Object Details
Artist
Zao Wou-Ki
Date
1953
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
Support: 45 x 58 inches (114.3 x 147.3 cm)
Frame: 46 1/4 × 59 inches (117.5 × 149.9 cm)
Credit Line
Gift of Charles and Eugenia Zadok
Object
Number
54.039
Prominent among the international artists who began their careers in the late 1940s, Zao Wou-Ki, (…)
Prominent among the international artists who began their careers in the late 1940s, Zao Wou-Ki, whose given name means “no limits,” was brought up in a multicultural environment in Nantong and Shanghai. After completing his studies in Hangzhou, he moved to Paris, where he thrived in the art world (and lived next door to Alberto Giacometti), became a French citizen, and built a successful career seamlessly synthesizing aspects of ancient Chinese and modern European art in his works.
Lune noire, among the first donations of contemporary painting to the A. D. White Museum of Art, represents a seminal moment in Zao’s development toward abstraction, and was featured in a 2016 retrospective catalogue and exhibition co-organized by the Asia Society Museum and the Colby College Museum of Art. Inspired by Paul Klee’s work and writings, here Zao assembled various signs and symbols, such as the black crescent moon and his versions of archaic Chinese pictographs, with boats and architectural vignettes from the sketchbooks that he made during his travels around Europe. Through a combination of sharply etched linear elements and layered translucent color washes, Zao has created his own dreamlike cosmos of personal experiences.
Zao first learned Chinese ink painting and calligraphy as a child and later studied the technique, as well as European sketching and oil painting, at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. While living in Paris he concentrated his efforts on oil painting and printmaking (the Johnson’s holdings include twenty of Zao’s prints) and as his career gained success in the 1950s and ’60s he only rarely worked in Chinese ink. But in the early 1970s, while his second wife was suffering from illness and he was unable to work in his painting studio, Zao returned to using Chinese brush and ink on paper. During his early years in Europe, he felt that working in Chinese ink was too predictable for an artist from China, but with the distance of time and his assimilation into French life, he discovered that he could once again turn to ink painting with a fresh perspective. Indeed, he infuses these ink works with much of what he learned from printmaking and abstract oil painting, and they came to represent another space and mindset for his expression.
(Ellen Avril, A Handbook of the Collections, 2018)
