Zhang Daqian may not be a household name in the West, but in China—and the global art market at large—he is on par with the likes of Warhol and Monet.
As a master of classical Chinese painting, Zhang’s work spanned traditions from ink landscapes to abstraction. He was called “Picasso of the East”, and his paintings reach sky-high prices.
In April, 2022, almost 40 years after his death, Zhang’s 1947 painting “Landscape after Wang Ximeng” became his most expensive work ever to sell at auction(拍卖会), fetching $47 million at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong. It was just one in a string of major sales. The artist’s work generated more than $354 million at auction in 2016, exceeding(超过) any other artist—dead or alive—in the world that year, according to an annual ranking produced by the Artprice database. Last year, he finished 6th on that same list, ahead of market heavyweights like Vincent van Gogh and Banksy.
In many ways, “Landscape after Wang Ximeng” is typical of Zhang’s paintings. As the name explains, the painting was a modern take on 12th-century artist Wang Ximeng’s painting “A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains”. Zhang’s painting faithfully recreated elements of the original, but he also gave the work a rich new quality. He challenged the original and transformed elements of the painting, which pushes it to a whole new level.
This may only be the tip of the iceberg, said art professor Mark Johnson. “There’s been a quick escalation in value as his genius is more widely recognized,” said Johnson, who co-organized a 2019 exhibition of Zhang’s work at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, in a phone interview. “I think prices will double soon,” he added. “There’s no question that Zhang Daqian is one of the most important artists of the 20th century,” Johnson said.
本时文内容由奇速英语国际教育研究院原创编写，未经书面授权，禁止复制和任何商业用途，版权所有，侵权必究！（作者投稿及时文阅读定制请联系微信：18980471698）
13980503458
13980503458
admin@qisuen.cn
