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Western masterpieces find a loving home
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ARTIST Quan Shanshi has realized a nearly life-long dream. With last month’s opening of the Quan Shanshi Art Center, the white-haired 84-year-old artist has given Chinese art fans a chance to see numerous original Western masterpiece paintings along with 11 replica sculptures of key pieces in the history of Western art.
“In most cases one needs to go to the West to look at original Western works, but not everyone can afford to do that,” says Quan, explaining the main reason why he founded the art center.
The replicas include Michelangelo’s “David and Dying Slave,” the Greek sculptures “Winged Victory of Samothrace” and “The Venus de Milo,” as well as Rodin’s “The Thinker” and “The Age of Bronze.”
The reproductions are from the Louvre, Rodin Museum or The Florence Academy of Art and are “very expensive,” says Quan, one of the country’s most celebrated modern oil painters.
Along with these sculptures, the center also has hundreds of oil paintings by Western masters including Russian-American painter Nicolai Fechin and French painters Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Henri Julien Félix Rousseau and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
“This art center has an important mission: to foster young painters,” says Quan. “The future of Chinese oil paintings is on the shoulders of young oil painters and my generation is paving stones for them.”
The native of Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, is a China Academy of Art professor who has devoted decades to cultivating young oil painters at one of the country’s leading art colleges.
The art center now has three simultaneous exhibitions running. The Exhibition of Works by Nicolai Fechin runs until the end of the year with most of the pieces belonging to the Tatarstan State Museum of Fine Arts.
The Exhibition of Western Masters is permanent and features more than 130 pieces from Europe and the US, all selected by Quan. They include tempera paintings, Barbizon school works and pieces by the impressionists.
Xu Jiang, director of the China Academy of Art, and a former student of Quan, says touring the art center “is like taking a pilgrimage to the Western world’s best art museums.”
“I have never seen a single art museum in China boast so many oil paintings by Western masters, and my teacher founded this museum for all Chinese art fans,” Xu says proudly.
Of course, Quan has had help from many of his entrepreneur friends, who purchased most of the paintings and the replica sculptures.
The oldest piece — a tempera painting by Italian artists Raffaelino Del Garbo and Lippi Fillipino in 1490 — also happens to be the first exhibit in the exhibition hall.
One of the most expensive pieces is the “Portrait of Madeleine Adam” by Renoir, one of the greatest impressionist painters of his time.
Quan says bringing Western art to China takes him back to his youth, a time when just reading an art magazine was like gold.
Quan recalls being selected to study art in the former Soviet Union back in 1954, but even then he had no chance to visit Western Europe.
Fast-forward four decades and Quan says he took a trip to Europe to finally see the masterpieces he and his friends had only seen in textbooks, magazines and on television.
“When I first saw David, I was shocked,” Quan says, admitting tears trickled down his face at the time. “The feeling is completely different from seeing a photo in a book.”
This powerful moment inspired him, he says, to make sure young Chinese students studying Western art didn’t suffer in the same way.
“I needed to move them back to China, to give young Chinese art students a chance to see them everyday.”
Quan Shanshi Art Center
Address: 10 Jianghan Rd, Zhuangtang Town, Hangzhou
Opening hours: 9:30am-4:30pm, closed on Mondays
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