seems to have attended in 1921 and 1925 in between, he spent two years in Berlin from 1921-1925. [back]
   
   
9. We know he met his future wife at the Grande Chaumière in 1925. It is very likely he went there to have access to models. A series of water colours depicting men and women sketching can be taken as proof. [back]
   
   
10. See the catalogue : China-Paris, Seven Chinese Painters who Studied in France, 1918-1960, Museum of Art of Taipei (March-June 1988). [back]
    
    
11. The Salon d'Automne had a jury: painters had to be accepted to exhibit. It was divided into sections: sculpture, graphic arts, decorative arts, and architecture. Sanyu exhibited in the painting section. It was this Salon which made Foujita's reputation in 1920; the following year, he was a member of the jury. [back]
    
    
12. He appears to have returned to China between 1926-1927. [back]
    
    
13. In her diaries, Kiki emphasises how important it was for a model to speak several languages and specially says that soon she would have to learn Chinese. Roché was her dealer in the late twenties. Sanyu's painting of Kiki seams to be a nude, her boyish haircut and heavily made-up eye contrast with the whiteness of her skin. [back]
    
    
14. H.-P. Roché (1879-1959), better known as the author of Jules et Jim, was above all a same eccentric. Well introduced in society, even before the war he wads a friend of the Steins. He left for New-York in 1916 and very rapidly became a vital go between especially for the collector John Quinn. After the later's death, Roché with his friend Marcel Duchamp, bought his entire collection of Brancusi. He was also Kiki's dealer in the late twenties and above all the American correspondent of the dealer Paul Guillaume. [back]
    
    
15. The thirties saw the demise of the Ecole de Paris : first the leading actors vanish : Pascin kills himself in 1930, Kisling leaves Paris as do Chagall, Soutine and Foujita. Critics do likewise. Then in 1933 the Jeu de Paume opened with a room given over to the Ecole de Paris. From That time onwards, there was a debate about opening a museum of modern art and the distinction between French and foreign artists is dropped. [back]
    
    
16. Mickael Lucker, L'art du Japon au XIXe siècle (Paris, 2001) [back]
    
    
17. Op. Cit. China-Paris, 1988 [back]
    
    
18. Paintings nudes from a live model was unknown in China and Japan. Free academies permitted systematic study on this theme for foreign students who had no access to it in their own countries. In Chinese tradition, artistic apprenticeship began by copying the teacher's work. [back]
    
    
19. Vaucaire, op. cit. p. 8. " You will see a third line giving you a thin clear outline as if you used a razor without putting any pressure on it ". [back]
    
    
20. Foujita's Nu à la toile de Jouy (1922) echoes Manet's Olympia [back]
    
    
21. A Far Eastern tradition which Matisse is the first to insert in western painting, giving it a very special role and often combined with the window and the artist's studio. See Pierre Schneider, Matisse ( Paris, 1984), p. 419 sqq. [back]
    
    
22. A citation from André Warnod in the Ecole de Paris. [back]
    
    
23. Michel-Gabriel Vaucaire, Foujita (Paris, 1924) [back]