Great Simplicity, No Carving - Compendium of Chinese Landscape Painting 33

Author: Wu Yan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: Landscape painting is a unique product of Chinese civilization. For over a thousand years, it has served as a major category of Chinese painting and a concentrated reflection of its artistic achievements, as well as an important way for the Chinese people to observe nature, interpret the world, and carry its conceptual significance. With distinct cultural characteristics and rich expressive forms, it has participated in the construction of the artistic spirit and humanistic atmosphere of the Chinese nation. Since the 20th century, with the profound changes in society, although the cultural penetration of landscape painting has weakened to some extent, it continues to provide and nourish the values and forms for later generations. It still deeply embeds itself in the contemporary era through its dual effects on both the practical artistic context and the subjective cognitive structure. Comprehensive Compendium of Chinese Landscape Painting organizes this vibrant and diverse history of landscape painting in a systematic and relatively complete manner through a combination of text and images. What it reveals is not only the process of the emergence and development of landscape painting, nor merely the evolving trajectories of the artists and artworks associated with it, but also the cultural soil on which landscape painting thrives, as well as the subtle and ever-evolving relationship between each generation of people who need landscape painting and the painting itself. For ease of reading and use, the entire work is organized along the timeline of the development of landscape painting as the longitude and the fluctuations of its value forms as the latitude, divided into thirty-four volumes, each a standalone chapter yet interconnected and resonant with one another. This volume, The Unadorned Simplicity, is the thirty-second, primarily exploring the landscape paintings influenced by the Expressionist movement in the 20th century.