Lot 13
  • 13

Chen Yifei

Estimate
800,000 - 1,000,000 USD
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Description

  • Chen Yifei
  • The Cellist
  • signed in Pinyin and dated 1983.6
  • oil on canvas
  • 53 1/8 by 37 1/4 in. 135 by 94.5 cm.

Provenance

The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, Los Angeles
Armand Hammer Foundation, Los Angeles
Acquired by the present owner from the above

 

Exhibited

Washington DC, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Chen Yifei, June 4-23, 1985
New York, Hammer Galleries, Chen Yifei, 1983

Condition

This work is in generally very good condition overall. There are no apparent condition problems with this work. It is framed and was not examined out of frame nor under UV light.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Catalogue Note

Although Chen Yifei met with a premature death in 2005, his affecting, sharply descriptive portraits, landscapes, and urban studies live on as powerful testaments of his life experiences as both a child and adult.  His romantic realism, based on the close examination of life but intensely poetic in feeling, conveys an objective vision of the scenes before him, infused with a sense of mysterious exaltation.  His portraits are exquisite examples of technical skill, while his studies of the bridges and waterways of Suzhou and the terrain and peasants of Tibet extend his visual language beyond the intimate and personal towards objective reportage.  With its verisimilitude and warmth of feeling, Chen's art has had the double impact of communicating Chinese culture to a Western audience while demonstrating the artist's passionate affection for the Western oil tradition, the Barbizon school in particular.  Though idiosyncratic, Chen was a brilliant practitioner of oil painting in the traditional mode:  his points of view, reliance on realism, and strong feeling conveyed through the tactility of paint together demonstrate the artist's embrace of tradition and the medium's capacity to translate particular cultural attributes into universal expressions of human experience.

Chen's work from the 1980s in particular reveals his interest in a rich, even luxurious realism, often devoted to the representation of musicians.  His pictures of flautists, violists, violinists, and cellists resonate with a noble grandeur that conveys the intimacy of the sitter's dialogue with her instrument.  The beautiful women who wear exquisite dresses as they engage their instruments represent a zenith in refinement and, indeed, erotic warmth; music, the most abstract of the arts, is pictured as arouser of desire.  The tableaux Chen invents focus on the charming attributes of the musicians, who are painted with a graciousness that may stand as art's most appreciative vision of classical music.  

The Cellist (1983, Lot 13) is a particularly strong example with its strikingly attractive young musician dressed in black and drawing her bow across the muted, deep reddish brown of her instrument. Her porcelain complexion, fine features, and graceful composure are brilliantly highlighted against the dark tones of the cello and the velvety black of her dress.  The dramatic contrasts of the picture (punctuated by the young woman's full, red lips) are complemented by nuances of tonal variety (the blondes and browns of her hair, the reddish browns of the cello), which work harmoniously together to accentuate the sitter's beauty.  Set in a dramatic, focused light, the cellist seems inseparable from her instrument and the music she plays, creating the image's inwardly-focused self-sufficiency that draws us into the sitter's - and painter's - virtuoso performance. 

The Cellist marked an important moment in Chen's career, as he was determined to prove himself a major artist to the discerning American collector Armand Hammer.  Chen took his cue from John Singer Sergeant's Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau) (1883-84), the scandalously revealing portrait of a beautiful, American-born Parisienne, painted exactly one hundred years earlier (and in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum since 1916).  Chen's deliberate comparison impressed Hammer, and the work is one of two by Chen that once graced Hammer's collection.  Masterfully displaying the oil painting skills of an artist whose native culture had only recently embraced the medium, The Cellist reveals Chen at his strongest.  Transcending both its source imagery and the cultural duality of East and West, the painting's lyrical figuration and romantic atmosphere convey Chen's obvious appreciation of beauty itself - whether expressed in feminine, musical, or painterly form.

A later painting entitled Shanghai Dream (1998, Lot 15) takes another approach to the portrayal of music-making.  Three musicians - a violinist, a trumpeter, and an alto saxophonist - play directly behind a beautiful, melancholic Chinese woman seated at a small table depicted at lower left.  More genre scene than portrait, the painting captures the aura and ambiance of a late-night jazz bar, with Chen's skillful realism rendering a view that seems somehow familiar, as the title implies.  Light is important to the artist in creating the painting's contemplative mood; the scene is bathed in a refulgent red glow: perhaps the effect of spotlights beyond the edge of the image.  Chen's realism does not copy the world so much as reenact the experiential effects of such a venue - note the unusual, expressive elongation of the figures and setting as a whole.  In this Shanghai Dream of the artist's fertile imagination, impartial objectivity is tempered by poetic reverie.

Chen's celebrated landscapes, which often portray the canals and bridges of his childhood home of Suzhou, register the atmosphere of the historical architecture and convey Chen's nostalgia for the lost beauty of his youth.  'Nostalgia' is close to 'sentiment', the expression of emotion for its own sake, but the artist keeps an overt display of feeling in check by concentrating on the physical realities of the setting.  In Blue Water of 1985 (Lot 17), a study of a bridge spanning a canal between picturesque buildings, we sense the artist's deep affection for structures made lyrical by the passage of time.  Leafy greenery covers the side of the bridge, amidst weathered two-story structures with windows opening onto the canal.  In another untitled work from the same year (Lot 14), Chen portrays a boatman steering under a small curved bridge.  Drenched in shadow as the setting sun illuminates buildings in the deep background of the image and highlights those nearer at right, the beautifully toned image is close to Impressionistic in both palette and motif.  

Another atmospheric oil entitled Out of Darkness (Suzhou) (Lot 16), describes the placid river that separates rows of houses built on stilts.  In the center foreground, a boatman steers his humble craft towards the center of the painting.  In that middle distance on the opposite bank, the colors are lighter in hue, whitewashed where light penetrates and pierces through.  The misty atmosphere of the image lends a sense of mystery to this otherworldly place in the far reaches of memory.  Chen is a brilliant historian of the picturesque China of the past, now encroached upon by the apartment towers and shopping malls of the present.  In this high poetic mode for which he is justly famous, Chen records the beauty of lost vistas that increasingly survive only in his art.

-Jonathan Goodman