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少女像 (Portrait of a Girl) by 關紫蘭 / Guan Zilan aka Violet Kwan (Chinese) - Oil on canvas / 1929 - National Art Museum of China (Beijing) #WomenInArt #art #WomanArtist #ArtText #FemaleArtist #oilpainting #fauvism #關紫蘭 #GuanZilan #VioletKwan #WomensArt #ChineseArtist #中国美术馆 #NationalArtMuseumofChina
Considered her masterpiece, “Portrait of a Girl” (少女像) by Chinese avant-garde painter Guan Zilan (關紫蘭), also known as Violet Kwan, is a fearless work completed at just 26 when the young Shanghai native was studying art in Japan in 1929. Whether it is the style or color, the painting is wild and unrestrained fauvism. Although an art world favorite during the late 1920s and the 1930s, Guan Zilan stopped painting after the onset of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s to became mostly forgotten in modern Communist China. Some may know this painting as “Portrait of Miss L.” We see a young woman sitting on a chair and holding a cute white dog sporting a red ribbon. The girl is wearing a colorful red, blue, and white qipao (cheongsam) Chinese style dress popular in China at the time. The dress she is wearing is really dedicated and gorgeous, inferring that Miss L. is from the upper class. Miss L. is wearing a ring on each hand and a green bracelet on her right wrist. The facial expression of Miss L. is very peaceful and steady as her eyes look beyond us to our left like she is thinking and planning something. The colors are bright, vivid, bold, and with high contrast. The red lips and rosy cheeks contrast sharply with her extremely white face, as well as the colorful dress and blue sleeveless jacket. This is a common characteristic of the Fauvism style which is “the style of les Fauves (French for “the wild beasts”).” The fauvism style emphasized “painterly qualities and strong color over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism.” Unlike traditional Chinese painting with a lot of landscapes, trees, and Chinese architecture, this painting only has a small part of a blue curtain as the background. “Portrait of a Girl” really displays how Guan Zilan was absorbing and learning western culture and techniques while actively trying to combine and involve Chinese elements.
July 2, 2025 at 4:31 AM