ILLUSTRATED:

"The sky is full of beauty, and when a cloud floats into your view, take it and make it the root of your art." This poem is excerpted from a letter from Wu Dayu to his student Wu Guanzhong to inspire the imagination. Zao Wou-ki also was Wu Dayu's student at the Hangzhou National Academy of Art, and he said that Wu was a great teacher who could light up the eyes of his students! The tragedies of that era silenced great painters like Lin Fengmian and Wu Dayu, and he escaped the restrictions of politics and the mainstream inside his little house in Shanghai. In 1972, during the Cultural Revolution, while the atmosphere was still tense, Zao Wou-ki returned to China to visit his teacher, but they did not dare to talk about painting. Wu Dayu said, "I'm still not interested in painting. I like to write poems nowadays. Wou-ki, you are more fortunate. You ought to go to France." The resignation in these words is clear. Before the Cultural Revolution, Wu Dayu submitted his works to officials and they were all collected by museums. Most of his early works that were not destroyed during the chaos of war were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Wu Chonglan, Wu Dayu's niece, wrote 'The Painter Without a Painting' about the oppression of a painter who could not save even one of his paintings. Actually, he still silently kept on creating, with an artistic "subcurrent" that secretly blossomed in his own world. In the winter of 1979, his student Chu Teh-chun mailed a package to him from Paris full of French oil paint colors, which were later used in the dozens of nonfigurative style oil paintings. The paintings he made in the last ten years of his life were all created in his small Shanghai loft and secretly stored inside drawers, unseen by anyone else until after his death. The work "Flower Symphony," is one of those dozens of paintings. The whole painting is dominated by blue tones, with large and small swaths of colorflowing together with rhythmic lines. Small strokes display a flourishing skill, hinting at associations abstractly and expressing his inner dreams. Wu Dayu loved blue, especially the Prussian blue that most painters will not dare to use indiscriminately, but in his hands it was used skillfully, always full of transformations.

Af ter Wu Dayu's later works wer e revealed for the first time in Taipei, people from all parts of society were stunned. In the same year, a Wu Dayu art conference was held in Beijing, and the "Wu Dayu Phenomenon" (in the words of Wu Guanzhong) swept across the art world. He freely put his life's energy into his later work, "Flower Symphony," which displays his genius with color and form. After his paintings were a part of the Ecole de Paris movement in the 1920's, where he studied sculpture at the Bourdelle workshop, Wu Dayu never experienced a featured artist exhibition in his lifetime. He still silently painted, though, and his paintings were inspired by Cubi sm and Expres s ioni sm. He brought to his painting an abstract style of automatism, and every facet of his paintings make people sit up and take notice. Wu Dayu can be said to be of China's first generation of modernist pioneers, and as Zao Wou-ki said, "He should be put up in the place where he belongs."