PROVENANCE:

Parke Bernet sale, c. 1970 (former name of Sotheby's)

Collection of Ken Ferris & Amy Schor Ferris (Amy Schor's mother acquired directly from the above auction)

Sotheby's Sale, Hong Kong, Oct. 28, 2001, lot 30

"Vase of Flowers with Blue Ground" was completed in 1956. It is one of the rare works by Sanyu that come complete with signature, address and date, which were all written on the back of the original painting as follows: "SANYU, 28 Rue de Sablière, Paris, 1956". We can only make conjectures as to whether Sanyu had any intention of publishing this picture anywhere-this would explain why he went to the trouble of providing all the above-mentioned details, in particular the address of his studio, which was also the place where he lived. According to the Biographies of Painters compiled by Rita Wong (cf. Sanyu-A Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings, pp. 62-72, which was published in 2001), Sanyu moved to the Rue de Sablière in the 14th arrondissement of Paris in 1943, where he would have his residence until the end of his life in 1966. In the exhibition catalogues of the Salon de Indépendants for the years 1943, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1954, 1955 and 1956, we find records of works by Sanyu on show, all with the notation "SANYU, 28 Rue de Sablière", and a list with the titles of his works that were on display through the years.

Between 1948 and 1950, Sanyu went to New York to search for new creative outlets, which led to a hiatus in his Paris exhibitions. Yet his trip to the United States did by no means improve Sanyu's financial fortunes. After his last participation in a Salon de Indépendants exhibition (1956), it seems that Sanyu no longer showed an active interest in being part of one of the most avant-garde showcase events of the time. He hit hard times, his paintings no longer sold well, and his dreams of making a career as a table tennis player also came to nothing. After having spent forty years far away from home, all on his own in the Capital of Arts, he eventually came down so much in the world that he had to work as a technical drawer and take other odd jobs at a furniture store. We can easily imagine the frustration and sadness in his heart, and his nostalgia about his native country.

Coming from a wealthy, renowned family, Sanyu must have felt keenly the stark contrast with his later lonely days as an impoverished painter down on his luck in a foreign country. In his oeuvre, we can sense some of the artist's poignant mood. In particular his flower stills of the 1950s and later are brimming with the forlorn desolation that follows when one falls from the heights of a careless life in prosperous circumstances. Flowers were probably the most important single motif in Sanyu's work, and some people have detected the heartrending spirit of the famous classical Chinese novel Honglou Meng (The Dream of the Red Chamber) in his flower paintings. One of his compatriots and fellow painters in France, the native Chinese artist Xiong Bingming, once took the four rhyme words of the "Ode to the Baihaitang", a poem in the Honglou Meng, "pen, hun, hen, hun" to describe the isolation and loneliness, but also the self-indulgence and over-indulgence in drink and other vices that were all characteristic of Sanyu, this "small transplanted bonsai" under strange skies. And aesthetician Jiang Xun was inspired by Sanyu's flower stills to make another association: if you take the names of the four daughters of the once powerful and prosperous Jia household in the novel Honglou Meng (Yuanchun, Yingchun, Tanchun and Xichun, the second element in all the names being identical, meaning "spring") and combine them into a sentence of similar-sounding characters, you end up with something like "There's truly good reason to heave a heavy sigh", an allusion to the fact that spring comes and goes, and that the beautiful season of blossoming flowers is always short-spring as an eternal metaphor for the ephemeral quality of extraordinary beauty. This interpretation by some readers of the novel came to Jiang's mind when pondering the sad fate of Sanyu.

Sanyu's life and work certainly had and has the power to deeply move his posterity. The painting "Vase of Flowers with Blue Ground" from 1956 gives evidence of his succinct style: no multiple layers of variegated colors to express some kind of brilliant splendor, but only dry slabs of blue and white which yet completely suffice to bring out the flower's refined elegance. The simplicity of style is rather reminiscent of traditional Chinese ink and wash painting. The shape and form of the vase, painted in pure white, also is that of conventional Chinese porcelain vases, rising proudly against the background of deep blue that seems to be stretching on forever like a vast ocean. In this "marine" ambience, the stalks and leaves are floating like corals at the bottom of the sea, sparkling and translucent as they sway gently with the movement of the water. We can say that "Vase of Flowers with Blue Ground" amply conveys both Sanyu's dashing and unrestrained personality and his sense of aloofness from a world that does not know how to properly appreciate his talent. Having been exposed to Oriental painting and calligraphy since his early childhood, Sanyu excels at the execution of supple and graceful lines of varying shape that are interwoven with a fine sense for spacing and composition. Cleverly blending the formal principles of Eastern and Western art, Sanyu applies dry monochromatic layers but infuses them with the substance and significance of modern painting. Sanyu spent almost his entire life in Paris in pursuit of the more liberal and uninhibited ways of Western art, yet it was still the blood of a Chinese scholar-painter that was pumping through his veins. It is this proud spirit of the Eastern literati that is fully displayed in his later flower stills, works in which Sanyu finds his definitive and unique style that remains inimitable to this day.

Among the many different schools and styles of painting competing with each other in Paris, Sanyu remained independent and aloof in his approach. For some time, his name was almost completely forgotten, yet there has been a strong revival in the appreciation of his art since the late 20th century. A number of his late flower paintings are currently kept at the National Museum of History in Taiwan, precious gems of the Chinese world. In 2004, the Musée des Arts Asiatique Guimet held an exhibition under the title "L'écriture du corps" featuring more than one hundred of Sanyu's works, introducing his oeuvre to an international audience.