Sold at Auction: Guanzhong Wu

(b Yixing, Jiangsu Province, China, 1919) Chinese Painter. Wu Guanzhong studied at both the Hangzhou art academy and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in his native China. In 1947, he received government permission from the Ministry of Administration to travel to Paris to study painting at the famous Ecole des Beaux-Arts. While in Paris, Wu also studied art history at the Ecole du Louvre, where he developed an appreciation for Western art. It would become a lifelong effort to synthesize his Chinese heritage with the Western tradition of oil painting. Wu returned to China in 1950 and began teaching at a number of art academies. He traveled extensively around the country making sketches for his works; these were often predominantly black and white dramatic landscapes or detailed depictions of trees. Utilizing loose and expressive brushstrokes he creates crisp open-air scenes. Throughout all of his work, Wu strove to reconcile the genre of oil painting with conventions of Chinese painting to create a sense of Chinese nationalism in the traditionally western medium.