Pietà

Lin, Fengmian 林風眠, né en 1900 à Guangdong (province), décédé en 1991 à Hong Kong

Vers 1940
Papier, Encre, Couleurs - Pigments
Peinture
Lin Fengmian
Don manuel : Desaleux, Edith

M.C. 10044

The depiction of pain featured in many of Lin Fengmian’s paintings and writings. Since his manifesto letter of 1927, the artist’s interest in the painting of emotions in a universal form never waned. He focused particularly on the expression of suffering, from his 1929 work Humanity’s Pain to his final paintings of the 1980s. Christian iconography provided the artist with subjects that enabled him to express the most poignant of sentiments. Several paintings from his latter years, such as the 1978 Pietà and the 1988 Crucifixion illustrate this aspect of the artist’s work.
The Cernuschi Museum’s Pietà, dating from the early 1930s, represents an important stage in Lin Fengmian’s exploration of the theme of bodily suffering. In many respects, it appears to put into practice his thinking of the late 1920s. Exploring the relationships between art and the sacred through the history of Western art, Lin Fengmian defined art as an affective migration of the work to the viewer. At the time, his work was exploring the interrelation of East and West, unafraid of renouncing part of his Chinese heritage. Yet in the Pietà, he uses the traditional tools of Oriental painting, ink and paper. In its modest format and tight composition, the work is less of an expressive demonstration than an internalisation of pain. The clearly traced outline conveys the cohesion of the group, with contrasting ink tones and splashes of light framing the two women’s faces and sculpting Christ’s chest. The balance thus achieved between Chinese and Western painting techniques extends and surpasses the theories of the 1920s: in fulfilling the artist’s intentions, it generates empathy and arouses in the viewer the feeling of shared suffering.

Reference(s) : Gilles Béguin, Activités  du musée Cernuschi, Arts asiatiques, 2000, t. 55, p.158
Antoine Gournay," Lin Fengmian" : Le Paris de l'Orient: Présence française à Shanghai, 1849-1946, Catalogue de l'exposition organisée par le musée Albert-Kahn, 2002, p. 272
Gilles Béguin (dir.), Art chinois,Musée Cernuschi, acquisitions 1993-2004, Paris Musées / Findakly, 2005, p. 72
Eric Lefebvre, Artistes chinois à Paris, Paris-Musées, 2011, p. 12, 14, 15, 19, 20, 22-26, 32, 40, 43, 48-52, 58, 96, 100, 101, 118-121, 123-135, 138, 208, 213, 217, 221, 226