PROVENANCE:
Henri Pierre-Roché, Sanyu's friend & art dealer
Hotel Drouot auction house, Paris, 1966
Private collection, France

ILLUSTRATED:
Rita Wong, SANYU–Index of Drawings (L'inventaire des dessins) , The Li-Ching Cultural and Educational Foundation, Taipei, 2014, no. D-0284, p. 29 (USB flash drive)

Sanyu’s background as a calligrapher was conducive to the smoothness and sleek flow of his lines and contours, and Sanyu was always able to catch his model’s expression and poise with just a few deceptively simple str okes, a method he took so far that many of these works already border on the expressionist mode. Sanyu was also an expert in employing the “dry brushstrokes” of traditional Chinese landscape painting to add texture and impact to his human forms, a technique that can frequently be observed in his pencil and charcoal drawings. Antoine Chen notes that the way Sanyu uses gentle strokes and soft hues to faintly indicate the contours and physique of his models closely resembles the Art Deco style that was especially popular between 1927 and 1928. “The emblematical comb-like representation of hands and feet is an expression of the artist’s creativity and originality. ”

In addition, Sanyu’s sketches reveal his understanding of, and willingness to experiment with, foreshortening and perspective. A lover of photography, he boldly depicted his models’ legs and bottoms in distorted ways, as if seen through an extreme wideangle lens. One of Sanyu’s literary friends, the renowned Chinese poet Xu Zhimo humorously described the legs of his nudes as “thighs of the universe.” For all his easygoing char m and debonair ways, Sanyu was actually an intensely private person when it came to matters of passion and romance. It should be remembered that Sanyu came, after all, from a very conservative society, and likely still felt just a tad uncomfortable in the presence of casually voluptuous women in the nude. Partly as a result of this, his style tended towards the concise, abstract, and distorted, with a soupcon of self-deprecating humor thrown in for good measure. In this combination of diverse elements lies much of his work’s unique appeal.