Lotus rouges

Qi, Baishi 齊白石, né en 1864, décédé en 1957

Entre 1930 et 1939
Papier, Encre, Couleurs - Pigments
Peinture
"Réalisé dans l'ancienne capitale (Pékin) par le maître du cabinet littéraire Jieshan"
Don manuel : Coffy de Boideffre, Marie-Joseph, Maître

M.C. 2004-2

The work of Qi Baishi belongs to the traditional genres of Chinese painting, which can be grouped into landscape, flowers and birds, and figures. However, his fondness for painting certain subjects, such as crabs and shrimps, enabled him to explore the plant and animal world and renew it through a personal angle. Conversely, with a subject more frequently chosen by painters, such as lotuses, the repetition of the motif is a way to show the plant’s development.
Unlike paintings of wilting autumn lotuses, whose dry, broken stems are often rendered with a dry brush, or of summer lotuses with large dabs of ink to suggest opened petals, here the flower is shown in between the seasons.
A still erect lotus has already lost its petals, while the other is bent to the ground. As the leaves begin to wilt and change shape they roll inward, revealing a striking contrast of colour and texture between the top side and underside of the leaves. The folding leaf is shown from the same perspective as its top side, only the colour differs. The strangely similar play of veins is inverted on the top and under sides. This colour contrast and alternating positive/negative juxtaposition in fact give the work its coherence.
Like The Magpie, this painting is characteristic of Qi Baishi’s work in his old age. The painting is signed by the “master of the Jieshan literary cabinet”, a reference to a pavilion at a residence where the painter stayed regularly from the late 1920s. There is a work on the same subject in the Fine Arts Museum of China.

Reference(s) : Gilles Béguin (dir.), Art chinois, Musée cernuschi, acquisitions 1993 - 2004, Paris-Musées/Findakly, 2005, p. 146-147
Eric Lefebvre, Artistes chinois à Paris, Paris-Musées, 2011, p. 26,50,52,118