Riding the wind of rebirth

Chapter 1605: Style of Fusion Period

Because he actually discovered several painters he was familiar with here - Li Keran, Xu Beihong, Qi Baishi, and Shi Lu.

Especially Shi Lu, An Siyuan seemed to particularly admire this founder of the Chang'an School of Painting who was later as famous as Li Keran, and he also seemed to particularly like collecting his representative works on modern and contemporary red historical themes.

In the room that Hou Zhongjin brought him into, Zhou Zhi saw Shi Lu's silk work, "Spring Plum Stands Alone", next to a Song Dynasty and Jin Dynasty wood-carved and painted Bodhisattva statue on a Ming Dynasty huanghuali altar.

An Siyuan was born into a prominent family in Manhattan. His love for art was almost innate. When he was four years old, he collected a small Chinese stamp, "he thought this stamp was very beautiful and had a strong exotic flavor", and then he fell in love with oriental art.

Born into a wealthy family, he showed a talent for collecting and a precocious business mind at an early age. His mother knew his hobbies very well and knew that if she couldn't find him at home, she would definitely find him "in the trash can near home. Because An Siyuan would rummage through the trash can to see if there was anything interesting inside."

Before he graduated from high school, An Siyuan went to thrift stores in New York, buying things including Chinese artworks and reselling them to antique shops for profit. With his unique vision, he successfully sold a complete set of snuff bottles to the Montreal Museum through an antique dealer when he was only 19 years old.

He was also very lucky. In 1948, he met the legendary female antique dealer Alice Bonnet, and further got to know heavyweight antique dealers in New York such as Lu Qinzhai and Dai Runzhai.

Alice Bonnet not only brought Ellsworth into the circle of famous scholars and experts, but also sent him to the Yale School of Far Eastern Languages, where he studied Chinese and ancient Chinese painting theories with her good friend, the famous antiquities collector Professor Wang Fangyu. Professor Wang gave Ellsworth his Chinese name during his studies.

Alice Bonnet's favor gave An Siyuan the opportunity to learn about Chinese ceramics, furniture and paintings, and brought him closer to high-end Chinese art. Just as Zhou Zhi received a large number of Ming and Qing furniture from Mr. Wang, An Siyuan also received many paintings by modern Chinese painters from Bonnet, among which Qi Baishi's paintings collected by Bonnet were the most famous.

In 1979, An Siyuan visited China for the first time and was granted permission to visit government warehouses where large quantities of artworks confiscated over a ten-year period were stored.

In the following years, he visited almost all the state-owned handicraft stores in cities such as Beijing, Xi'an, Shanghai, and Tianjin to learn and buy Chinese calligraphy and paintings. The scale of his collection of modern Chinese calligraphy and paintings expanded dramatically, and he successively owned many important representative works of 20th century Chinese artists.

A few years ago, Ellsworth donated 471 of the "Ellsworth Collection" to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which made the Metropolitan Museum of Art famous for its "largest collection of modern oriental paintings and calligraphy in a Western art museum." Ellsworth is also considered the first Western collector to systematically collect in this field.

The painting in front of you is Shi Lu's masterpiece, which shows the red plum blossom's enthusiastic and high-spirited spirit of not fearing wind and snow and daring to fight.

Shi Lu is a rare all-rounder in modern times who is proficient in poetry, calligraphy, painting and seal carving. This accumulation comes from his youth. When he was young, his family owned thousands of hectares of land and more than 100,000 books. Later, he devoted himself to the revolution. Because he admired Shi Tao and Lu Xun, he gave himself the stage name Shi Lu.

Like Van Gogh, he suffered from intermittent schizophrenia, and his condition became more serious when he encountered stress in his later years. Therefore, in the eyes of people at that time, he was considered a crazy painter.

But that kind of persistence, stubbornness, wildness, and even madness, expressed in the paintings, is an extremely vivid expression that comes to the fore.

This work was not donated by An Siyuan, but became his private collection, which shows his love for this painting. "Do children like this painting too?" a voice asked behind Zhou Zhi.

"Oh." Zhou Zhi turned around and found that An Siyuan and Hou Zhongjin had been standing behind him since some time ago. "This is one of my fellow villagers. I like to summarize his works with a poem - the spirit is strengthened by wind and rain."

"Oh?" An Siyuan's eyes lit up. "It's really the most appropriate way to use this poem to describe the soul inherent in Mr. Shi's works. Whose poem is this?"

"This is a line from a poem by Wang Shao, Duke Xiangmin of the Song Dynasty," Zhou Zhi said, and then pointed to the statue next to the painting: "He was probably a hundred years earlier than this Bodhisattva statue."

"I've heard of him. He seems to be a tragic military strategist." An Siyuan held the pipe in his hand. "He opened up the northwest border for the Song Dynasty and once had the upper hand in the struggle against the Western Xia."

"That's him." Zhou Zhi smiled. "Mr. An's knowledge of Chinese culture is better than that of many of our compatriots. It's really admirable."

"Many people believe that this statue is from the early Song Dynasty. It seems that you think it is not?"

"Mr. An is testing me." Zhou Zhi said with a smile, "The early Song Dynasty inherited the style of the late Tang Dynasty. Woodcarving statues focused on craftsmanship rather than decoration. Painting and gilding were rarely used. It was not until the reign of Emperor Zhenzong that they began to rise, but at that time they were mostly used in Taoist statues."

"This Bodhisattva statue is painted and gilded. Judging from the craftsmanship, the northern style is prominent. Combined with the northern ethnic minority regimes' admiration for Buddhism, I personally think it is more reasonable to push the date back further."

"Also, the face of this Bodhisattva is obviously thinner than those in the north during the same period. It should be the influence of the style brought by the 'Southern Works and Northern Gradually' in the Hangzhou-Yangzhou area, and it has the style of the fusion period..." Zhou Zhi suddenly thought of an act of An Siyuan: "Mr. An established the China Cultural Relics and Art Restoration Foundation in Hong Kong Island in 1991, and took the lead in donating money, raising about 6 million Hong Kong dollars, so that five ancient Anhui dwellings on the verge of collapse could be repaired. In 1992, he went deep into Huangshan, Anhui, and donated money to repair the family ancestral hall 'Bao Lun Pavilion' built in the Ming Dynasty. Could this statue be purchased in Anhui at that time?"

Considering that the power of the Jin people had expanded to Lianghuai at the time the statues were made, this speculation is very likely.

Hou Zhongjin praised: "Mr. An, I think Mr. Xiao Zhou's level is not bad, right?"

An Siyuan nodded and said, "I indeed bought this statue in England in 1990. I think it is very exquisite."

"But you said that these things are indeed related. According to Chinese tradition, such an exquisite statue should be matched with a corresponding Buddhist shrine. The inspiration for the Buddhist shrine often comes from the architectural components of the temple. It was only after I got this statue that I began to pay attention to ancient Chinese architecture, and then I made the two donations in 1991 and 1992."

"In 1993, it seemed that you and Jesse Cheng took over."